Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant 9780804792288

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Poetic Force

MERIDIAN

Crossing Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher Editor

Stanford University Press Stanford California

POETIC FORCE Poetry After Kant

Kevin McLaughlin

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. 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 McLaughlin, Kevin, 1959- author. Poetic force : poetry after Kant / Kevin McLaughlin. pages cm--(Meridian, crossing aesthetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-9100-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Poetry--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804--Influence. 3. Aesthetics, Modern--20th century. 4. Philosophy, Modern--20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) pn1261.m38 2014 808.1--dc23 2014020013 isbn 978-0-8047-9228-8 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.9/13 Adobe Garamond

For Ourida, Emily, Sara, and Heidi

Contents

Preface: Poetic Force Acknowledgments Translations and Abbreviations 1.

Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin

xi xxiii xxv 1

2.

Hölderlin’s Peace

29

3.

Poetic Reason of State: Baudelaire and the Multitudes

55

4. Arnold’s Resignation

77



Epilogue: Making Room for Reason

105

Notes

121

Bibliography

153

Index

167

Preface: Poetic Force

The force at issue in this study resists becoming one. It is less a capacity than an incapacity expressed by the irreducible plurality of language as a communicative medium. This incapacity makes it possible to speak of an unforce or an adynamism in language. Aristotle states that “every force is unforce,” insofar as forcefulness and forcelessness are both defined in relation to the same thing, namely, a power over or a possession of something. Unforce is a modification, specifically a lack or “privation” (steresis), of force (Metaphysics 1046a 29–30). Like force, unforce also resists becoming one and must be understood, Aristotle points out, in multiple ways: “It is applied (1) to anything which does not possess a certain attribute; (2) to that which would naturally possess it, but does not, either (a) in general, or (b) when it would naturally possess it; and either (1) in a particular way, e.g., entirely, or (2) in any way at all. And in some cases if things which would naturally possess some attribute lack it as the result of constraint, we say that they are ‘deprived’” (Metaphysics 1046a 30–35). Simply not having something else, not having something else that should be had— either altogether, for the time being, only to a certain extent, or in a certain way—all of these are states of the “privation” of force that Aristotle calls non- or unforce. Martin Heidegger insists that the non- and un- of non- and unforce “are not merely negations” (in that case the un- would unify and reduce the multiplicity of xi

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unforce and thus of force) (Aristoteles “Metaphysik,” 109; ­Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” 92). As a “negativum,” Heidegger proposes, the steresis—what he translates as the “withdrawal” (Entzug)—of unforce “does not simply stand beside the positive of force but haunts this force in the force itself (lauert dieser in ihr selbst auf ), and this because every force of this type according to its essence is invested with divisiveness (Zwiespältigkeit), and so with a ‘not’” (Aristoteles “Metaphysik,” 154; Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” 132).1 Unforce is an internal lack or a loss that “haunts” or “lies in wait of ” force: it is the impending death or, as Heidegger suggests, “the inner finitude” of force. . . . Where there is force and power,” he concludes, “there is finitude” (Aristoteles “Metaphysik,” 158; Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” 135). What I am calling poetic force bears within it the “not” of unforce. It resists the unity of oneness but also the multiplicity of a finite or even an infinite set of individual forces in language. It is marked by the “divisiveness” of force and unforce that Heidegger underlines in Aristotle and thus expresses a finitude and multiplicity internal to language. The study of poetic force calls for a capacity to be affected by a “privation” or “withdrawal” of force—a steresis of unforce in language. Kant claims that certain spectacles of natural power affect us mentally as a privation of cognitive force. The incapacity experienced as what he calls the “dynamic sublime” gives the feeling of the supersensible force of reason (of its superiority over the cognitive faculty). The criterion of this feeling, Kant argues, is its communicability: we must be able to communicate it. Thus the finitude of the cognitive faculty that is overcome by the feeling of the dynamic sublime returns in the capacity (and incapacity) to communicate. The communicability of the feeling bears the inner finitude and divisiveness of force and the “privation” or “withdrawal” of force that Heidegger explicates in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The poets, according to Kant, exemplify this ability to communicate the feeling of the supersensible force of reason. Not only able to see the world in a way that goes beyond cognitive experience—as withdrawing from a capacity to possess it mentally in the form of something extended in space and time—the poets are also capable of communicating the

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feeling of seeing the world “merely (bloß ) . . . in accordance with what its appearance shows” (AA 5: 270; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 152–53).2 But the capacity of poetic language to exceed the grasp of empirical consciousness—for example, by breaking free from spatial and temporal metaphors that draw on an empirical view of the world—does not simply make it into a medium of rational or philosophical communication after Kant.3 The ability to communicate the feeling of reason transcending cognitive experience also brings with it internally a “withdrawal” of communicability. The language of the poets expresses the capacity and the incapacity to communicate the feeling of the divisive finitude of reason as a force and an unforce. The irreducible tension between force and unforce that Heidegger amplifies in Aristotle is at the crux of Nietzsche’s approach to art, and especially to lyric poetry. Indeed Heidegger’s 1931 lecture course on the first three chapters of book 9 of the Metaphysics opens up a reading of force along lines that extend through his interpretation, from the late 1930s and early 1940s, of Nietzsche’s theory of “the will to power as art.” The guiding question of Heidegger’s inquiry—whether the theory of “the will to power” constitutes a metaphysics of immanence—turns on the evidence of Nietzsche’s adherence to an uncritical concept of force (of belief in a force without unforce).4 There can be no doubt about Nietz­sche’s commitment to the primacy of aesthetic experience in human life. This experience, he asserts, suspends the traditional teleological reductions of the truth of human existence promoted by religion and in particular Christianity, on the one hand, and by what Nietzsche regards as the cult of reason instituted by Greek philosophy, on the other. Instead of a means to an end— something ultimately to be redeemed by faith in God or in reason—man as a living, thinking being is, according to Nietzsche, primarily a “way” (Genealogie, 340; Genealogy, 66). But this way is the manifestation, not of one, but rather of multiple forces that act on and as human being and that keep its path open by resisting preconceived purposes.5 And the capacity of human being—what we call living—is expressed above all, he argues, as an “incapacity

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not to react” to forces that resist, not only conscious awareness of the cognitive faculty (as in Kant), but also the transcendent ends of a supposedly truer existence from which we are separated by life.6 Under the influence of these forces, living becomes an aesthetic phenomenon: what Nietzsche describes as “an aesthetic doing and seeing” (Götzendämmerung, 116; Twilight, 46). Such aestheticization does not result in a beautiful image of life in the form of a self-contained medium of human existence, like the image of a particular individual or of mankind in general progressing toward a redemptive goal or purpose. Rather, the forces in question produce interruptions in movements toward such a unifying and ultimately false soteriological end. This incapacity breaks free from cognitive constraints while also resisting determination by an end to which living is subordinated, whether it be the end of what Kant calls a “purposiveness without purpose,” or the end of remaining a self-integrated individual or collective entity that can be saved as such. Nietzsche’s approach to language as the medium of such forces (and unforces), and his interrogation of the connection between language and power, have been exceptionally influential in recent decades. Important work in history, philosophy, and literary criticism has started from the Nietzschean characterization of truth as “an army of metaphors” and his declaration that the “lordly right” (Herrenrecht) of giving names to things points to the origin of language itself as an “expression of power by the rulers” (Machtäußerung der Herrschenden) (“Wahrheit und Lüge,” 374, and Genealogie, 274; “On Truth,” 46, and Genealogy, 13).7 In what follows I propose that this reflection on linguistic force and its connection to poetry can be traced ultimately to a thesis implicit in Kantian philosophy: that of an a priori capacity of language to free itself from having empirical content. This linguistic capacity, which is derived indirectly from a cognitive incapacity, emerges as a key motif or theme in Kant’s thinking. But by virtue of its very ability to communicate or produce the feeling of the faculty of reason, this force of language is also accompanied by an unforce that must be felt in Kant’s writing even as it remains (perhaps aptly) unstressed. In this sense the productivity of the

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poetic force emerging in Kantian philosophy is haunted by the unproductivity of apoetic unforce. The following chapters are devoted to outlining the theory of this force (and unforce) in Kant, and in the writing of three poets working in diverse languages and different intellectual contexts more or less directly influenced by Kantian philosophy. The first poet is Friedrich Hölderlin. In immediate contact with the Kant­ ian exposition of an aesthetic force exceeding sensible comprehension, Hölderlin also develops a theory of poetry and of poetic language predicated on an adynamic interruption in the sphere of supersensible ends—a radical pause in verse that he developed along the lines of the caesura in Sophoclean tragedy. The effects of this halting point are evident in the way Hölderlin’s poetry reacts to the most powerful political event of his age, the French Revolution. Of particular significance is the way this reaction diverges from that of Kant, the philosopher whose critical project exerted the greatest influence over Hölderlin’s thinking. For Hölderlin, as for Kant, the empirical event of the revolution was certainly of enormous import. Yet of still greater consequence to both was the feeling that it gave to those who looked on from afar. For Kant it was the supersensible feeling of mankind progressing on the path to a “republican constitution”—a forceful feeling of humanity’s capacity for progressive development and of an ability to communicate this capacity that must be attributed to every member of the species. There is plenty of evidence that Hölderlin shared this sentiment. But ultimately the poet was also left with a feeling of what goes beyond, not just the empirical event, but also the feeling of the ability to communicate the promise of human progress that the event appears to make. The poet in Hölderlin is also affected by a revolutionary incapacity of mankind to serve as a medium of progressive history. In the particular case of the 1801 poem “Celebration of Peace,” which I examine in detail below, the poet is shown intercepting the direction of a world history that is driven by the goal of global domination, and thus of war, as well as by the higher end of gradual republican development over time. This poetic intervention does not change the course of ­history and

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establish a millennium of peace. Nothing that happens in the years and decades following the composition of the poem supports such a claim. Yet, in a sense that is captured by the irony of Kant’s famous essay written during these same years, the peace of the poem exists and persists on paper in the form of the poem itself that did not in fact appear in print until the middle of the 1950s, when the manuscript turned up in London. The revolutionary peace celebrated by the poem is marked, in other words, as a strange persistence of a piece of writing demonstrating its incapacity to give the feeling of a time transformed into a self-consistent medium of rational historical development. The exemplarity of Hölderlin’s poetry for twentieth-century literary criticism has been recognized for some time.8 But the specific theory of force (and unforce) connecting this poetic output to the philosophical genealogy I have outlined has yet to receive specific attention. This link is fundamental, however, to the work of one of the most significant literary critical projects to emerge during the years immediately following the appearance of the first collection of Hölderlin’s writings in the second decade of the twentieth century, that of Walter Benjamin. The term poetic force appears nowhere in Benjamin’s work. But beginning with his early essay on Hölderlin the theory of such a force is at work in Benjamin’s criticism. In his early Hölderlin essay, but also his late studies of Baudelaire, Benjamin is receptive to the unforce underlined by Heidegger in Aristotle’s discussion of force. The first three chapters of this book seek to elucidate this aspect of Benjamin’s critical approach to nineteenth-century poetry, and to follow its lead. The last chapter argues for the importance of a divisive interpenetration of force and unforce in the critical writings of Paul de Man. An early encounter with Hölderlin, which parallels in an important way that of Benjamin, led de Man to make some valuable suggestions about poetry and force in the work and literary career of Matthew Arnold—suggestions that I pursue further. Among the earliest entries on Baudelaire that Benjamin made as part of his unfinished study of nineteenth-century Paris is one containing a quotation from Paul Valéry. According to Valéry, Baude-

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xvii

laire’s poetry must be understood as a response to an imperative comparable to the declaration of reason of state in the political realm. Although neither Valéry nor Benjamin mention it, this political principle that all means can be justified to the extent that they contribute to the end of preserving the state is the subject of a book that Baudelaire read with admiration at a moment when he was about to compose some of his greatest poetry. The book in question carries the title Histoire de la raison d’État, published in 1860 by the Italian philosopher and politician Giuseppe Ferrari, whom Baudelaire placed in his pantheon of “literary dandies” (Correspondance, 128). Ferrari’s interpretation of a world history driven by the efforts of sovereigns and sovereign states to dissimulate their ultimate goal of maintaining political power corresponds to the vision of everyday experience that informs Baudelaire’s poetry. On one level many of the poems and in particular the prose poems that were composed in the early 1860s dramatize in the daily existence of the poet the hypocritical self-justification outlined by Ferrari’s world historical survey. In this sense it is possible to read many of Baudelaire’s poems as documenting the ruses by which the “I”— like the “hypocritical reader” of The Flowers of Evil—seeks to cover up a self-centered will to power. But Benjamin suggests another way of building on Valéry’s comment. Reason of state is declared for Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, in the name of an experience that resists the ability of the “I” to become conscious of it. This experience not only rejects cognitive processing; it also refuses to give the “I” the feeling of a higher purpose beyond the range of the life of which it is conscious. Instead, the “I” is left with the feeling of the disappearance or, to use Benjamin’s word, the “decline” of such an ideal. Needless to say, this experience is hardly fulfilling. On the contrary, it is endlessly pointless: it points nowhere and is subject to ceaseless repetition. Yet, as Benjamin’s adoption of the term reason of state asserts, the feeling of this experience is imposed as the supreme law of Baudelairean “modernity.” The poet is incapable of not responding to it, even if there is precisely no “it” with which this sovereign force can be consciously identified. The reaction is thus on the order of an act of faith that is freed from the

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command to believe in something. In this sense the reason of state to which Benjamin alludes in Baudelaire is marked by what Derrida has characterized as “the experience of belief,” in an interpretation of Nietzsche and Heidegger that, as I suggest in an epilogue to this book, extends the philosophical genealogy of what I am calling poetic force (Foi et savoir, 95; Acts of Religion, 97). The capacity of language to break free from cognitive metaphors is the subject of a late lecture by Paul de Man on the dynamic sublime in Kant. The source of this reading goes back, ultimately, to an early encounter with Hölderlin, as de Man indicates elsewhere (Rhetoric of Romanticism, ix). This encounter, I suggest, places de Man on the literary critical path opened up by Benjamin in his own early confrontation with Hölderlin. De Man’s Gauss lectures of the mid-1960s, which are pivotal to the development of his late work, including the lecture on Kant, apply his reading of Hölderlin to Wordsworth in a way that introduces into the heart of British Romanticism a critical deconstruction of Heidegger’s tendency to align portions of Hölderlin’s poems too directly with the force of authentic “being.”9 The reading of Wordsworth offered by de Man reveals precisely that aspect of the British Romantic’s work that becomes the occasion for one of Matthew Arnold’s early poems, “Resignation.” In an essay on the anxious response of the Victorians to Wordsworth, de Man correctly diagnoses a certain defensiveness on the part of Arnold toward the peculiar “­powers” of the Romantic poet (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 86). These “powers” are undoubtedly troubling to the author of Culture and Anarchy and “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” whose theory of culture and of poetry, its highest manifestation, is informed by the “aesthetic ideology” that de Man attributes to Friedrich Schiller’s misreading of Kant. But this assessment of Arnold overlooks the decisive precondition for the development of the theory of culture: Wordsworth’s poetry exposes the divisiveness and finitude internal to the lyrical force, and more precisely unforce, affecting Arnold’s own work as a poet during the first two decades of his career. Thus the cultural turn in Arnold’s work of the mid-1860s seeks to bring to an end an

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early experience discovered in Wordsworth—that of an incapacitating affect haunting the very potentiality of poetic language, its impending lack of force. It is on the divisive strength of such an experience, I argue, that the poem “Resignation” ultimately allows for the incapacity exposed in Wordsworth’s poetry. In this early work the effort to surpass the Romantic poet gives way to the very element to which Wordsworth’s greatest poetry already yields. As an illustration I demonstrate how “Resignation” ultimately resists the urge not to repeat the caesura erupting in Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” In light of this analysis, Arnold’s cultural program appears as the anxious attempt to convert the ambiguous force linking his early poetry to Wordsworth into the redemptive power of culture set forth in his theory of criticism. This development at the midpoint in Arnold’s career turns on his interpretation of the category of the messianic in the letters of Saint Paul. The function of Arnoldian criticism is in the end the individual and collective redemption promised by the messianic force of culture. Arnold has been condemned for promoting a religion of culture founded on the belief in the redemptive power of literary works. The poetic force that concerns me in this book could also be seen to require a certain kind of belief. Not, however, a belief in poetry or even in poetic language, but rather an attestation to an experience of the capacity of language to free itself from sensible and supersensible ends while nevertheless remaining open to the finitude and divisiveness that comes with this linguistic force. There is a powerful tendency today to reduce experience to the neurophysiological processes of cognition based on a heightened fascination with the brain. Resistance to this neurocentric tendency often consists in asserting the power of the human mind—for example, the creative capacity of the imagination—to transcend the limitations of empirical experience.10 This debate renews the question posed by aesthetics in eighteenth-century philosophy in a way that calls for another return to Kant, and in particular to his insistence on the communicability of an empirically unaccountable feeling as the ground of human community. But going back in this case

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means returning to a force that is unfamiliar and unrecognizable from the traditional perspective of a unifying faculty transcending empirical experience. A reconsideration of what is for Kant the exemplary manifestation of communicability and communability—the language of the poets—leads instead to a confrontation with a dynamic force that emerges exclusively within the horizon of its potential adynamism. Thus the return to Kant that is proposed in the following chapters introduces a modification in the terms of the traditional resistance to empiricism, avoiding an aesthetic as well as an empiricist ideology. It is confronted by the possibility of a force of language that resists cognitive determination, without denying the divisive finitude accompanying this very resistance. Returning to Kant’s aesthetics in this way means becoming mindful of an aspect of collective human existence that arises from the feeling of incommunicability haunting the ability to communicate. Recently Werner Hamacher has advocated for this feeling and for the study of this feeling of communicability and incommunicability. Hamacher makes the case in the name of philology, not in the traditional sense of the academic discipline devoted to the analysis of languages as historical and morphological objects, but as the inquiry and the questioning of a feeling of “friendship” (philia) with language (logos) as an ambiguous and fragile medium of community. Hamacher’s provocative philological project insists on the withdrawal from communicability that comes with the communicability of language. If the capacity of language to communicate, as Kant argues, connects us to and reminds us of others in the possession of a similar ability, the incapacity of language to communicate removes this possession—of having an ability to communicate—as the ground of a relation to others. Such incommunicability occurs, not just as an inability to have possession of language (in the sense that “having” a language is sometimes meant to signify mastery of the proper use of a particular language), but also an incapacity of language to have anything. It is, in short, a withdrawal of having from language: an unforce that dispossesses and empties language. This is what Hamacher

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calls an “openness of language,” or more precisely, in order to stress the elimination of every hint of possession, an “openness to language” (Sprachoffenheit). Above all poetry, Hamacher argues, makes it possible to speak of such “openness to language” and of the fellow feeling of this philia as a certain linguistic pathos: “And philology shares this pathos with everyone who speaks or writes, a fortiori with the poets, who speak of nothing other than the experience of openness to language: of language-possibility under conditions of its improbability, of language power under conditions of its power­lessness, of power within the horizon of its withdrawal (Entzugs). Poetry is the most unreserved philology and only therefore can it attract the privileged and persistent attention of philologists” (Für—Die Philologie, 33–34). The philological community of which Hamacher writes is marked by the withdrawal of communicability. It exists as a public sphere (eine Öffentlichkeit) that is open to language (eine ­Sprachoffenheit). It raises the possibility of a communal human being arising from the feeling of a communicability—of a philological sociability and a socius emerging out of philology—that is threatened by the divisive finitude of incommunicability. Inquiring into the existence of such an endangered communability would require, perhaps first of all, the rigorous study of the capacity and incapacity of what I am calling poetic force. If, as Hamacher proposes, “poetry is first philology,” poetic force names the primal ability and inability of philological community (Für—Die Philologie, 14). The following chapters proceed from this thesis.

Acknowledgments

Among the many friends and colleagues who have helped with this project I would like to thank Peter Fenves for sharing his unpublished work, Samuel Weber for the many invaluable conversations and exchanges over the years, and especially Susan Bernstein for reading the chapters as they were completed and offering thoughtful, encouraging comments. For support and advice during the later stages of the project, I am deeply grateful to Werner Hamacher and Jonathan Culler (along with Cynthia Chase). I am also immensely appreciative of the wonderful community of ­scholars and students with whom I have had the good fortune to work at Brown University, as well as for the assistance of the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty for providing me with the means for carrying out the research and writing of this book. An additional word of thanks is due to Natalie Adler and Silvia Cernea Clark for their expert help with the final preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful most of all to my wife, Ourida, and to my daughters, Emily and Sara, and to Heidi. This book is dedicated to them.

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Translations and Abbreviations

Throughout this book I have provided references to the original French and German works and to available English translations, respectively. Where necessary I have modified the translated text. All other translations are my own. The following abbreviations are used: AA Immanuel Kant. Gesammelte Schriften. 29 vols. to date. Ed. Königliche Preußische [later, Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer; later, De Gruyter, 1900–. References to The Critique of Pure Reason are to the first edition (= A) and the second edition (= B). GS Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–91. OC Charles Baudelaire. Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. Ed. Claude Pichois. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1975– 76. StA Friedrich Hölderlin. Sämtliche Werke. 8 vols. Ed. Friedrich Beißner and Adolf Beck. Stuttgart: Cottanachfolger, 1943– 85. Vols. 7–8; Stuttgart: Kohlammer. SW Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. xxv

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§1 Ur-ability Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin All ground must at some point have been made arable (urbar) by reason . . . Walter Benjamin

There are two ways of looking at the sea from the perspective of critical philosophy. One is as a thing to be owned. This is the subject of the discussion of the power of possession in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). In this context Kant distinguishes between empirical and rational titles of acquisition. The former, he proposes, are based on the physical possession of an “original community of land.” In order for such an empirical title to be brought into accord with a “rational concept of right,” he argues, its legitimacy must be established outside of space and time. This “intellectual possession” of the land, however, must continue to “correspond” (korrespondieren) to the empirical conditions of space and time with which it originated and the medium of this correspondence is a certain “force” (Gewalt): “‘What I bring under my control (in meine Gewalt bringe) in accordance with laws of outer freedom and will to become mine becomes mine’” (AA 6: 264; Practical Philosophy, 416). Notwithstanding its traditional connection to illegitimate force (violentia as distinguished from potestas), the term Gewalt is introduced at this point to designate a kind of control that is more responsible to reason than physical power and that therefore provides the basis for the empirical title of acquisition to become rational. The force in question allows possession to be grounded in “the laws of outer freedom”—under the authority of the “united will” of “the civil condition.” It is only on the 



Ur-ability

foundation of such a civil condition, Kant insists, that the “provisional” character of the original empirical possession can become “conclusive.” But there is a wrinkle: this rational possession cannot do without an original physical acquisition—possession has to start somewhere, and this physical starting point remains, as Kant states, “a true acquisition.” The difficulty being negotiated in this passage is that the possessible dimension of things derives ultimately from their empirical existence, and a rational concept of the right to possess them must be established, from the perspective of critical philosophy, outside of empirical space and time. The problem, in short, is that nothing can be possessed rationally, as Kant defines it, because possession is rooted in the physical power over the empirical world and reason calls for a ground outside of that world. The necessary correspondence between possession and physical force is highlighted when one looks at the sea as an acquisition, as Kant does in the following passage on the empirical limits of property rights: The question arises, how far does authorization to take possession of a piece of land extend? As far as the capacity for controlling it extends (das Vermögen, ihn in seiner Gewalt zu haben), that is, as far as whoever wants to appropriate it can defend it—as if the land were to say, if you cannot protect me you cannot command me. This is how the dispute over whether the sea is open or closed also has to be decided; for example, as far as a cannon shot can reach no one may fish, haul up amber from the ocean floor, and so forth, along the coast of a territory that already belongs to a certain state. (AA 6: 265; Practical Philosophy, 416–17)

From the perspective of its possessibility the sea is seen as a finite thing extended in space and time that can be used for certain ends. It is a matter of limited resources that can be acquired to the precise extent of the owner’s capacity to control them; or, in the terms of the personification offered by Kant, a question of the kind of protection provided by a lord to a loyal vassal.1 This figure lays the metaphorical ground for the sea to become an empirical object. According to the terms of this figurative contract, a portion of the

Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin



sea becomes a property circumscribed by the limits of the ability of the owner (in this case the state) to project the physical force required to protect it. In this way a parcel of sea is transformed into a space containing things usable over time such as food (fish) and precious minerals (amber). A contrasting ability to see the sea appears in the famous passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgment to which I alluded in the Preface. It comes in the “General Remark” that concludes the analysis of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime. At this point Kant has explained that aesthetic judgments occur when the cognition of things extended in space and time fails: in the case of the beautiful, the lack of a cognitive object produces a subjective agreement of the imagination with the understanding resulting in the feeling of a purposiveness in nature that is not determined definitively by a purpose; in the case of the sublime, as I noted above, the cognitive failure leads to a feeling of the superiority of man’s mental capacity over the physical power of nature. As Kant distinguishes aesthetic judgment from cognition of an empirical object, the sea enters a scene decisively different from the sight of property described in the Metaphysics of Morals: In just the same way, we must not take the sight of the ocean as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which are not, however, contained in the immediate intuition), for example as a wide realm of water creatures, as the great storehouse of water for evaporation which impregnates the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that separates parts of the world from one another but at the same time makes possible the greatest community among them, for this would yield teleological judgments; rather, one must consider the ocean merely as the poets do, in accordance with what its appearance shows, for instance, when it is considered in periods of calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the heavens, but also when it is turbulent, an abyss threatening to devour everything, and yet still be able to find it sublime. (AA 5: 270; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 152–53)

In this passage the sea is not viewed as a parcel of finite things offering themselves for use by man in exchange for protection: it is



Ur-ability

not a matter of food for consumption, of water for the cultivation of the land, or of a continuous empirical space for the communication over time among otherwise discontinuous land masses. These are all end-oriented or “teleological” perspectives on the sea as a substantial thing extended in space and time. An aesthetic judgment of the scene is detached from this vision of the sea as a usable object outside of consciousness. Under the conditions of such judgments, instead of offering itself for use (as food, water, or a medium of communication) the sea merely appears: rather than acquiring meaning metaphorically as an object that is seen, by way of personification, to ask for protection, the sea means itself as an appearance. The beauty and sublimity that are associated with its appearances are what the poets see, according to Kant, when they look at the sea. The poets have the ability, in other words, to apprehend such scenes “merely” (bloß ): before they become seen as objects in the cognitive sense, that is, before they become subject to the empiricist claim that makes them into the manifestations of an external thing affecting the mind. The capacity of the sea to mean and to communicate itself as an appearance, rather than being made to stand for an object extended in space and time, is poetic, then, in the sense of a force to which the poets are said to be especially receptive and which they are able to communicate. But this combination of receptivity and communicability, which is disclosed as what Kant calls aesthetic judgment, is not restricted to bards or writers of verse; it must be attributed, he insists, to all reasonable beings. The ability, for example, to see the sea before it has been claimed as a substantial thing affecting the mind and the capacity to communicate this vision are the basis of a rational community that never can be fully secured by the sight of a common possession of a portion of the earth’s surface. This capacity is what I am calling poetic force. It is not, strictly speaking, a property of poetry as a literary genre, and indeed Kant’s attribution of it to the poets is a fine example of the sort of erroneous attribution that he classifies as “subreption.”2 Nevertheless, lyric poetry becomes a privileged site for the exploration and expression of this capacity after Kant. But it is important to stress

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that the force in question is for Kant a shared and a sharing ability: it is collective in the double sense of the sensus communis outlined in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It thus bears what Kant calls the “ambiguity” (Zweideutigkeit) of a common sense that is both held and expressed communally by all beings capable of reason (AA 5: 293–94; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173–74). The place of this complex capacity within the broader outline of Kant’s philosophy is delineated by the comments on the metaphysical ambiguity of community that he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787)—around the time of his discovery of the transcendental principle of the power of judgment. The last of the three analogies of experience laid out in the first Critique, community (Gemeinschaft) is, Kant explains, the temporal mode of simultaneity. Along with persistence and succession, the simultaneity of community makes it possible for empirical intuitions to be subsumed under pure concepts of understanding in time. Community is in this sense what Kant calls a “temporal domain” (Zeitumfang) as distinct from a temporal series (causation), on the one hand, and a persistence in time (substance), on the other. We perceive a community when appearances exist in the same time, rather than, for example, occurring one after another. Communities appear when A and B are not sequential but reciprocal, reversible. After explaining this analogy, Kant takes note of the ambiguity in the word community that connects these observations with the account of a similar feature of the sensus ­communis in the third Critique (which, let me emphasize once again, he began writing around this same time): “The word ‘community’ is ambiguous (zweideutig) in our language,” he notes, “and can mean either ­communio or commercium” (AA B: 260; Critique of Pure Reason, 318). On this point Kant is unambiguous: when it comes to the cognition of community, what we perceive is a commercium. Temporal simultaneity is a matter of a community of entities interacting on one another at the same time. Empirical community, in other words, is commercial interaction. Kant does not speculate about nonempirical simultaneity in this section of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, he is explicit about not refuting its existence.

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He only rules out that such a community could ever become “an object for our possible experience” (AA B: 261; Critique of Pure Reason, 319). To adapt a famous phrase from the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, we might say that we can think a nonempirical community—community as communio—even if it cannot be given in our experience, provided that the I thinking this possibility does not “contradict itself.”3 Thinking communio in the sense of a nonempirical simultaneity or of a community that exists “where perceptions do not reach” becomes one of the fundamental imperatives of reason in the wake of critical philosophy. Reason after Kant, in this sense, dictates a vision of community as a matter, not of common possession of a thing like a parcel of land or sea, but of a communicability shared by all rational beings. Being able to see this requires the capacity for envisioning community that Kant attributes to the poets. This is the ability that Benjamin finds expressed in an exemplary way in the poetry of Hölderlin. The groundwork for this discovery was carried out in the renewal of Kantian thinking to which Benjamin’s early writings were devoted.4 Although this intensive engagement with Kant occurs in Benjamin’s early years, he remains faithful throughout his work to the theory of a force exceeding the cognitive determination of what he describes as empiricist “mythology”—of an a priori ability making reason possible and, as suggested by the phrase cited above as an epigraph, clearing the ground for its exercise (GS 2.1: 161; SW 1: 103–4). In this sense Benjamin’s critical project is fundamentally directed toward the thinking of the peculiar temporal simultaneity characteristic of the nonempirical community to which Kant alludes in the Critique of Pure Reason. An illuminating example of the persistence of this effort in Benjamin’s work and of a certain modification of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is the emergence in Benjamin’s later writings of what he calls “now-time.”5 Benjamin’s late historicalphilosophical reflections reveal his ongoing participation in the critical project of reinterpreting time along the lines of the nonempirical simultaneity to which Kant alludes in his comments on the “ambiguity” of community in the first Critique. “Now-time” thus

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points to a manifestation of an a priori ability—a force in principle, to invoke another term qualified as “ambiguous” by Kant.6 The influential theory of the “dialectical image” developed in Benjamin’s later writings illustrates the link between the specific force at issue in his reflections on “now-time” and the Kantian principle of reason as involving a sovereign or primal ability prior to cognitive experience. What Benjamin calls the “dialectical image” has proven itself the most arresting example of a virtualizing force ascribed, throughout his writing, to the category of the image. In a remarkable book outlining the structure and extent of this fundamental stress on virtuality in Benjamin’s thinking, Samuel Weber offers some reflections on the “dialectical image” and on the image as such that highlight the Kantian source. Weber focuses in particular on the structure of the image in Benjamin’s work: “Image” for Benjamin is something very different from the familiar conception; indeed, it is something unheard-of. Image, as used here, signifies not the illustrative depiction of an external object. Rather, as something to be read rather than merely seen, the image is construed by Benjamin as both disjunctive and medial in its structure—which is to say, as both actual and virtual at the same time. Such images become a point of convergence, which Benjamin here designates as “now.” This now coexists with the “time” from which it simulta­ neously sets itself apart. Time, one could say, imparts itself as now, and in a historical sense. For history signifies not a temporal continuum, nor even the continuity of an expected or sought-after meaning. Rather it contributes to the explosion of all meaning, as that “death of intention” that never ceased to fascinate Benjamin and that he here ascribes to the mode of being of the image, marking the “birth of a genuinely historical time as the time of truth.” Such historical truth should not be conceived as a preserving of truth, understood as the correspondence or adequation theory, but rather as a dissolving, non-integrative dialectics of explosive convergence or coincidence. (­Benjamin’s -abilities, 49)

Of special note in this set of observations is what Weber characterizes as the imparting of time in Benjamin’s image. According to the virtualizing logic that is the signature of Benjamin’s work,

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the stress in this passage is on the impartability of an ambiguous time in the “dialectical image.” Earlier in his book Weber proposes the word impartability as a more accurate alternative to what is usually translated as “communicability” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, since the original Mitteilbarkeit contains the root part (Teil), which participates in a crucial nexus of philosophical terms in German, including the word for judgment itself (Urteil) (Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities, 13). The verb impart in the passage cited above thus suggests that the temporality of Benjamin’s “dialectical image” is related to that of aesthetic judgment in Kant’s third Critique and, more precisely, that this “genuinely historical time” manifests itself not as a cognition that is imparted but as a capacity to impart—an impartability—that resists cognitive determination and liberates itself or, as Weber suggests, “sets itself apart” from the time and space of empirical experience. The force connecting the “dialectical image” to aesthetic judgment in Kant can be found in images throughout Benjamin’s writing. The image is, in this sense, the self-dividing medium of virtuality in his work.7 In order to suggest how this self-dividing action also parts with the Kantian theory as a consequence of Benjamin’s encounter with its manifestation in Hölderlin’s poetry, it is important to underline the way that the force specific to this image draws on the Kantian source to which Weber’s remarks draw our attention.

. . . The force of the image in Benjamin’s criticism emerges in his early essay “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” (1914–15). Throughout his interpretation the image, or what at one point is called “imageability” (Bildhaftigkeit), bears a decisive relation to a specific force designated by the word Gewalt (derived from the verb walten, meaning “to hold sway” or “to reign”) (GS 2.1: 117; SW 1: 29). In his political writings, Benjamin employs the word Gewalt in a way that draws on its capacity to signify both legitimate and illegitimate force, departing from an established tradition that seeks to define Gewalt in opposition to Macht (violence in opposition to power).8 Benjamin’s handling of this term is illumi-

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nated by the Indo-German root of Gewalt which is related to the Latin valere, meaning simply “to be worthy or capable” or “to have power,” apart from any context in which the legitimacy of this capacity can be determined. Indeed, philological research suggests that Gewalt was not a technical term in Germanic law.9 The constellation of old Germanic words from which Gewalt derives was understood to have the capacity to translate a wide range of Latin terms for clearly differentiated concepts in Roman law, including imperium, sceptrum, maiestas, tyrannis, auctoritas, ius, ­potestas, potentia, ­licentia, vis, fortitudo, brachium, violentia.10 ­During the medieval period Macht established itself as the prevalent translation of potestas and Gewalt was consigned to ­violentia. But the substantive basis for a juridical distinction between power and violence is thrown into question by Kant’s thesis in paragraph 28 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that violence (Gewalt) can only be understood in relation to power (Macht), and vice versa. “Power (Macht) is a capacity that is superior to great hindrances,” Kant declares. “This same capacity is called violence (Gewalt), when it is superior to the resistance of that which itself possesses power (Macht)” (AA  5: 260; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 143).11 Kant articulates this thesis about the relational character of power and violence in his analysis of the “dynamic sublime.”12 The idea of the sublime awakened in us by the apprehension of “power” (Macht) in nature demonstrates mankind’s “superiority to nature,” and thus reveals a mode of “self-­preservation” superior to that which is threatened by nature, even while, as Kant notes, on another level—that of “physical” existence—“man must submit to the violence (Gewalt) of nature” (AA 5: 261–62; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 144–45). Kant’s recasting of the traditional relation of power to violence in his analysis of the sublime must be understood in the context of the irreducible plurality and relationality of the mental capacities throughout and beyond his critical project. The insistence on this point is made emphatically clear by Kant’s refusal, issued in the second part of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and reiterated near the beginning of the Critique of the Power of

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Judgment, of the thesis of “a single radical, absolute fundamental power” (AA B: 678; Critique of Pure Reason, 594; and AA 5: 177; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 64).13 Thus cognition of an object for Kant occurs through the interaction and collaboration of mental faculties, with judgment subsuming what imagination represents under a concept provided by understanding. In an aesthetic judgment the relationality of psychic forces is highlighted in a different way. In this case the mental powers cooperate to produce, not cognition of an object, but rather a feeling that is referred to an object. This feeling, which can only be repeatedly referred to the object and which can never result in cognition of it, reveals an a priori principle of nature that exists only in view of the relations of our mental faculties to one another, specifically, from the perspective of the “free play” between understanding’s power to conceptualize and imagination’s capacity to produce representations. This singular play of the faculties is free in the sense that it is not subject to conceptual resolution. Instead of determining an object of cognition (by subsuming a particular representation under a general concept), aesthetic judgment reveals a natural principle that exists exclusively with regard to the relation among the mental powers themselves when they are freed from conceptual determination. In this way the mind discovers in its own interacting forces the communicable feeling of the “formal purposiveness” of nature that must be attributed to all similarly constituted beings—the principle that Kant himself “discovered” in the years separating The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) from the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).14 The discovery of an a priori principle in the relation among the mental powers in aesthetic judgment not only makes possible a transcendental critique of judgment. It also opens the possibility for Kant to try to establish the existence of a system of moving or “agitating” forces in nature. The postulation of such natural forces provides the basis for Kant’s effort to develop the “elementary system” of matter that occupied the aging philosopher throughout the 1790s and into the late writings collected in the Opus ­postumum (AA 21: 596).15 In this unfinished project Kant seeks

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such a principle in the act without which the systematic character of nature would be unthinkable from his point of view, namely, in the effort of the subject striving to turn itself into the object of experience—the “I exist thinking” implicit in all experience (AA B: 429; Critique of Pure Reason, 456—this quoted phrase is from the second edition of this work published in 1787). In a set of recent studies of the Opus postumum, Eckart Förster has argued convincingly that these late writings elaborate a doctrine of theoretical and practical self-positing on the basis of which the author of the Critique of Pure Reason “felt compelled to reverse the order of reason and understanding” laid out at the beginning of the critical project (and to elevate the former over the latter) (Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, 150). In the end, Förster contends, Kant concludes that as finite rational beings we experience our own physical and moral limitation and self-constitution as a “subjective” matter that must “be regarded at the same time as given and as independent of the subject” (171). In contrast to the various post-Kantian theories of self-­positing and self-consciousness already in circulation during the later 1790s, the ambiguous experience of transcendental self-affection in Kant’s own later work conforms to the structure of aesthetic judgment, including the liberating feeling of what he characterizes as the “dynamic sublime.” At this point the subject is not simply an object of its own experience in the cognitive sense, and thus not a matter of experience according to the meaning of this concept in the first Critique.16 Rather, the subject exists in transcendental self-affection with regard to two orders of moving forces that are based on principles discovered in the subjective form of a relation among its own mental capacities, which is to say, in aesthetic judgment. On the one hand, there is the theoretical principle of the natural moving forces to which we are physically subject—the formal purposiveness of nature; on the other hand, there is the practical principle of moral moving forces to which we are ethically bound—freedom.17 These theoretical and practical principles are revealed in the act of transcendental self-affection by aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, respectively.

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In both cases, Kant writes in the Opus postumum, “we are spectators and at the same time originators (Zuschauer und zugleich Urheber)” of our existence (AA 22: 421; Opus postumum, 184). The distinction between power and violence is introduced by Kant in paragraph 28 of the third Critique in the analysis of the “dynamic sublime”—an aesthetic judgment in which the faculty of imagination, rather than engaging in free play with the understanding (as in an aesthetic judgment of beauty), gets “serious about its business” and enters into a relation with practical reason and thus with freedom (AA 5: 245; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 129). The greater force or violence to be considered in paragraph 28 is that of a mental power to overpower nature, specifically, our capacity to judge nature as a power that exercises no superior force (Gewalt) over us. In such a judgment natural power is “fearsome,” but we are not “afraid” of it: “we can look on an object as fearful ( furchtbar),” Kant observes, “without being afraid of it (ohne sich vor ihm zu fürchten)” (AA 5: 260; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 144). The ability to look on an “object” as potentially fearsome without actually being afraid of it—this capacity and nothing else—demonstrates the superiority of our mental faculties to nature’s power. As soon as Kant says “can,” in other words, the object of fear is potentialized by the ability to judge the dynamic sublime. The locution “we can” performs the judgment under analysis and reveals in our mental makeup a capacity to look on the moving forces of nature as potential, rather than actual, power. Yet this capacity does not establish the perspective of a detached onlooker. What we see attracts us in this case, Kant says, with a power that is proportional to the strength of the natural forces that are potentialized: “the sight (Anblick) of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearsome it is, provided that we are secure” (AA 5: 261; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 144). The “sight” to which we are drawn is not completely detached, but it has the security provided by our power to see natural force as removed from the realm of actuality. This secure “sight” exists, therefore, at a point where our mental faculties are unaffected by the actual force of physical things in nature. Judging in this

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manner is a matter, Kant suggests, of “merely thinking”—in our mind’s eye—of a case of physical resistance that we would want to put up against natural power in order to see that all such resistance would be in vain (AA 5: 260; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 144). The ability to see natural force as having a potentiality that goes beyond all actual physical resistance thus demonstrates the greater power of our mental faculties over the power of nature. This capacity can be observed, for example, in the way a “virtuous man” (der Tugendhafte) looks on God: with the religious “reverence” (Ehrfurcht) that favors the positive “transformation of life” over the superstitious “fear” (Furcht) that leads to the mere currying of worldly favor, as Kant puts it later in the paragraph (AA 5: 264; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 147).18 The ability to look on a potential power that allows for no actual case of resistance is in this sense the basis of our moral faculty: Likewise the irresistibility of [nature’s] power (Macht) certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical power­lessness (Ohnmacht), but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent from it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion (Gewalt). In this way, in our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (Kraft) (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health, and life) as trivial, and hence to regard [nature’s] power (Macht) (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion (Gewalt) over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment. (AA 5: 261–62; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 145)

Only in the feeling of the dynamic sublime, when we “recognize” the pure potentiality of nature’s physical “irresistibility,” can we discover the superior power of our faculty of aesthetic judgment. This capacity requires the recognition of a certain “violence” (­Gewalt)

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to which the empirical human being must and the nonempirical human community must not submit. Aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime thus divides “humanity” from “the human being” subjected to natural force (the human person from the human thing, mankind’s autonomy from mankind’s autognosis). At issue, as Kant’s precise use of the word Gewalt in this passage suggests, are two orders of violence, two kinds of relatively greater power. There is the force of the physical irresistibility of nature and the greater force it “calls up”—the sovereign human capacity to look on fearsome natural potentiality. The example that Kant provides at this point to reassure those who may be skeptical about his analysis of the dynamic sublime is somewhat surprising, given his insistence that aesthetic judgments of this kind demonstrate an ability to “look on” potential, rather than actual, power: the greater reverence for the warrior (der Krieger) over the statesman, “even in the most highly ethical state” (AA 5: 262; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 146). This example seems even more “far-fetched” than the principle it is supposed to defend until we see that the power we venerate in our aesthetic judgment of the warrior consists, not in the superiority of actual physical force, but rather in the superiority to all such force. This power is called courage. Like the “irresistibility” of nature, the “indomitability of [the warrior’s] mind” is a power against which all physical resistance would be taken in vain.19 For us the courage of the warrior is judged to be like the force of nature—it lies beyond the field of actuality—and, therefore, our reverence for this power takes the form of an aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime: Hence however much debate there may be about whether it is the statesman or the general who deserves the greater respect in comparison to the other, aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the latter. Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage; where a long peace causes the spirit

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of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice and weakness, and usually debases the mentality of the populace. (AA 5: 263; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 146)

We may debate the relative respectability of the statesman in comparison with the field general, for instance, from the pragmatic point of view of how well each serves the state in particular or mankind in general when it comes to worldly matters of war and peace. Aesthetic judgment, however, “decides for the latter.” The principle grounding this decision is courage—specifically, the power revealed, not by anything that could be carried out on an actual field of battle, but by a mental power that transcends every­ thing that could possibly happen in such a space. The aesthetic judgment of the field general discloses the principle of courage in the relation of our mental faculties when imagination frees itself from understanding and is engaged by the supersensible realm of reason. The basis of the decision in favor of the field general, then, is our courage—the courage we communicate as our judgment of the general. As Kant writes earlier in this section, aesthetic judgment “gives us the courage to be able to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature” (AA 5: 261; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 145). The aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime reveals courage as a communicable feeling that we must attribute to all similarly constituted beings. Or, as Kant puts it, courage enters into “the mode of thinking of the people” by way of its capacity to “look on” the power of nature with a superior power that is affected by no actual worldly force, which is to say, by way of the aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime.20 Unaffected “security” is the condition of this greater power of sight. The sight remains secure, it seems, as long as it is elicited by those objects or, more precisely, those forces that resist being subsumed under a general concept—the resistance that compels the subject to fold back upon itself in search of a concept and, with respect to the dynamic sublime, to discover in its own mental faculties a force greater than that of nature. But the security gives way when the capacity for thinking that made it possible can be seen to

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resemble the thinking that makes possible the cognition of objects in space described by Kant at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason. We cannot represent any thing without space, Kant proposes, but “we can very well think that there are no objects to be encountered in it” (AA A: 24, B: 39; Critique of Pure Reason, 158). The possibility of the cognition of “outer appearances” in the first Critique, like the possibility of the aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime in the third Critique, is secured by an act of thinking that removes worldly objects from the space in question. In both cases, thinking comes first and indeed a certain kind of “thinking” (Denken), namely, that which Kant distinguishes from “knowing” or “cognizing” (Erkennen) in the preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1787)—significantly, the same year in which he discovered the universality of aesthetic judgment in an a priori principle that was independent of cognitive knowledge (AA B: xvii–xix; 111).21 The force of the prior thinking in question with respect to aesthetic judgment and theoretical knowledge is distinct from the ability to cognize an object. Required first is thinking of states of affairs that do not have to correspond to some actual, or even possible, condition: in the case of the aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime, we can think of an instance of powerful physical resistance bound to give way to the violence of nature; in that of the cognition of objects extended in space, we can think of space completely devoid of objects.22 In both instances an act of simulation secures the space by virtualizing it as a field from which worldly things have been removed. In keeping with a distinction as old as philosophy itself, such a simulated space, as distinct from the sphere of reality and truth, has traditionally been restricted to art and poetry. Kant’s description of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime, including the cathartic feeling of “indirect” pleasure and the “delight” taken in images of things that would be repulsive if they were real, can be traced back through aesthetic and poetic theory to antiquity (see, for example, Aristotle, Poetics 1448b). But the security of the other-worldly space that the aesthetic judgment of the sublime shares with art and poetry can become the source of insecurity

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when it enters into the realm of philosophical knowledge of the world and becomes the medium of what used to be understood as empirical experience. Kant’s later natural philosophical reflections, in particular in the Opus postumum, engage in an effort to resolve this conflict by positing the existence of invisible moving forces.23 The virtuality of these forces would modify every mental act and, as a result, experience as such would be unsecured or freed from its basis in the actuality of cognitive affect. Experience would, in other words, become a matter of aesthetic judgment.

. . . Hölderlin introduces a further modification to this reflection on the aesthetic force that Kant associates with poetry. The change is illustrated by the reinterpretation of Kant’s account of the sublimity of courage that Hölderlin worked out in his revision of the poem initially titled “Poet’s Courage” (“Dichtermut”; 1801) into what becomes “Timidity” (“Blödigkeit”; 1803). The transformation of the poem is the subject of Benjamin’s essay “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” Although Kant is never explicitly named, either in this passage or indeed anywhere else in the essay, Benjamin’s comments point to the significance of Hölderlin’s poem as a reinterpretation of the account of the dynamic sublime in the third Critique. The revisions to the poem reveal a force with the potentiality to reduce the world of things, including the human thing, to nothing—a power that at once deposes the world of objects and imposes a field of relations. This is the force of the image in Benjamin’s work. Receptivity to its force calls for the courage to exist amid nothing but relations—the existence exemplified by the poet in Hölderlin’s “Timidity.” As Benjamin says, “the more deeply it is understood, [courage] becomes less a quality than a relation of man to world and of world to man.” Courage is not a “property,” but a force—“a spiritual principle” to which living responds (GS 2.1: 123; SW 1: 33). Becoming receptive to the moving force of an image that does not affect us cognitively calls for poetic courage: the courage of a poetic relation to the world that is liberated from what Benjamin characterizes, in another early essay on the “coming philosophy,” as

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the “mythological” concept of empirical consciousness (GS 2.1: 162; SW 1: 103). Benjamin attributes this mythology, in Neo-Kantian fashion, to Kant. But, as I have just suggested, this dimension of the “spiritual principle” exemplified by the poet’s courage is already implicit in the “discovery” of the principle of aesthetic judgment announced by Kant in 1787. This finding required a bold step out of the world with which the critical project had begun. The selfaffection that modifies all experience—the “I exist thinking” to which Kant alludes in the second edition of the first Critique— is freed from the analogy to cognition that governs the subject’s inner experience of itself in the first Critique (AA B: 429; Critique of Pure Reason, 456). This is the upshot of the finding that would provide Kant, as he noted in a famous letter to Karl Reinhold, with “enough material for the rest of my life”: the principle of purposiveness calls for a transcendental critique of noncognitive self-affection (AA 10: 514). Such a critique addresses itself to this dimension of the poetic relation to the world—or “courage”—that Benjamin discovered in Hölderlin’s poetry, namely, that of an unaffected receptivity to existence amid relations of force.24 As with the “mode of thinking” of the people who judge the warrior superior to the statesman in Kant’s analysis of the dynamic sublime, the poetic existence that Benjamin finds in Hölderlin’s “Timidity” consists in a courageous attitude toward the danger affecting the entire world of physical things. In this sense, the critique of what Benjamin in his essay on the “coming philosophy” calls the Kantian “mythology” of “empirical consciousness” is already outlined by Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment—a work that Benjamin seems to have studied intensively only several years after the composition of the essay on “Timidity.”25 The force that Benjamin finds in Hölderlin’s poem thus in this sense has its origins in the transcendental principle of the power to judge (Urteilskraft) discovered by Kant.26 The dynamic, supercognitive field laid out by Kant’s critique of the judging power is disclosed by the image in Benjamin’s work. Throughout his critical project, the image is the polarizing form of the virtualized world. It emerges in his interpretation of Hölderlin’s “Timidity” as the “more rigorous power of a world-

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image (strengere Gewalt eines Weltbildes)” (GS 2.1: 118; SW 1: 29). The connection between this image in Hölderlin and the “dialectical image” in the Paris of the later project is indicated by the “interpenetration” (Durchdringung) of time in both contexts. Just as the world-image in “Timidity” is traversed by “spatio­temporal interpenetration” (raumzeitliche Durchdringung) in the essay on Hölderlin, so the “genuinely historical” image is stamped with “dialectical interpenetration” (dialektische Durchdringung) in The Arcades Project (GS 2.1: 112; SW 1: 25; and GS 5.2: 1027; Arcades, 857). In both cases time is imparted with the force that concerns Kant in the critique of the aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime. In Benjamin’s early essay on Hölderlin this comes out clearly from an inspection of his approach to the key revisions in the final strophes of “Timidity.” Under the conditions of “spatiotemporal interpenetration” of “the image of the world” that come to prevail in Hölderlin’s poem, Benjamin proposes, “all spatial relation” inherently bears “temporal identity.” The poem’s “layout” (Lage) is thus a singular temporal space (GS 2.1: 115; SW 1: 27).27 Time is likewise interpenetrated by space, rather than presenting itself in the mythological form of a self-consistent, independent condition of subjective experience, according to the cognitive model outlined by Kant in the first part of the first Critique. This is what Benjamin calls “temporal plasticity” (GS 2.1: 117 and 120; SW 1: 29 and 31). We now come to the first set of revisions in last two strophes of “­Timidity.” At issue in these lines is a certain equality and openness that the poets share with “the god of heaven,” Who grants the thinking day to poor and rich, Who, at the turning of time, holds us, who pass away in sleep, Drawn erect on golden Leading strings, like children. Good also are, and skillfully sent to someone for something, When we come, with art, and bring one From among the heavenly beings. Yet we ourselves Bring suitable hands.  (Hölderlin, “Timidity,” ll. 17–24)28

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These lines were written immediately after Hölderlin’s legendary “exile” in France—“a kind of caesura in his career,” as one commentator suggests.29 The gap falls, in other words, precisely between the two versions of the poem interpreted by Benjamin: “Poet’s Courage” was completed in early 1801 and work on “­Timidity” began in the summer of 1802, just after Hölderlin returned from his six-month stay abroad (see StA 2.2: 527). In a famous letter from November 1802 to Casimir Böhlendorff, Hölderlin writes of having been, “as one says of heroes, struck by Apollo” during his time in southern France (StA 6.1: 432; Essays and Letters, 152). Back in Germany, he continues: The more I study it, the more powerfully (mächtiger) the nature of my country seizes me. The thunderstorm, not only in its highest manifestation but, precisely in this sense as power and figure (Macht und Gestalt) among other forms of the sky; the light in its effects, forming (bildend ) nationally and as a principle and mode of destiny—that something is sacred to us—its force (Drang) in coming and going; the characteristic element of the woods and the coinciding of various characters in nature in one area; that all sacred places of the earth are gathered around one place, and the philosophical light around my window: they are now my delight; may I remember how I have come to this point. (StA 6.1: 433; Essays and Letters, 153)

The letter to Böhlendorff, which echoes Kant’s evocation of the natural power calling forth the greater power of aesthetic judgment (“thunderclouds piling up in the sky . . .”), suggests a link between the account of the dynamic sublime in the third Critique and the transaction taking place in the fifth strophe of “Timidity” (AA 5: 261; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 144).30 Granted to the “poor and rich” of the poem, as to Hölderlin after he was “struck by Apollo,” is the time of the “thinking” that Kant distinguishes from “knowing” or “cognizing” in the first Critique—mental time off from cognition. Working “nationally” (nationell ) or originating on this day is instead a figuring or imaging (bildende) force.31 This power is the source of the first alteration in strophe 5: in the earlier version the day granted was “joyful” ( fröhlich), now it is

Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin

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“thinking” (denkend ). In Kant’s terms the “thinking day” is given by a transcendental principle of judgment that lays out existence in relation to the two orders of moving forces calling for aesthetic judgment. On this day there is, in place of the cognition of objects, the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful and the sublime. In the letter to Böhlendorff just cited, Hölderlin writes of the natural moving force that imparts itself in images of beauty—the gathering phenomena of natural purposiveness.32 The lines of “Timidity” that concern us, on the other hand, offer an image of the power or violence of the dynamic sublime in the receptivity of the poets—more precisely, “the tongues of the people”—to the moral moving force of freedom that holds “those who pass away in sleep, / Drawn upright on golden / Leading strings, like children (die Entschlafenden / Aufgerichtet an goldnen / Gängelbanden, wie Kinder)” (ll. 18–20).33 Significantly, the moral force of uprightness takes effect at a moment marked by the failure of cognition— the poets are “those who have fallen asleep” or, as one could also translate, “those who have passed away” (die Entschlafenden).34 The bodies of the sleepwalking poets are thus suspended by a spiritual force enabling them to stand in the reason of “the thinking day.” Such suspension occurs, moreover, at what is described as the “turning of time” (Wende der Zeit), which is the second revision in this strophe. This change also responds to the force of the transcendental principle of judgment discovered by Kant. On one level, it evokes the epochal turn or Wende that has been associated with the revolution in philosophy announced in the remarks on the Copernican “hypothesis,” introduced, once again, in the preface to the second edition of the first Critique in 1787. Yet, it must be emphasized that the analogy to the Copernican revolution is not based on the replacement of one (geocentric) worldview for another (heliocentric) one. Copernicus’s thought is paradigmatic for Kant, rather, as a “transformation in our way of thinking” (Umänderung der Denkart), according to which the cognitive relation to the world is subordinated to one dictated by freedom (AA B: xxii n.; Critique of Pure Reason, 113 n.).35 What concerns Kant, in other words, is a standpoint that is unaffected by worldly

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things: freely standing—or, as Kant puts it at one point, participating—in practical reason.36 Such a perspective cannot be oriented by a more adequate—for example, heliocentric—worldview. Hölderlin brings his poem into line with this point when he replaces the “sun god” with “heaven’s god” as the source of what has become, in the final version, “the thinking day.” But the “turning of time” can be understood on another level as well. Instead of existing as an independent, self-consistent element in which “inner” appearances are extended, time turns. At this turning, in other words, time becomes versatile and figurable—in short, as Benjamin says, “plastic” (GS 2.1: 120; SW 1: 31). By acceding to plasticity time takes on a capacity specifically denied to it in the first Critique, namely, the ability to turn into a figure or a layout: time, writes Kant, “belongs neither to a figure or a layout, etc. (Gestalt, oder Lage, etc.)” (AA A: 33, B: 50; Critique of Pure Reason, 163). This plasticity is not an analogy through which we seek to replace the figurability or turnability lacking in time and “represent the temporal sequence [by analogy] through a line progressing to infinity” (AA A: 33, B: 50; Critique of Pure Reason, 163). Rather, a turning point exists in time in Hölderlin’s poem. At this point time is no longer temporal in the sense of Kant’s first Critique.37 The two alterations in lines 17–18 of “Timidity” thus bear the force of the transcendental principle of judgment in Kant. Benjamin interprets these shifts by way of a number of later philosophical developments, Neo-Kantian among others.38 For example, the interpenetration of time and space that takes effect in the final version of Hölderlin’s poem is analyzed as a manifestation of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of “function.” Through interpenetration—at the “turning of time” and during “the thinking day”—time becomes, in Cassirer’s terms, a function of space and vice versa. This manifests itself in Benjamin’s essay with the power of an image, specifically, “the more rigorous power of a world-image (die ­strengere Gewalt eines Weltbildes) . . . that turns the people [i.e., the ‘poor and rich’ of line 17] into a sensuous-spiritual function of the poetic life” (GS 2.1: 118; SW 1: 29). Under the force of this image figurability is emancipated from the mythological concept of space as

Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin

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a self-consistent element in which objects are extended. “In the forming of this world-image,” Benjamin writes, “every association with conventional mythology is ever more destroyed” (GS 2.1: 120; SW 1: 31). After citing the example of the substitution of the “architectonic” figure of heaven for the sun in the characterization of the granting god of the poem, Benjamin invokes the liberation of figurability as another instance of the mythology-destroying force of the image: “It is clear here how the poet progressively lifts (aufhebt) the difference between figure and figureless (Gestalt und Gestaltlosem)” (GS 2.1: 120; SW 1: 31).39 By pressing through the boundary that separates space from time under conditions of cognition, figurability makes time impartable in the form of an image. But at this point a certain difference between Hölderlin and Kant comes to light. Liberation from cognitive constraint in “­Timidity” leads to no vision—there is no panorama of human history and no explicit recognition of the greater inner force of a mental faculty over natural power. Instead there is the mere suspended existence of the uplifted poets. The poets of line 18, and by extension “the living” amid whom they exist, are receptive to a projection of plasticity that breaks the space-time barrier and turns them into an “image”: “Drawn upright on golden / Leading strings, like children” (GS 2.1: 121; SW 1: 31). But the greater force of the architectonic element of the last version of the poem also projects figurability into the sphere of the gods, where it traditionally submits to their ends. Now, however, the figuring force in the hands of the poets is greater than that of the gods, and the poets “bring one / From among the heavenly beings” (ll. 22–23). Benjamin interprets this turn of events as a revolution in the relation between the god who is brought and the figuring force that had been up to this point (i.e., in the world of the Greek gods) his very principle. The god does not determine, but instead is determined by, “the cosmos of the poem”: “Even the god must in the end serve (dienen) the poem to the utmost and execute (vollstrecken) its law, just as the people had to be the sign of its extension (­Erstreckung)” (GS 2.1: 121; SW 1: 32). The god becomes a part of the poem’s extension—an “object” (Gegenstand ) of its cosmos—and the poet

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“seizes” him (GS 2.1: 121–22; SW 1: 32). With this resistance, what Benjamin calls the “supreme sovereignty of relations,” emerges a medium of existence or living that suspends all ends. We are no longer within the Kantian framework of a supersensible appearance that elicits a mental vision of purposiveness. Instead, the freedom from cognitive limits testifies merely to the existence of the poets animated by the figurability running through their hands. There is no indication of forward or backward movement; indeed the poets are not even said to be walking—they are going and being led nowhere by the strings. Benjamin engages in multiple tactics to convey the “spatiotemporal interpenetration” that constitutes the dynamic sphere of this dramatic interaction that the poem shares initially with the liberation from empirical space and time characteristic of aesthetic judgment in Kant. For example, time is characterized spatially in the phrase temporal plasticity, and space is inflected temporally in the play on the etymological link in German between the words Lage (situation or layout) and Gelegenheit (opportunity or occasion). Similar effects are produced by phrases that drive time and space into one another, such as “the spatial extension of the living determines itself in the temporally inward intervention of the poet” (GS 2.1: 121; SW 1: 32). But Benjamin also folds an image into his elucidation of the manner in which the god is handled in the last strophe of the poem, and this gesture indicates the intensification of the force Kant analyzes in his account of the “dynamic sublime”: Figuration, the inwardly plastic principle, is so heightened that the fate (Verhängnis) of the dead form breaks in over the god, and—to remain within the image—plasticity is turned inside out and now the god becomes wholly an object. The temporal form is broken from the inside out as something animated. The heavenly one is brought. Here lies before us the highest expression of identity: the Greek god has entirely fallen prey to his own principle, the figure. (GS 2.1: 121; SW 1: 32)

The “image” to which Benjamin explicitly refers in this passage begins to take hold with the word translated as “fate”—­ Verhängnis—from the verb meaning to drape or to veil. The

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phrase “the dead form,” inserted into this common German expression, reinforces the association of the “fate” that envelops the god with the draping of a veil or a shroud over a corpse. But there is also a twist already available in the verb of the German formulation on which Benjamin draws. I have translated the verb literally, including its prefix (herein), in order to indicate this: the shroudlike fate “breaks in over the god (über den Gott hereingebrochen ist).” The inward thrust of the verb exposes a spatial surface in the veil of fate that catches hold of the god who is then pulled into its fold—in keeping with Benjamin’s image—as figuration turns itself inside out “over the god.” There is a suggestion here of the hunting figure that Benjamin will later employ to describe the bagging of images in the Paris project.40 In the Hölderlin essay, however, the image of fate as a veil itself becomes the bag in which the poets trap the god. In this case, instead of being enfolded, the image enfolds. The reversible enveloping movement, according to which the contained (inside) can become the container (outside), and vice versa, is fundamental to the image throughout Benjamin’s work.41 In the passage that concerns us, the reversibility of the image breaks out with the breaking in of temporal plasticity over the god. Thus in the image of the “fate” of the dead god the enveloping outbreak of plastic time slips into the hands that the poets “bring” in the final lines of “Timidity.” In these lines the dynamic capacity of what the poets “bring” is rigorously differentiated from the “dead form” in which the god “is brought.” This, as Benjamin notes, is the decisive point of the imposing caesura of the poem’s penultimate line: “When we come, with art, and bring one / From among the heavenly beings. Yet we ourselves / Bring suitable hands” (ll. 22–24). Thus the image of the god mummified in plasticity ultimately gives way, in the penetrating pause, to the image-producing potentiality of the poets that is subordinated to no determinate end. What the poets “bring,” then, is an ability to impart the force of spatiotemporal interpenetration in the reversible form of the image. In the “world-image” of Hölderlin’s poem Benjamin discovers what time and space would have been in Kant’s first Critique if

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Ur-ability

reason had taken priority over understanding and the cognitively oriented spatialization of space and time as inside and outside had been abandoned in favor of the approach suggested in the Opus postumum.42 By the same token, the spatiotemporal interpenetration of the image throughout Benjamin’s work bears traces of the Kantian theory of force and also of its intensification in the writings of Hölderlin.43 As the reading I have started to develop shows, the intensification of this force in poems like “Timidity” frees itself from ends by, for example, turning inside out the very logic of containment. This supreme sovereignty of the medium in Hölderlin authorizes a radical suspension of the “purposiveness” that is revealed, according to Kant, by aesthetic judgment. In Benjamin’s early essay this authority of the medium emerging in Hölderlin and summarized in the poet’s famous allusion to a law of “strict mediacy” that has the highest sovereignty over mortals and immortals becomes merged with the influence of Nietzsche’s advocacy of life as primarily a means and of living as a reaction to an endsuspending force eliciting the human being’s “incapacity not to react.”44 The development of the theory of the “dialectical image” by Benjamin twenty years later in the Paris project is an extension of this reflection on an intensified Kantian force.45 The critique of the “bourgeois” concept of history as progress that is fundamental to the later writings is part of Benjamin’s long-­standing project to liberate thinking from the “mythological” model he associates with Kant’s first Critique, according to which time is regarded as a progressive continuum. What needs to be stressed first, however, is that the search for what Benjamin calls a time that is “not temporal but image-like” (bildlich) turns at once away from and toward Kant, specifically, away from cognitive experience and toward the thinking of critical philosophy—away from “time” and toward “force” (GS 5.1: 578; Arcades, 463). Thus instead of flowing continuously forward, time spaces in the “dialectical image” of Benjamin’s studies of Paris and, as I will suggest, in certain places in Kant’s writing as well, although in the latter case it appears to test and confirm, rather than to interrupt, the rational faith in the redemptive progressive movement of human history. In the

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case of Benjamin’s late work on Paris, even the time of working on the project is included in his notes as evidence of the spacing of time. In one anecdote from the section of The Arcades Project devoted to Paris streets, for example, Benjamin tells of a Sunday walk in the city when suddenly time turns itself inside out over the Place du Maroc and the “what has been” of imperial and urban expansion folds itself over the space separating the place in North Africa from la place in Paris that bears its name (GS 5.1: 645–46; Arcades, 518).46 At such junctures time stops being “temporal” and becomes “image-like.” This is the time of the “dialectical image”: it originates not with a time flowing but with a “time differential” (Zeitdifferential ), as Benjamin noted when the “dialectical image” first appeared in his writing and its “image-like” time was immediately differentiated from that of Hegel’s “dialectic” (GS 5.2: ­ rcades, 867). Instead of flowing progressively, time at 1037–38; A such points turns and is suddenly spatialized. In turning, then, time can turn around and interface with “what has been.” Yet in order to turn around, time must first space. The “image-like” spacing of time is repeatedly described by Benjamin as taking place as part of a dynamic field: as a moment that “polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out” (GS 5.1: 587; Arcades, 470). The Paris of the late studies is, in this sense, the field of Benjamin’s labors. Not objects or things from the past viewed from the perspective of the present, but sources with the capacity to impart “what has been” to the “now” are what concerns him. Paris in this context is a city of images and in particular “dialectical images” in which “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (GS 5.1: 578; Arcades, 463). It is less a matter of gathering material than of bringing forth the capacity of self-dividing, polarizing units of impartability. This is the point made by Benjamin’s manipulation of what seems at first to be a common agricultural figure in one of the earliest of the “epistemo-theoretical” notes to the Paris project that I have cited as an epigraph to this chapter: “All ground must at some point have been made arable by reason, must have been

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Ur-ability

cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and myth” (GS 5.1: 571; Arcades, 456–57). The stress here, once again, is on “reason” as ability—in Kant’s terms “thinking” as distinct from “knowing”—and on mythology-destroying force. For this reason, it is a question of arability rather than harvesting or even cultivation: this is certainly not a matter of property in the Lockean sense or in the sense sketched out by Kant himself in the Metaphysics of Morals. Indeed the root of the word translated as “arable” does not share the sense of the Latin arare meaning “to plough.” It derives instead from a cluster of words that Grimm’s dictionary traces to an old verb signifying “to bring forth” (erbern).47 The root of the adjective is thus rigorously in keeping with the potentializing force that Benjamin brings to his field work. Yet the highly evocative syllables joined in the word that I have been withholding up to this point—urbar— seem to break out of the etymological container and to contain a more primal sense of potentiality that Benjamin brings to his project. The word urbar contains the root ur, which means “original” or “primal,” as in those “primal phenomena” (Urphänomene) that fascinated Benjamin in Goethe; and the suffix –bar, which signifies potentiality or, as in the title of Weber’s study of Benjamin with which this chapter began, “–ability.” By breaking out its two parts the word urbar takes on the capacity to impart the primal potentiality or Ur-ability of reason after Kant. The source of this capacity can be traced, as we have seen, to the primal division— Ur-teil—that Hölderlin discovered in Kant’s critique of the transcendental power of judgment (Ur-teils-kraft) and that Benjamin in turn discovered in Hölderlin’s poetry.48

§2

Hölderlin’s Peace

In his essay “Toward the Critique of Violence” (1921), Benjamin points to an ambiguity affecting the language of critical philosophy to which I alluded at the beginning of the preceding chapter. From the perspective of Kantian philosophy, he observes, words such as life and man disclose a fundamental “ambiguity” (Doppelsinn) deriving from their relation to two “spheres”: one of mere existence (as in “mere life”); another consisting of an “irreducible, total condition” (as in “the irreducible, total condition that is man”) (GS 2.1: 201; SW 1: 251). The difference between the mere existence of man and what is described as “the not-yet-existence of the just man” constitutes the fundamental “ambiguity” (Zweideutig­keit) of terms such as life and man: “Man does not coincide, at any price, with the mere life of the man, any more than with the mere life in the man or with any other of his conditions or qualities, indeed not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person” (GS 2.1: 201; SW 1: 251). Benjamin takes an example of this “ambiguity” from “Toward Eternal Peace” (1795), noting at one point that the doubleness of words like life and man, which “is to be unlocked” with reference to the two spheres, is “analogous to that of the word peace” (GS 2.1: 201; SW 1: 251). This remark alludes to an explicit citation of Kant earlier in the essay. Conventionally and erroneously used to describe what is always also the imposition of a new legal order through war, Benjamin notes, 

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Hölderlin’s Peace

the word peace is employed otherwise by Kant, so that it signifies not merely the enforcement of a new worldly order but also the irreducible, total end of all such orders. This is the dual sense, Benjamin suggests, “in which Kant speaks of ‘Eternal Peace’” (GS 2.1: 185–86; SW 1: 240).1 The doubleness of the word peace in “Toward Eternal Peace” provides an instance of the “ambiguity” attributed to community in the Critique of Pure Reason and to the sensus communis of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It includes the possibility of nonempirical community that Kant does not rule out in his analysis of time and experience in the first Critique—a community that can be seen on the basis of an ability exemplified by the poets in the account of aesthetic judgment in the third Critique. In addition to being metaphorical and standing for political conditions brought about, for example, by agreements calling for the cessation of worldly conflict, the word peace in “Toward Eternal Peace” also contains an unmetaphorical dimension that stands for no worldly condition and that is in this sense unconditional and philosophical. In a phrase that draws on the chiasmus formed by this ambiguity in “Toward Eternal Peace,” Benjamin describes the peace of which Kant writes as “equally unmetaphorical and political”: unmetaphorical in the philosophical sense that peace refers to nothing in this world and political in the metaphorical sense that peace can stand for many things in this world, including another means of war. By displaying an ambiguity associated with poetic language, critical philosophy defends its right to declare itself publicly on matters of revolution, war, and peace in “Toward Eternal Peace” along the lines of traditional defenses of poetry. Kant’s philosophers concern themselves with a world of pure possibility that is hypothetical and therefore supposedly harmless in the real world of practical politics. Yet the ambiguity of peace in Kant’s essay opens up a more complex relation of political philosophy to the worldly power from which it seeks the right to speak freely. In this sense the ambiguous power of philosophy is indeed related to that of poetry, the political force of which was recognized from the start—if not deployed—by its self-styled philosophical opponents. When reflect-

Hölderlin’s Peace

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ing on a hypothetical peace treaty or even indirectly on an actual pact to which a fictional document may implicitly refer, such as the peace concluded between Prussia and the French revolutionary government on April 5, 1795 (four months before “Toward Eternal Peace” was sent to the publisher), philosophy is presented by Kant as posing no threat to state power on the basis of its exclusive responsibility to an other-worldly sovereign, namely, reason. As a matter of fact, the possession of political power interferes with this responsibility, according to Kant, and “corrupts” the freedom of the judgment that philosophers bring to political questions: That kings should philosophize or philosophers become kings is not to be expected, but it is also not to be wished for, since possession of power unavoidably corrupts (verdirbt) the free judgment of reason. But that kings or royal peoples . . . should not let the class of philosophers disappear or be silent but should let it speak publicly is indispensable to both, so that light may be thrown on their business; and, because this class is by its nature incapable of forming seditious factions or clubs, it cannot be suspected of spreading propaganda. (AA 8: 369; Practical Philosophy, 338)

Political power—specifically state power, the power of kings— corrupts philosophy because free judgment submits only to the higher moral law transcending the imperatives of individual self-­ preservation and collective well-being. From the perspective of critical philosophy these demands issue from the inclination to evil that is rooted in man. By making themselves responsible for subordinating these demands to the higher law of reason, Kant argues, philosophers belong to a “class” that is by its very “nature” incapable of “forming seditious factions.” Yet the mode of rebellion to which this last phrase alludes raises a possibility that provides another instance of the “ambiguity” that Benjamin finds in the political philosophical style of “Toward Eternal Peace.” The phrase “forming seditious factions” translates the German ­Rottierung : “diese Klasse ­ ottierung stems ihrer Natur nach der Rottierung . . . unfähig ist.” R from Rotte, meaning faction, which is the word Luther chose to characterize the followers of Korah who rose up against Moses and

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who were swallowed up into the earth as a divine punishment (in the King James version this is translated as “Korah and his company”) (see Num. 16:1). As a class defined by its responsibility to the higher moral law, the philosophers, Kant suggests, are essentially incapable of belonging to the Rotte. But the sedition in question in this passage from “Toward Eternal Peace” refers specifically to rebellion against worldly power—the power of kings. The word Rottierung, deriving from a source that seems to allude to factionalism with regard to the higher law (the divinely ordained order against which Korah and his company rise up), is used to refer to a rebellion in the practical sphere of politics. Even if there is reason to believe that the story of Korah and his company emerged in the very political context of the struggle to centralize the hierarchy of the Second Temple and to restrict the authority of the priesthood to the “sons of Aaron” in the late sixth century b.c.e., it is not clear that Kant had specific knowledge of this history, apart from his reading of the Bible.2 Nevertheless the ambiguity of the word Rotte in “Toward Eternal Peace” opens the possibility that the incapacity for revolt in the transcendental sphere might reveal an incapacity not to revolt against the state in the world of politics. In Kant’s satirical essay this remains ambiguous. The ambiguity is resolved two years later in Kant’s defense, in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, of the legitimacy of the state’s right to use coercive force. The state is ultimately authorized to exercise force on the basis of its justified claim to control a finite portion of the earth’s surface as a unified sphere. Human beings have a right, not only individually to occupy the space and time where they happen to be (as distinct from the places where they choose to reside), but collectively to possess parts of the surface of the earth that extend beyond the spatiotemporal limits of their own bodily existence. The right to such collective nonphysical possession is legitimate, according to Kant, only in a civil society that results from the “coercion (Zwang) which is necessary if people are to leave the state of nature” (AA 6: 264; Practical Philosophy, 416). The foundation for this right lies in the postulate that there is no usable thing in this world that is “without a lord” (­herrenlos)

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(AA, 6: 246; Practical Philosophy, 405). More precisely, the ultimate legitimacy of the state’s right to employ coercive force, as we have seen, is based on a mythic personification of the land as a vassal who offers the use of his body in exchange for the protection of a lord: it is “as if the land were to say, ‘if you cannot protect me you cannot command me’” (AA 6: 265; Practical Philosophy, 416). As Peter Fenves has compellingly demonstrated, it is precisely this mythic source of state power in the first part of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals that served as the starting point for Benjamin’s critique of violence (Messianic Reduction, 190–226). For Benjamin justice emerges when the coercive power enshrined in the state’s mythic right to use force is reduced to an absolute minimum. At these moments the inversely proportional strength of pure “revolutionary” force (Gewalt) is at its highest level. Tellingly Benjamin also returns to the story of Korah’s faction to which Kant alludes, and resolves the ambiguity of the conclusion of “Toward Eternal Peace” in precisely the opposite direction of the deduction, in the Metaphysics of Morals, of the state’s right to use force. The coercive force of state power is now cast in the role of die Rotte and becomes subject to the “divine” or “revolutionary” violence exemplified, as Benjamin writes, by “God’s judgment on the company of Korah” (GS 2.1: 199; SW 1: 250). The tables are turned, in other words, and the legal power of the state, which was ambiguously affirmed in Kant’s essay on peace, is annihilated by revolutionary Gewalt along the lines of the divine punishment of Korah and his faction. According to Benjamin’s reworking of the biblical tale, it is as if Kant’s practical politicians were swallowed up by the land they looked upon as a feudal subject. Instead of offering itself up in exchange for protection, the land rises up and closes over those who assumed a right to possess it.3 From Benjamin’s perspective, everyone who claims possession of a portion of the earth’s surface treads on the shaky ground of Korah’s faction (including, presumably, Moses and the sons of Aaron). Factionalism begins with the fall into the state of possessibility in which the world expresses itself in the transitory mode of finite space and time.4 Pure Gewalt collapses the possessible dimension of the world (its existence in

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space and time) to which human beings unjustly cling. It is in this sense an “expiatory force” that interrupts, not only the history of guilt that begins with the possession of nature on the basis of myth (its personification as a vassal under the protection of a lord), but also the mythic conception of “empirical consciousness” to which such possession corresponds (what Husserl called the “natural attitude”) (GS 2.1: 162; SW 1: 103).5 Gewalt, therefore, resists materialization as an empirical event that belongs to cognitive experience. Or, as Benjamin puts it, “the expiatory force of Gewalt does not come to light for human beings” (GS 2.1: 203; SW 1: 252). The source of this understanding of nonempirical force for Benjamin is detectable in the Hölderlinian cadences of the key sentence in which it is described at the end of “Toward the Critique of Violence”: “Not equally possible and not equally urgent is, however, for human beings the decision when pure Gewalt in a specific case was real (Nicht gleich möglich noch auch gleich d­ ringend ist aber für Menschen die Entscheidung, wann reine Gewalt in einem bestimmten Falle wirklich war)” (GS 2.1: 202–3; SW 1: 252). Yet, as Fenves makes clear in his excavation and explication of the category of justice worked out by Benjamin in his early writings, the theory of Gewalt in “Toward the Critique of Violence” takes as its point of departure Kant’s postulation of a force greater than physical power in the critical examination of pure and pure practical reason. This is the force emerging most purely in the aesthetic judgment of the dynamic sublime that was analyzed in the preceding chapter and that Benjamin was studying at the time he laid the groundwork for his critique of Gewalt.6 In keeping with the tension between knowing and thinking that is accentuated in the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, the doctrine of right, and in particular the doctrine of the fundamental right to possession, comes into conflict with a force greater than empirical power. This surfaces most clearly at the points in Kant’s work where practical reason touches on religious and theological matters. It is indicated, for example, by the innkeeper’s sign picturing a graveyard and bearing the inscription “Toward Eternal Peace,” with which the essay of that title opens.

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It is also evident in the condition placed on mankind’s possession of the earth in the earlier treatise on religion that in many ways laid the foundation for Kant’s satirical reflections on peace—­ Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). This earlier account of the origin of property emphasizes the fallen state in which human beings are given the limited right of usufruct, rather than taking outright possession, of “the goods of this earth” (AA 6: 78; Religion, 118). Instead of lords in possession of the land (or of the sea) human beings are subject from the perspective of rational religion to the “supreme proprietor” of what for mankind can only be a matter of use (not Eigentum but Untereigentum): “The human being was originally appointed the proprietor (Eigentümer) of all the goods of the earth (Genesis 1:28), though he was to have only their usufruct (Untereigentum) (dominium utile) under his Creator and Lord as the supreme proprietor (Obereigentümer) (­dominus ­directus)” (AA 6: 78; Religion and Rational Theology, 118). The lower, fallen mode of possession (Untereigentum) that consists in using “all the goods of the earth” takes effect at the same time that an “evil being” takes over this world by establishing dominion over the minds of men. This evil “prince,” as Kant puts it, thus rules over a world that becomes a space and a time of conflict over the utilization of finite resources—a world of wars (AA 6: 80; Religion, 120). Under such a “hierarchical constitution,” and with mankind “ripe for a revolution,” Kant goes on, a “person” is sent “as though descended from heaven” to restore the “original innocence” of the human race before it entered into the “contract” in accordance with which it uses the world after the fall (AA 6: 79–80; Religion, 119). Although Kant makes it clear in this passage that the revolutionary event in question takes place outside of the empirical dimensions of space and time and although he stresses in the preceding section that it occurs internally as a matter of virtue and will, it is nevertheless granted the right to a certain space: “The good principle descended among humans from heaven, not at one particular time, but at the origin of the human race in some invisible way (as anyone must grant who is attentive to the sacredness of the principle, and the incomprehensibility as well of the union

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of this sacredness with the human sensible nature in the moral predisposition) and has primary residence in humankind by right (in der Menschheit rechtlicherwise seinen ersten Wohnsitz)” (AA 6: 82; Religion, 121). The “moral predisposition,” therefore, leaves room for believing that the principle of good did indeed come down from heaven among mankind—not spatially and temporally but invisibly and originally. It is not, therefore, a matter of a spatial metaphor since the “moral predisposition” (moralische Anlage) stands for no empirical space. The residential “right” of the principle of good is not derived from a capacity to control or to protect such a space. It is not, in other words, a case of taking possession in the Kantian sense outlined in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals. Invoked with respect to the principle of good is right, not in the restricted sense of possession, but rather in the absolute sense of justice. The right of the principle of good—the good that is prior to “all the goods of the world”—is, in this sense, justice. In relation to this supreme right claims to possession appear as a lower order of empirical control—metaphorical or, to cite Benjamin, mythic possession. In place of a personification of the sort encountered in Kant’s metaphorical transformation of the land into a vassal asking for protection, the “person” said to have “descended among humans” is subject to what Kant calls the “special laws of pure practical reason,” namely those of “both” the sensible and the intelligible worlds. In this sense the “person” of justice is marked by the same ambiguity as words like “man” and “peace.” This “person” is personified empirically as part of the sensible world and also subject to a “personality” that comes from participation in the intelligible world (AA 5: 86–87; Practical Philosophy, 210). In the political world the question of the right of justice was posed perhaps most poignantly for Kant and his contemporaries by the French Revolution. Kant, for his part, as Hannah Arendt astutely pointed out, looked upon the “events of 1789” as a matter of aesthetic judgment, which is to say, as calling for the disinterested judging that is the subject of the third Critique. The disinterested attitude toward the revolution is described in a passage from The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), on the different perspec-

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tives of the philosopher and the jurist with regard to this occurrence. From the former, Kant argues, the revolution elicits what he calls “participation” (Teilnehmung). The capacity to participate in the revolution without experiencing it as a cognitive event expresses the nonempirical communability of the sensus communis outlined in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In participation (Teilnehmung), the communicability or, to return to Weber’s suggestion, the impartability (Mitteilbarkeit) of aesthetic judgment manifests itself as an ethically grounded political force. Moreover, because it reveals a force of reason that is not subject to cognitive determination, participation also involves the revolutionary “turn” of time and space I explored in the reading of Hölderlin’s “Timidity” in the preceding chapter. This turn is evident in Kant’s description in The Conflict of the Faculties of the participation called forth by the French Revolution from the perspective of critical philosophy: “This revolution, I say, finds in the minds of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation (Teilnehmung) that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is tied to danger; this participation, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race” (AA 7: 85; Conflict of the Faculties, 153). The participants in this passage are not actors in the French Revolution, but they are also not simply its spectators. For the participants the revolution is not a cognitive event. They do not take it in: it brings out a capacity in them. Accordingly, the revolutionary public of participation described by Kant comes about, not with the observation and taking in of powerful events in the world, but with the turning inside out or “expression” (Äußerung) of a mental power in man resulting from the deactivation of worldly affect. Participation takes place as an inner moral force presses through the boundary separating the internal from the external dimensions of experience—space and time—under the conditions of cognition outlined in the first Critique. Significantly, however, the outside is already installed inside of man in Kant’s account. The “cause” (Ursache) of the expressive action of participation is designated, not as a faculty or a capacity,

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but as a moral space laid out in man—the “moral predisposition” (­moralische Anlage) that is the seat of justice in the messianic revolution dramatized in the essay on religion. As suggested, the German word Anlage signifies a spatial structure or layout, such as an enclosure or a park. One thinks, for example, of the Parkanlage around which Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) is constructed.7 Like the park or garden in Goethe’s novel, the moral space in man from which participation springs is the site of conflicting elements— drives for self-preservation, calculations aimed at maximizing happiness, and a moral law to which mankind is held accountable. Kant had surveyed this moral region with its subdivisions of “animality,” “humanity,” and “personality” five years earlier in the discussion of “radical evil” in the second section of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 6: 26–56; Religion, 15–49).8 Although all three of these elements tend originally toward goodness, he observes, evil results whenever one of the first two (self-­preserving drives and happiness-maximizing calculations) is elevated over the third (accountability to the moral law). Participation affirms the sovereign imperative dictating that man must become a better human being. For this reason the participants respond to the French Revolution in the passage cited above from The Conflict of the Faculties without regard to self-preservation and without calculating the happiness likely to result from their response. As moral beings they expose themselves “practically” to the danger of a world dominated by men who have illegitimately elevated rational calculation to a first principle, specifically, the politicians and statesmen whom Kant portrays satirically in “Toward Eternal Peace” (AA 5: 75; Practical Philosophy, 201). This takes courage. Participation reinstitutes the sovereignty of “personality” and, in Kant’s phrase from the “General Remark” in the first part of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, undertakes the “restoration of the original moral predisposition to the good to its power (Wiederherstellung der ursprünglichen Anlage zum Guten in ihre Kraft)” (AA 6: 44: Religion, 89). This “power,” it must be emphasized, reigns over a space and thus reveals the inner moral “predisposition” occupying a dimension confined to the external world

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under the conditions of cognitive experience. Similarly, under the effect of “spatiotemporal interpenetration” underlined by Benjamin in Hölderlin’s poetry, the demand for restoration imputes less time than a turn in time to the space that is projected from the inside out in the act of participating. In order for it to be genuinely moral and good—rather than, for example, an evil attempt to maximize individual or collective “happiness”—the participation that the French Revolution “finds” in mankind must be grounded in what Kant calls “a revolution in the disposition in man (eine Revolution in der Gesinnung im Menschen)” (AA 6: 47; Religion, 92). And such a revolution, Kant insists, cannot take place in the sensible flow of time that constitutes the subjective dimension of man’s cognitive experience. There is but one spectator of this revolution: only “for God” is “the change looked upon as a revolution” (AA 6: 48; Religion, 92). Exclusively from this paradisal perspective does the revolutionary force of justice become visible in man’s inner moral space. Yet when cognitive experience, which is closed off from such a vision, is deactivated by certain powerful beautiful and sublime spectacles a sense—a supersensible feeling—of this moral predisposition is made evident. From this supersensible perspective the French Revolution is judged to be beautiful. As such it gives its “disinterested” spectators a feeling for the singular purposiveness (without an external purpose) of human history’s progress toward a republican constitution and ultimately toward the cessation of the conflict over the world as a finite possessible thing—in other words, peace. At the moment of cognitive failure the participant in the French Revolution is recharged by the moral law and directed onto the path of progressive development leading to the unambiguous peace that is the end of historical time. At the (nontemporal) moment when the original “power” of the “moral predisposition” is restored the continuum of historical progress as such is suddenly revealed as a lower-level empirical substitute for a purer time. Progressive history at this messianic time appears as a figure or shape that is the temporal correlate of the lower mode of possession (the Untereigentum of the right of use) described in Kant’s account of man’s provisional dominion over the earth in the

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essay on religion. This split between two orders of time—paradisal and earthly—is characterized in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason as the difference between revolution and reform: For him who penetrates to the intelligible ground of the heart (the ground of all the maxims of the power of choice), for him to whom this endless progress is a unity, i.e. for God, this is the same as actually being a good human being (pleasing to him); and to this extent the change can be considered a revolution (Revolution). For the judgment of human beings, however, who can assess themselves and the strength of their maxims only by the upper hand they gain over the senses in time, the change is to be regarded only as an ever-­ continuing striving for the better, hence as a gradual reformation (Reform) of the propensity to evil, of the perverted mode of thinking (Denkungsart). (AA 6: 48; Religion, 92)

The revolution that restores the moral space in man can only appear to mankind within a cognitive spectrum—as “degrees” or “moments,” as Kant puts it in his explanation of the “intensive magnitudes” of objects of sensation in the first Critique (AA A: 168–70; Critique of Pure Reason, 291–92). Never presenting itself as such, then, the revolution in the “moral predisposition” is represented as points on a spatiotemporal continuum that composes the medium of cognitive experience. Within the context of such a continuum empirical consciousness of the revolutionary “change” remains a matter of degrees of intensity, of “moments” infinitely more or less remote from the essentially inaccessible revolution in man’s inner moral space. In this spectrum man can be “a good human being only in incessant laboring and becoming; i.e., he can hope . . . to find himself upon the good (though narrow) path of constant progress from bad to better” (AA 6: 48; Religion, 92). Still there must also be a revolutionary force of a different order that compels man to “reverse the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being” and to become “a subject receptive to the good” (AA 6: 48; Religion, 92): But does not the thesis of the innate corruption of the human being with respect to all that is good stand in direct opposition to this resto-

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ration (Wiederherstellung) through one’s own effort? Of course it does, so far as the comprehensibility of, i.e. our insight into, its possibility is concerned, or, for that matter, the possibility of anything that must be represented (vorgestellt) as an event in time (change) and, to this extent, as necessary according to nature, though the opposite of the thesis must equally be represented (vorgestellt), under moral laws, as possible through freedom; the thesis is not however opposed to the possibility of this restoration itself. For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now ( jetzt), it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings (wir müssen es auch können). (AA 6: 50; Religion, 94; Kant’s emphasis)

The “restoration” of the moral “predisposition” (Anlage) and of the sovereignty of moral accountability over self-preserving drives and calculation is “represented”—the Wiederherstellung is vorgestellt— not as an “event in time,” but as a “possibility” under “moral laws.” Yet this moral, rather than natural, possibility emerges at a singular point or space in time, namely, “now”: “If the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now ( jetzt), it inescapably follows that we must also be able to be better human beings (wir müssen es auch können).” The moral revolution in man is immediate (it is outside of the medium of time): it occurs at time’s limit or at the point where time spaces as an Anlage. As an indication of the extratemporal character of the moral event, the revolution in man becomes possible and exists as a possibility only through an inner or temporal spacing: through the opening of an internal Anlage. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously posits an ability to think objects that “cannot be given in experience at all.” We can know of such objects, he insists, “only what we ourselves lay into them (nur was wir selbst in sie legen)” (AA B: xviii; Critique of Pure Reason, 111). Thus to disclose mankind’s moral faculty—an ethical ability that cannot be a matter of cognitive experience—Kant himself lays in a layout. A spatial figure referring to no empirical space (there is, Kant insists, no space and thus no Lage in man [AA B: 50; Critique of Pure Reason, 180]), the installation of the moralische Anlage in the critical project is marked by a movement

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of spatial language that is forced by reason to liberate itself from spatial reference. This inner space is a matter, not of cognition, but of the suspension of the cognitive rules, more specifically, of imagining a place where the independent dimensions of experience are made to stand for one another: where space can stand in for time and vice versa. The imaginative laying in of the moral layout is an example of the poetic force of thinking in Kant’s writing. It emerges as a linguistic force that frees itself from the metaphorical character of the language of empirical experience. The expression of the moral predisposition in revolutionary participation gives the feeling of nonempirical community that Kant does not rule out as a possibility in his analysis of the analogies of experience in the first Critique. As a beautiful appearance, this revolutionary occurrence does not nullify the state’s right to use coercive force (for example, to put down a republican uprising in the political sphere); it indicates a purposiveness promising of the human community’s progressive historical development toward a “republican constitution.” The philosophical participants in the French Revolution provide evidence of the principle of good—in the sense of justice—prior to empirical developments. This evidence emerges from the restoration of the nonspatial space of the moralische Anlage. Revolutionary participation thus expresses the belief in the promise of a redemptive end of human beings that is guaranteed by the moral disposition. By positing or laying in the moral space Kant’s language reveals the communicability of a moral deposit in man that is to be redeemed at the end of human history. Reason gives in to the language of the layout—the inner ban on space must be lifted, precisely to make room for reason. Kant touches on this inner moral space at several points in his writings on history during the middle of the 1780s—for example, in “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784) and in “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786) (AA 8: 18 and 20; “Idea for a Universal History,” 109 and 110; and AA 8: 109; “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” 163). But the crucial place of the Anlage is posited for the first time in the so-called canonical works of the critical project in

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the 1787 preface to the second edition of the first Critique, where it provides the “room” that is made for “faith” (AA B: xxx; Critique of Pure Reason, 117). The discovery in man’s mental faculties of a transcendental power to judge that is superior to all natural force requires Kant to allow a place for morality that is not determined by the temporal and spatial dimensions of cognition. This “important alteration in the field of the sciences,” as Kant describes it, calls for the making and remaking of another dimension for reason—outside of the space of cognitive experience (AA B: xxxii; Critique of Pure Reason, 117). In other words, just as the “now” of the moral revolution described in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason takes place at a time that is not temporal, the “room for faith” on which Kant insists in the 1787 preface to the Critique of Pure Reason exists as a nonspatial space on the supersensible ground of the inner Anlage. With respect to “the continuation of our soul after death,” Kant declares that the “rational grounds” (Vernunftgründen) of the “room for faith” lie in “that remarkable predisposition (bemerkliche Anlage) of our nature, noticeable to every human being, never to be capable of being satisfied (zufrieden) by what is temporal (since the temporal is always insufficient for the predisposition (Anlagen) of our whole vocation) leading to the hope of a future life” (AA B: xxxii; Critique of Pure Reason, 117–18). The force of the moralischen Anlage that registers in Kant’s writing as spatial language liberates itself from spatial reference is also evident in the way the “room for faith” is designated: “Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith (Ich mußte also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben den Platz zu bekommen)” (AA B: xxx; Critique of Pure Reason, 117). The word Platz, signifying a specific, concrete location in space—an empirical place—is in tension with the supersensible ground of the inner Anlage on which the room for faith is laid out. Along with knowledge, then, the spatial reference of Platz must be lifted in order to make room for faith, and language has this ability. The forcefulness of its capacity to emancipate itself from space is underlined by the characterization of the “place” (Platz) as a site of conflict that would have to be ceded to nature if man were not able to say and

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in a certain sense to think—specifically without cognizing—freedom and morality. Without this ability and without this disabling of the cognitive faculty, freedom would fall to nature and the space in question would have to be put back in its (empirical) place, as Kant suggests with his use of the verb einräumen: “freedom and with it morality . . . would have to give way to the mechanism of nature” (dem Naturmechanism den Platz einräumen) (AA B: xxix; Critique of Pure Reason, 116). Platz in this passage, then, is the site of a struggle between thinking and cognition over the room for reasonable faith—the battlefield or Kampfplatz on which morality must prove more powerful than nature (AA A: viii; Critique of Pure Reason, 99). On this battlefield reason speaks out. Participation in the French Revolution in this sense expresses the belief in an ultimately redemptive place of rational peace—a land promised by the deposition of the moral space in man.

. . . “Toward Eternal Peace” is in part a reflection on the Peace of Basel, which was concluded on April 5, 1795. This treaty announced an end to the conflict between France and the AustroPrussian alliance that had started formally with the declaration of war by the French revolutionary assembly roughly three years earlier, on April 20, 1792. But this War of the First Coalition or, as nineteenth-century German historians called it, War of Revolution (Revolutionskrieg), which was of course not concluded in 1795, also did not really begin with the official declaration of war. It was part of a chain of events going back to the Circular of Padua, the letter released on July 6, 1791, by Leopold II, Emperor of Austria, calling on the courts of Europe to secure “the liberty and the honor” of the king of France. The circular itself was in turn a response to the earlier decision by the revolutionary government to place the king under house arrest at the Château des Tuilleries (Attar, Révolution française, 22). Some historians have argued that Leopold II’s circular was made into the pretext for war by the propaganda of Jacques Pierre Brissot and the so-called “war party” in the revolutionary assembly during the end of 1791 and the beginning of

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1792. According to this interpretation, the revolution was turned into a political spectacle and the original republican pact became transformed into a cause for war.9 From this perspective the genuine constitutive revolutionary force is seen to have fallen into the political world of constituted power. But it seems more likely that the revolution in this pure sense was over long before 1791. In any case there can be no doubt that Hölderlin followed these developments closely and hopefully, albeit from afar.10 In a letter to his brother from the period leading up to the declaration of war by the revolutionary assembly, one finds Hölderlin regretfully coming to the view that “the good patriot” Brissot seems destined to become “the victim of his lowly enemies” (StA 6: 88). Four years later—a week after the Peace of Basel—as Kant was turning to the composition of his satirical essay on peace, Hölderlin wrote again to his brother, this time in a more sanguine tone, about the certainty of the positive development of mankind. In this letter, dated April 13, 1795, Hölderlin expresses his belief in “the infinite progress in the good,” in terms that echo Kant’s description, in the essay on religion published two years earlier, of progressive reform (StA 6: 63; Essays and Letters, 128). Much of what we know about Hölderlin’s response to the events in France supports the conclusion that for him, as for Kant, the revolution was a thing of beauty. Nevertheless, precisely at this time, Hölderlin also begins reflecting on a certain intensification of the force expressed by what Kant calls revolutionary participation that resists containment by the framework of aesthetic judgment constructed in the third Critique. Hölderlin’s work during the next decade bears witness to this force—a capacity for what he comes to regard as a poetic mode of “being” interrupting the progressive movement attributed by Kant to historical experience.11 This decade was a time of ongoing conflict in Europe, and thus, as Kant predicts, of peace treaties. One such agreement—the Peace of Lunéville, concluded in 1801 between Napoleon and the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II—provided the occasion for Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace.” This poem lays out a positive poetic vision of peace that illustrates the intensification of the force discovered by Kant in

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1787. “Celebration of Peace” may be understood to develop in a highly original way the ambiguous suggestion buried in the account of illusory peace agreements offered in “Toward Eternal Peace.” In this sense Hölderlin’s poem may also be interpreted as implicitly drawing on and removing the terms set forth in Kant’s defense of the right of possession in the Metaphysics of Morals. Composed immediately following the Treaty of Lunéville “Celebration of Peace” did not appear in print until 1954—more than a century and a half after its completion. The publication of the poem led to an explosion of commentary and a total lack of consensus among its interpreters about the meaning of the work. This so-called “battle over the peace” also gave rise to one of the most important literary critical projects to emerge during these years— that of Paul de Man. The response of de Man to the appearance of the poem and to the controversy surrounding it, which extends from the middle of the 1950s to his death in the early 1980s, points to the decisive importance in Hölderlin’s poetry of the force in Kant’s work—that of aesthetic judgment—that comes into conflict with the political power of the state justified in the Metaphysics of Morals. In an essay written in 1958, de Man diagnoses the critical reception of “Celebration of Peace” as compelling evidence that “the fundamental significance of Hölderlin is not yet understood” (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 127). De Man correctly points out that the key figure in the poem—“the king of the feast” (der Fürst des Festes)—is variously identified by the critics as Napoleon, the “genius of the German people,” and Christ (a few years later Peter Szondi argues that the royal personage stands for the poet “himself ” [Hölderlin-Studien, 91–92]). Yet instead of offering his own interpretation of this figure in the poem and adding his voice to polemic, de Man goes on to extend the incomprehensibility of “Celebration of Peace” to the reception of Hölderlin’s work as a whole, and proposes that the inability of the critical tradition to come to terms with the poet lies in a misunderstanding of “Hölderlin’s attitude toward the dominant romantic themes,” and in particular his interpretation of the “myth” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 129). With

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this de Man is launched on the trajectory that leads him in the middle of the 1960s to his major essay on Hölderlin, “The Image of Rousseau in the Poetry of Hölderlin” (originally published in French in 1965), and the famous Gauss Seminar of 1967. A trace of this starting point appears at a key moment in de Man’s interpretation of the central strophes of Hölderlin’s “The Rhine.” At issue is the critical stance toward what de Man describes as “the ontological priority of the sensuous object” (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 39). Hölderlin works this critique out in relation to Rousseau, in particular in the invocation in the middle of “The Rhine” of the mode of consciousness that emerges in the “Fifth Reverie.” This consciousness is introduced, according to de Man, in the eighth strophe of Hölderlin’s poem, which turns on the ambiguity of the word fühlen, which can mean both empirical sensation and nonempirical sentiment. Nothing less than “the fate of thought,” de Man observes, “is at stake in this ambiguity.” He explains: For as we have seen this double feeling (sentiment-sensation) constitutes the obstacle that restrains the earthly creature in its rush toward being. Consciousness is founded by colliding with sensuously apprehended things which keep us at a distance from being. From an ontological point of view, sensuous things are therefore those that are the farthest from being, even though they play an essential role in the dialectic that preserves the earthly entities in the mode of existence proper to them. Hence there is a temptation to grant them an ontological priority over nonsensuous entities, and to make sense perception (the immediate contact with the object) into the ontological experience par excellence. This temptation can be found at all moments in the history of thought; for Hölderlin it manifests itself above all as a nostalgia for the world of the Greeks that we conceive (wrongly) as a world founded on the ontological priority of the sensuous object. (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 39)

The consciousness that gives priority to something other than the sensuous object is exemplified in “The Rhine” by the passage that alludes to Rousseau’s hearing of the water in the episode from the “Fifth Reverie” that describes a boat excursion on the Lake of B ­ ienne. The feeling in question is not the sensation of an

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object but what Rousseau calls “le sentiment de l’existence”—a sentiment that is also characterized in this reverie as a state “of peace.”12 The sound of the water in Rousseau is read by Hölderlin as giving rise to the capacity to experience the world before it becomes an object of cognition. This “feeling” that is not accompanied by the sensation of anything extended in space and time is the subject of the eighth strophe of “The Rhine,” as de Man points out. However, this feeling is also brought into alignment with the participation described by Kant in his remarks on the French Revolution in The Conflict of the Faculties. Indeed the feeling of participating emerges precisely at the mid-point of “The Rhine”—between the eighth and ninth lines of the sixteen-line middle strophe of the poem: But their own immortality Suffices the gods. If there be One thing they need It is heroes and men And mortals in general. Since The gods feel nothing Of themselves, if to speak so Be permitted, in the name of the gods Participating another must feel, And they need this other; yet ordain That he shall break his own Home, curse those he loves Like enemies, and bury father and child Under rubble, should he seek To become their equal, fanatic, Refusing to observe distinctions. (Hölderlin, “The Rhine,” Hymns and Fragments, 75, my emphasis)

In other words, if the gods needed something, it would be by definition mortality, and mortality is not something that can be known: it is a feeling and it is therefore marked by the ambiguity of sensation-sentiment that makes Rousseau the man, for example, a historical figure and a “demigod” (l. 136) and the River Rhine an empirical thing and a pure mythic source, as its name

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suggests (in German, Rhein is homophonic with the word meaning “pure”—rein). At issue therefore is an ambiguous feeling of which the gods are deprived—a feeling that must be carried out on behalf of or “in the name of the gods,” and that also involves a certain force suggested by the alternative signification of Nahmen (with the antiquated h), which is the plural form of a word that from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries was used to describe “violent seizure, stolen goods, spoils” (Grimm). In this sense the poet takes the liberty of saying that this feeling is a “participating” in the name of the gods that is at once a sharing in their spoils (their “immortality”), and also a taking of their position (Nahme also meant the seizure of an enemy’s position) by one alien to them (ein Andrer). These hints of conflict in “The Rhine” surrounding the feeling of inwardness that Rousseau associates with peace are consistent with the expressive participation we encountered in Kant’s remarks on the philosopher’s receptivity to the French Revolution. In this sense the appearance of participation precisely at the poem’s midpoint raises the question of the practical impact of this feeling. De Man does not explicitly take note of the allusion to Kant in Hölderlin’s image of Rousseau. But the conclusion of his reading of “The Rhine” turns to the question of revolutionary feeling that we encountered in The Conflict of the Faculties. At this point “Celebration of Peace” reappears briefly in de Man’s comments on the way that the “inwardness” Hölderlin develops out of his critical encounter with Rousseau is subject to a “transposition onto the plane of reality”: Only a philosophy imbued with the ontological priority of the sensuous object could confuse ideality with irreality to this degree; it is not because a thought is no longer centered on sensuous objects that it loses all possibility of practical efficacity, and it is not because it emanates from the inside that a thought becomes incapable of attaining universality. On the contrary, to the extent that it reestablishes an authentic relation to being, it extends itself to the entire human community, and its particular will becomes general will. Hence it necessarily has an aspect not merely political but revolutionary. (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 41)

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These remarks, which forecast de Man’s later interpretations of Rousseau, turn to the political and revolutionary effects of noncognitive feeling—the outward dimension of inwardness (like that of the moralische Anlage that is expressed by philosophical participation in the French Revolution according to Kant). These comments also mark a return of the question of peace as it is addressed by the poem composed by Hölderlin on the occasion of the Treaty of Lunéville. Immediately after the phrase asserting that the feeling in question does not exclude the “possibility of practical efficacity,” a footnote is inserted that reads: “This is so obvious for Hölderlin that he has no difficulty in fusing the figures of Rousseau and Bonaparte. Like his friends Hegel and Schelling, he sees Bonaparte (in any case until the peace of Lunéville) as the culmination of the French Revolution” (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 296 n. 47). Lunéville, this note suggests, comes to signify the point at which the renewal of the republican principle—the practical manifestation of a feeling liberated from dependence on the “ontological priority of the sensuous object”—is defeated by the drive for physical control over an ever greater portion of the earth’s surface in the name of the revolution, in other words, the rise of the Napoleonic empire. Before Waterloo, in other words, there is Lunéville: the fall of the revolution into an endless state of war, in short, Revolutionskrieg. Yet Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace” takes Lunéville as a more ambiguous event, and as the occasion for a more positive mode of revolutionary participation.

. . . The peace of Hölderlin’s poetic response to Lunéville celebrates less the end of the war between Napoleon and the emperor of Austria than the end of war as such, which is to say, the end of world history and time. The exposition of this end in “Celebration of Peace” takes the form of four triads that begin with the Greek historical-philosophical dimension, represented by the “thousandyear weather” of the “thunderer’s echo” to which the opening triad builds (l. 32). This leads to the Christian dimension of the end in the second three-strophe section with the historical fate of Christ,

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the “youth” cut down “in the middle of his words” darkly overshadowed by a “deadly doom” (ein tödlich Verhängnis) (ll. 48–50). As this application of the Homeric topos of the black cloud of death to the Christian god already suggests, the third triad is concerned with the reconciliation, not just of the Greek and Christian gods, but of all of the gods and men. The poem’s final section reaches back to the first in the image of the mother and child who “look upon peace” hopefully and thus in the future on “ground still resounding with thunder” (ll. 121–25).13 Peter Szondi underlines the “freedom” that Hölderlin takes in substituting concrete descriptions for the proper names (antonomasias) of both Greek and Christian gods (Hölderlin-Studien, 71). “No single figure of the hymn,” Szondi observes, “is called by its own, traditional name. In place of the proper name a multiplicity of characterizations appears. Why this multiplicity, and how is it distributed (wie verteilt sie sich) to the two main characters of the account that is called ‘Celebration of Peace’ (79)?” By dividing up the names—according to what Szondi calls “the principle of name-giving” (das Prinzip der Namengebung) in the poem—Hölderlin disseminates them in the medium of its language. The divisibility of the names allows them to be distributed (Teilbarkeit making possible ­Verteilung). The dividing up of the names of Jupiter and Christ in “Celebration of Peace” participates or takes part in the naming of the gods—the ­ amennehmen.14 In Namengebung could also be characterized as a N this sense the give-and-take of the Namengebung is the mode of celebration taken by the poem. The priority of the linguistic medium over the proper names of the gods—the supremacy of distribution over attribution—is in keeping with the remarks Hölderlin offers on Pindar’s fragment “The Highest,” the fifth or middle of his nine commentaries: “Strict mediacy, however, is the law (Die strenge Mittelbarkeit aber ist das Gesetz),” and it holds, Hölderlin insists, for “mortals” and “immortals” (StA 5: 285). The force of this law is nowhere more evident than at the very middle of “Celebration of Peace”—in the transition from the sixth to the seventh of the poem’s twelve strophes (between the second and third of the four triads). The sixth

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strophe moves through this transition in a way that turns on the status of the day of celebration as a middle space shared by god and man. Or, more precisely, a day of celebration to which both are subject: for there is a suggestion in the last lines of the strophe that such days are held and observed not just by mortals but also by immortals. The gods incline toward men, not primarily for the sake of mankind, but “to hold days of celebration”: “And to hold days of celebration / The high, the spirit / Of the world has inclined towards men” (ll. 76–78). The more conventional logic according to which the days of celebration would be understood as the means for the divine inclination toward humanity, is reversed: the inclination is determined by the obligation to hold days of celebration. The god can also, however, choose days of work, and thus with this choice enter into the sphere of history and time— “the thousand-year weather” of the poem’s first triad. In this case the god takes part or shares in man’s fate: “For once, however, even a god may choose day-work (Tagewerk) / Like mortals and share (theilen) all manner of fate” (ll. 81–82). But now the god appears as a “lord”: “the lord of time (der Herr der Zeit).”15 In this sense the movement from the days of celebration to the days of work at the very middle of Hölderlin’s poem corresponds to the shift from the “spirit of the world” to “Lord of Time.” The spirit that is “too large” to remain the (working) lord of time comes out of what had been his field and becomes the “god of time.” This time, however, is not the empirical temporality of history—not the time of thunder and war, and not the medium of sounds sensuously affecting the ear—but a “quiet” time: what Hölderlin calls “the quiet god of time” (l. 89). The time of this god is, Benjamin would say, “not temporal but image-like” and indeed Hölderlin describes it as a “time-image” (Zeitbild) in the next strophe (l. 111).16 As we have seen, Kant’s essay on religion distinguishes between lower form of property by which mankind divides the surface of the earth (­Untereigentum) from the higher form of possession (­Obereigentum) that is proper to god. What we call property, Kant argues, is from the divine perspective usufruct. The image that emerges at this point in Hölderlin’s poem is of a time when even

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the gods cease to be lords, indeed of a time that is “without a lord” (herrenlos) (AA 6: 246; Practical Philosophy, 405).17 At such a moment the principle of justice descends among humans in a way that does not involve what Kant calls a residential right— the world at this time is a matter neither of Untereigentum nor of Obereigentum, neither of property nor of usufruct. It is not to be owned or used but merely to be. The correlate of lordless time for Hölderlin is peace: a moment at which, as the third strophe of the poem states, “Herrschaft (dominion or domination but also lordship) is nowhere to be seen among spirits or mankind” (l. 28).18 Only then—when human and divine Herrschaft is not to be seen—does the sovereignty of peace appear. This occurs in the second strophe of the poem, therefore, at the point where the god ceases his “day-labor” in the field of time and “disavows” or “disclaims” his “outland”—a term that was more commonly understood in Hölderlin’s day to signify the outer lands belonging to an estate but lying beyond its boundaries (Szondi, Hölderlin-Studien, 89) (the Oxford English Dictionary defines the cognate “outland” as feudal term for a “portion of a manor or estate not retained by the lord but granted to the tenants”). The sovereignty of peace appears, in other words, only when the god ceases to be the lord of time. This god is affected by the force of a medium that resists subjection to the will of men and gods alike. Thus, as with the poets in “Timidity,” the poet of “Celebration of Peace” does not so much deploy as communicate this force by imparting it as a medium. In keeping with the logic of the poem’s Namengebung, which gives priority to the linguistic medium over the individual name (to the naming process over the name), the poet does not properly name the god and assert what Nietzsche calls this “lordly right” (Herrenrecht) (Genealogie, 274; Genealogy, 13). The source of this naming is the medium of the poem, not the “I” of the poet. In place of an “I” claiming the sovereign right to name, there is the poem testifying to the figuring force served by men and gods alike.19 This poetic force, however, does not announce the coming of a millennium of peace—an announcement that would have been contradicted ­immediately by the historical

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record that Napoleon and others have left in the more than two centuries since “Celebration of Peace” was composed. But it also does not point to a peaceful purposiveness shaping human affairs gradually over time as the French Revolution does from Kant’s perspective. The poem is instead a piece of language celebrating its capacity to resist the effort to designate things as well as the effort to make it into an instrument of mastery—a peace of language disowning an illusory power to appropriate the world. This peace is revolutionary exclusively in that, as the “lord of time” turns into the “god of time,” the divine is turned out of power by the strict law of the poetic medium. Instead of overturning the worldly order along the lines of the biblical legend of Korah and his faction, the revolutionary force to which the “lord of time” becomes subject removes the divine from the sphere of politics.

§3

Poetic Reason of State Baudelaire and the Multitudes

In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin cites the following observation by Paul Valéry: “Baudelaire’s problem must have posed itself in these terms: ‘How to be a great poet, but neither a Lamartine nor a Hugo nor a Musset.’ I do not say that this ambition was consciously formulated, but it must have been latent in Baudelaire’s mind; it even constituted the essential Baudelaire. It was his reason of state” (GS 1.2: 615; SW 4: 318).1 Benjamin adds: “There is something strange about speaking of reason of state with a poet. It means something remarkable: the emancipation from experiences (Erlebnissen)” (GS 1.2: 615; SW 4: 318). The concept of reason of state emerged in post-Machiavellian political theory, where it had gained currency among Italian diplomats in need of a general term to characterize measures taken exclusively for the establishment, preservation, and aggrandizement of the state.2 Benjamin finds the application of this political term to a poet “strange,” but the remarkable significance it acquires in his interpretation of Baudelaire is even stranger. The paragraphs leading up to this observation develop an interpretive framework based on the “correlation” between memory and consciousness that Freud postulates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Of particular importance in this context is the protective action with which consciousness shields the subject from stimuli by converting impressions into representations and producing experience 

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as what Benjamin calls Erlebnissen. This defensive and, for Freud, narcissistic measure, which is taken in the service of constituting and maintaining the ego, is what brings to mind the political principle of reason of state. Consciousness responds to a psychic emergency—a threat to the ego—by limiting experience to Erlebnissen. But the terms of Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire impute something far more radical to this emancipation from the consciously controlled experience of an egocentric subject. The liberation from consciousness also requires freedom from the illusion of a transsubjective communicability denied by an age governed precisely by the decline of communicable experience—a time when “the conditions for the reception of lyric poetry have become increasingly unfavorable” (GS 1.2: 607; SW 4: 313). Reason of state under these conditions of what Baudelaire calls “modernity” demands the acknowledgment of a severely limited capacity to communicate—a restriction on the force of a universal communicability that, according to the theory promulgated by eighteenth-century German aesthetics, exceeds the power of a conscious faculty. According to Christoph Menke, this force constitutes the basis for “a genuinely philosophical concept of art” that is developed by the thinkers of the German Aufklärung (Die Kraft der Kunst, 9). Art in this aesthetic sense, which is to be distinguished “above all from the tradition of poetics,” consists in the unfolding of an unconscious force (Kraft) that comes into conflict with and exceeds the grasp of a conscious faculty (Vermögen) (Die Kraft der Kunst, 9). “Force,” according to Menke, “is the aesthetic counterconcept to the (‘poetic’) faculties.” He goes on: “‘Force’ and ‘faculty’ are the names of two opposing ways of understanding the activity of art. An activity is the realization of a principle. Force and faculty are two opposing ways of understanding the principle and its realization” (Die Kraft der Kunst, 12). Menke reserves the qualification “poetic” for the (conscious) activity of a faculty in order to differentiate it from, and in order ultimately to affirm, the (unconscious) “aesthetic” capacity of force. Yet to the extent that it is the “realization of a principle,” the unconscious activity of “force” remains “poetic”: it is a subjective inability that becomes the medium of an unpro-

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ductive activity, namely, play (Spiel ). The activity of play makes those who become receptive to art the unproductive agents of a community, according to this aesthetic theory. Such subjective inability, however, presupposes an unsubjective ability—a mode of communicability that exceeds the comprehension of a conscious faculty. Baudelaire’s poetry bears witness to the decline of precisely this ability. With the experiential poverty of modernity resisting the transsubjective “play” (Spiel ) of communicability, his poetry zeroes in on the inability and unforce that haunts this aesthetic force. This is what reason of state means for Baudelaire. Modernity demands that poetry become an exposition of what threatens the communicability through which a community can be said to make itself “aesthetically equal.”3 Nowhere is this imperative more evident than in the singular confrontation with the urban multitudes that emerges in Baudelaire’s writing. Although neither Valéry nor Benjamin take note of it, Baudelaire read and greatly admired a work of what he called “the philosophy of history” that appeared under the title of History of Reason of State in 1860. The author of this work was the Italian philosopher Giuseppe Ferrari, whose earlier writings criticizing social utopianism were probably familiar to Baudelaire.4 Baudelaire read History of Reason of State while preparing the sequence of nine prose poems to appear in November 1861 under the title “Poëmes en prose” in the Revue fantaisiste.5 In a letter of August 1860 Baudelaire enthusiastically recommended Ferrari’s study of reason of state to his friend and publisher Auguste Poulet-­Malassis as an antidote to the latter’s lingering attachment to “the old remains of the philosophies of 1848 (vieux reste des philosophies de 1848)” (Baudelaire, Correspondance 2: 86; Selected Letters, 157).6 The main point of Ferrari’s History of Reason of State is to revive a “mysterious doctrine” that has “faded” from view under a modern regime of political philosophy dominated by an illusory principle of justice (Ferrari, Histoire, 369). Knowledge of the doctrine of reason of state, Ferrari argues, reveals that all claims to universal principle made by the state throughout human history are in the end a matter of self-interest. Ferrari seeks to demonstrate the

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c­ ritical power that comes with the knowledge of this doctrine by giving a historical account with examples from antiquity up to the nineteenth century. Of special relevance to Baudelaire is the final section of this remarkable book, in which the logic of reason of state is pushed to its limit and turned on itself. With this turn the connection to Baudelaire’s poetry comes to light. By unmasking the state’s appeals to principle as a matter of nothing more than a struggle for political survival, the doctrine of reason of state ultimately exposes the fundamental transience and ephemerality of all states.7 In other words, the “mysterious doctrine” of reason of state gives rise to a vision of worldly affairs as governed by the finitude of human history that Baudelaire’s theory of modernity shared with the melancholic perspective of the Baroque age.8 In his letter to Poulet-Malassis Baudelaire rephrases the final lines of Ferrari’s book, which call for a “new”—we might say “modern”— prophet, who envisions what can never exist as a state of affairs in the world, except as a state that is fading away.9 Such a prophet, Ferrari concludes, “will see only multitudes” (Histoire, 422). Ferrari’s “multitudes” must have struck the poet, who was at work in the summer of 1860 on the essay on Constantine Guys, on the one hand, and the prose poem “The Crowds,” on the other.10 The multitudes, in the sense of city crowds, had been for some time threatening the self-preservation of the poet in Baudelaire’s work and in that of many of his contemporaries. In order to bring out Baudelaire’s peculiar response to this challenge, it is instructive to begin with a text that appeared in May 1860—just three months before the letter to Poulet-Malassis recommending Ferrari’s study of reason of state: Artificial Paradises.11 The first half of this composition sets the stage for the passage that provides the key to that aspect of the confrontation with the urban masses that becomes decisive for Baudelaire at this point in his work. These early sections of Artificial Paradises are devoted to a consideration of the psychic and “moral” effects of hashish, and extend Baudelaire’s earlier writings on wine. Hashish in this context is the antithesis of wine. Whereas wine fosters sociability and fraternity, hashish produces solipsism and leads, as Baudelaire puts it in the

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chapter of Artificial Paradises entitled “The Man-God,” to “the individual’s belief in his own divinity” (OC 1: 430; Artificial Paradises, 67).12 Opium, however, is a different matter. It does not fall into the oppositional logic of wine and hashish, or sociability and subjectivism. Thus, while the effects of wine and hashish are susceptible to exposition in the form of the analytical essay or treatise familiar to readers of the nineteenth-century periodical press, such as Balzac’s Treatise on Modern Stimulants (Traité sur les excitants modernes), opium must be treated from a perspective that is less self-centered. Baudelaire explains this difference in a later “exordium” to his public readings of excerpts from A ­ rtificial Paradises by saying that the section of the book dealing with hashish is “entirely by me,” whereas the part on opium is “such an amalgam that I would not be able to recognize in it the portion that comes from me, which by the way can be but very small” (OC 1: 519).13 Taking the place of the treatise offered by the Baudelaire of the first half of the book is, in other words, the translation of Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater with interspersed paraphrase and commentary. This “amalgam” of writing related to DeQuincey’s text is the medium employed to explore the effect produced by opium, namely, ­rêverie. If wine fosters sociability and hashish subjectivism, opium produces a peculiar mode of solitude that oscillates paradoxically between self and other. Thus the urban multitudes produce a singular state of solitude that is, however, not governed by subjective self-relation—a solitude stripped of selfhood. From the very beginning—in the dedication of Artificial Paradises—Baudelaire associates himself selflessly with the narrator of DeQuincey’s text, who also loses himself among the crowds: “a somber and solitary stroller immersed in the moving flow of the multitudes” (OC 1: 400). This selfless association alludes to the episode from the opium eater’s Confessions that becomes a key source for the three poems Baudelaire was to publish the following year under the title of “Poems in Prose.”14 These three prose poems—“The Crowds,” “The ­Widows,” and “The Old Clown”—may in this sense also be understood as amalgamated forms emerging from transactions already underway

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in Baudelaire’s early translations of Poe, whose work is another source of these particular prose poems. In the scene from DeQuincey’s text to which Baudelaire refers in his “exordium” the opium eater describes an interaction with the urban masses. This encounter is deliberately framed as a mimetic identification with that state of the working class’s existence that, he believes, “can never become oppressive to contemplate,” namely, its rest: Now Saturday night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest to the poor: in this point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood: almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It is a rest introductory to another rest: and divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labor, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. . . . Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in dis-

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tant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience. (DeQuincey, Confessions, 52–53)

Setting out, on Saturday night, to imitate “the return of rest to the poor,” DeQuincey writes, it is “as though I also were released from some yoke of labor, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy” (52). By imitating the repose of the masses the opium eater seeks to gain an impression of himself at rest. Opium is taken to enhance the effects of this self-reflection or reverie and to allow the narrator to “witness” his sympathetic identification with the masses “upon as large a scale as possible” (52). But the experiment ultimately draws the opium eater into a relation that is not subject to self-affection. In the Kantian terms, with which DeQuincey was very familiar and which are implicit in the allusion to “perplexities moral and intellectual” at the end of this passage, we might say that the opium eater is led to a region of experience where cognition in the sense of transcendental synthesis is lost—where the subject is no longer affected by its own representations of the world.15 Voyaging to this region exacts a “heavy price” that the opium eater describes as one of having his “dreams” “tyrannized” by “the human face” (53). It is important to note that this face is without any positive, substantive properties or content: although associated perhaps with the prostitute Ann of an earlier episode, it is defined almost exclusively as a disembodied tyrannical force. This negative quality persists as the face moves to Baudelaire’s writing and fails to materialize as a self-consistent individual or collective subject. For the opium eater the “human face” remains the sign of a perplexing relation between a subject and an irreducibly multiple mass of humanity that defies sympathetic identification.16 Indeed this diffuse aspect of the face is conveyed by the fact that it marks no determinate interface between the English and the French texts: the face of the opium eater’s confessions is invoked but not quite translated by Artificial Paradises (see OC 1: 483, 123).17

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The effect of this invocation becomes all the more striking when the “human face” that emerges in the English text and that is absorbed into the French of Artificial Paradises surfaces two years later in Baudelaire’s 1862 spleen poem “At One O’clock in the Morning”—appearing in the amalgamated medium of a prose poem reflecting on the experience of a condition that cannot be faced: “Finally! Alone! One no longer hears anything but the rumbling of a few belated and exhausted cabs. For several hours, we will possess silence, if not repose. Finally! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I will no longer suffer except by myself ” (OC 1: 287; Twenty Prose Poems, 23; my emphasis). The return of the phrase “the tyranny of the human face,” especially as an image of a disappearing recurrence, illustrates how the self-justifying capacity of the poet becomes subject to a greater incapacity communicated by the poem. It starts with the double exclamation asserting the definitive end of a period, after which the poet is “alone.” But as with all such crepuscular moments in Baudelaire’s poetry, ambiguity abounds: not only is there a need for the defensive declaration of finality to be repeated (three times in the opening sections of the poem), but this announcement is also made initially from a perspective that is in the third person (on). It is followed by the first-person plural form (nous) before we are introduced to the first-person singular “I” ( je), who is said to suffer “by myself.” But the suffering of the self cannot fully separate it as such—as an integrated self that excludes otherness. The oppressive interactions with others during the day invade and revisit the reflections of the self at night. In keeping with this pattern, moreover, the return of the phrase “tyranny of the human face” in “At One O’Clock in the Morning” reveals at the level of textual production the force of amalgamation that makes it impossible, as Baudelaire says with regard to Artificial Paradises, to recognize the portion of the poem that comes from the poet (OC 1: 519).18 The “solitude” in question is less of a self than of an overpopulated multitude of “shadows” cast by the day onto the night. As the insecure “I” of the poem literally “recapitulates” the day—again significantly in the first-person plural: “Let us recapitulate” (­récapitulons)—the speaker “relaxes” in a phantas-

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matic repetition of the vain efforts of self-affirmation (the capitulations) that make up the life of the vile city (la vile ville) (OC 1: 287; Twenty Prose Poems, 23). The self-­dissolving “bath in the shadows” takes priority over and indeed takes the place of the self-validating “beautiful verses” to which the last lines of the poem allude. It affirms the sovereignty of the process of amalgamation through which the phrase from DeQuincey returns at the beginning of “At One O’clock in the Morning.”

. . . I need this notorious bath in the multitude, the incorrectness of which had justly shocked you. Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve (March 30, 1865)

Perhaps an even more telling trace of the amalgamation conveyed by Baudelaire’s translation of the English opium eater’s encounter with the urban multitudes comes in the set of three prose poems published in 1861 in the Revue fantaisiste. The most explicit manifestation of this mixing force is the word multitude itself in “The Crowds.” It occurs in the poem’s first phrase, which could be translated literally as: “It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude” (OC 1: 291; Twenty Prose Poems, 27). It is colloquial in French to speak, for example, of politicians or celebrities mixing with crowds as “taking a bath in the crowd” (un bain de foule). Such contact may be considered salubrious or revitalizing—a sort of rebaptism.19 But Baudelaire writes “bath in the multitude” (bain de multitude). Sainte-Beuve considered this odd turn of phrase simply “incorrect”—he is “justly shocked,” Baudelaire admits (Correspondance, 2: 493; Selected Letters, 154). But the deviation from foule to multitude produces a couple of significant effects. Structurally, it links the first phrase of the poem to the line that begins the second paragraph: “Multitude, solitude: terms equal and convertible by the active and fecund poet” (OC 1: 291; Twenty Prose Poems, 27). Conceptually, moreover, it prepares the reversible logic of the one and the many that is crucial to this one poem and many other poems by Baudelaire (see Compagnon, Baudelaire, 79–99). But, perhaps most importantly, the

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first phrase also reprises verbatim a line from Artificial Paradises (published a year earlier) that occurs in the section of that text to which I just alluded—a line that in this case does not appear in De­Quincey’s text (OC 1: 468; Artificial Paradises, 123).20 Thus if “At One O’Clock in the Morning” reaches back to a phrase in the Confessions of an English Opium Eater that is not translated in ­Artificial Paradises, “The Crowds” returns to a line that exists only in Baudelaire’s “translation” and that reaffirms the amalgamation underway in this writing. An interpretive key to the relation of the poet to the multitudes in “The Crowds” is offered by the phrase “holy prostitution of the soul.” Benjamin describes this as a mode of empathy (Einfühlung) that he considers in the context of the craze for physiognomic writing around the beginning of the 1840s in France (GS 1.2: 559; SW 4: 32). The physiologies, he argues, provided the city dweller with social types allowing for the identification, and the identification with, the urban crowds in terms that made it appear more familiar and less threatening. Benjamin interprets “The Crowds” as the work of a poet under the intoxicating effects of a phantasmagorical physiological vision of the urban masses. To the extent that the physiologies reflected the commodification of social relations under capitalism, the poet of “The Crowds” engages in a psychic mimesis of the commodity: a prostitution of the soul. But, Benjamin argues, the author of Artificial Paradises was “an expert on intoxicating media,” and as such he understood the condition of the poet in “The Crowds” as a fleeting or, in Baudelairean terms, as a “modern” state of intoxication (GS 1.2: 559; SW 4: 32). The flaneur’s artificial paradise—and by extension the one adopted transiently by the poet of “The Crowds”—is an idol. And Baudelaire, Benjamin observes, “hardly worshipped at this idol. . . . The belief in original sin served Baudelaire as a charm against” such idolatry (GS 1.2: 542; SW 4: 21). In the end Baudelaire’s concern was to watch over and protect what Benjamin calls “a threshold that separates the individual from the crowd” (GS 1.2: 569; SW 4: 39). This threshold, he argues, is not only concealed by the passing fancies of the flaneur and the stereotypes of the physiologist. It is

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also obscured by the republican belief in the masses as a collective subject of secularization, progress, and democracy—the vision of the multitudes expressed in the writings of Victor Hugo. These revolutionary ideals are, Benjamin writes, the banner or canopy that hovers over and obscures the threshold where Baudelaire stands watch. As they march on the path of progressive republican development, Hugo’s masses, which also means his mass reading public, are entirely unreceptive to Baudelaire.21 “For these masses,” as Benjamin puts it, “there was no Baudelaire” (GS 1.2: 568; SW 4: 39). Thus instead of giving rise to the feeling of progress toward republican community, the sentiment aroused by these multitudes is of nothing other than the existence of the poet as a being separated from the human masses. Yet this experience is a divided one, not of an isolated self looking on from a location outside of the crowd, but rather of an individual disintegrating and shadowed by an unreceptive multiplicity that comes to pass by a threshold. For Baudelaire this incapacity both to be part of and to part with the multitude, Benjamin points out, is a peculiar mode of heroism— less of the poet than of an experience of “modern life” as such. Baudelaire describes it precisely as “the heroism of modern life.” Although the artist certainly appears as or “plays the part of ” the hero in many of Baudelaire’s writings—most notably in the essay on Guys from which this phrase is taken—the true hero of his poems is a modernity to which the artist repeatedly yields.22 Such is the modern movement that confronts the poet as the passing multitudes and especially the points at which they are marked by adynamic interruptions—dead spots of a public sphere emptied of communicative content and tyrannized by incommunicability. The phrase “tyranny of the human face” is a figure of the unreceptive public haunting the poet. It expresses and speaks of this regime of incommunicability: not only as a figure of the mute and impersonal face of the multitudes but also as a linguistic phrase emerging out of the communicative blank in the amalgamating medium of Artificial Paradises, where it appears as a blurring of the line between translation and commentary. The same can be said of the phrase “bath in the multitude,” which amalgamates what

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is missing in the work it translates. These bits of language in “At One O’Clock in the Morning” and “The Crowds” repeat pauses in the interaction of Artificial Paradises with Confessions of an English Opium Eater in ways that reiterate the disconnections interrupting the flow of the multitudes passing blankly by the threshold on which Benjamin imagines Baudelaire standing watch. The technique of amalgamation of Artificial Paradises neither simply translates nor supplements DeQuincey’s Confessions: it imitates a dead spot, a pause, that comes between the two works. The reflection on the strange community Baudelaire’s poet and DeQuincey’s opium eater share with the crowds extends to the two other new poems that follow “The Crowds” in the 1861 sequence published in the Revue fantaisiste—“The Widows” and “The Old Clown.” The ongoing amalgamation is signaled once again by a phrase at the beginning of the latter poem. This phrase, which could serve as the tag for a caricature or a physiology, looks back on DeQuincey’s imitation of the masses at rest while also conveying the emptiness of the community in question: “the people on vacation (le people en vacances).” The vacancy of this public is expressed by the gaps in communicability emerging in these poems, which are marked by the “openness to language” (Sprachoffenheit) of Hamacher’s philological community (see my remarks above at the end of the Preface). In both “The Widows” and “The Old Clown,” as in “The Crowds,” the moving flow of the multitudes is drawn to the edge of a public sphere (eine Öffentlichkeit) that is disclosed as a singular “vision” (OC 1: 294 and 297; Paris Spleen, 24 and 27). In the case of “The Widows” the sight is of a striking woman amid a crowd listening to an orchestra in a public garden: It was a tall woman, majestic and so noble in all of her bearing that I do not remember ever having seen her like in all of the collections of aristocratic beauties of the past. A perfume of haughty virtue emanated from all of her person. Her sad, thin face was in perfect accord with the great mourning dress that she wore. She too, like the plebeian masses with which she mingled but did not see, looked at the luminous world with a profound eye, and she listened while gently nodding her head.

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Singular vision! “Certainly,” I said to myself, “That poverty there, if there is poverty, must not admit sordid economy; such a noble face assures me of that. Why then does she remain voluntarily in a milieu in which she makes such a striking mark?” But, passing by her with curiosity, I believe I divined the reason. The tall widow was holding by the hand a child who was, like her, dressed in black. However modest the price of entry, that price would perhaps be sufficient to pay for one of the needs of the small being, or, even better, for something superfluous, a toy. And she would return home on foot, meditative and dreaming, alone, always alone. For the child is turbulent, egotistical, without softness and without patience. And it cannot even, like the pure animal, like the dog or the cat, serve as a confidant to solitary sorrows. (OC 1: 294; Paris Spleen, 27)

The feeling of being able to know and of being able to impart the reason for the vision of the widow represses the sense of an inability to know and an inability to communicate that emerges at the decisive point in this passage, precisely at the point of the exclamation: “singular vision!” From this point on in the poem it is a question of overcoming the exclamation of incommunicability. However, the claim of communicability that the poet goes on to make remains haunted by this exclamation. The form this claim takes—an assertion made by the poet to himself—suggests that the very force or possession of self is at stake in this utterance. Overcoming the exclamation point in this passage is a matter of self-assertion. In this sense the solitude of the widow and the solitude occasioned by the poet’s encounter with the widow resists the unity of a self. It is a feeling of separation that has nothing to do with the isolation of a self—a solitude that does not allow for solipsism. The imperative of this “singular vision” imposes a solitude that lacks the consistency or oneness of a self precisely because it is marked by the singularity of a multiplicity: in Baudelaire’s terms, the solitude of a multitude. The feeling is not of a self but rather of a divisive element that is unreceptive to egological determination and assertion. It is thus as a mode of repression that the “I” of the poem claims the power to convert the vision of the widow

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into the ­solipsistic and sentimental terms of a self-sacrifice or the giving of a self.23 The striking image, the poet insists, is the vision of a gift: the widow gives herself for the benefit of the child. Distinguishing herself from the “sordid economy” of both the paying public pretending to listen to the music of the orchestra and the unpaying public that stands close enough to listen “for free,” the widow pays the price of appearing there, the poet speculates, as a gift to the child. This speculation is, it is implied, in the gift of the poet who declares an ability to assert himself and his capacity to attribute this logic or reason to the vision of the widow at the end of the poem. But the sense the poet makes of this singular sight— with his story of the gift and his gift of the story—is not identical with the meaning of the poem in which the ability of the poet remains haunted by the disabling vision marked by the exclamation point. The production of the poet claims to take the place of the uncommunicative community that exists at the point of an exclamation hovering between the “I” of the poem and the widow— “singular vision!” Who is to say that this vision belongs to the one or the other? Such a dispossessing element—a medium emptying language of a force that can be said to belong to the poet—is suggested by the very word veuve, which, like the ­English widow, derives from the Latin viduus and ultimately from the Indo-European root widh- signifying “to be empty.” In this sense the assertion of a productive communicative force at the end of “The Widows”—the declaration of a poetic faculty or gift—rings hollow.

. . . Like the dead spots or gaps in transmission that come between The Confessions of an Opium Eater and Artificial Paradises the exclamation point in “The Widows” marks an interruption in the mimetic activity of the poem. With the singular vision of the widow the poem turns from the imitation of the incidents that precede the exclamation to their supposed completion and resolution in the poet’s reflections on the meaning of this action. At the end of “The Widows” the poet claims to be able to perfect and fulfill what is not given in experience. In Aristotelian terms this amounts

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to the assertion of an artistic capacity to “carry to its end (epitelei) what nature is incapable of effecting (­apergasasthai )” (Physics 199a 15). Baudelaire’s poetry may be understood to conduct a critical examination of this ability; it takes seriously the possibility that the poet may simply make up what is missing from experience instead of making up for—completing and perfecting—something that is at work but left unaccomplished in what happens. The poems provide opportunities to question and determine the limits of the finishing capacity of mimesis that, according to Aristotle, goes beyond imitation as reproduction. Under investigation and under suspicion in Baudelaire’s poetry, in other words, is the Aristotelian theory of what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe calls “a general mimesis, which reproduces nothing given (which re-­produces nothing at all), but which supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything, organize everything, make everything work—produce everything. It is a productive mimesis, that is, an imitation of phusis as a productive force, or as poiesis” (Typography, 255–56).24 The critical project undertaken by Baudelaire requires that the poet and his readers acknowledge that this claim of a poetic faculty, like the one made at the end of “The Widows,” may conceal the narcissistic end of producing a public sphere governed by a communicability missing from experience— the self-interested claim of a poetic ability to “organize everything” and “make everything work.” This possibility is exposed in poems like “The Widows” through a modification in the mimetic capacity as the poem turns from the imitation of a productive force at work but unfulfilled in the course of events recounted to a mimesis of unproductive and apoetic unforce—the citation of an unforce that haunts or, as Heidegger says, “lies in wait of ” mimetic force. The exclamation point in the poem marks the intervention of this adynamic third moment of mimesis that comes between the imitation and the supplementation or completion of the teleological force driving the course of events recounted in the poem.25 “The Widows” displays the unforce of a divisive finitude punctuating the poet’s defensive assertion of communicability. By exposing themselves to this threat, Baudelaire’s poems avoid the

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identification of poetry with the egological projections of community made by the poet. Instead this poetry is governed by the unsentimental feeling that Lacoue-Labarthe traces to Hölderlin’s “extremely rigorous meditation on the difference between (Greek) enthusiasm and (Western) sobriety,” specifically, “a tragic acceptance of the law of finitude following from the ‘categorical turning away’ of (and from) the divine; and a firm exigency regarding the difficulty—not to say the impossibility—of a ‘nationell ’ appropriation or identification. . . . All this ultimately forbids every form of Schwärmerei (out of fidelity to Kant), every poetic project founded exclusively in effusion, and every mythologization that would lead to the project of an immanent fashioning of a community” (Heidegger, 66, 30).26 Like Hölderlin, Baudelaire turns away from the identification of poetry with the egological enthusiasm expressed at the end of “The Widows.” This insistence on sobriety deprives the poet of the ability to mythologize the masses, as Benjamin points out, in the manner of both the class-consciousness of the physiologies and the classlessness proclaimed by republican ideology associated with Hugo. When it comes to what Baudelaire’s contemporaries called la question sociale, the adynamic moments breaking into poems like “The Widows” interrupt the communicability that would provide the basis for what Lacoue-Labarthe calls the “immanent fashioning of a community.” This is the affective state that is described by Baudelaire as “lyrical”: “[Lyre expresses] that almost supernatural state, that intensity of life when the heart sings, when it is constrained to sing, like the tree, the bird, and the sea. . . . There is, in fact, a lyrical manner of feeling. . . . Inevitably there also exists a lyric manner of speaking and a lyric world, a lyric atmosphere, landscapes, men, women, animals who all have something of the character preferred by the Lyre” (OC 2: 164; Baudelaire as Literary Critic, 261–62). There is also a lyrical politics that is “in contrast with the horrible life of contention and struggle in which we are plunged” (OC 2: 168; Baudelaire as Literary Critic, 265). Baudelaire is especially critical of the political implications of lyrical feeling, which for him are bound up with the failure of

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1848 and with what he calls its “old remains” in his recommendation of Ferrari’s study of reason of state to Poulet-Malassis. A critique, or what Lacoue-Labarthe describes as a “desacralization,” of lyrical politics—a critique of social utopianism, of Proudhon, and Hugo—can be found from allusions in an early poem like “Pride Punished” to the passage already cited from Artificial Paradises on the effects of hashish.27 Considered in this context Baudelaire’s study of “artificial paradises”—written between the first and second editions of The Flowers of Evil—may be understood as an investigation into the lyrical politics of French socialism. An important extension of this critical project is the set of “Parisian Tableaus” published in February 1861 in the second edition of The Flowers of Evil. Among these the poem “The Little Old Women” brings out most clearly the contrast to Hugo that, as Benjamin argues, is so crucial to Baudelaire’s literary politics. Not only refusing to attribute a special subjective gift or faculty to the poet, this poem also accentuates a resistance to the political claim of a communicability enabling the poet and his readers unsubjectively and unconsciously to make themselves into a community of “aesthetic equality,” to return to Menke’s formulation. The differentiation from Hugo begins significantly with the poem’s dedication: “To Victor Hugo” (the two poems that immediately precede “The Little Old Women”—“The Swan” and “The Seven Old Men”—bear the same dedication). Far from a simple homage, this invocation points to the complex critical attitude of Baudelaire toward Hugo analyzed by Benjamin.28 The dedication of “The Little Old Women,” which was originally published as a set of poems under the heading Parisian Phantoms, indeed invites a comparative analysis of this work alongside Hugo’s “Phantoms” from his early collection Les Orientales (1829) (OC 1: 1015). The relations between these phantoms have been noted, starting with Baudelaire himself, who wrote to Poulet-Malassis: “I dedicated to him [Hugo] the two Parisian phantoms, and the truth is that, in the second piece [‘The Little Old Women’], I attempted to imitate his manner” (Correspondance, 1: 604). Claude Pichois speculates that the ulterior motive behind the dedication and the

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“­imitation” might have been to compel Hugo to reciprocate and supply a prefatory letter to an essay on Gautier that Baudelaire was about to publish at this time (OC 1: 1010). But from Pichois to Pierre ­Brunel commentators have mostly contented themselves with noting convergences between the two poems (Brunel, Baudelaire, 111–28). The connections are indeed quite clear. For instance, the first line of Hugo’s “Phantoms” is picked up at the beginning of the third section of “The Little Old Women”: Alas! have I seen perish those young girls! (“Fantômes,” Œuvres poétiques, 1: stanza 1, l. 1) Ah! have I followed those little old women! (“The Little Old Women,” OC 1: l. 50)29

As Pichois points out, there is also a parallel between the beginning of the second part of Hugo’s poem and the middle of the second section of “The Little Old Women”:   One was pink and white; The other seemed to hear celestial accords; The other, weak . . . ... All fragile flowers, just as soon dead as born! (“Fantômes,” Œuvres poétiques, 1: stanza 2, ll. 1–3 and 11) All these intoxicate me! . . . One tested in sorrow by her own country; Another her husband heaped with pain; Another, Madonna, by her child transpierced. Tears from any one of them could fill a river. (“The Little Old Women,” OC 1: ll. 41 and 45–48)

Pichois qualifies this as a “pastiche of admiration. Young girls. Old women” (OC 1: 1016). However, the shift is not from young to old but rather from death to life. Baudelaire’s “imitation” gives Hugo’s poem a prosaic treatment. In “Phantoms” the poet is a sympathetic spectator; in “The Little Old Women” he is a preda-

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tory stalker. This difference is accentuated by the menacing opening quatrain of “The Little Old Women”: In the sinuous folds of old capitals, Where everything, even horror, turns into enchantment, I watch—faithful to my mortal temper— Singular creatures, decrepit and charming. (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: ll. 1–4)

Nothing marks the shift in perspective from Hugo to Baudelaire more emphatically than the word guetter in line 3 of “The Little Old Women” (the first signification given in Littré captures the implication of surveillance in this word: “to spy, to observe, with the design of surprising, of injuring”). At the center of Hugo’s poem there is the ecstatic transport through which the poet enters into a sympathetic communication with the phantoms of the dead girls “in the depth of the forest!” (“Phantoms,” Œuvres poétiques, 1: stanza 2, l. 20): Sweet phantoms! It is there, when I dream in the shadow Where they come one by one to listen and to speak to me. A dubious day shows me and conceals from me their number. Through the branches and the somber leaves I see their eyes sparkle. My soul is a sister to these so beautiful shades. Life and the tomb no longer rule over us. At times I help their steps, at others I take their wings. Ineffable vision in which I am dead like them! (“Fantômes,” Œuvres poétiques, 1: stanza 2, ll. 21–30)

In Hugo’s poem the young girls are described as flowers that die when blossoming: “All fragile flowers, just as soon dead as born!” (“Fantômes,” Œuvres poétiques, 1: stanza 2, ll. 1–3 and 11). In “The Little Old Women,” by contrast, the old women are compared to the city of Paris that seems to outlive itself. In the first section of the poem the women bear the ancient history of the place (“Eponine or Laïs” [l. 6]), as well as the “relics” of outmoded fashion (their purses embroidered with rebuses [OC, 1: ll. 11–12]). The old women

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also merge with the cityscape of omnibuses (“All aquiver in the omnibus’ fast din” [12]) and their eyes are “potholes of stagnant water glistening in the night” (OC, 1: l. 18). The poet develops the link between the women and the history and actuality of Paris over the next two sections, while also alluding to other verse and prose poems by Baudelaire that follow a similar pattern (in particular “The Swan” [see OC, 1: l. 48] and “The Widows” [see OC, 1: ll. 50– 60]).30 In the fourth section, the poet apostrophizes the women and makes more explicit the relation of the poet to the women that was suggested by the word guetter (to watch) in the opening lines: But I, I who watch over you tenderly from afar My troubled eye on your uncertain steps, As if I were in fact your father—how fantastic! Unknown to you, I taste clandestine pleasures. I see your tyro passions blossom; I watch your days, dark or sunny, gone; My multifarious heart takes pleasure in all your vices! My soul shines with all your virtues. (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: ll. 73–80)

By way of its measured description the poet’s address works to exclude the sympathetic or “lyrical” identification of Hugo’s poem. Thus the poet openly exposes the ulterior motive of his pursuit of the old women: “clandestine pleasures.” There is no reciprocal engagement, only profit gained on the backs, and behind the backs, of the old women. The intoxication of the first sections of the poem—“All intoxicates me!” (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: l. 41)—is in this sense moderated by the sobering confession of the decidedly unsympathetic and alyrical pursuit in section 4. Proust (in Contre Sainte-Beuve) cites this passage as an example of the “cruelty” of Baudelaire’s poetry: “it seems that he eternalizes with an extraordinary unheard of verbal force . . . a sentiment that he forces himself not to feel at the moment that he names it.”31 Proust points to the feeling in Baudelaire of a language drained of sentiment—a mere citation and recitation of sentiment. The rhyme that closes the first quatrain of the poem’s last section makes the connection to citation explicit:

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So you wander, stoical and uncomplaining, Across the chaos of living cities (des vivantes cités), Mothers with bleeding hearts, whores or saints, Whose names were once cited by everyone ( par tous étaient cités). (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: ll. 61–64)

The phrase “des vivantes cités,” in line 62, which comes after the caesura in the alexandrine and which then rhymes with the word “cités,” has multiple effects. Linked with the existence of the old women these “living cities” become collections of names to be cited and forgotten. Thus the poet paradoxically memorializes an ephemeral element of city life by testifying to the ongoing existence of beings whose names have fallen out of use. But the echo of the rhyme also makes audible a sense of the anonymous mummification of these living beings as citations—as vivantes cité(e)s (this effect is reinforced by the enjambment: “des vivantes cités / Mères . . .”). By suspending the semantic function of the rhymed phrase the poem transforms the living city into citations affecting the poet. The poetic technique empties the life from the city and makes it into a linguistic thing. Rhyme thus subjects the living women and by extension the living city to what Hamacher calls a “fundamental philological operation”: “no harmless utensil for the beautification of an appearance,” rhyme is the “instrument of the evacuation, dispossession, and incompletion of what is said in the mere saying” (Für—Die Philologie, 44–45). Instead of the supplementary action of a “general mimesis” the poem fails to complete the movement of the women across the city. The poetic technique of rhyme marks the poet’s failure to perfect a movement that merges with the city. If the poet is, as he claims, the “father” of the old women (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: l. 75), it is as a progenitor of “octogenarians”—the “debris of humanity ripened for eternity” (“The Little Old Women,” OC, 1: l. 72). Eternalized moreover, to invoke Proust again, is a feeling of “unheard of verbal force” compelling the poet to produce the women and the city as citations that have lost or exceeded their semantic content. The result, in short, is what Hamacher characterizes as the “philological affect” of a feeling of fellowship or friendship with “mere”

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language: a ­language that “continues to speak but that means nothing” (Für—Die Philologie, 44). Such is the language that ultimately binds the poet to the women and the city in the eternal separation evoked in the poem’s last quatrain: Ruins! my family! brains of the same descent! Each night I bid you solemn farewell! Where will you be tomorrow, octogenarian Eves, In the clutch of God’s awful claws? 

(ll. 81–84)

Like the rhyming of the living city with citation the repetition of a phrase that signifies a final farewell empties it of meaning. When it is repeated, adieu does not mean good-bye forever. The strange community of the poem ultimately consists, not of communication, but of the mere saying of adieu (that does not mean “farewell”). This is the suspended word with which the poem poignantly ends, specifically, the Dieu that rhymes with adieu. Lying in wait of the adieu that the poet is able to “make” repeatedly (it is not communicated or “said” to the women) is the surpassing force of the grip of “Dieu” on the fallen women—“octogenarian Eves.” The griffe of Dieu may be understood, according to Littré, as “an unjust and tyrannical power” that annuls the farewells that are the work of the poet (the effort perhaps to render poetic justice and equality to the women). But griffe can also signify, again according to Littré, “a stamp imitating the signature of a person” or “an instrument that is used to frank postage stamps.” In this case the final rhyme of the poem suggests that the signature or mark of Dieu supersedes or cancels the poet’s adieu. The final word is indeed à Dieu. The end of the poem, and the tolling of last rhyme, may be read as an acknowledgment of an inability to perfect the suspended action of the poet taking leave eternally of the women and the city of which they all become the ruined figures.

§4

Arnold’s Resignation

In a lecture delivered shortly before his death, Paul de Man focused on the conflict between mental and linguistic power in Kant’s analysis of the sublime. Kant’s portrayal of the imagination submitting to the freedom of reason in an aesthetic judgment of the sublime turns into what de Man calls “a dramatized scene of the mind in action” (Aesthetic Ideology, 86). According to this scenario the mind yields heroically to language as argument in Kant’s writing gives way to story. “Such personifications,” de Man continues, “are not governed by the laws of the mind but by the laws of figural language” (87). Under the sway of tropological force the philosopher loses control of the discourse. This is the second example of the phenomenon cited in the lecture. The first concerns Kant’s description of the “mathematical sublime” as the tension between apprehension and comprehension in imagination’s struggle to give spatial appearance to infinity. “The model reminds one,” de Man notes, “of a simple phenomenology of reading, in which one has to make constant syntheses to comprehend the successive unfolding of the text: the eye moves horizontally in succession whereas the mind has to combine vertically the cumulative understanding of what has been apprehended” (77). Kant’s own example of this mental balancing act is the account given by the Egyptologist Claude-Étienne Savary of the effort to take up the proper position from which the magnitude of 

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the ­pyramids can be perceived. This too, de Man writes, brings reading to mind, specifically the reading of one of Pascal’s P ­ ensées (78). The passage recalled is understood as well to move from cognition to the more powerful sphere of language as a “purely formal system” in which the mathematical sublime can emerge (78). No sooner does one arrive at this point, however, than a new conflict breaks out, this time within language itself, as the tropological force that asserted its control over Kant’s writing in the dramatic victory of story over argument is now confronted by a greater linguistic power. According to de Man, this superior force corresponds to the “dynamic sublime.” The resistance to trope is, however, also presented in dramatic terms: “The transition from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime,” de Man observes, “marks the saturation of the tropological field as language frees itself of its constraints and discovers within itself a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of cognition” (79). In this scene the figural force that comes to mind in de Man’s reading of the mathematical sublime is overcome by an atropological power that “language” finds “within itself.” Language emerges, in other words, as the unstoried hero in this account of the “dynamic sublime.” Kant’s analysis of these conditions reveals the existence of mere language apart from its ability to tell a story. De Man’s remarks on the linguistic force of the “dynamic sublime” in Kant belong to the last phase of the incomplete study of poetic language after Romanticism that began with his early work on Hölderlin—from the remarks in the later 1950s on the misunderstood significance of the poet through the interpretation of the image of Rousseau in “The Rhine” in the middle of the 1960s. This connection of the late reading of Kant to the early encounter with Hölderlin is suggested by an essay on the Victorian reception of Wordsworth’s poetry written by de Man in his later years.1 The essay on Wordsworth’s legacy explicitly links the English Romantic poet to Hölderlin in a way that draws on the theory of linguistic force developed in the lecture on Kant. For the Victorians, de Man argues, “the challenge of understanding [Wordsworth’s] work remains almost urgently felt . . . in a manner of which the

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German involvement with Hölderlin or the French concern with Rousseau are the only comparable instances” (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 84). As with Hölderlin for the Germans and Rousseau for the French there is “an enigmatic aspect of Wordsworth, obliquely noted by the Victorians as well as by contemporary commentators,” that de Man approaches along the lines of his reading of the aesthetic judgment of the “dynamic sublime” in Kant, that is to say, in terms of the reflection on force just outlined. It is precisely this “puzzling element” in Wordsworth that, according to de Man, produces a defensive reaction among the Victorians (85). An especially revealing and complex case of this defensiveness, according to de Man, is Matthew Arnold. This reaction leads the Victorian man of letters to reject the moralizing tendencies of his contemporaries (in particular, Leslie Stephen) and to dismiss what de Man describes as “an ethical emphasis not all that different from his own” (86). This reaction to Wordsworth, in particular its manifestation of resistance to the “ethical emphasis” that Arnold shares with his fellow Victorians, betrays a peculiar receptivity to the “enigmatic aspect” of the Romantic poet, according to de Man: Arnold’s instinct was not unsound, especially in making it apparent that Stephen’s claim for Wordsworth’s consoling power was less convincing than his awareness of the threat which these powers were supposed to console one from. The strategy of denegation which calls a threat a shelter in the hope of thus laying it to rest is all too familiar; Arnold was reacting in his own defensive manner to Stephen’s defensive attempts at reassurance. “Philosophy” is supposed to shelter us from something to which Wordsworth’s poetry, unlike any other Romantic poetry, gives access, although it remains unnamed and undefined. The effort of all subsequent Wordsworth interpreters has been, often with the poet’s own assistance, to domesticate it by giving it at least a recognizable content. (86)

De Man’s somewhat enigmatic comments illuminate Arnold’s reaction to Wordsworth only if they are interpreted in the following way. Aware of a threat in Wordsworth’s poetry that is greater than the consoling power of the “philosophy” Stephen finds in it, A ­ rnold nevertheless reacts defensively to this Victorian claim

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on the Romantic poet. In other words, Arnold is threatened by what the Victorians call “philosophy” in Wordsworth’s poetry because he is sensitive to what this term seeks to avoid, namely, “something” that “remains unnamed and undefined” and that “all subsequent Wordsworth interpreters” have sought “to domesticate . . . by giving it at least a recognizable content.” But in spite of his awareness of it, the “something” to which Wordsworth’s poetry “gives access” certainly is named and defined repeatedly, even obsessively, by Arnold in the essay to which de Man alludes in this passage. The “something” in question bears the name of “power” in the essay—the word appears in almost every one of its paragraphs—and it is defined precisely as the power of nature that in Wordsworth’s poetry provides the consolation of a feeling of nature’s ability to communicate and of the poet’s capacity for sharing it.2 This attribution of “power” can only be understood as the defensive gesture through which Arnold attempts to provide Wordsworth’s poetry with an alternative version of a “recognizable content.” The name power, like the word philosophy, seeks compensation for what is missing in Wordsworth: it substitutes force for what would otherwise be unforce. Nevertheless, as de Man suggests, Arnold was aware of this threatening lack of force in Words­ worth in spite of his defensive attribution of “power” to the poet. Arnold’s projection of power onto Wordsworth’s poetry is informed by the theory of culture that he began to develop in the same years that Baudelaire was composing his poetic reflections on the urban multitudes. From this perspective, in other words, the “greatness” of Wordsworth—the power of his work— affects the “disinterested lover of poetry” (“Wordsworth,” 15). Recently a number of important studies have highlighted the underappreciated dynamism of disinterestedness in Arnold. Amanda Anderson, for example, emphasizes the productive tension in Arnold’s cultural theory between “aesthetic disinterestedness” and “critical reason” (Powers of Distance, 92). Anderson defends Arnold’s reconciliation of “cultivated stances,” on the one hand, and “transcendence of the subjective point of view through the impersonal entities such as criticism, the best self, or the state,”

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on the other, and praises it as “the successful subjective enactment or embodiment of forms of universality” (96–97). Marc Redfield, on the other hand, underlines the violence with which Arnoldian disinterestedness draws the brute “material bodiliness” of an ungovernable working class into the ideal sphere of an aesthetic history (Politics of Aesthetics, 92). Redfield questions the “turbulent force” that empowers the disinterested critic to “obtain purchase on the world and drive history toward its ideal” (86).3 But whether dialectically synthetic or violently destructive, the dynamism of disinterestedness reacts defensively to an adynamic element that Arnold discovered in poetry—not only in Wordsworth, as de Man suggests, but also in his own early lyrical experiments. In this sense the development of the theory of disinterestedness that forms the basis of Arnold’s emergence as a critic in the 1860s may also be understood as leading to his resignation as a poet.

. . . The concept of disinterestedness belongs to the history of Kant­ ianism in nineteenth-century England and France—the idealization of transcendentalism by Coleridge and, of more immediate importance to Arnold, the aestheticization of judgment by Cousin as absorbed by Sainte-Beuve.4 But disinterestedness develops in Arnold’s work in the context of the political questions that also concern Kant in his later writings, specifically, the question of revolutionary enthusiasm. The ground for Arnold’s denunciation of the popular uprisings of 1866 in Culture and Anarchy (1867–69) had been prepared by the theory of criticism worked out in essays written in the early 1860s and culminating in the publication of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” in 1864 in The National Review. This earlier essay is ostensibly about literature (“I will limit myself to literature,” Arnold claims, “for it is about literature that the question [of criticism] arises”; “Function of Criticism,” 28). But the presence of revolutionary politics becomes unmistakable as the discussion of criticism moves promptly to the French Revolution—“the greatest, the most animating event in history” (32). Arnold begins his analysis along lines similar to

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those followed by Kant, arguing that the transitory institutions of “law” (here the equivalent of the German Recht) are subject to the “absolute, unchanging, and universal . . . prescriptions of reason” (corresponding to the German Gesetz) (32). Like Kant, Arnold writes in praise of the French Revolution, describing it as “a whole nation . . . penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure ­reason” (32). But this revolutionary enthusiasm is marred, according to Arnold, by “the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application” to reason’s prescriptions (32). The passion for pure reason must be measured by readiness and the revolution in France violated this fundamental principle. In support of this argument Arnold invokes first the French moralist Joseph Joubert on the proper relation between “right” (employed here in the sense of “the prescriptions of reason”) and “force” (what ­Arnold defines as “the existing order of things”): “C’est la force et le droit qui ­règlent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit (Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready)” (“Function of Criticism,” 33; Joubert, Pensées, 330). For Arnold this dictum comprises a pair of reversible claims about the readiness of “force” and “right” that lays out criticism’s limits and its field of operation. Criticism is limited in that “right” cannot be forced: no one can force “right” to be ready and no one can be forced to be ready for “right” (“Function of Criticism,” 33). But criticism is possible and necessary in that “force” can be readied for “right” and “right” can be readied for “force.” This defines criticism’s function: to prepare the way for the coming of reason. As a case in point Arnold turns to a passage from Edmund Burke’s late text, Thoughts on French Affairs (1791). Burke makes the argument for readiness as a criterion of genuine revolutionary enthusiasm in messianic terms: “If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men” (quoted in “Function of Criticism,” 34). Burke compares revolution to a messianic

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event while at the same time proposing the mental fitness of man as the effective condition for its occurrence. But how great can the change really be if mankind is mentally prepared for it? This is the question Kant may be understood to pose in his reflections on the messianic structure of authentic ethical and political enthusiasm. To the extent that there is any external criterion by which the genuineness of such enthusiasm may be confirmed, it would lie in the singular failure or unfitness of man’s natural limitations at the given moment. Mankind is not ready and cannot be ready for the singularity of an experience that has no precedent (see, for instance, Kant, AA 5: 80–81; Practical Philosophy, 204–5). Lack of preparedness may thus be considered the subjective criterion of the genuinely revolutionary quality of the event. In this sense Kant turns Burke’s declaration on its head: truly great things can happen in the world when the natural limits of man do not prevent the taking of action out of respect for the prescriptions of reason.5 In such instances men are not fitted to the moral law but they have to respect it in order to be able to act and to think freely. By contrast, the concept of readiness advocated by Arnold on the basis of Joubert and Burke preserves the authority of man’s limitations—the fitness of men’s minds—over an unfit enthusiastic state in which acting and thinking freely becomes possible. But being ready must not take priority over becoming disinterested. In the terms of Arnold’s cultural theory this means that “ordinary selves,” without respect to readiness, must become disinterested in order for the community of “best selves” to assemble.6 This call to disinterestedness takes on an explicitly messianic character at the end of Culture and Anarchy, as Arnold turns to the writings of Saint Paul. The reassessment of Paul takes aim at what Arnold considered the most powerful historical force working toward the promotion of “ordinary selves” in England, namely Puritanism. He has recourse to Paul’s messianism in order to establish the ground on which self-interest, in particular class self-interest, can be canceled and a society of “best selves” can emerge. In this sense the England envisioned in Culture and Anarchy is a messianic community that has undergone a collective necrosis, dying to the

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ordinary self-interest of class. The Puritan interpretation contested by Arnold works against this ecclesiastical project by reducing the dynamism of messianic vocation in Paul and turning it into a static rule that applies strictly to “ordinary selves”: The Puritan’s great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of selfassurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of instincts of his ordinary self. (Culture and Anarchy, 142)

For Arnold the rioters in the streets during the summer of 1866 are the direct descendants of this Puritan. By acting mechanically on the dogma of individual liberty they transpose into the political sphere the theological self-assurance of the Puritan. Instead of rigid rules established once and for all at a fixed moment in the past, Arnold’s Paul gives the greatest emphasis to messianic vocation as an ongoing experience of a lived present or “now.” This is made especially clear in connection with the crucial concept of resurrection. In contrast to the Puritan distortion of this doctrine to mean “a rising again after the physical death of the body,” Paul “thinks and speaks of it . . . in the sense of a rising to a new life before the physical death of the body, and not after it. . . . [The Puritans] have substituted for the apostle’s living and near conception of a resurrection now, their mechanical and remote conception of a resurrection hereafter” (Culture and Anarchy, 144–45). The “now” punctuating this last sentence is decisive for the messianic concept of disinterestedness that Arnold bases on Paul. It constitutes the crucial point on which the elaboration of the theory of culture in the major essays of the 1860s comes to turn. Arnold is drawn to the revolutionary potentiality of Paul’s emphasis on the radical presentness of the messianic event. It is illuminating to consider Arnold’s stress on the present in Pauline vocation in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s recent comments on alternative interpretations of messianism in nineteenth-century political

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thought. Like the political thinkers discussed by Agamben, Arnold is concerned specifically with the effects of vocation on class. Agamben finds this connection crystallized in the undoubtedly spurious etymology of the word class offered by Max Weber, who traces its roots to vocation (the Greek klesis) in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). This pseudo-etymology conveniently provides the linguistic link between vocation and class that concerns Arnold and the tradition of social theory to which Weber belongs. At issue in Paul’s presentation of this matter, Agamben stresses, is the interpretation of the phrase “as not” (hos me): “those having wives may be as not (hos me) having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing, as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up” (1 Cor. 7:29–32). Extending vocation to class would add to this series of appeals a political call: “those having class interest may be as not having it.” Agamben outlines two nineteenth-century interpretations of this call to political being as not. The first (Stirner) distinguishes between a “worldly” uprising that provisionally deactivates existing historical and political conditions (a revolt) and a truly “messianic” event that annuls all such conditions (a revolution); the second (Marx) considers every revolt as part of the unfolding revolutionary mission to suspend the existence of class. But Agamben is most interested in a third possibility (exemplified by Benjamin), which extends the “indiscernability” of worldly and messianic vocation to awareness of vocation as such. According to this interpretation, self-consciousness is revoked by the call to political being as not. This third version of messianic vocation, Agamben observes: plays on the absolute indiscernability between revolt and revolution, worldly klesis and messianic klesis. One consequence of this is the impossibility of distinguishing something like an awareness of the vocation from the movement of its tension and revocation in the as not. This interpretation has Paul’s explicit affirmation on its side, when Paul says that he does not recall seizing hold of himself, but only of being seized, and from this being seized, straining forward toward ­klesis (Philippians 3:12–13). In this instance, vocation coincides with the movement of the calling toward itself. (Agamben, Il tempo, 37; The Time, 33)

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According to this strain of messianic thought, the deactivating logic of the Pauline as not is applied to the self-consciousness of vocation. The moment of being called, as Agamben says, cannot be recalled as an act of self-possession. In this sense, the experience of the call takes precedence over the capacity consciously to have it. Or, in Paul’s terms, having the experience of vocation is as not having it. The resistance of vocation to conscious appropriation in Paul derives from the mixing of the two kinds of temporality characterized by Paul with the terms chronos and kairos—chronological or secular time and “the time of the now” (ho nyn kairos). Agamben provides a formula for describing the interaction between these temporalities. Kairos, he proposes, is the remainder of chronos. The “time of the now” is what remains of time after it has been chronologically reduced and before it comes to an end. “Now” is what is left, and left over, when time takes the comprehensible form of a representation and we become aware of it. The time that remains, after the messianic event, exists, then, as an incomprehensible space between our awareness of time and whatever time is left to us—or, in Paul’s terms, between chronological time and the end of time (eschaton). “Now” in this sense is the time that we cannot have but that we can experience as not having. Rather than becoming a representation of time grasped by a self-­conscious subject, the messianic “now” occurs as the very experience of time being reduced in representation. This “now,” Agamben says, “measures my disconnection with regard to it, my being out of synch and in noncoincidence with regard to my representation of time, but precisely because of this, allows for the possibility of my achieving and taking hold of it (mia possibilità di compierla e di afferrarla)” (Il tempo, 67; The Time, 67). To the extent that messianic time withdraws or contracts in representation, instead of being represented in a fully comprehensible present, it resists the self-conscious awareness that is essential to Arnold’s argument for readiness in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Agamben underlines this resistance when he says: For Paul, the redemption of what has been is the place of an exigency for the messianic. This place does not involve a point of view

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from which we could see a world in which redemption had taken place. The coming of the Messiah means that all things, even the subjects who contemplate it, are caught up in the as not, called and revoked at one and the same time. No subject could watch it or act as if at a given point. The messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entire subject (tutto il soggetto). . . . Pauline klesis is a theory of the interrelation between the messianic and the subject, a theory that settles its differences once and for all with presumed identities and ensuing properties. In this sense, that which is not (ta me onta) is stronger than that which is. (Agamben, Il tempo, 44–45; The Time, 41)

In other words, a “now” reduced by worldly or chronological time calls for a mode of receptivity for which the self-conscious subject is unfit and unready. Another mode of experience is required. Rather than having time, Agamben goes on to suggest, we must “make use” of it in the sense indicated by Paul’s use of the term chresai—“make use”—in 1 Corinthians 7:21, for example: “Art thou called being a slave? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” Agamben glosses as follows: “We would do well to hear in this line, as do the majority of interpreters, ‘But if thou mayest be made free, use your klesis as slave.’ Use: this is the definition Paul gives to messianic life in the form of the as not. To live messianically means ‘to use’ klesis; conversely, messianic klesis is something to use, not to possess” (Il tempo, 31; The Time, 26). Agamben develops this concept of “use” further in a subsequent study of the political category of the state of exception, which translates the doctrine of the as not into the juridical sphere. More would have to be explained about how the expressions taking hold of it and achieving it (compierla and afferrarla) are used in the passage cited above—this formulation is repeated—and how to reconcile these actions with the use of the terms study and play, as well the concept of “use” itself, in Agamben’s critique of the political state of exception (see in particular Agamben, State of Exception, 63–64). It is clear, however, that Agamben is attempting to delineate something like what Kant calls “participation”: taking part in the world without seeking to appropriate it or the existence of the actor in it as a

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self-conscious subject. One could not be appropriately ready for such action in advance or even know surely that it has taken place after the fact. On the contrary, one must be unready and unsure so that the activity in question is taken purely in response to the obligation to act and to think freely and not with the calculated end of conserving oneself as a fully aware subject (if, that is, the end of moral action is to be freedom, and not self-consciousness). Or, to keep more rigorously to Kant’s thesis of “radical evil,” the possibility must never be excluded that awareness and the kind of readiness attending it might prevent respect for an ethical and political vocation that makes one act freely. The moral law dictates, therefore, that what must be conserved is not self-consciousness, but the possibility that consciousness may be self-interested. The extent to which Arnold comes close to considering this possibility in the essays of this period is indicated by his further elaboration of the interpretation of Paul’s messianism in the sequel to Culture and Anarchy—Saint Paul and Protestantism (1869–70).7 The latter work continues to emphasize the nowness of messianic vocation as a refutation of Puritanism. Commenting on the same passage invoked in Agamben’s remarks on the “indiscernability” of worldly and messianic vocation (Phil. 3:12–13), Arnold insists that mankind is punctually seized or, as he translates, “apprehended” by the call and compelled to imitate Christ’s identification with humanity (Saint Paul, 39).8 Thus the stress in Saint Paul and Protestantism remains on the presentness of the call’s apprehension of man, as is suggested by the following: “Christ’s physical resurrection after he was crucified is neither in point of time nor in point of character the resurrection on which Paul, following his essential line of thought, wanted to fix the believer’s mind. The ­resurrection Paul was striving after for himself and others was a resurrection now, and a resurrection to righteousness” (52). In a subsequent passage the punctuality of the messianic present is dramatized in a series of repeated declarations marked anaphorically by the word “now” (67–68). This insistence on a dynamic now in which the subject is forcefully seized echoes a similar stress in early poems such as “Resignation,” “Empedocles on Etna,” and

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“The Buried Life.” But in his later reading of Paul, Arnold shies away from the possibility that the force of messianic vocation might hold sway over the interest the subject has in maintaining a hold on itself. This reluctance comes out clearly in Arnold’s interpretation of vocation as a call for “identification” in the passage placing the greatest stress on the nowness of the call: And now, to help this our impulse toward righteousness, we find a power enabling us to turn the impulse to full account. Now the spirit does its greatest work in us; because now, for the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ’s pregnant act really gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation of it. . . . We put on Christ, we identify ourselves,—this is the line of Paul’s thought,— with Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ’s death to the law of the flesh. . . . Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the sense of having it; . . . we are in harmony with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony with it. (67–68)

The sudden, apprehending “power” of vocation in this passage is met with a corresponding “power” of “identification”—the faculty that leads to “justification.” The force that seizes the subject, ­Arnold insists, is contained by self-consciousness of the experience: by the “feeling” and “the sense of having it.” There is no sense in the space of this apprehension that the claim to conscious possession of the experience might be superseded by the force of vocation and that at some point the interest of consciousness might have to be subordinated to respect for the imperative of the call. Arnold’s rejection of this possibility is emphatic when it comes to the key question of the revocation of social class in Culture and Anarchy. At this crucial point the force of the call to revoke worldly orders yields to the sovereignty of a self-conscious subject that elevates its own preservation to an ultimate end. This is especially evident in the section of the famous chapter explicitly devoted to class, entitled “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace.” Arnold begins this passage by echoing the preamble to Romans 11:1 (Paul’s

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declaration, “I myself am an Israelite”) before going on to apply the Pauline doctrine of the as not to social class: For instance, I myself (I again take myself as a sort of corpus vile to serve for illustration in a manner where serving for illustration may not by every one be thought agreeable), I myself am properly a Philistine. . . . And although, through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known if ever the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my class, yet I have not, on that account, been brought much the nearer to the ideas and works of the Barbarians or of the Populace. Nevertheless, I never take a gun or a fishing-rod in my hands without feeling that I have in the ground of my nature the self-same seeds which, fostered by circumstances, do so much to make the Barbarian. . . . And as to the Populace, who, whether he be Barbarian or Philistine, can look at them without sympathy, when he remembers how often,—every time we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, every time that we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, every time that we are envious, every time that we are brutal, every time that we adore mere power or success, every time that we add our voice to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage, every time that we trample savagely on the fallen,—he has found in his own bosom the eternal spirit of the Populace, and that there needs only a little help from circumstances to make it triumph in him untamably. (Culture and Anarchy, 108–9)

The principle of the as not at work in the beginning of this passage could, it is suggested, easily be generalized to include all social classes: “those being as Philistines may be as not being, those being as Barbarians as not being, those being as the Populace as not being.” In this way the worldly orders of social class can be revoked by messianic vocation or “conversion,” and “ordinary selves” can be seen from the point of view of “best selves.” From this perspective, social class can be exposed as what it really is, namely, a self-interested way of being in the world. If everyone would apply the as not to social class every day—Arnold introduces this passage by claiming it describes “an experience we may all verify every day”

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(Culture and Anarchy, 108)—an ecclesia of “best selves” would take the place of a society where each person does “as he likes.” But the force of messianic vocation necessary for the annulment of social class is overseen by a logic of identification that is ultimately in the service of preserving self-conscious subjectivity. It thus rejects the possibility that such a state could be self-­interested. The priority accorded to self-consciousness comes out most clearly in the difficulty of identifying the Populace in the passage just cited. The portraits of the aristocracy and the middle class here are like the typological characters of the nineteenth-century physiologies to which Benjamin contrasts the “amorphous” crowds of Baudelaire’s poetry. The Barbarian is depicted doing field sports, the Philistine tea meetings—ordinary things that allow for easy identification. These stereotypes render the higher classes as unthreatening and harmless, in accordance with the function described in Benjamin’s analysis of the French physiologies. But the Populace appears as a purely violent force that cannot be resolved into a physiological representation. Because it lacks the consistency of an identifiable representation and eludes conscious comprehension, “the eternal spirit of the Populace” must be screened out. It imperils the existence of the state of mind that makes possible the identification of and, according to the logic of the essay, the annulment of class interest. But the imperative to screen out the Populace serves the interest of consciousness as a subjective condition that elevates its own self-preservation to a supreme end. Such an imperative dictates that the appeal for the revocation of worldly orders must be rejected when it threatens the capacity of the subject to remain selfpossessed. From the messianic perspective of Arnold’s cultural theory, in other words, self-consciousness does not count as a worldly order. Arnold’s reluctance to apply Paul’s doctrine of the as not to self-conscious subjectivity leads him to equate consciousness with disinterestedness. In Kantian terms this equation makes the maintenance of the self-conscious subject, rather than truly disinterested respect for the moral law, the ground of the theory and practice of criticism. This limited concept of disinterestedness turns Arnold’s cultural theory into an instance of what Kant describes as “moral

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fanaticism”: positing subjective self-­consciousness, rather than what Arnold describes as “the prescriptions of reason” (or what Kant calls the “moral law”), as the basis of ethical and political obligation (see AA 5: 92; Practical Philosophy, 214). By being equated with disinterestedness consciousness is granted an exemption from the messianic vocation of culture. This equation has the effect of removing consciousness from the worldly order revoked by the call to disinterestedness. In this way the messianism of culture in Arnold’s prose writings of the 1860s places a new restriction on disinterestedness in his work. In the earlier lyric poems consciousness was far from immune to the charge of self-interestedness. In order to suggest this, it suffices to consider a passage from “Empedocles on Etna” (1852), the poem that Arnold famously disavowed and excluded from the 1853 edition of his Poems (see Poems, especially 657–59). In this poem consciousness is challenged as a manifestation of worldly order that is explicitly self-interested. Indeed in Empedocles’ speech near the end of the poem “consciousness” is presented in political terms as the means by which a tyrannical mental state maintains an oppressive hold over mankind. Arnold’s leanings here can be traced back to earlier poems like “To a Republican Friend,” which show the poet participating in the revolutionary enthusiasm of a friend along the lines laid out by Kant. The key passage in Empedocles’ speech turns on the power of a punctual “now” to revoke this regime of “consciousness”:     But mind, but thought— If these have been the master part of us— Where will they find their parent element? What will receive them, who will call them home? But we shall be the strangers of the world, And they will be our lords, as they are now; And keep us prisoners of our consciousness, And never let us clasp and feel the All But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils. And we shall be unsatisfied as now; And we shall feel the agony of thirst,

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The ineffable longing for the life of life Baffled for ever; and still thought and mind Will hurry us with them on their homeless march, ... And then we shall unwillingly return Back to this meadow of calamity, This uncongenial place, this human life; And in our individual human state Go through the sad probation all again, To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world; Or whether we will once more fall away Into some bondage of the flesh or mind, Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power. (2.345–59; 364–76)9

Empedocles begins with the revolutionary hope that the oppressive force of “consciousness” will be revoked. Then, as in the later prose writings on Saint Paul, the question comes to turn on the presentness of a crucial moment marked by the word now, which is repeated three times in the passage. At the first of these, mind and thought dominate and there is no prospect of a time beyond the reach of their “element”: “And they will be our lords, as they are now; / And keep us prisoners of our consciousness, / And never let us clasp and feel the All” (2.350–52). The sense of domination is reinforced by the enjambment in which the overflowing movement of this last line is in the next firmly locked into the channels of conscious mind and thought: “And never let us clasp and feel the All / But through their forms, and modes and stifling veils.” The second “now,” however, involves a shift. This moment is one at which the repressive work of consciousness is subject to reflection. Here the reduction of the moment in conscious “forms” and “modes” is felt and there is a refusal to accept this limitation: “And we shall be unsatisfied as now” (2.355). At this point it is a matter, not just of life dominated by consciousness, but of the experience or the living of that life: “the life of life / baffled” (2.357–58).

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This time the enjambment complicates the containment of life by consciousness. The word baffled can apply both to (conscious) “life” and also to “the life of (conscious) life.” This reflexive “life of life” is also qualified as conscious. In this sense the phrase life / baffled that straddles the lines has the potentiality to generate an endless series of moments of reflection on consciousness. Each of these moments would be subject to the reduction of time in the forms and modes of mind, but the chain of “nows” would expand without limit and, as the German Romantics would say, absolutize reflection in a way that could be understood to overcome the temporal restrictions of consciousness. According to this logic, the time of this “now” would be fulfilled as an infinite medium of reflection (see Benjamin, GS 1.1: 30–32; SW 1: 128–30). But the reflexive movement between “life” and the “life of life” is interrupted by a third “now” in this passage (l. 370). It is as if the infinite reflection suggested by the “life of life” threatens to make the sovereignty of self-consciousness absolute. At this point something matters more than consciousness. A higher order imposes an unselfish “return” (“And then we shall unwillingly return”) to “human life” (2.364, 366): “To see if we will now at last be true / To our own only true, deep-buried selves, / Being one with which we are one with the whole world” (2.370–72). The time remaining between the second and the third “now” of this passage—between the temporality of reflection and the “now at last”—calls for the possibility of singular collective existence (again the enjambment is significant: “selves / Being one”). Moments when this call becomes compelling can be found in many of Arnold’s early poems. In “The Buried Life,” for example, the poem that shares the Stoic image of the subterranean flow of an elusive true life, such an imperative is said “to force [man] to obey / Even in his own despite his being’s law” (36–37). In the passage from “Empedocles on Etna” that we have been considering this force calls self to “selves,” self-consciousness to collective being—or, more precisely, to a collective seeing. No one is interested in this seeing because it exists at a time that we do not have. By placing emphasis on this experience of not having time—of a

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spot of time, to invoke again Wordsworth—Arnold’s early poetry explores a force of disinterestedness that is more critical than the one elaborated in his later criticism.

. . . If “Empedocles on Etna” offers an exposition of the illegitimate power of consciousness and by extension a critique of the psychic state of emergency (“anarchy”) declared by disinterestedness in Arnold’s theory of culture, an even earlier poem, “Resignation,” marks a confrontation with the limits of the greater and more legitimate poetic force he associates with Wordsworth. In this sense “Resignation” turns on that “something” that, as de Man points out, “remains unnamed and undefined” and that “all subsequent Wordsworth interpreters” have sought “to domesticate . . . by giving it at least a recognizable content” (Rhetoric of Romanticism, 86). This content is a certain retirement or resignation that comes to be attributed defensively to Romantic lyric by Arnold later in his career. A reading of “Resignation,” however, shows that it refrains from precisely this anxious attribution. As its title hints, this earlier poem, which was composed between 1843 and 1848, is about repetition. It deals with a country walk taken in 1843 by Arnold and his sister, Jane, that repeats one taken ten years earlier with a larger group, including, perhaps most significantly, Arnold’s father, who died in June 1842 (a year before the second walk). In this sense, Jane and Matthew Arnold are described as “ghosts” in the poem (l. 89). Moreover, beyond the theme of returning and reenacting—of haunting and being haunted—the role of A ­ rnold’s sister (the dedicatee [“Fausta”], addressee, and friend whose thoughts are “scanned” later in the poem [l. 203]), together with the setting of the excursion in the “Lake-Country” (a location underlined by the author’s note added to the two-volume edition of his poems in 1869), stage “Resignation” as a repetition of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798).10 Thus the lines addressed to the sister in Arnold’s poem—“We left, just ten years since, you say, / That wayside inn we left to-day” (ll. 40–41)—especially with the addition of the footnote inserted precisely at this point, are certain to

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recall the opening lines of “Tintern Abbey”: “Five years have past; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! and again I hear.” These conspicuous allusions to Wordsworth’s poem and the dense web of references to other pastoral precursors recall the repetitive nature of poetry as such. But “Resignation” is also ­repeated and revised in Arnold’s later work, in particular with respect to the question of disinterestedness that would come to occupy a central place in the turn away from poetry toward critical prose in the 1860s. A crucial turning point, Arnold’s early poem resigns the position of self-conscious detachment assumed by the later essays and reveals that the shift from poetry to prose involves the repression of the threatening element discovered in Wordsworth. “Resignation” begins by evoking those for whom repetition is a “pain” (l. 19). Paradoxically, “repose” is sought from this perspective through the proposing of a “goal” to be “gained”: Because they to themselves propose On this side the all-common close A goal which, gained, may give repose. So pray they: and to stand again Where they stood once, to them were pain; Pain to thread back and to renew Past straits, and currents long steered through. 

(ll. 15–21)

In other words, the gain of a goal aims to cancel the again of standing where one “stood once.” Such an instrumentalized existence is contrasted with the freedom of resignation to which the addressee is exhorted: But milder natures, and more free; Whom an unblamed serenity Hath freed from passions, and the state Of struggle these necessitate; Whom schooling of the stubborn mind Hath made, or birth hath found, resigned; 

(ll. 22–27)

The resigned life rejects the attitude in which time is a means to an end, the medium through which a mission is fulfilled and an office

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is carried out. This is the first meaning of resignation: “relinquishing, surrendering, giving up an office” (Oxford English Dictionary). But another sense is also developed along the lines of the concept of relational force outlined above in Kant. The resigned are relatively, not absolutely free: they are “more free” (l. 22) than those who seek to free themselves from death through the imposition of “labours, self-ordained” (l. 14). “To die be given us, or attain!” (l. 1) exclaim those who pretend to take their lives into their own hands and, in doing so, to escape the hand of death. The greater freedom of the resigned consists in the emancipation, not from mortality, but from “passions”—overpowering emotions that impose a “state of struggle” (ll. 24–25). Resignation “mourns not . . . the passing day” (ll. 28–29), but instead recognizes its greater power and “pays obedience” to this higher authority. This is the second meaning of resignation: “the form by which a vassal returns the fee into the hands of a superior” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term obedience also brings with it an ecclesiastical signification that points to yet a third sense of “resignation”: “the giving up of oneself (to God)” (Oxford English Dictionary).11 With this we come to the principle of self-renunciation that will be taken up again in the theory of disinterestedness elaborated by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy and in the interpretation of messianic vocation of culture in Saint Paul and Protestantism. In “Resignation” this principle is elaborated in relation to the aesthetic and moral exemplarity of the poet. The elevation of the poet described in this section of the poem (ll. 144–98) parallels the process in Culture and Anarchy by which the “best self ” overcomes the “ordinary self.” Suppressing the “energy” of greater passion that is granted to the ordinary poetic condition leads to the disinterested vision of what Arnold calls “the whole community” in his later essay (Culture and Anarchy, 98): The Poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man. 

(ll. 144–47)

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This poetic ability corresponds to the power of aesthetic judgment in Kant, for example, the capacity to see the French Revolution as an indication of the purposiveness in human history rather than an occasion for revolutionary Schwärmerei. The intellectual, political, and moral power of the poet ultimately submits to the “high station” of detachment from which he looks down (l. 164). Kenneth Allott’s fine 1963 edition of Arnold’s poems points to sources of this elevated position in Lucretius (De rerum natura 2.7–10) and Marcus Aurelius (Thoughts 7.48). But of greater relevance is ­Allott’s citation of a letter from Arnold to Clough on March 4, 1848, that invokes the “supreme step” of “the Indians” that involves “abandoning the fruits of action and all respect thereto” (Complete Poems, 94). This allusion is to the Bhagavad Gita, which Arnold would have encountered in 1845 in his reading of Victor Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie du dix-huitième siècle during the composition of “Resignation.” In this context the “high station” of the first half of section 5 derives from the “disinterestedness” that Cousin elaborates in his reading of A. W. Schlegel’s 1823 Latin translation of the Indian text. Désintéressement, according to Cousin, is “­inaction in action” (l’inaction dans l’action)—in ­Schlegel’s Latin cited by Cousin, in opere otium (Cours de l’histoire, 224). The supreme imperative of disinterestedness, according to Cousin, requires that one “act . . . as if one were not acting (agir . . . comme si on n’agissait pas)” (224). The structural similarity to the as not underlined by Agamben in his interpretation of Saint Paul connects the “high station” of the poet at this point in “Resignation” to the messianic vocation of disinterestedness in Arnold’s later cultural theory. A closer reading of this section of “Resignation,” however, reveals an important difference between the disinterested stance of the poet and that of the critic in the essays of the 1860s. The shift in the middle of this section of the poem merges the detached or disinterested perspective with that of English pastoral poetry, and specifically Milton. This is made evident in the allusions of the “high lawn” (l. 176) to “Lycidas” (l. 25) and of the “whistling clown” (ll. 181–83) to “L’Allegro” (ll. 63–64).12 The “sad lucidity of soul” ascribed to the pastoral poet at the end of this

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section (l. 198) corresponds to the self-interested, detached state of consciousness that gives way in other poems of this period, such as “Empedocles on Etna” and “The Buried Life.” As the poet “scans” the “thoughts” of the sister (l. 203) at this point in “Resignation” a similar verdict is pronounced on the pastoral outlook that Arnold later in his career assigns defensively to Wordsworth, namely, a version of the pastoral that seeks to seclude itself and to retire from the “iron round” of the world (l. 209).13 In this way section 5 and the first part of section 6 of “Resignation” link the aesthetic theory of the later Arnoldian concept of disinterestedness with older (Miltonic) and newer (Wordsworthian) forms of pastoral detachment. In the remainder of the poem, however, the detached attitude yields to a sphere that stresses a more complex interpenetration between action and inaction and between the ability and inability of the poet in a way that extends the theory of désintéressement as in opere otium. Unlike the preceding section, which seems to take Wordsworth to task for reclusiveness and a withdrawal from the world, this development, by contrast, ends up exposing a similar dynamic in “Tintern Abbey.” Key to the exposition of the critical theory of force (and unforce) shared by “Resignation” and “Tintern Abbey” is the ambiguous status of “the world” of the last three sections of Arnold’s poem.14 The sphere in question is approached by way of a scale of relatively greater power, starting at the human level with man’s capacity for sentiment, which is subordinate to an intellectual faculty with the power to see beyond passing attachments. Above this level is death, which is in turn superseded by “the world.”15 “The world” of “Resignation” ultimately draws man into a relation to death that is understood along the lines of Cousin’s theory of “inaction in action”—a field of force and activity that does not exclude unforce and inactivity. On the one hand, “the world” is nature (physical existence) and in this context man is individually and collectively, according to a natural and evolutionary law, a means to an end. In this case death is the end of man. On the other hand, “the world” is the space of collective human being (moral and political existence) and from this perspective man is an

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end in itself, in keeping with the Kantian law of freedom. Viewed in this way, death becomes a medium of human existence in the sense that it is repeatedly overcome by collective experience. In Arnold’s poem the contrast between these two spheres is spelled out as the difference between “the world” and “the world in which we live and move”: The world in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy; and were the scope Of these affections wider made, Man still would see, and see dismayed, Beyond his passion’s widest range Far regions of eternal change. Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan, With much unknown, and much untried, Wonder not dead, and thirst not dried, Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle— This world in which we draw our breath, In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death. 

(ll. 215–30)

The world of this passage outlasts “affections” (each sentimental version of ourselves) and also the elevated disinterested vision associated with the poet’s “high station” (l. 164) earlier in the poem (the world “outlasts,” in other words, our “ordinary” and our “best” selves). Moreover, by outlasting death, the world goes on as an evolutionary process that naturally effaces man, individually and as a species. Man can be conscious theoretically or intellectually of the natural limit at which man is “dismayed”—disallowed or restricted—but also, building on the rhyme with “made,” un-made:    . . . and were the scope Of these affections wider made, Man still would see, and see dismayed Beyond his passion’s widest range. 

(ll. 218–21)

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At the same time, however, death finds man unfinished (“with many an unsolved plan, / With much unknown” [ll. 224–25]) and taking part in an ongoing moral development—the subject of what the Victorians call “philosophy.” Unlike the natural, evolutionary process, this moral and political process—the “culture” of Arnold’s later work—demands active involvement. The poet’s task is to take part by communicating this vision of collective development and community. The static sight of human finitude must, in other words, give way, in the language of the poets, to the mode of collective vision for which Empedocles calls in his final speech: To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world. (“Empedocles on Etna,” ll. 370–72)

The contrast between this open-ended communal vision and the self-interested, restrictive sight of consciousness at the end of “Empedocles on Etna” draws on the tension that develops in the stillness of man’s gaze in this passage from “Resignation.” In the earlier poem what seems at first to be simply the static stillness of human seeing (l. 220) turns into the active stillness—the ongoing character—with which mankind collectively gazes on the “eternal mundane spectacle,” in particular through the eyes of the poets (ll. 227–28). The capacity for open-ended collective vision, and not the end-oriented ability to see something, engages mankind poetically in a world that “outlasts death.” Under these conditions the sense in which death “wipes out man” is revised. This phrase now means, not simply effacement, but the extending and winding round of mankind in a polarizing existential space in which natural limitation is supplemented and completed in a process of living, moving, and breathing freely in the communicability of community. In this sense, man is rubbed out of natural and rubbed into communal existence—whirled into the interpenetrating theoretical and moral dimensions of “the world.” The suggestion that being wiped out means being whirled in this

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way—a suggestion that has etymology on its side—is made explicit in the last lines of “Resignation”: Enough, we live! and if a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth; Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills around us spread, This stream that falls incessantly, The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky, If I might lend their life a voice, Seem to bear rather than rejoice. And even could the intemperate prayer? Man iterates, while these forbear, For movement, for an ampler sphere, Pierce Fate’s impenetrable ear; Not milder is the general lot? Because our spirits have forgot, In action’s dizzying eddy whirled, The something that infects the world. 

(ll. 261–78)

Once again the theoretical and moral dimensions intersect in “the world” of the poem’s final section. On the one hand, there is natural limitation—“the something that infects the world”—and, on the other, the moral imperative of collective existence—the mildness of “the general lot” (mildness, it should be recalled, is associated with the freedom of the resigned earlier in the poem: “But milder natures, and more free” [l. 22]). These two spheres are separate: knowledge of natural limitation—awareness that we forget our physical existence in the whirl of action—does nothing to respect the moral law of mildness. But there is a curious twist or chiasmus in the last two couplets of “Resignation.” The rhyme of “world” with “whirled” articulates a return to consciousness: the remembering of human finitude that is obscured in the whirl of action. This conscious knowledge, the poem asserts, makes the “general lot” no “milder.” But the rhyming of “forgot” with “the general lot” seems calculated to produce the very confu-

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sion of consciousness with moral practice that the final sentence is denying. The echo of this couplet has the effect of suggesting that awareness of natural limitation (knowledge of forgetting) has a bearing on the moral sphere (man’s collective existence), even while the sentence in which this rhyme occurs rejects this proposition: it is, not “the general lot,” but the “something that infects the world” that is forgotten. If the last rhyme makes us conscious of the infection of human finitude, the rhyme that precedes it instigates a process that leads us to forget—while whirled in the rhyme—that such consciousness is irrelevant to moral obligation. With the rhyming of “forgot” with “general lot” the relation of forgetting to the natural finitude of the “world” is suspended as the semantic content of the sentence is interrupted momentarily by the poetic technique. At the point of this interruption instead of enacting the meaning of the sentence language is semantically inactive. The result is an idling of language—a manifestation of “inaction in action” (in opere otium) in the medium of the poem. By demonstrating this inaction in linguistic action “Resignation” repeats an aspect of the “world” of “Tintern Abbey.” In Words­ worth’s poem the “world” is the site of a crisis of communicability. The power of nature and the correspondent ability of the poet to communicate are considered at one pivotal point, for example, as the expression of “a vain belief ” (“Tintern Abbey,” in Complete Poetical Works, l. 50). Instead of a reassertion of a communicative capacity, however, this possibility leads to a mere turning:       If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! (“Tintern Abbey,” 49–57; my emphasis)

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The repetition of the turning in this passage—a turning in and of the poet’s “spirit”—suggests a mechanical inanimation and an adynamic recurrence. As in other such passages in Wordsworth— often punctuated as here with exclamation points—this confrontation with inanimateness leads the poet to wonder at the possibility that the communicability that is elsewhere supposed to join the poet to nature and to mankind as a whole is a delusion.16 This possibility gives pause and marks an interruption in the power that is the subject of Wordsworth’s poetry. The spinning of the spirit that suspends the correspondence to nature is expressed as mere tropic movement—a turn that is not met with a reciprocal return on the part of the apostrophized “Wye.” The turn of spirit, which is the figure of a caesura—a gap in the poetic line—exposes a void of communicability in the “world” of “Tintern Abbey.” The tropic idling of the turns in Wordsworth’s lines is like the whirl of rhyme at the end of “Resignation”: at both points a figure of mere language apart from any recognizable context is foregrounded. In this sense “Tintern Abbey” and “Resignation” are fundamentally concerned with junctures at which the communicability of the “world” fails—due, not to natural limits (the physical power of nature), but to the unforce or incommunicability that is internal to communicative force as such. Instead of supplementing and completing a communication or correspondence left unfinished in nature, the poet in both cases imitates in language an adynamic unforce in the “world.” As Matthew Arnold turned to active life as a leading man of letters and public advocate for the cultural power of literature during the 1860s, he turned away from this critical perspective on poetic force and unforce laid out in early poems such as “Resignation.” Arnold came to view this poetic outlook as a form of retirement and reclusiveness he associates with Words­ worth. In this way Arnold resigned himself to a concept of “disinterestedness” that excludes the inactivity in action that his poetry shares with Wordsworth.

Epilogue Making Room for Reason The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room (Platz schaffen); only one activity: clearing away (räumen). Walter Benjamin

A century and a half after the publication of the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Martin Heidegger made a declaration that seems to evict faith from the place Kant had granted it in philosophy: “Faith has no place in thinking (Der Glaube hat im Denken keinen Platz), Heidegger asserts at the end of his 1946 essay “Anaximander’s Saying” (Holzwege, 372; Off the Beaten Track, 280). The place of faith in this statement, however, is not without a certain ambiguity, which can be traced back to the passage in Kant’s first Critique to which Heidegger silently alludes.1 First of all there is the complication introduced by the paradigmatic analysis of place itself in section 22 of Being and Time (published a decade before the statement on faith is made): “When we do not find something in its place, the region of that place often becomes explicitly accessible as such for the first time. . . . Space is split up into places (Der Raum ist in die Plätze ­aufgesplittert)” (Sein und Zeit, 104; Being and Time, 138). Saying “faith has no place in thinking,” then, could also mean that the “poeticizing” force of thinking brings about or provides access to the region of a faith that is not merely a belief in a scientific authority. This possibility is not excluded by the immediate context of Heidegger’s statement. The declaration is issued at the end of the discussion of the epochal shift in the understanding of being that is said to take place in Western metaphysics as the ­ancient 

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Epilogue

Greek energeia “is translated” into the Latin actualitas. “The Greek is shut away,” Heidegger maintains, “and appears, right up to our own times, only in its Roman guise. Actualitas becomes reality. Reality becomes objectivity” (Holzwege, 371; Off the Beaten Track, 280). The retranslation of Anaximander’s saying to which Heidegger comes at the end of his essay is meant to restore the dynamic power of being of which the original Greek speaks, and it is with regard to the validity of this authentic translation that the declaration about faith and thinking is made: “This translation cannot be scientifically established: nor should we have faith in it merely on the basis of some kind of authority. Scientific proof will not take us far enough. Faith has no place in thinking. We can only reflect on the translation by thinking through the saying. Thinking, however, is the poeticizing of the truth of being in the historical dialogue between those who think” (Holzwege, 372; Off the Beaten Track, 280). Banned from thinking, then, is faith in one sense: that which is upheld by the canons of Western metaphysics, of “scientific proof,” of the kind of “authority” specifically signified by the Latin and in particular Roman auctoritas (the choice of the word Autorität in this passage makes this clear). The question of another sense of faith—of a belief that consists in what Heidegger calls “thinking through the saying” of the Greek—remains open in this passage. In lectures from the later 1930s Heidegger had indeed discovered and explored this possibility explicitly in the “ambiguity” of Nietzsche’s definition of faith as “holding-to-betrue” (­Für-wahr-halten).2 To the extent that “holding-to-be-true” expresses a relation to “something represented”—of a substantial object affecting the mind—faith in this sense remains within the metaphysical tradition of representation from which genuine thinking distinguishes itself. But, Heidegger continues, “‘holdingto-be-true’ is holding firm in the true (Sichhalten im Wahren), hence holding firm in a double sense (Doppelsinn): having a hold (einen Halt haben) and preserving a bearing (eine ­Haltung ­bewahren)” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1: 345; Nietzsche, 3–4: 124). This explication and what follows in the remainder of the lecture make it clear that faith in the second sense—of “holding-to-be-true”—is

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a kind of belief positively placed in thinking. Faith in this second sense for Heidegger is ultimately the very ability of thinking to hold itself in what he calls the poeticizing production of the true. As these qualifications start to make clear, Heidegger’s eviction notice has the effect upon closer inspection of freeing up room for the kind of faith advocated in the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, in his explication and promotion of the more dynamic understanding of faith in Nietzsche, Heidegger makes the following statement that points directly to Kant as restoring the originary force specific to reason: “This poetizing essence (dichtende Wesen) of reason was not first discovered by Nietzsche but only emphasized by him in some particularly blunt respects, and not always sufficiently. Kant first explicitly perceived and thought through the poetizing character (dichtenden Charakter) of reason in his doctrine of the transcendental imagination” (Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1: 526; Nietzsche, 3–4: 95–96). Taking note of an inclination on Heidegger’s part toward a “sacramental” mode of faith—an emphasis on a demand for the restoration of a sacred place such as Kant places on the restitution of the moralischen Anlage that I analyzed above in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason—Jacques Derrida has insisted on a more complex relation of faith to reason in Heidegger’s thought. Fundamentally, Derrida argues, “it seems difficult to dissociate from faith in general the accord, acquiescence, or consent of the Zusage that for Heidegger designates what is most irreducible and originary in thinking” (Foi et savoir, 91; Acts of Religion, 95). Derrida’s interpretation of such motifs as “­accord” (Zusage), “attestation” (Bezeugung), “restraint” (Verhaltenheit), and the a priori and thus nonempirical Faktum of being in language leads him to propose the following thesis about the “two sources” of religion in Heidegger’s thought. Along with “the experience of sacredness” in Heidegger there is also what Derrida calls “the experience of belief ”: More receptive to the first (in its Graeco-Hölderlinian or even archeoChristian tradition), Heidegger was probably more resistant to the second, which he constantly reduced to figures he never ceased to put

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in question, not to say “destroy” or denounce: dogmatic or credulous belief in authority, to be sure, but also belief according to the religions of the Book and ontotheology, and above all, that which in the belief in the other could appear to him (wrongly, we would say) to appeal necessarily to the egological subjectivity of an alter ego. (Foi et savoir, 95; Acts of Religion, 97)

Derrida’s stress on the irreducible tension between two tendencies, two “experiences” of faith in Heidegger’s work—one sacramental, the other testimonial—does not correspond precisely to the conflict in Kant between the nonempirical aesthetic judgment of nature, on the one hand, and the cognition of the world as an object extended in space and time, on the other. The “tele-­technoscience,” as Derrida calls it, that is in conflict with the philosophical critique of representational metaphysics undertaken by Heidegger is no longer identical with the science of the ­English Empiricism that concerns Kant.3 What remains, however, is the ambiguity of a limit experience—indeed what does not count as experience in the classic Kantian sense—where the finitude of the empirical gives the sense of a community that is not entirely determined by its relation to the world as a thing to be used, appropriated, and defended by a restricted body of owners. The insistence on a timeless, spaceless place for reason that is nevertheless in some sense in this world connects Derrida’s thesis of the “two sources of religion” to Kant’s stress on reason as supernational, as well as a supernatural force. For Derrida it is the place “where the socius or the relation to the other would disclose itself to be the secret of testimonial experience—and hence, of a certain faith” (Foi et savoir, 98; Acts of Religion, 99). Derrida pursued the question of such a socius, for example, in his late remarks on the tension between reason and globalization. These reflections make a compelling case for the poetic force of reason that is the starting point of this study. Thus I propose to dwell on them in closing as a way of demonstrating the ongoing relevance, and indeed necessity, of this critical force to contemporary thought. With explicit reference to Kant ­Derrida presents the conflict between the power of global economic rationaliza-

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tion and the force of reason as an irreducible relation between the power of calculation and conditionality (the world under conditions of globalization), on the one hand, and the greater power of the incalculable and the unconditional (what he calls “the ‘world’ of the Enlightenment to come”) (Voyous, 208; Rogues, 142). The force of reason is “poetic,” Derrida suggests at one point, in the sense that it makes for the invention of “a singular idiom of reason, of the reasonable transaction between two antinomic rationalities” (Voyous, 217; Rogues, 158). This “poetic invention,” as Derrida calls it, responds to the sovereign relation between reason’s conditional and unconditional demands—what he characterizes as the hypothetical and anhypothetical dimensions of the rational capacity. Kant’s image of the moral Anlage, which was analyzed in Chapter 2, might be adduced as a leading example of such poetic invention: it makes room for reason by respecting the relation between the rational hypothesis (the natural purposiveness according to which man reforms under the pressure of conditions and becomes by degrees a better human being) and its anhypothesis (the immediate and revolutionary obligation of mankind unconditionally to be better “now”). Derrida’s account of the aporetic structure of rational sovereignty in the political context of globalization thus may be understood to illuminate Kant’s approach to “participation” in the French Revolution as the expression of an inner moral space answerable to the irreducible relation between the conditional and the unconditional demands of reason. The Anlage exposed by “participation” constitutes in this sense an image that makes the fundamental link between the hypothetical and anhypothetical forces of reason along the lines sketched by Derrida: Hypothesis in Greek will have signified before all else the base or basis, the infrastructure posed beneath or at the bottom of a foundation. As such, it will have been a figure for the bottom or the basement, the groundwork or the foundation, and thus the principle of a thing, the reason of an institution, the raison d’être of a science or a reasoning, of a logos or a logic, of a theory, rationalization, or ratiocination. It will have also done this as the subject, substance, or supposition of

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Epilogue

a discourse, as a proposition, design, or resolution, but most often as a condition. The rationality of reason is forever destined, and universally so, for every possible future and development, every possible tocome and becoming, to contend between, on the one hand, all these figures and conditions of the hypothetical and, on the other hand, the absolute sovereignty of the anhypothetical, of the unconditional or absolute principle, a principle that I qualify as sovereign . . . so as to recall . . . a moment within the canonical text of Plato’s Republic that I would be tempted to consider quasi-inaugural. It is the moment when, for the first time, in Greek, the question is posed, when the demand, rather, is made, in Greek, a demand that just might be, still today, here and now, at once our postulation and our common, inflexible, and demanding interrogation. It is the question of or demand for knowledge as power, for truth and for capacity (dynamis, Vermögen), namely, for the power to know, for power-knowledge, for the power of knowledge, for knowledge as power. . . . Now, this cause, namely that which gives us the capacity, the force, the power, the potential (dynamis) of knowing and that thus gives truth (aletheia) to the things to be known, is, we must not forget, an idea of the good (idea tou agathou). (Voyous, 190–91; Rogues, 136–37)

Based on Derrida’s explication, we can say that Kant’s image of the Anlage is a hypothetical or conditional spatial figure that at the same time postulates the anhypothetical or unconditional force of reason understood as a dynamic capacity or faculty exceeding space and time. The Anlage invents a space where a moral condition of gradual teleological development across a differential spectrum—natural purposiveness—must coexist with an unconditional moral power to be, rather than merely to become, better right now. The coexistence and relation between reform and revolution, or between politics and ethics, in Kant’s theory of participation corresponds to the connection between the hypothetical and the anhypothetical demands of reason. What Kant calls participation is marked, therefore, by the same fundamental tension between conditionality and unconditionality that Derrida has illuminated in Kant’s discussion of universal hospitality in “­Toward Eternal Peace.”4 Derrida’s affirmation of the sovereignty of this tension in his reflections on democracy and globalization

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thus a­ ccords with Kant’s characterization of the genuinely philosophical response to the French Revolution. Derrida’s insistence on the complex, irreducible relation between sovereignty and reason—on a sovereign reason requiring the questioning of sovereignty in all of its manifestations—reveals a poetic force connecting his political theory to Kant. This can be seen in the critique in Rogues of the sovereignty of the nation-state in the modern era. The logic of “autoimmunity” that governs the nation-state, according to Derrida’s account, is a manifestation of “radical evil”: it operates through the elevation of self-preserving drives and calculations for maximizing happiness to a supreme end. Therefore, just as man, according to Kant, must “reverse the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being” (AA 6: 48; Religion, 92), so the sovereignty of the nationstate’s regime of “autoimmunity” must be overturned. Moreover, as in Kant, this overturning is not only demanded now and at every instant in the life of every nation state as an (unconditional) revolutionary injunction; it also occurs gradually, through an evolutionary process of (conditional) reform. Indeed, Derrida suggests with regard to the latter, we can see this happening in the context of globalization: “It is already under way. It is at work today; it is what’s coming, what’s happening. It is and it makes history through the anxiety-provoking turmoil we are currently undergoing” (­Voyous, 216; Rogues, 157). One of the salient effects singled out by Derrida in the gradual process according to which the questioning of sovereignty “is” and “makes history” can be discerned in the change to the concept of war, which in the case of the “war on terror” is no longer a conflict between nation-states and “enemies” in the classic sense. Now there is no official declaration of war against an enemy but rather “rationalizations” of violence carried out on “rogue states” hosting a transnational power against which the nation-state seeks to preserve itself and the collection of private interests for which it stands. These “rationalizations” of nation-state sovereignty must be questioned, but not sovereignty as such. The unconditional relation between reason and sovereignty imposes this double proposition, according to Derrida. So,

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Epilogue

on the one hand, unconditionally: “It is thus no doubt necessary, in the name of reason, to call into question and to limit a logic of nation-state sovereignty. It is no doubt necessary to erode not only its principle of indivisibility but its right to the exception, its right to suspend rights and law” (Voyous, 215; Rogues, 157). And, on the other hand, conditionally: And yet . . . it would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly reasonable, to oppose unconditionally, that is, head-on, all sovereignty, sovereignty in general, without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state figure of sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and self-determination. Like the classical tradition of law (and the force that it presupposes), these classical principles remain inseparable from a sovereignty at once indivisible and yet able to be shared. ­Nation-state sovereignty can even itself, in certain conditions, become an indispensable bulwark against certain international p ­ owers . . . that, under the cover of liberalism or universalism, would still represent, in a world that would be little more than a marketplace, a rationalization in the service of particular interests. Yet again, in a context that is each time singular, where the respectful attention paid to singularity is not relativist but universalizable and rational, responsibility would consist in orienting oneself without any determinative knowledge of the rule. To be responsible, to keep within reason, would be to invent maxims of transaction for deciding between two just as rational and universal but contradictory exigencies of reason as well as its enlightenment. (Voyous, 216–17; Rogues, 158)

This invention of singular maxims that Derrida goes on to describe as “poetic” holds open a space for reason that is nevertheless not one of the objects affecting the mind or of a finite set of material things to be protected.5 In this sense placing faith in this poetic ability makes room for the end of the world as a thing to be used and defended. This way of seeing things, which Kant associates with the poets, responds to an unconditional demand for a peaceful condition that would nullify claims to possession of the land based on physical force. Such a pacific state, however, would have to remain as a nonempirical condition and at the same time resist becoming unconditional in the sense of transcending

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the world to which it must correlate.6 As I have attempted to demonstrate, this is the elusive condition to which the poetic projects of Hölderlin, Baudelaire, and Arnold allude in various overlapping ways that can be traced to Kant. The demand of such an irreconcilable tension is the subject of a series of lectures on Kant that Hannah Arendt delivered near the end of her life. The focus is on judgment as the connection between philosophy and politics. In her inquiry into this aspect of Kant’s work—what she calls his “nonwritten political philosophy”—Arendt concentrates on the faculty of judgment as the site of a power struggle between reason and imagination in the third Critique (Lectures, 19).7 The outlines of the conflict are discerned in Kant’s remarks on the overtly political topics of revolution and war in his essays of the 1790s. These two spectacles reveal what Arendt characterizes as the “clash” between politics and philosophy that is the subject of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment. This polemic is for Arendt a matter of life and death and she begins her exposition by placing the philosopher on the side of the latter (Lectures, 19). Alluding to the observation in the Phaedo that “a philosopher’s life is like dying,” Arendt depicts the position of the philosopher as follows: The true philosopher does not accept the conditions under which life has been given to man. This is not just a whim of Plato, and not just hostility to the body. It is implicit in Parmenides’ trip to the heavens to escape “the opinions of mortals” and the delusions of sense experience, and it is implicit in Heraclitus’ withdrawal from his fellow citizens and in those who, asked about their true home, pointed toward the skies; that is, it is implicit in the beginnings of philosophy in Ionia. . . . The point for us here is that this preference for death became a general topic of philosophers after Plato. When (in the third century) Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, asked the Delphic Oracle what he should do to attain the best life, the Oracle answered: “Take on the color of the dead.” This, as usual, was ambiguous; it could mean, “Live as though you were dead” or, as Zeno himself allegedly interpreted it, “Study the ancients.” (Lectures, 22–23)8

Arendt dramatizes the tension set forth in these oracular terms as a conflict between the political “actor” and the philosophical

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Epilogue

“­spectator” in Kant’s equivocal response to the French Revolution. At first, as a heuristic step, these figures stand irreconcilably opposed to one another in Arendt’s exposition, and her main concern is to emphasize that the position of the philosopher (the side of the spectator and death) contains no principle for action in the world of the politician (the side of the actor and life). When it comes to revolution there appears to be little room for ambiguity and the audience is reminded repeatedly: “We have the spectacle and the spectator on one side, the actors and all the single events and contingent haphazard happenings on the other” (Lectures, 52). Then, however, there is a fundamental shift in the philosophical perspective as the end of the lectures approaches. Ultimately, Arendt points out, Kant is concerned with the judgment less of the lone spectator than of the plurality of spectators because this judging collective opens up the connection of philosophy to politics. Unlike the traditional philosophical spectator, whether alone or as an isolated member of an aggregate—Arendt alludes to the “Pythagorean spectator at the Olympic games or the spectators in the Platonic cave, who could not communicate with one another”—these onlookers, Kant says, communicate their approbation to one another. They become significant at this point not as involved actors or as detached spectators but as communicators testifying to an irreducibly collective faculty or common sense on the basis of which human beings can exist together as a community independent of their cognitive interaction and apart from the commercium of empirical community described in the passage from Kant’s first Critique to which I alluded at the beginning of this study (AA B: 260; Critique of Pure Reason, 318). This other nonempirical communio that is not ruled out in The Critique of Pure Reason becomes the subject of the theory of sensus communis in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The extra sense of community is unaccompanied by vision, hearing, and touch—it is, Arendt points out, closer to smelling or tasting—but it is independent both of the other senses as well as of all empirical manifestations of community. It is, in this sense, the a priori principle of community and thus less a community than the possibility of community—a communability.

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This communability disclosed by communicability is what characterizes the “uninvolved and non-participating spectators” of the French Revolution that ultimately concern Arendt in her lectures on Kant’s “unwritten” political philosophy. These participants, as she underlines, “were involved with one another” (Lectures, 65). Their involvement, moreover, constitutes a community in a very specific sense, as I have been suggesting: in the ambiguous sense introduced into the idea of the common by the possibility of what Kant calls sensus communis. The commonness of this community derives from an a priori sense of the common—a commonality that is independent of common experience in the classic Kantian sense: The common human understanding, which, as merely healthy (not yet cultivated) understanding, is regarded as the least that can be expected from anyone who lays claim to the name of human being, thus has the unfortunate honor of being endowed with the name of common sense (sensus communis), and indeed in such a way that what is understood by the word common (not merely in our language, which here really contains an ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), but in many ­others as well) comes to the same as the vulgar, which is encountered every­ where, to possess which is certainly not an advantage or an honor. By “sensus ‘communis,’” however, must be understood the idea of a communal sense (“gemeinschaftlichen” Sinnes), i.e. a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole and thereby avoid the illusion which, from subjective private conditions that could easily be held to be objective, would have a detrimental influence on the judgment. Now this happens by holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to ­ rteile) of others, and the merely possible judgments (bloß mögliche U putting himself into the position of everyone else, merely (bloß ) by abstracting from the limitations that contingently attach to our own judging; which is in turn accomplished by leaving out (weglässt) as far as is possible everything in one’s representational state that is matter, i.e., sensation, and attending solely to the formal peculiarities of his representation or his representational state. (AA 5: 293–94; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 173–74)

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Epilogue

The involvement with one another of the uninvolved and nonparticipating spectators of the French Revolution is not an interaction among individuals exchanging accounts of what Kant describes as “subjective private conditions.” Rather the judgment of this community gives priority to a sense of the common that is independent of all empirical senses of this word. What the spectators discover in and among themselves is a common sense that brackets out or, as Kant says, “leaves out” everything belonging to sensation. This community is constituted out of the sense of belief that Heidegger finds in Nietzsche—its members hold themselves up to reason and are upheld as a community that is “barely possible.” In this sense the spectators of the French Revolution in Kant’s account ambiguously enter into and expose an uncommon community. The complex sense of involvement manifested by Kant’s revolutionary onlookers is the focus of Arendt’s interpretation of the communicability of judgment as the mental power that reconciles seeing with doing. As the Kant lectures draw to a close, Arendt outlines the power sharing agreement of communicability and “community sense” under which “the actor and spectator become united” (Lectures, 75). Arendt concludes by returning to the question of the life-and-death struggle between politics and philosophy with which she began. Resolving this conflict ultimately compels us, she insists, to enact the contradictory mental operation of “thinking the particular” and of bringing the generalizing force of mind (death) to bear on what by definition resists generalization (life). Arendt finds two “solutions” to this life-anddeath dilemma in Kant. The first involves the thinking of humanity, specifically, “of what actually constitutes the humanness of human beings, living and dying in this world, on this earth that is a globe, which they inhabit in common, share in common, in the succession of generations” (Lectures, 76). The second “solution,” which she considers “far more valuable,” is the thinking of examples: “Examples,” Arendt says, “are the go-cart of judgment” (Lectures, 76). The word “go-cart” in this citation from Kant’s first Critique literally translates the German Gängelwagen, which re-

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fers to a device with wheels and supporting strings used to train toddlers to walk; it is what we would now call a “walker.”9 This figure—Kant’s example of the support provided by examples to the thinking of the particular—leads Arendt to the last lines of her final lecture, which tie together the two “solutions” to the conflict between politics and philosophy in the example of thinking humanity: In Kant himself there is this contradiction: Infinite Progress is the law of the human species; at the same time, man’s dignity demands that he be seen (every single one of us) in his particularity and, as such, be seen—but without any comparison and independent of time—as reflecting mankind in general. In other words, the very idea of progress—if it is more than a change in circumstances and an improvement of the world—contradicts Kant’s notion of man’s dignity. It is against human dignity to believe in progress. Progress, moreover, means that the story never has an end. The end of the story itself is in infinity. There is no point at which we might stand still and look back with the backward glance of the historian. (Lectures, 77)

Thus Arendt’s presentation comes to an end with the impossible “standing still” and “arrest” of time that echoes the late fragment by Benjamin—“Theses on the Philosophy of History”—included in the collection of writings she had edited just two years earlier (GS 1.2: 702; Illuminations, 262). The lectures on Kant’s political philosophy conclude with the ambiguous triumph of life: with the inability of mankind to think of itself as an example from the perspective of its existence as an evolutionary species. This act of thinking, as Benjamin underlined, demands stepping out of the triumphal march of life and seeing in mankind a force of exemplarity greater than the capacity of a single human being or any aggregate of empirical human beings to stand for humanity as such. From this revolutionary standpoint the example of humanity reveals an exceptional force that is superior to the power of representation that allows, for instance, a particular empirical community to stand for the infinite progressive history of mankind (as a part representing a whole). This greater force that e­ nables the

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Epilogue

example of humanity to be singled out—as Arendt says “without any comparison and independent of time”—is also inhabited by a singular unforce. It is not only the exemplary capacity to stand for something other than progress but also the exemplary incapacity to stand still.10 Those with such a weak ability are supported as a community that is “barely possible.” They are upheld, like Hölderlin’s poets, “on golden / leading strings, like children” (“­Timidity,” l. 20). Arendt’s lectures close in this sense with the poetic force and unforce that Benjamin encountered in Hölderlin and that leads back to Kant’s example.11

Reference Matter

Notes

Preface 1.  Without explicitly mentioning Heidegger and without stressing the “divisiveness” and finitude that Heidegger discovers in the Aristotelian steresis, Agamben makes some illuminating remarks on this passage (see Potentialities, 179–84). 2.  Rodolphe Gasché’s gloss on the word bloß in Kant is illuminating in this context: “Thus whenever the mereness of something is asserted, systematic attention must be paid to what precisely has been excluded” (Idea of Form, 22). In the case of the mode of seeing attributed to the poets, cognition (or what Kant calls a “determining judgment”) is excluded. 3.  An example of this tendency to appropriate poetic language to the Kantian critique of cognitive experience is Nancy, Le discours de la ­syncope, 82–100; The Discourse of the Syncope, 72–90. For example: “These are the philosophers of intuition and feeling, in short those who believe in the possibility of the presentation of the supersensible, for example, of the moral law in the figure of the veiled Isis” (Le discours, 85; The Discourse, 75). Of the production of poetry out of philosophy Nancy writes: “Produced on the outside of philosophy by the barbaric charms of a veiled Medusa, Dichtung is also discovered—by the way, not with chagrin, as we’ve already mentioned—in the exalted Letters of a certain Plato, that is to say, somewhere on the inside of philosophy. And this isn’t the only reason for which Dichtung is also produced, at the same time, inside philosophy” (Le discours, 90–91; The Discourse, 80). I will return to this point, especially in Chapter 2.

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Notes to Preface

4.  The key points in Heidegger’s inquiry are the 1936 lecture “Der Rausch als ästhetischer Zustand” (Niestsche, vol. 1: 91–106); the 1940 lecture “Die Gerechtigkeit” (Niestsche, vol. 2: 282–300); and the 1943 essay “Nietz­sches Wort ‘Gott ist tot’” (Holzwege, 209–67). For a critique of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche see Müller-Lauter, Über Werden, especially 39–53. 5.  On the multiplicity of force in Nietzsche see Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, 7. 6.  See Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, 117; Twilight, 48. For an instructive overview of this development of Nietzsche’s idea of life from the reflection on force in later eighteenth-century German aesthetics, see Menke, Kraft, especially 46–115. The source of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and in a sense of the genealogy of genealogical critique is unconscious force. Thus Menke insists on the distinction in Nietzsche’s thinking between mental faculties (Vermögen), which are “essentially conscious,” from the forces (Kräften), which are “beyond (or before) consciousness; forces are unconscious” (Kraft, 112). Ultimately Menke goes on in a more recent book, Die Kraft der Kunst, to develop an uncritical concept of this unconscious force—a force that excludes u ­ nforce— as the foundation of a community of “aesthetic equality” (Die Kraft der Kunst, 172). In Chapter 3 I will suggest how the force at work in Baudelaire and what concerns me throughout this study carries out a critique of precisely what Menke calls “the force of art.” 7.  Leading examples of this influence of Nietzsche corresponding to the fields of history, philosophy, and literary criticism are Foucault (see “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 79), Derrida (see “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Humanities,” 292), and de Man (see Rhetoric of Romanticism, 239). 8.  Paul de Man makes this point in an early 1958 essay, alluding to the critical survey of the reception of Hölderlin’s work, Alessandro Pellegrini’s Hölderlin: Storia della critica, which was published in 1956 (de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 127). Pellegrini makes no mention of Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay, which had appeared just one year earlier. Pellegrini does, however, devote a couple of pages to Benjamin’s essay in the expanded German version of his critical study that appeared in 1965 (Friedrich Hölderlin: Sein Bild in der Forschung, 476– 77). “Although we are concerned only with a youthful work,” Pellegrini states, “Benjamin recognized in it already the demand for a methodological and philosophical foundation” (Friedrich Hölderlin: Sein Bild in der

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Forschung, 476). In the 1967 Gauss seminar, “Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage,’” de Man alludes specifically to the German edition of Pellegrini’s work, although once again he does not mention Benjamin’s essay (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 53). 9.  For an illuminating discussion of de Man’s application to Words­ worth of his reading of Hölderlin in the context of a deconstruction of Heidegger, see Warminski, “Discontinuous Shifts.” 10.  The desire for such transcendence has been described succinctly by Françoise Dastur as an aspiration to “conquer death”: Conquering death: this is in effect the program not only of metaphysics, which claims knowledge of the supersensible and the non-corruptible, but also of religion, to the extent that this involves a promise of personal survival, of science, which institutes the validity of a truth independent of the mortals who contemplate it, and more generally of all of human culture, since this bases itself on the transmissibility of the knowledge and the techniques that constitute the lasting inheritance of a community of living beings extending across several generations. (La mort, 10)

Chapter 1: Ur-ability 1.  A couple of pages later Kant is critical of “the prevalent deception of personifying things (Täuschung, Sachen zu personifizieren), of thinking of a right to things as being a right directly against them, as if someone could, by the labor he expends upon them, put things under an obligation to serve him and no one else” (AA 6: 268–69; Practical Philosophy, 420). For an illuminating interpretation of this entire section of Kant’s treatise, see Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 190–97. My remarks here and my approach to Kant are indebted to Fenves’s insightful work. 2.  As Kant observes in his discussion of the sublime, we commit “a certain subreption (in which respect for the object is substituted for the idea of humanity within ourselves as subjects)” (AA 5: 257; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 141). For an illuminating analysis of subreption in Kant see Sng, Rhetoric of Error, 78–90. 3.  Kant remains clear on this point: “To cognize an object, it is required that I be able to prove its possibility (whether by the testimony of experience from its actuality or a priori through reason). But I can think whatever I like, as long as I do not contradict myself, i.e., as long as my concept is a possible thought, even if I cannot give any assurance whether or not there is a corresponding object somewhere within the sum total of all possibilities” (B: xxvi; Critique of Pure Reason, 115).

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Notes to Chapter 1

4.  This aspect of Benjamin’s work remains underappreciated. But the most rigorous, compelling account to date of the decisiveness for Benjamin of his early reinterpretation of Kant is Peter Fenves’s The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. By establishing the Kantian foundation on which Benjamin worked out his philosophical project, Fenves lays the ground on which my study of poetic force is based. I am grateful to him for generously sharing portions of this work with me while it was in preparation. Benjamin writes of his critical engagement with Kant and in particular with the latter’s “philosophical style” in a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem: What is essential in Kant’s thought must be preserved. I still do not know what this “essential” something consists of and how his system must be grounded anew for it to emerge clearly. But this is my conviction: anyone who does not feel struggling (ringen) in Kant the thinking of doctrine itself and who therefore does not comprehend him with the utmost reverence, looking on even the least letter as a trandendum to be transmitted (however much it is necessary to recast him afterwards), knows nothing of philosophy. Thus all finding of fault with his philosophical style is also pure philistinism and profane gibberish. (GS 2.3: 937; Correspondence, 97–98)

5.  On this point, see Agamben, Time That Remains, 142–45. 6.  At the beginning of the second edition of the “Transcendental Dialectic” in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comments on the “ambiguity” of the concept of the principle and thus suggests that the very basis of transcendental philosophy—the principle of the a priori principle—is ambiguous: The term “a principle” is ambiguous (zweideutig) and commonly signifies only a cognition that can be used as a principle even if in itself and so to its own origin it is not a principle. Every universal proposition, even if it is taken from experience (from induction) can serve as the major premise in a syllogism; but it is not therefore itself a principle. The mathematical axioms (e.g., that there can be only one straight line between any two points) are even universal cognitions a priori, and thus they are correctly called principles relative to the cases that can be subsumed under them. But I cannot therefore say that in general and in itself I cognize this proposition about straight lines from principles, but only that I cognize it in pure intuition. (AA B: 356; Critique of Pure Reason, 388)

The use of the verb cognize in the phrase that concludes this paragraph illustrates its point: cognize commonly signifies an experience and the proposition of the mathematical principle is independent of all ex-

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perience and thus of all cognition. In other words, the verb cognize bears the ambiguous linguistic force of transcendental philosophy. Hermann Cohen comments on this point in the 1918 edition of his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung: “Principles thus only allow the particular to be cognized in the general through concepts by virtue of the relation of these concepts to the possibility of experience, which we have cognized as accidental and lacking systematic determination” (Werke, 1.1: 653). This elaboration only appears in the 1918 edition. 7.  While composing the early sketches of the Paris project, in which the “dialectical image” first emerged, Benjamin had, for example, just completed an essay explicating the virtual force of the image in Marcel Proust’s work (see GS 2.3: 1046; SW 2.1: 240). Benjamin’s essay “On the Image of Proust” was published in three installments in the Literarische Welt in June and July of 1929. For an illuminating explication of this essay, see Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin, especially 40–47. 8.  The capacity of the German word Gewalt to signify legitimate and illegitimate force has often been noted in the extensive commentary on Benjamin’s essay on this topic, “Toward the Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) (GS 2.1: 179–203; SW 1: 236–52). For a clear statement on the range of significations carried by the German word Gewalt, see Derrida, Force de loi, 19–20. The traditional attempt to resolve the relation between Gewalt and Macht, or violence and power, into an opposition continues in the well-known essay of Hannah Arendt (see On Violence, 4–5; see also Röttgers, “Gewalt,” 562–70). 9. “Vald is interesting in various respects as a legal term. Vald is, as it were, an extralegal concept (außerrechtlicher Begriff ): it signifies a realm of personal discretion that the law limits and that the law however explicitly allows the individual within these limits. . . . The ‘fundamental opposition’ (Urgegensatz) between Recht and Gewalt, represented by the Greek poets and philosophers with the concepts of right and violence (for example, Pindar, fragment 169; Hesiod, Works and Days, verse 274) came much later to German consciousness” (Klaus von See, “Recht und Gewalt,” 202). 10.  Von See observes, “Scarcely any other Old Norse word appears more adaptable (wandelbarer) [to the translation of Roman legal terms] than (vald )” (“Recht und Gewalt,” 196). On this point, see also Röttgers, “Gewalt,” 562. 11.  For a succinct commentary on this passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgment, see Teichert, Immanuel Kant, 63–68.

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Notes to Chapter 1

12.  Röttgers traces this thesis about violence back to Kant’s 1784 “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” and cites the following statement about the legal order of civic society: “Freedom under external laws can be encountered combined in the greatest possible degree with irresistible power (Gewalt)” (Kant, AA 8: 22; “Idea for a Universal History,” 112). 13.  On Kant’s rejection of the fundamental “unity of reason,” see Henrich, Unity of Reason, 19–27; on his refutation of the Hylozoism of Herder and others, see Zammito, Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” 184–213. Henrich provides a reconstruction of the philosophical background of the eighteenth-century debate over the “unity of reason” and an illuminating overview of the complex legacy of Kant’s allusion in the Critique of Pure Reason to the “common, but to us unknown root,” in which originates “perhaps” sensibility and understanding (AA A: 15, B: 29; Critique of Pure Reason, 152). Henrich argues that the “perhaps” in this phrase is interpreted, incorrectly from a philological point of view but productively from a philosophical perspective, from Hegel to Hermann Cohen and Heidegger, as an “allusion to still hidden but answerable questions” (Unity of Reason, 47). 14.  Kant communicated his discovery in a letter to Reinhold in December 1787. “Thus,” writes Kant, “I am occupied now with the critique of taste which provides the opportunity (Gelegenheit) for the discovery of a new kind of a priori principle than heretofore.” The discovery of this principle, Kant goes on to say, provides him “enough material for the rest of my life” (AA 10: 514; Philosophical Correspondence, 127–28). See Zammito, Genesis, 89–90; and Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, 8. 15.  This “elementary system” was to lay the ground for a “transition” from Kant’s Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science (1786) to physics itself (see Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, 4–13). On the distinction between Newtonian force and Lockean power, see Heimann and McGuire, “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Power,” 233–306. For an account of Kant’s critique of Newton in the Opus postumum, see Caygill, “Force of Kant’s Opus postumum,” 33–42. 16.  The limitations of the theory of experience in the first Critique were the subject of Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. In this influential book, Cohen argues that if Leibniz’s approach to the question of substance as divisibility (power, dynamis) had been adequately understood by Kant, he would not have objected to his precursor’s “dogmatism” (i.e., metaphysics). See Cohen, Kants Theorie der

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Erfahrung, Werke 1.1: 149–73. Denying the priority of understanding and sensibility over reason and thinking with regard to experience is the basis of the critique of Kant undertaken by Cohen in Logik der reinen ­Erkenntnis (Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 32–77). On this point, see Fenves, Arresting Language, 188–91. 17.  Förster delineates the task of analyzing practical self-affection with characteristic elegance: the question is “what endows practical reason’s ideas of right with ‘moving force’ and makes possible their unity” (Kant’s Final Synthesis, 142). Förster focuses on Kant’s reflection on the ontological status of God as a “moral sovereign” in the Opus postumum. 18.  Kant’s qualification of the postulate of God’s existence in the Opus postumum as meaning, practically speaking, that we must act “in such a way as if I stood under such fearsome ( furchtbaren)—but yet, at the same time, salutary—guidance” (AA 22: 116; Opus postumum, 200), is parallel to the attribute of fearsomeness to the feeling of the dynamic sublime in paragraph 28 of the third Critique. On the ideal of life implicit in the phrase “positive transformation of life” (guter Lebenswandel), see Makreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 88–107. 19.  The connection between the German words Mut (courage) and Gemüt (mind) suggests that courage is a power of mind (“courage” derives from the French word for “heart”—cœur—and ultimately the Latin cor). 20.  The aesthetic judgment of the “warrior” and of “war” in this passage is, in this sense, connected to Kant’s reflections near the end of the third Critique that evoke the “war” that may lead to the establishment of “lawfulness (Gesetzmäßigkeit) amid the freedom of a morally grounded system of states” that would become the subject of the later essay “Toward Eternal Peace” (1795) (AA 5: 433; Practical Philosophy, 320). 21.  The discovery of the noncognitive a priori principle of judgment in 1787 compelled Kant to revise the footnote near the beginning of the first edition of “Transcendental Aesthetic” in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which judgments of taste are described as “merely empirical” and as such not the object of “true science” (AA A: 21; Critique of Pure Reason, 156). In the revised version of this note, Kant introduces the possibility that such judgments may “share” the title of “true science” with speculative philosophy when they are considered “aesthetic . . . in the transcendental [as distinct from the psychological] sense” (AA B: 36; Critique of Pure Reason, 173). On this revision, see Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, 8. 22.  Kant makes the distinction between “thinking” and “knowing” in

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Notes to Chapter 1

the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (AA B: xviii–xix; Critique of Pure Reason, 16–17). 23.  For example, “transcendental philosophy precedes the assertion of things that are thought, as their archetype (Urbild ), [the place] in which they must be set” (AA 21: 7; Opus postumum, 256). See also, AA 21: 82–84, 248–250, and 99; Opus postumum, 255. See Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, especially 158–64. 24.  “The danger exists for the courageous person,” Benjamin writes, “yet he does not heed it. For he would be a coward if he heeded it; and if it did not exist for him, he would not be courageous” (GS 2.1: 123; SW 1: 33). 25.  On this point see Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 6–7. 26.  As Schulte-Sasse states it succinctly: “Hölderlin seems to have read the problems raised by Kant’s first Critique from a viewpoint shaped by his reading of the third Critique” (Schulte-Sasse, “Subject’s Aesthetic Foundation,” 38). Fenves traces a parallel gesture in Benjamin’s early color theory: “Benjamin thus develops the concept of spirit in his Farbenlehre by radicalizing the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ of the third Critique to the point where it revises the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ of the first” (Arresting Language, 183–84). The parallel Förster draws between Hölderlin and Kant supports this assertion (Kant’s Final Synthesis, 148–74). 27.  On the way time interpenetrates the space—what Benjamin calls “the layout” (die Lage)—of “Timidity,” see Weber, Targets of Opportunity, 129–33. 28.  The English translation is by Stanley Corngold, published with the English version of Benjamin’s Hölderlin essay (SW 1: 22), with the exception of the first line of the last strophe, which is offered by Weber (Targets of Opportunity, 131). 29.  Richard Sieburth, introduction to Hymns and Fragments, 4. 30.  In October 1794—just as he was about to compose his famous critique of Fichte in “Judgment and Being” (dated to early 1795)— Hölderlin wrote to his friend Christian Ludwig Neuffer of his work on a manuscript dealing with “aesthetic ideas” that analyzed “the beautiful and the sublime” in a way that went beyond Schiller’s interpretation of Kant in “Anmut und Würde” (Hölderlin, StA, 6.1: 137). For Kant’s discussion of “aesthetic ideas” in the third Critique, see AA 5: 314; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 192. 31.  For Hölderlin’s call for the “free use” of the word nationell, see the letter of December 4, 1801, to Böhlendorff (StA 6.1: 425–27; Essays and Letters, 149–51). On this point, see Szondi, Hölderlin-Studien, 128–31;

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and Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” 169–70; Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 135–36. 32.  See Heidegger’s comments on these lines from the letter to Böhlendorff connecting them to Hölderlin’s poem “Greece” (“Griechen­ land”), in “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” (Erläuterungen, 161; Elucidations, 186). 33.  These “leading strings” clearly echo Kant’s characterization in the second edition of the first Critique of examples (Beispiele) that are not derived from experience but rather thought—a priori examples, as it were—as the “leading-strings of the power of judgment” (Gängelwagen der Urteilskraft) (AA B: 173; Critique of Pure Reason, 269). Kant employs this figure near the beginning of “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (AA 8: 35; Practical Philosophy, 17). Arendt refers to the passage from the Critique of Pure Reason in a highly interesting turn at the very end of her lectures on Kant (Lectures, 76). I will come back to Arendt’s comments below in the Epilogue. 34.  Benjamin takes note of the latter possible signification by observing that these lines, like the effects to which they refer, are “most oddly strange and almost killing (ertötend )” (GS 2.1: 121; SW 1: 31–32). 35.  Kant did not use the phrase “Copernican revolution” or “Copernican turn” (Wende) that has been attributed to him repeatedly throughout the history of his work’s reception (see I. B. Cohen, Revolution in Science, 248–53). The association of this “revolution” with Kant’s work is, however, made in the influential work of Karl Leonard Reinhold, for example in the 1794 essay entitled “Über das Fundament der Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (see Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen, 2: 415–16). On the analogy drawn to Copernicus, particularly with respect to the question of perspective and standpoint in Kant’s moral philosophy, see Kaulbach, “Die Copernische,” 31, 34–35, and 45–48; and Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, 201–4. Miles has argued convincingly that Kant develops the “transcendental turn” toward the natural purposiveness discovered in the mental faculties of man and the thesis that “objects of knowledge are only appearances of things, and not things in themselves . . . with explicit reference to Copernicus” (“Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution,’” 4–5). 36.  On this free moral standing or participation, see Kant’s handwritten notes (in the Nachlass) collected in AA 19: 163–64, in which Kant describes the transcendental process by which the moral actor “oversteps” “the participation in nature with respect to himself ” in order to assume

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Notes to Chapter 1

the role of “participant of freedom with respect to others (Teilnehmers der Freiheit in Ansehung andrer)” (AA 19: 164). On this point, see Kaulbach, “Die Copernische,” 44–48. The importance of “participation” in Kant’s writings of the 1790s will be considered in more detail in Chapter 2. 37.  For a highly illuminating analysis of a similar Wende that appears in Hölderlin’s comments on his translation of Sophocles, specifically on the peripetia in Oedipus, see Hamacher, “Parusie, Mauer,” 121–23. 38.  Fenves has astutely noted the echo of Henri Bergson’s concept of durée in Benjamin’s use of the phrase “temporal plasticity,” in Messianic Reduction, 15. 39.  On the signification of the term architectonic in Kant, see Tonelli, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 234–36 and 240–300. Tonelli offers a detailed commentary on the section of the Critique of Pure Reason called “The Architectonic of Pure Reason.” “There is an empirical and architectonical use of reason,” Tonelli notes, “only in the practical and moral fields. [Christian] Wolff enlarged our knowledge, but did not exercise the critique; his works are useful as storehouses of reason, not as architectonic of reason” (Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 235–36). On the specific meaning and import of the term “critique” in Kant, see Giorgio Tonelli, “‘Critique’ and Related Terms Prior to Kant: A Historical Survey,” 119–48. For a highly suggestive discussion of the relationship between architectonic and architecture or “housing,” see Bernstein, Housing Problems, 2–10 and 12–13. 40.  The allusion to hunting occurs in section m2a1 of The Arcades Project: “Student and hunter. The text is a forest in which the reader is hunter. Rustling in the underbrush—the idea, skittish prey, the citation—another piece ‘in the bag’” (GS 5.2: 963–64; Arcades Project, 802). The phrase “in the bag” captures the association with hunting, but not the connection of the hunt with the image, in the French word used by Benjamin—tableau. 41.  The image-producing power is associated with hands in the essay that Benjamin composed while drawing up the early sketches to The Arcades Project, “On the Image of Proust” (1929). Of particular relevance to the early essay on Hölderlin, and specifically to the image Benjamin folds into his explication of the way the god is “brought” in “Timidity,” is the discussion of the child’s game of transforming a sock into a “bag” and then a “present” (Mitgebrachtes), followed by this passage on Proust’s “world”: “To this world belongs what happens in Proust. . . . It is never isolated, rhetorical, or visionary; carefully heralded and securely

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supported, it bears a fragile, precious reality: the image. It detaches itself from the structure of Proust’s sentences just as that summer day at Balbec—old, immemorial, mummified—emerged from the lace curtains under Françoise’s hands” (GS 2.1: 314; SW 2: 240). 42.  Heidegger alludes to this possibility unveiled by the revision of the first Critique as the new ground of “the subjectivity of the subject,” from which Kant himself shrank back (Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 208; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 150). 43.  It is thus certainly no accident that when the phrase “dialectical image” first appears in Benjamin’s writing, he immediately distinguishes it from the Hegelian dialectic (see GS 5.2: 1037–38; Arcades Project, 867). 44.  The allusion to Hölderlin is to one of his remarks on his ­Pindar translations, to which I return at the end of the next chapter. The quotation from Nietzsche is, once again, to be found in his Götzendämmerung, 117. It should be emphasized that the influence of Nietzsche on Benjamin is mostly evident in the latter’s critique of the biologism of Lebensphilosophie that is associated with Nietzscheanism. In Benjamin’s case the leading example of this tendency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is Henri Bergson, who remains a point of reference for Benjamin up until the late studies of Baudelaire to which I will turn in a subsequent chapter. 45.  On the relation of Benjamin’s early linguistic theory and late historical theory to Kant’s mathematical theory of “intensive magnitudes,” see Hamacher, “Intensive Sprachen,” especially 191–214, and “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” especially the analysis of Benjamin’s allusion to a “weak messianic force” in his late historical-­philosophical theses on pp. 166–69. Hamacher’s phrase “there is a weak messianic force only where it can fail” (168) means that there is no messianic force without messianic unforce. 46.  For a more detailed analysis of this passage, see my “Benjamin’s Barbarism,” 14–16. 47.  The Grimm dictionary traces the word urbar to the verb erbern, which, according to the dictionary, signifies “bringing forth” (hervorbringen). The noun form of the word—also Urbar—refers to a “revenueyielding plot of land,” and by extension a “land registry” used for the purposes of taxation. 48.  In his famous critique of Fichte’s “absolute I” in the short text “Urtheil und Seyn” (“Judgment and Being”) (StA 4: 216–17), Hölderlin draws on the probably false etymological connection of the German

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Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

word for “judgment”—Ur-teil as primal division—by breaking it down into its two syllabic parts. Hölderlin may have encountered the pseudoetymology of Urteil in Reinhold (Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie der menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögen, 435–40; see Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 103); or in Fichte (see Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte, 140–45).

Chapter 2: Hölderlin’s Peace 1.  In her famous essay “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” Simone Weil writes of force as manifested in relation to only one dimension of the ambiguous meaning of words like life to which Benjamin alludes. Force for Weil is the physical, empirical power “to transform a man into a thing” (529). In this way Weil overlooks the force of the poem to resist through the application of its own power of memorialization the reduction of man to bodily existence. By leaving the force of the poem out of her account of the “poem of force” Weil’s essay neglects the crucial tension and interplay in the Iliad between two kinds of force. Of course Weil’s objective in discussing the Iliad is not to assess the function of poetry and its force but rather to analyze the structure of what Étienne B ­ alibar has recently called “extreme violence” (Violence et civilité, 386–401). 2.  Of the historical background of the fable of Korah and his company, Liver (“Korah,” 298) observes: During the first half of the first millennium b.c.e. the existence of two distinct Israelite states with numerous shrines in each meant that no single family or clan had a monopoly on the priesthood. In contrast, the temple rebuilt in Yehud, the former Judah, in the late sixth century adhered to the principle of centralization associated with the reform of Josiah in being the single sacrificial temple in the land. The result was that far fewer people could become priests. The restriction of the priesthood to the “sons of Aaron” must have resulted from a compromise among many competing factions. One of the factions unhappy with the compromise was the “sons of Korah,” who were being demoted to “performing the sanctuary’s labor” (Num. 16:9–10).

The Torah’s story of their unsuccessful challenge to Aaron, which resulted in their being swallowed up without a trace (Num. 16:31–35), was meant to illustrate the fate in store for all who would challenge the new order (Num. 17:5). On this point, see also Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 303. 3.  The biblical legend emphasizes that not just Korah and his men but all of their possessions are swallowed into the earth: “Not these wicked people alone were swallowed by the earth, but their possessions also. . . . Nowhere upon earth remained a trace of them or of their pos-

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sessions, and even their names disappeared from the documents upon which they were written” (Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 298). 4.  As Benjamin writes in the early set of notes published in Gershom Scholem’s diaries that Fenves explicates as providing the basis of his critique of Gewalt, “to every good, limited as it is by the spatio-temporal order, there accrues a possession-character that expresses its transitoriness (Besitzcharakter als Ausdruck seiner Vergänglichkeit)” (Tagebücher, 1: 401; Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 257). 5.  Husserl’s critique of the “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung ) is initiated in his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, published in 1913. For example: “we put out of action the general positing, which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize anything and everything that this thesis encompasses with respect to being” (Ideen, 65; Ideas, 61). On the connection between Husserl and Benjamin on the “natural attitude” and on Benjamin’s departure from Husserl’s insistence that it can be “put out of action” or “turned off ” (ausgeschaltet) on the strength of the philosopher’s force of will, see Fenves, Messianic Reduction, especially 2–3. 6.  On Benjamin’s study of the Critique of the Power of Judgment in the winter of 1915–16 in the context of Moritz Geiger’s philosophy seminar at the University of Munich, see Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 6–7. 7.  See, for example, Goethe, Goethes Werke, 262, 285, and 313. On the relation between Anlage and building in Goethe’s novel, see Bernstein, Housing Problems, especially 73–83. 8.  For a succinct overview of the three elements of the “moral disposition” outlined by Kant in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, see Allison, Kant’s Theory, 148–49. For a critique of Allison’s account of “radical evil,” to which we will return below, see Fenves, Late Kant, 78–83 and 186–87 n. 6. 9.  See, for example, Darnton, Literary Underground, 49–68. For a corrective to the excessively disdainful view of Brissot propogated by Darnton, see de Luna, “Dean Street Style,” and Attar, Révolution française, 237. 10.  The controversial question of the precise nature of Hölderlin’s political position, which has been the subject of much research and speculation starting especially from Bertaux’s promulgation of the image of the poet as a Jacobin, leaves no doubts as to the republican leanings of the author of Hyperion. For an overview of this considerable body of criticism on Hölderlin’s politics and an interesting attempt to place it in

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Notes to Chapter 2

the specific historical context of the public celebrations in the wake of the French Revolution, see Stierle, “Die Friedensfeier,” especially 482– 86. For a lucid philosophical interpretation of Hölderlin’s relation to the French Revolution, see Dastur, “Histoire et révolution.” 11.  I am referring to the 1795 fragment by Hölderlin that was published in 1961 under the title of “Urtheil und Seyn” (Judgment and Being) (StA 4: 216–17). For a description of Hölderlin’s “Urtheil und Sein” and an account of its recovery, see Henrich, Unity of Reason, 682–707; and Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 102. D. E. Sattler, editor of the Kritische Textausgabe of Hölderlin’s Sämtliche Werke (1982), has argued that the title “Judgment and Being” leads to a “general misunderstanding” by placing judgment before being. Sattler proposes the title “Seyn—, drükt die Verbindung des Subjects und Objects aus” (Being—, expresses the connection between subject and object). Sattler’s explanation for this can be found in Hölderlin, Briefe und Dokumente in zeitlicher Folge, StA 4: 163. In the highly condensed set of propositions advanced in this text, Hölderlin does indeed mount, as Henrich and others claim, a powerful critique of the concept of the “absolute I” in the first edition of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (indeed Hölderlin alludes to this problem explicitly in the letter of April 13, 1795, to his brother). Drawing on the probably false etymological connection of the German word for “judgment”—Ur-theil as primal division—Hölderlin demonstrates how the unifying capacity of subjective self-consciousness is ultimately subordinate to what he calls “being” (Seyn). Manfred Frank sums up the import of Hölderlin’s manuscript as follows: “Here, even before idealism spread its wings, the self-sufficiency of self-consciousness is contested. . . . Self-consciousness stands in a relation of dependency to Being, understood as preidentical existence” (Frank, Philosophical Foundations, 107). Frank and his colleagues contend that this critique of the principle of self-consciousness, and of philosophical first principles in general, came to be adopted collectively by the entire Jena group from the spring of 1795 to the fall of 1796. The insistence on the thoroughly corporate manner in which the movement came to embrace this thesis extends from Frank’s claim that Schelling deserves to share credit with Hölderlin for the original conception of its critique of Fichte to Jürgen Stolzenberg’s contention that Fichte himself had already become critical of his own concept of the “absolute I” by the time Hölderlin took aim at it in his note. Benjamin contends, by contrast, that the force emerging in Hölderlin’s work questions Fichte’s egological interpretation of

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Kantian reflection as well as the Romantic critique of it. This proposition, advanced near the beginning of The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, is glossed over by the recent constellation research that instead simply extends Benjamin’s interpretation of the German Romantics to Hölderlin. I am aware of no refutation or even acknowledgment of Benjamin’s interpretation of Hölderlin on the part of Henrich, Frank, and their colleagues. Indeed, the extent to which the recent archival research on the Romantic constellation differs or supports Benjamin’s approach to German Romanticism as a critique of self-consciousness is also never addressed, as far as I know. The single allusion to Benjamin in Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, credits him merely with inventing the term “medium of reflection” in connection with Schlegel’s work (202). 12.  “Le sentiment de l’existence dépouillé de toute autre affection est par lui-même un sentiment précieux de contentement et de paix . . .” (Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 1: 1047). 13.  Examples of the “deadly doom” (tödliches Verhängnis)—the black cloud—that looms over those fallen in battle included Iliad 20.417 (in Voss’s translation: “Und Gewölk des Todes umhüllt ihn”) and Odyssey 4.180 (Voss translates as “Bis uns die Schwarze Wolke des Todes endlich umhüllte”). See Schmidt, Hölderlins geschichtsphilosophische Hymne, 31. 14.  Indeed, as Thomas Schestag points out, the central lines in Hölderlin’s “The Rhine”—“in der Götter Nahmen/Theilnehmend”— draw on the common root of nehmen and teilen in the Greek nemein, signifying “to allot, to distribute, etc.” (Schestag, “The Highest,” 405–10). 15.  Here is the full text of the seventh strophe of “Celebration of Peace”: For long now he had been too great to rule As lord of time, and wide his field extended, but when did it exhaust him? For once, however, even a god may choose Day work, like mortals, and share all manner of fate. This is the law of fate, that all shall experience themselves, That when the silence returns there shall be a language too. Yet where the spirit is active, we too will stir and contest What course might be the best. So now it seems best to me If now the master completes his image and, finished, Himself transfigured by it, steps out of his workshop, The quiet god of time, and only the law of love, That gently resolves all difference, prevails from here up to heaven. (Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” strophe 7, trans. Michael Hamburger)

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Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

16.  “Celebration of Peace” begins with such a time-image. It is felt in the hearing of celebratory “tones” that open the poem and that perhaps allude to the Hölderlinian poetic doctrine of the “alternation of tones” informing these lines. Such “tones” are “heavenly”—too big for the medium of time in the classic sense—and thus they are said to be “echoing quietly” (l. 1). 17.  Hölderlin’s poem “As on a Holiday” (“Wie wenn am Feiertage”) sets up this same problematic in the ambiguity of its opening lines— what de Man calls the “ambiguity of metaphorical reference” (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 62). The “they” that alludes to the poets is like either the property owner who goes out to look at his land after a storm or the trees that experience the storm. For some illuminating remarks on de Man’s critique of Heidegger’s reading (more precisely, failure to read) this poem, see Warminski, “Discontinuous Shifts.” 18.  Also annulled at this point is the glory of the lord of time—die Herrlichkeit des Herrn der Zeit. On the connection between glory and the economia of power implicit in governmentality, see Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 197–259 (this section includes an illuminating excursus on Hölderlin proceeding from the statement that “the hymn is the radical deactivation of signifying language, the word rendered completely inorperative and, nevertheless, retained as such in the form of liturgy” [237]). 19.  The force of the poetic medium is a manifestation of what Werner Hamacher calls “philological affect” (see especially Für—Die Philologie, 33–37).

Chapter 3: Poetic Reason of State 1.  Benjamin cites the phrase from Valéry at several points in the Baudelaire section of Arcades Project (see J1, 1, and J24a, 5). Benjamin notes that Valéry’s remark is to be traced back to Sainte-Beuve’s suggestions to Baudelaire for his courtroom defense (J24a, 5). 2. The term reason of state enters political theory explicitly in Giovanni Botero’s 1589 treatise, Della ragion di stato. In this context, reason of state was in tension with a higher religious, or later ethical, order that might have to be suspended in the interest of the preservation of the state. Botero’s elegant Machiavellian proposal that reconciliation with the higher order—the Church—is always fundamentally in the interest of the state has hardly put the matter to rest. In a comprehensive historical study of reason of state that appeared in 1924 (coincidentally

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the same year as Valéry’s remark on Baudelaire), Friedrich Meinecke concludes that the state is different from “every other legal community and association, from the church to the common association” in that it is not “based in its constitution on the demand for the unconditional validation of ideal norms. . . . It belongs to the essence and the spirit of reason of state rather,” Meinecke continues, “that it must repeatedly dirty itself with the violation of ethics and law, indeed alone through the seemingly inevitable means of war, which in spite of all legal forms in which it can be dressed up signifies natural conditions breaking through the norms of culture. The state must, it seems, sin” (Meinecke, Die Idee der Staaträson, 15). 3.  “Equality is an aesthetic effect,” asserts Menke, “an effect of the aestheticization in spectatorship. And if aesthetic spectatorship is an activity, then we make ourselves aesthetically equal. Or: in the aesthetic activity of spectatorship we make ourselves equal” (see Die Kraft der Kunst, 172). 4.  The original French title of Ferrari’s book is Histoire de la raison d’État (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860). Ferrari’s 1845 essay “Des idées et de l’école de Fourier depuis 1830” is cited by Benjamin in The Arcades Project. See Arcades Project, W5a,4; W6,1–W7,2. For a very informative account of Ferrari’s work and his influence on Baudelaire, see Howells, Baudelaire, 150–74. 5.  Ferrari’s study of reason of state was read by Baudelaire during the period when he was at work on The Painter of Modern Life, composed probably during 1859–60 (and published in 1863), and the two sets of Little Poems in Prose published in the Revue fantaisiste in 1861 and in 1862 (see Baudelaire, OC 1: 1296–99). 6.  Baudelaire compares the political views articulated in Ferrari’s Histoire de la raison d’État with those of Eugène Delacroix in his 1863 obituary of the painter (Baudelaire, OC 2: 758). In The Arcades Project (W5a,4–W7,2) Benjamin cites from Ferrari’s very interesting critique of Fourier, “Des idées et de l’école de Fourier,” which was published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1845. 7.  On the turning of the logic of reason of state on itself in Ferrari’s work, see Howells, Baudelaire, 170. 8.  On the connection between Benjamin’s study of the Baroque drama and his interpretations of Baudelaire, see Buci-Glucksmann, B ­ aroque Reason, 63–81. 9.  Baudelaire presents Ferrari’s thesis as demonstrating that “whatever the transformations of human races (les races humaines), however

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Notes to Chapter 3

rapid the destruction, the necessity of antagonism must subsist, and the relations (rapports) with different colors and forms remain the same” (Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2: 86). History from this perspective does not consist in the conservation of certain material states the content of which is transformed over time—this is precisely what is ephemeral. Conserved rather are “relations” within which such historical content is repeatedly destroyed and passes away. It is noteworthy, then, that Ferrari uses the word pythonisse here—an allusion to the witch of Endor solicited by Saul for a message from the spirit of the recently departed ­Samuel, who returns only to admonish Saul for seeking a message through such a medium (1 Sam. 28:7). 10.  For the passage in The Painter of Modern Life that overlaps with the lines of “The Crowds” on the multitudes, see Baudelaire, OC 2: 692. Baudelaire’s essay on Guys, which was not published until November– December 1863 in the Figaro, was probably begun in late 1859. In August of 1860, just two weeks before recommending Ferrari’s study of reason of state to Poulet-Malassis, Baudelaire writes to this same correspondent that his essay on Guys is being sent to the Constitutionnel (Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2: 76). 11.  The book edition was published by Poulet-Malassis just three months before he received that letter urging him to read Ferrari on reason of state. Artificial Paradises appeared serially in the January 15 and 31, 1860, issues of the Revue contemporaine. 12.  On the solipsism of hashish, see especially Baudelaire, OC 2: 437, which concludes with an allusion to Karl Grün’s Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien (1845). Baudelaire was only indirectly familiar with Grün’s work, which was the subject of Marx’s critique in the German Ideology and which Benjamin cites often in The Arcades Project. According to editor, Claude Pichois, Baudelaire read an October 1848 review published in the Revue des deux mondes by Saint-René Taillandier entitled “L’Athéisme allemand et le socialisme français,” which paired Grün’s book with Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (1846)—a work which was also the subject of Marx’s satirical critique in La misère dans la philosophie (Baudelaire, OC 1: 1381–82). Baudelaire seems to associate the subjectivism of hashish with the neo-Hegelians who, according to Taillandier, have declared that “God is but a reflection of ourselves, a transposition of our most sublime ideas onto an imaginary being; homo homini Deus” (Taillandier, “L’Athéisme allemand,” 300).

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13.  In the Pléiade edition Claude Pichois offers an informative account of how Baudelaire arrived at this peculiar genre for his composition of Artificial Paradises. Pichois compares Baudelaire’s approach to that of Galland in The Thousand and One Nights (OC 1: 1364). 14.  Baudelaire was also at this time contemplating the title of Le promeneur solitaire, which might have acknowledged more explicitly another debt, namely to Rousseau, author of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, who is also mentioned in Artificial Paradises (Baudelaire, OC 2: 436). On the possibility of this title, see the letter to Arsène Houssaye dated “Noël. 1861” (Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2: 207). 15.  For a reading of this passage that shows how DeQuincey orientalizes the threat posed by the crowd, see Barrell, Infection of Thomas DeQuincey, 1–8. For a trenchant analysis of how DeQuincey’s opium eater exposes the limit to a classical concept of experience, like the one to which I allude above in my opening remarks on Kant, see Ronell, Crack Wars, 57–61. 16.  Here is the entire passage from DeQuincey’s Confessions: The waters now changed their character—from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the ocean. (DeQuincey, Confessions, 80)

17.  Baudelaire does not translate the phrase the tyranny of the human face; he attributes it to DeQuincey but keeps it in what would conventionally be understood as his own voice. And now that which he has already called, I believe, the tyranny of the human face manifested itself. “Now it was that upon the rocking waters of the Ocean the human face began to appear . . .” (Baudelaire, OC 1: 483; 123)

18.  This comment appears in an exordium written by Baudelaire a couple of years after the original publication of Artificial Paradises; it is not included in the English translation.

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Notes to Chapter 3

19.  Bain also suggests the liquefied quality of the modern city and its masses in Baudelaire. See Compagnon, Baudelaire, 110–14. 20.  Here is the relevant phrase in Artificial Paradises: “as the swimmer embraces the sea, thus entering into the most direct contact with nature, so he would, in a manner of speaking, take a bath among the disinherited masses (comme le nageur embrasse la mer et entre ainsi en contact plus direct avec la nature, il aspire à prendre, pour ainsi dire, un bain de multitude)” (OC 1: 468; Artificial Paradises, 106). The word multitude implies multiplication and refers to the many passages in Baudelaire’s works in which multiplicity is at issue—from the poems to The Painter of Modern Life and the Journaux intimes. On this point, see Antoine Compagnon’s discussion of the extensive “vocabulary of infinity” in Baudelaire (Compagnon, Baudelaire, 77–99). Thus, the word multitude in “The Crowds” seems to draw in, and to be drawn into, a multitude of texts by Baudelaire on the masses. 21.  Benjamin describes Hugo’s relation to and depiction of the crowd along the lines of the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful in Kant. For Hugo, Benjamin observes, “the crowd is a nature play” (GS 1.2: 565; SW 4: 36). 22.  Benjamin alludes to this when he observes that “the modern hero is not a hero—he is a portrayer of heroes. Heroic modernity turns out to be a play of mourning in which the role of hero is available” (GS 1.2: 600; SW 4: 60). Benjamin also writes elsewhere of the modernist hero as “the stand-in for the ancient hero” (GS 1.2: 584; SW 4: 49). 23.  The parable of self-sacrifice projected onto the vision of the widow follows the logic of gift economy elucidated by Jacques Derrida in the remarkable final pages of his commentary on the later Spleen poem “Counterfeit Money” (Donner le temps, 208–17; Given Time, 164–72). In his interpretation of the prose poem Derrida suggests a connection between Baudelaire and Kant along these lines. The speaker of this poem criticizes a friend, who has given what he believes to be a counterfeit coin to a beggar (just as the poet may be understood to give the counterfeit tale of the gift to the widow in the poem just discussed). The friend in “Counterfeit Money” is charged with a failure of the will, specifically, of not wanting to use his rational capacity for understanding this evil and thus of allowing his moral faculty to function passively as an organ. The friend is accused, therefore, not of diabolism—elevating evil to a motive—but of stupidity, specifically, the failure to want to understand the communicability of the counter-

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feit gift (its power to create “an event” in the life of the beggar [OC 1: 324]). Derrida follows Bataille here in rejecting Sartre’s reduction of evil in Baudelaire to diabolism—“Evil for the sake of Evil” (see Sartre, Baudelaire, 67; and Bataille, La littérature et le mal, 46). Bataille argues that the will in the sense of a faculty of choice has nothing to do with the evil that concerns Baudelaire (46). Evil is a source of “fascination”: it exercises an “attraction” that “ruins” the will (45). Fascination with evil represents in this sense, Bataille speculates, the only means of liberation from the will. It is a violence—Benjamin would call it a “divine violence”—that destroys the violence of the will’s plans for selfpreservation. For Bataille, then, Baudelaire’s poetry poses the question of a sovereignty that, as he writes elsewhere, “has little to do with that of states” (La souveraineté, 247). The possibility of genuine sovereignty opens for Benjamin and for ­Bataille at the point where action is not a means to an end. “The beyond of utility,” Bataille says, “is the domain of sovereignty” (La Souveraineté, 248). But, as in “The Widows,” it is ultimately the poet of “Counterfeit Money” who pretends to grant this gift and who fails to want to know the ulterior motive that might lie behind the attribution of communicability to the act of the friend, namely, the end of preserving a poetic ability or gift of communication. This possibility is suggested as the poet claims, as he says, to “lend” (prêter) the faculty in question to the friend, thus revealing the calculated self-interest of his action—his expectation of being repaid (Baudelaire, OC 1: 324). In this way, when it is seen as possibly issuing from the counterfeit projection of a poetic ability, the accusation of “evil out of stupidity” on the part of the poet turns into an illustration of “radical evil.” The accusation itself, which is based on the frustrated ulterior motive of getting paid back, appears as a symptom of the poet’s unwillingness to use his reason to understand his own evil. In other words, the poet of “Counterfeit Money” seeks an exception to the rule of “radical evil” in the Kantian sense in order to establish a position from which the accusation of “evil out of stupidity” can be made. 24.  Lacoue-Labarthe takes this passage on mimesis from Aristotle’s Physics as the basis of an illuminating interpretation of Diderot’s “The Paradox of the Actor” and thus suggests one path by which the distinction could have made its way to Baudelaire. 25.  I would like to thank my colleague, Thomas Schestag, for pointing out to me that Aristotle makes explicit this third adynamic interruption of mimesis in the passage from the Physics just cited. Commenting

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Notes to Chapter 3

on Lacoue-Labarthe’s proposal that Schiller’s aesthetic theory historicizes Aristotle’s definition of art (of technē) (L’imitation, 74; Typography, 238), Schestag continues to read the passage in question from the Physics (199a 31–199b 9): This ambiguous relation between physis and téchne, with téchne overcoming nature’s adynamism (that is, overcoming nothing less than the opening of a counter-rhythmic interruption in the teleological course, or entelecheia, of all things natural as well as technical) is “visited” by a third (and LacoueLabarthe, surprisingly enough, never mentions nor develops this irritating intervention). Three times in this passage Aristotle resorts to the turn of phrase àn mé ti empodíse: “if something doesn’t step in between.” Empódisma is literally the-coming-(or going)-in-between, a hindrance, barrier, obstacle. With the intervention (unforseen and unforseeable) of such a third, neither natural nor technical (and never taken into closer examination by the philosopher) Aristotle gets to what the notion of poetic force encapsulates. The intervention of some unforce, modifying the communication or Mitteilung between physis and téchne into Teilnehmung. (email correspondence, February 5, 2013)

26.  This is the perspective from which Lacoue-Labarthe develops his critique of Badiou’s denunciation of the “age of the poets” (see Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 69; and Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, especially, 45–77 and 83–84; 17–36 and 39–40). For an incisive analysis of Lacoue-Labarthe’s more positive account of the poetic project after Kant (from Hölderlin to Celan) that reveals where the causal logic of a certain narrative pattern imposed on historical experience continues to exert its hold over this affirmation of ethical and political power of poetry, see Burt, Poetry’s Appeal, 8–19. 27.  In a study that precedes Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry Lacoue-Labarthe traces the case against lyric in Baudelaire to the essay on Wagner that also dates to the spring of 1860 (see Bernstein, Virtuosity, 133–51 [esp. on la foule, 139–40]). Lacoue-Labarthe points to the inquiry into the ecstatic response elicited by Wagner’s Tannhäuser as a form of self-examination that compels the poet to correct his lyric transgressions by “translating” some poems from The Flowers of Evil into prose: In other words, Baudelaire writes Wagner. In any case, this is not at all surprising if, in its most “inspired” moments, this critical prose equals that of the “Prose Poems,” which are probably, in Baudelaire, what exceeds or are the way to exceeding literature, that is, the lyrical in its subjective determination. Another lyricism begins to be invented by Baudelaire. In particular, but

Notes to Chapter 3

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not only, in the “translation” into prose of certain poems from The Flowers of Evil—even though, certainly, everything here is a matter of translation—in a new sense, as attested by the task of the translator that Baudelaire assigns himself and the very high idea he holds of critical writing. This other lyricism, which cannot properly be called objective, does not at all reverse the values of lyricism but leaves perfectly intact their entire thematics. It is simply the rewriting—the translation—of lyricism itself, whose aura he withholds for this reason. One might say that he desacralizes lyricism. It would be more correct to say that he literalizes it: he destroys it, through cold, deliberate, calculated explication and recomposition; figural deportation or “transportation.” (Musica Ficta, 80–81; 33–34)

Lacoue-Labarthe’s account of the “desacralization” of lyric in Baudelaire suggests that lyric is “desacralized” and exposed as a survival strategy, which is to say, as a manifestation of “radical evil.” But the prosaic sobriety brought to bear on lyric ecstasis is not limited to Baudelaire’s prose. It can be found in some of the earliest publications of the verse that would become The Flowers of Evil. A good example is “Pride Punished” (“Châtiment de l’orgueil”), which offers a cautionary parable of lyrical enthusiasm that is aimed at, among others, Proudhon (see Pichois’s note, OC 1: 870). 28.  Baudelaire had published two essays on Hugo around this time: a “notice” in the Revue fantaisiste on June 15, 1861, and a review of Les misérables in Boulevard on April 20, 1862. The second of these essays begins with a long citation from the first in which Baudelaire provides a description of Hugo’s lyrical attitude that has an ambiguously neutral tone: Strength delights and intoxicates him; he approaches it as if it were a brother: fraternal affection. . . . The poet always shows warm compassion for all that is weak, lonely, sorrowful, for all that is fatherless: a paternal attraction. . . . It is from strength itself and from the certainty it gives to one who possesses it that the spirit of justice and of charity is derived. Thus in the poems of Victor Hugo there constantly occur those notes of love for fallen women, for the poor who are crushed in the cogwheels of society, for the animals that are martyrs of our gluttony and our despotism. (OC 2: 136 and 217–18; Baudelaire as Literary Critic, 242 and 283)

For an example of Baudelaire’s disdain for Hugo’s sentimental fraternalism, see Asselineau’s remark cited by Pichois in OC 2: 1182. More evidence of the complex relation of Baudelaire to Hugo can be found in the correspondence. For example, in the fall of 1862 Baudelaire cites, in

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Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

a letter to his mother, two recently published essays in praise of Hugo as evidence of the latter’s mastery of the “art of lying” (Correspondance, 2: 254; Selected Letters, 190). Yet only three years earlier Baudelaire had sent Hugo—appreciatively, it would seem—the manuscript of “The Little Old Women” that had appeared under the Hugoesque title Fantômes parisiens. 29.  Throughout, Baudelaire’s “The Little Old Women” is cited by line number. I have used Keith Waldrop’s translation with slight modifications where necessary for closeness to the original (The Flowers of Evil, 119–21). 30.  Pichois speculates that “The Widows” was composed shortly after “The Little Old Women” (OC 1: 1020 n. 8). 31.  Here is the entire passage from Proust: And he is merciless in his poetry, merciless with the utmost sensibility, his ruthlessness the more startling since one feels that he had felt to his nerves’ ends the sufferings he makes a mock of and describes with such composure. To be sure, in such a poem as the magnificent “The Little Old Women” no item of the old women’s sufferings escapes him. It is not only their vast unhappiness. . . . The picture he draws of those sights which I am convinced really pained him is so powerful, and yet so divorced from any expression of feeling, that purely ironic and sensation-hunting minds, truly hard hearts can take pleasure in it. . . . Perhaps this subordination of sensibility to truth and statement is ultimately a sign of genius, of the force of art overcoming a personal compassion. But there are stranger things than this in Baudelaire. When he is giving the noblest possible expression to certain feelings, he seems to be describing them from outside and without being involved in them. . . . It is as though he were employing this extraordinary and unprecedented power of language (a hundred times more powerful than Hugo’s, for all that people may say), in order to state for all time a feeling that he tries not to feel at the same time he speaks of it, and which he paints rather than expresses. (Contre Sainte-Beuve, 250–52; Marcel Proust on Art and ­Literature, 129–32)

Chapter 4: Arnold’s Resignation 1.  Neil Hertz observes that de Man’s essay “Wordsworth and the Victorians” “seems to have been intended to serve as a preface to the reissue of F. W. H. Myers’s 1881 volume in the English Men of Letters series” (Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” 83), and that it was probably written in 1979.

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Thanks are due to my colleague, Marc Redfield, for calling my attention to Hertz’s essay. 2.  The essay in question is Arnold’s 1879 introduction to a selection of Wordsworth’s poetry. In this essay the “greatness” of the Romantic poet is repeatedly and insistently described as a certain “power” (the word appears in nearly every paragraph). It is, specifically, the power of communication or of what Kant calls communicability that Arnold finds in Wordsworth. As in Kant, this communicability is felt, Arnold stresses, as a power of nature and an ability to communicate this power: “Words­ worth’s poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as to make us share it” (“Wordsworth,” 17). 3.  In addition to Redfield there have been other more skeptical accounts that attribute coercive political designs to Arnold’s theory. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, for example, have argued that the Arnoldian cultural program with its basis in the concept of critical disinterestedness conforms to Antonio Gramsci’s description of the hegemonic character of the “ethical state” (Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 21). According to this view, culture as conceived by Arnold, like the “hegemonic” state apparatus, works above all through the actions of individual subjects who internalize and identify with the political ends of the state. What Anderson regards as the successful subjective enactment of universality becomes, from the perspective of Lloyd and Thomas, the failure of collective resistance to the ideology of the state. From yet another angle, Arnold’s theory of disinterestedness has been approached recently as a response to questions coming to a head in his poetic experiments of the 1840s and 1850s. This approach, which has been in a sense part of the story of disinterestedness from the moment Arnold began presenting the theory, can be traced back in the scholarship to Lionel Trilling’s praise, more than half a century ago, for the shift toward an emphasis on criticism in the later writing. “The poet’s vision,” writes Trilling, “gave the prose writer his goal. To see the object as it really is is no less the aim of the poet than of the practical man; Arnold the poet saw first the problems Arnold the practical man tried to solve” (Trilling, Matthew Arnold, xi). Since Trilling, there has been much commentary on Arnold’s “conversion” to prose, including Culler, Victorian Mirror, 123–25; DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, 41–53; and,

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Notes to Chapter 4

most recently, Grob, Longing Like Despair, 162–222. The focus of much of this criticism, as seen in DeLaura and Grob, has been on identifying an emerging historicism in Arnold’s thought. In a recent essay by Herbert Tucker, this same pattern has been uncovered and underlined as marking a decline in Arnold’s work. The effort to “institutionalize disinterestedness,” Tucker argues, involves an unfortunate turn away from an earlier attachment to “interpretation” and to “ideas” that animates Arnold’s most important criticism and poetry through the mid-1860s (“Arnold and the Authorization,” 114). Tucker’s inversion of Trilling puts together the two sides of the current polemic over disinterestedness in the form of a diachronic development and moves from the celebration of critical detachment in the early poetry to the denunciation of an ideologically repressive canon promoted by the criticism. 4.  Arnold read Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (1829) in the middle of the 1840s. See Allott’s note in The Complete Poems, 94 n. 5.  On this point see Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 6: 154 n.; Religion, 177 n.) 6.  Benjamin cites Novalis using the same distinction in a description of the movement of the self within the medium of reflection or “romanticizing”: “Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative potentiation. The lower self becomes identified with a better self in this operation (Das niedere Selbst wird mit einem besseren Selbst in dieser Operation identifiziert)” (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik, GS 1.1: 37; The Concept of Criticism, SW 1: 133). 7.  I am not suggesting that Arnold’s interpretation of Saint Paul conforms entirely to that of Agamben. The reading developed in Culture and Anarchy and in Saint Paul and Protestantism is in fact closer in important respects to that of one of Agamben’s polemical antagonists, Alain ­Badiou, especially on the question of Paul’s “universalism.” In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Badiou globalizes the Arnoldian cultural program, placing Paul’s doctrine in the service of an argument against factionalism—specifically, what is described as “cultural and historical relativism” (Badiou, Saint Paul, 7). Badiou makes the case for a concept of truth as universal “event”—what he calls the processus de vérité—on the basis of Pauline vocation. It could be easily shown that the eventlike status of the call adheres to the logic and the temporality of self-consciousness on which the Arnoldian account of disinterestedness is based. 8.  To compare would be Arnold’s comments on this “apprehension” (Saint Paul, 39) in Philippians 3:12–13 and Agamben’s interpretation of this same passage cited above (Il tempo, 37; The Time, 33).

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9.  All citations of Arnold’s poetry are to Complete Poems. 10.  Arnold’s note to lines 40–41 reads as follows: “Those who have been long familiar with the English Lake-Country will find no difficulty in recalling, from the description in the text, the roadside inn of Wythburn on the descent from Dunmail Rise towards Keswick: its sedentary landlord of twenty years ago, and the passage over the Wythburn Fells to Watendlath” (Complete Poems, 90). 11. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two instances from two ­English translations of Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi 3.42: “c1450 tr. De Imitatione III. xlii. 112 Of pure resignacion of a mannys self. 1504 W. Atkynson tr. De Imitatione III. xlii. 231 If they make a hole resygnacyon & a dayly oblacion of them selfe.” Thomas à Kempis’s text is cited twice in Culture and Anarchy (see 129 and 132). 12.  Here are the relevant lines from (1) “Lycidas” and (2) “L’Allegro”: For we were nurst upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill. Together both, ere the high Lawns appear’d Under the opening eye-lids of the morn, We drove a field, and both together heard What time the Gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the Star that rose, at Ev’ning, bright Toward Heav’ns descent had slop’d his westering wheel. Mean while the Rural ditties were not mute, Temper’d to th’ Oaten Flute, Rough Satyrs danc’d, and Fauns with clov’n heel, From the glad sound would not be absent long, And old Damœtas lov’d to hear our song. But O the heavy change, now thou art gon, Now thou art gon, and never must return! (John Milton, “Lycidas,” ll. 23–38) Som time walking not unseen By Hedge-row Elms, on Hillocks green, Right against the Eastern gate, Wher the great Sun begins his state, Rob’d in flames, and Amber light, The clouds in thousand Liveries dight. While the Plowman neer at hand, Whistles ore the Furrow’d Land.  (John Milton, “L’Allegro,” ll. 57–64)

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Notes to Chapter 4 and Epilogue

13.  The lines “In the day’s life, whose iron round / Hems us all in, he [the poet] is not bound” (ll. 209–10) will be echoed in “Memorial Verses” (1850) (ll. 45–47); “In Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” specifies the shortcoming of Wordsworth as follows: “But Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate” (ll. 53–54); the essay, “Heinrich Heine” asserts that Wordsworth “plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit” (Complete Prose Works, 3: 121). These connections are suggested by Allott in his notes. 14.  The word world appears three times in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” each time stressing the physical existence and power of nature as a puzzling burden: “the heavy and weary weight / Of all this intelligible world” (ll. 39–40); “the fever of the world” (l. 53); and “the mighty world / Of eye, and ear” (ll. 106–77). 15.  The pattern modifies the “hierarchy of the human faculties” outlined by Cousin in his discussion of désintéressement. “The BhagavadGita,” Cousin observes, “teaches explicitly that in the hierarchy of the human faculties the soul is superior to sensibility and that superior to the soul is intelligence and that there is something still above the intelligence or knowledge, namely, being” (Cousin, Cours de l’histoire, 222). What Arnold calls “the world” seems to correspond to what Cousin characterizes as “being” (être), and therefore “the world” in “Resignation” may be understood as the sphere of “inaction in action” or in opere otium of “pure inaction”—the point at which the poetic force of désintéressement becomes unforce. 16.  This aspect of Wordsworth’s poetry is the subject of de Man’s interpretation of the discontinuous “allegorical” dimension of the Lucy poems (Blindness and Insight, 223–25).

Epilogue 1. “Ich mußte also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben den Platz zu bekommen” (AA B: xxx; Critique of Pure Reason, 117). 2.  Heidegger is alluding to Nietzsche’s Will to Power. See Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 12: 354. 3.  On the “uncanniness” of this “tele-technoscientific reason,” of which Derrida catches a glimpse even in the critical reflections on the mythological delusions produced by the mechanical logic of science by Bergson (the source of Derrida’s analysis of the “two sources” of religion), see, for example, Foi et savoir, 63–64; Acts of Religion, 76–77.

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4.  See, for example, Cosmopolites, 47–58. 5.  Unlike Derrida’s, Foucault’s reflection on power excludes the possibility of noninstrumental force. See, for example, as compared with Derrida’s comments on testimonial belief, Foucault’s critique of “acts of faith” in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979–80 (Du gouvernement, 99–101 and 222–26). By way of contrast with the noninstrumental (unconditional and conditional) force of reason in Derrida, the “goal” of the power of what Foucault calls “direction” is the reestablishment of “the relation of the self to the self.” The approach outlined by Derrida that is in line with the poetic force at issue in this study requires taking account of the points at which this directing force reveals an undirected unforce. In short, it calls for learning to read the moments in the “verbalizations” and the “acts of faith” in which the truth of the self fails to be established—when the “rupturing of the identity of the subject” (the sed ego non sum ego of Christian messianic conversion) is not appropriated by the “new self ” (Du gouvernement, 222). 6.  By responding to the sovereign relation between the conditional and the unconditional imperatives of reason Kant’s image of the ­moralische Anlage resists teleology in the orthodox sense. It would be possible to demonstrate how the relational character of rational force informs and complicates the employment of the moralische Anlage in the critique of the teleological offered in the second part of the third Critique. A careful analysis of the key passages of that section would reveal it to be governed not by an end but, once again, by a dynamic movement between a hypothetical and an anhypothetical “purpose”—in short, between an “ultimate purpose” (letzter Zweck) of natural force and a “final purpose” (Endzweck) of a power that lies outside of nature. As with the two forces of reason acting on the moralische Anlage, these two purposes enter into a teleological relation, according to which man is both the “ultimate purpose” of nature on the basis of a capacity to project natural purposiveness and the “final purpose” of nature on the strength of an ability to project a purpose that exceeds nature. To a certain extent this distinction corresponds to the difference between what Kant calls “ultimate purpose” (letzter Zweck) and “final purpose” (Endzweck). See especially Critique of Judgment, paragraphs 63, 80, 81, 82, and 83. Bennington makes some relevant suggestions about the paradoxes of teleology discovered by Kant in the second part of the Critique of Judgment (see Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 146–52). Bennington’s account of the point in Kant’s reflections at which there is, from a teleological

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Notes to Epilogue

perspective, “no difference between possibility and actuality (or between contingency and necessity)” is parallel to my proposal in the first chapter about a dimension of Kant’s thinking in which virtuality inflects all cognition of objects (Bennington, Interrupting Derrida, 148). 7.  An important source of Arendt’s approach to judgment in Kant— explicitly and somewhat dramatically named by Arendt at the beginning of her first lecture—is Hans Saner’s 1967 study, Widerstreit und Einheit: Wege zu Kants politischem Denken. Particularly relevent is Saner’s discussion of judgment as the mode of philosophical polemic that Kant calls Streit—as in Kant’s later Streit der Fakultäten or The Conflict of the Faculties (in the English translation of Saner’s book, Streit is translated as “debate”): Debate, observes Saner, is “a mode of combat in which the grounds of judgment cannot be reduced to objective concepts” (110; 93). The significance of Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment, from this point of view, is that it elevates the question of taste from the unphilosophical level of what Saner calls Gezänk (translated as “dispute”), a category not even named by Kant), to the philosophical status of Streit. See especially Saner, Widerstreit und Einheit, 106–16; Kant’s Political Philosophy, 89–107. 8.  This anecdote appears in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 7.1.2. Here is the online reference to the Ancient Greek followed by the English: www.mikrosapoplous.gr/dl/dl07.html (accessed February 14, 2014); www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A19 99.01.0258%3Abook%3D7%3Achapter%3D1 (accessed March 2, 2014). 9.  The allusion to Gängelwagen der Urteilskraft, which is translated by Guyer and Wood in the Cambridge edition as “leading-strings of the power of judgment,” is to the introduction to the second book of the “Transcendental Analytic” (AA B: 173; 269). Kant also employs this figure near the beginning of “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (A 8: 35; Practical Philosophy, 17). However, in this context the “leading-strings” are more constraining than enabling of enlightenment. In Arendt’s seminar notes published along with the lectures on Kant under the title of “Imagination,” Arendt—perhaps citing from memory or from a confusion with Hölderlin’s poem—mistakenly points to Kant’s description of examples as “the go-cart (Gängelband ) of judgment” (Lectures, 84). Arendt cites N. K. Smith’s translation of Gängelwagen as “go-cart,” which does not capture the sense of a device used to teach toddlers to walk: what we would call a “walker” (for the relevant passage in Smith’s translation, see Critique of Pure Reason, 178). It is noteworthy

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that the figure of the “leading strings” transforms Schiller’s characterization of the hold of the mythological Venus over mankind in the poem “The Gods of Greece” (“Die Götter Griechenlands”; 1788). 10.  For some highly illuminating remarks linking Arendt’s reading of Kant on exemplarity to Hölderlin’s poem “The Walk” (Der Spaziergang), see Schestag, Die Unbewältigte Sprache, 223–45. 11.  The “walker” (Gängelwagen) in Kant’s first Critique is transformed into “leading strings” (Gängelbande) by Hölderlin. It is interesting that in the seminar Arendt conducted in conjunction with her lectures on Kant she herself refers to examples as the Gängelband of judgment (Lectures, 84).

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Adorno, Theodor W. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ———. Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla “Lettera ai Romani.” Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. ———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio: and Arnold, 84–85, 86–87; and Benjamin, 85; on class, 85; and Kant, 87–88; Kingdom and the Glory, 136n18; on messianism, 84–87, 88; on St. Paul, 85–87, 98, 146nn7,8; State of Exception, 87; on time, 86; Time That ­Remains, 85–87, 124n5, 146n8; on vocation, 85–87, 88, 98 Allison, Henry: Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 133n8; on radical evil, 133n8 Allott, Kenneth, 98, 146n4, 148n13 Anderson, Amanda: on Arnold, 80–81, 145n3; Powers of Distance, 80–81 Arendt, Hannah: and Benjamin, 117, 118; on judgment, 113–18, 129n33, 150n7, 151nn10,11; on Kant and French Revolution, 36; lectures on Kant, 113–18, 129n33, 150n7, 151n10; On Violence, 125n8; on philosophy and death, 113–14, 116; on philoso-

phy and politics, 113–18; and Saner, 150n7; on thinking of examples, 116–17, 118; on thinking of humanity, 116, 117–18 Aristotle: on finishing capacity of mimesis, 69, 142nn24,25; Physics, 69, 142nn24,25; Poetics, 16 Arnold, Jane, 95–96 Arnold, Matthew: and Agamben, 84–85, 86–87; and Badiou, 146n7; and Benjamin, 91; and Bhagavad Gita, 98; on Burke, 82–83; on class and vocation, 85, 89–92; on class self-interest, 83–84, 91; on communicability, 101; on consciousness, 86, 89, 91–95, 99, 101, 102–3, 146n7; on critical reason, 80–81; on criticism, 82, 91; cultural theory, 81, 83, 84–85, 89–92, 95, 145n3, 146n7; on death, 99–101; de Man on, 79–80; on disinterestedness, 80–81, 83–85, 91–92, 94–95, 96, 97, 98–99, 100, 104, 145n3, 146n7;

167



Index

on freedom, 97; on French Revolution, 81–83; on Jesus Christ, 88, 89; on Joubert, 82, 83; and Kant, 81–82, 91–92, 97, 98, 99–100, 113; on messianism, 83–86, 88–89, 91–92, 97, 98; and Milton, 98–99; and pastoral poetry, 98–99; on St. Paul, 83–85, 88–91, 93, 97, 146n7; on philosophy, 79–80; on power of nature, 80; on Puritanism, 83–84, 88; on readiness, 82–83; on reason, 80–81, 82, 92; and repetition, 95–96; on resurrection, 84, 88; on Stephen, 79; and uprisings of 1866, 81, 84; on vocation, 84–85, 88–89, 97, 98; on Words­worth, 79–80, 81, 95, 99, 104, 145n2, 148n13; on the world, 99–103, 104, 148n15 Arnold, Matthew, works of: “The Buried Life,” 88–89, 94, 99; Culture and Anarchy, 81–82, 83–84, 89–92, 97, 146n7, 147n11; “Empedocles on Etna,” 88–89, 92–95, 99, 101; “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 81, 82–83, 86–87; “Heinrich Heine,” 148n13; “In Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’,” 148n13; “Memorial Verses,” 148n13; “Resignation,” 88–89, 95–103, 104, 147n10, 148nn13,14; Saint Paul and Protestantism, 88–89, 97, 146nn7,8; “To a Republican Friend,” 92 Asselineau, Charles, 144n28 Attar, Frank, 44, 133n9

Aurelius, Marcus, 98 Badiou, Alain: on age of the poets, 142n26; and Arnold, 146n7; Manifesto for Philosophy, 142n26; Saint Paul, 146n7; on truth, 146n7 Balibar, Étienne: on extreme violence, 132n1; Violence et civilité, 132n1 Balzac, Honoré de: Treatise on Modern Stimulants, 59 Barrell, John: The Infection of Thomas DeQuincey, 139n15 Bataille, Georges: on Baudelaire, 141n23; La littérature et le mal, 141n23; on sovereignty, 141n23 Baudelaire, Charles: Benjamin on, 55–56, 57, 64–66, 70, 71, 91, 131n44, 136n1, 137n8; correspondence with PouletMalassis, 57, 58, 71, 137n9, 138nn10,11; correspondence with Sainte-Beuve, 63, 140n19; and DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 59–62, 63, 64–65, 68, 139nn16,17; on evil, 141n23; on Ferrari’s History of Reason of State, 57, 58, 71, 137nn4–7,9, 138n10; on hashish vs. wine, 58–59, 71, 138n12; and Hölderlin, 70; and Hugo, 65, 70, 71–74, 143n28, 144n31; and Kant, 140–41n23; on lyrical feelings, 70–71, 142nn27,28; on modernity, 56, 57, 58, 64; on opium and rêverie, 59; on poetic faculty, 68, 69, 71; on politics, 71–72; and reason of state,

Index 55, 57–58, 136n1; on solipsism, 58–59, 67, 138n12; on solitude, 59, 62–63, 67–68; translations of Poe, 60; on tyranny of the human face, 61–62, 65, 139n17; and urban multitudes, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 63–68, 80, 137n9, 138n10, 140nn19,20; and Wagner, 91, 142n27 Baudelaire, Charles, works of: ­Artificial Paradises, 58–60, 61– 62, 64, 65–66, 68, 71, 138n11, 139nn13,14, 139n18, 140n20; “At One O’clock in the Morning,” 62–63, 64, 65–66; “Counterfeit Money,” 140n23; “The Crowds,” 58, 59–60, 63–66, 138n10; essay on Guys, 58, 65, 138n10; The Flowers of Evil, 71– 75, 143n27, 144n29; Journaux intimes, 140n20; “The Little Old Women,” 71–75, 144nn28– 30; Little Poems in Prose, 137n5; obituary of Delacroix, 137n6; “The Old Clown,” 59–60, 66; The Painter of Modern Life, 137n5, 138n10, 140n20; Parisian Phantoms, 71–75, 144n28; “Parisian Tableaus,” 71–72; “Poems in Prose,” 57, 59–60, 63–68, 137n5, 139n14; “Pride Punished,” 71, 143n27; “The Seven Old Men,” 71; “The Swan,” 71, 74; “The Widows,” 59–60, 66–70, 74, 140–41n23, 144n30 Benjamin, Walter: and Agamben, 85; on ambiguity, 29–30, 31, 132n1; on arability, 1, 27–28, 131n47; and Arendt, 91; and

 ­Arnold, 91; on Baudelaire, 55–56, 57, 64–66, 70, 71, 91, 131n44, 136n1, 137n8; and Bergson, 131n44; on Cassirer’s concept of function, 22; color theory of, 128n26; on communicability, 56; on the destructive character, 105; on the dialectical image, 7–8, 19, 26–27, 125n7, 131n43; on empiricism, 6; on experiences (Erlebnissen), 55–56; on figurability, 22–24; on force (Gewalt), 8–9, 17–19, 22–23, 33–34, 125n8, 133n4; and Freud, 55–56; on hands and image-producing power, 130n41; on Hegel’s dialectic, 27, 131n43; on history as progress, 26; on Hölderlin, 6, 8–9, 17, 18–19, 22–26, 28, 39, 118, 128n27, 129n34, 130n41, 134n11; on Hugo, 140n21; on the image as reversible, 25; on justice and state force, 33–34; and Kant, 6–7, 8, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25–26, 29–30, 31, 33, 36, 124n4, 128n26, 131n45, 133n6, 134n11, 140n21; on life vs. man, 29–30, 132n1; on modern heroes, 65, 140n22; on mythic possession, 36; on mythology of empirical consciousness, 18, 22–23, 34, 133n5; and Nietzsche, 131n44; on now-time, 6–8; on peace, 29–30; on physiologies, 64, 70, 91; on poetic courage, 17–18, 128n24; on poetic reason of state, 55, 136n1; on power of the image, 17–19, 22–23; on Proust,



Index

125n7, 130n41; on reason, 1, 6, 27–28; on romanticizing, 146n6; on sovereignty, 141n23; on spatiotemporal interpenetration, 19, 22–23, 24, 26–27, 37, 39, 128n27; on time, 19, 22–23, 26–27, 52, 128n27, 130n38; on transitoriness, 33–34, 133n4; on veil of fate, 24–25; on virtuality, 7–8, 18; on weak messianic force, 131n45; on world-image, 18–19, 22–23 Benjamin, Walter, works of: Arcades Project, 19, 25, 26–28, 125n7, 130nn40,41, 136n1, 137nn4,6, 138n12; The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, 135n11, 146n6; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 55; “On the Image of Proust,” 125n7, 130n41; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 117; “Toward the Critique of Violence,” 29–30, 33–34, 125n8; “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” 8–9, 17, 18–19, 22– 26, 28, 39, 128nn27,28, 129n34, 130n41 Bennington, Geoffrey: Interrupting Derrida, 149n6; on Kant, 149n6 Bergson, Henri: and Benjamin, 131n44; and Derrida, 148n3; on durée, 130n38 Bernstein, Susan: Housing Problems, 130n39, 133n7; Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, 142n27 Bertaux, Pierre, 133n10

Bhagavad Gita, 98, 148n15 Böhlendorff, Casimir, 20 Botero, Giovanni: Della ragion di stato, 136n2 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 44–45, 133n9 Brunel, Pierre, 72 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 137n8 Burke, Edmund: on readiness and revolution, 82–83; Thoughts on French Affairs, 82–83 Burt, E. S.: Poetry’s Appeal, 142n26 Cassirer, Ernst: on function, 22 Caygill, Howard, 126n15 Circular of Padua, 44 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 98 Cohen, Hermann, 126n13; Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 125n6, 126n16; Logik der einen Erkenntnis, 127n16 Cohen, I. Bernard: Revolution in Science, 129n35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81 Compagnon, Antoine: Baudelaire devant l’innombrable, 63, 140n20 1 Corinthians: 7:21, 87; 7:29–32, 85 Corngold, Stanley, 128n28 courage: Benjamin on, 17–18, 128n24; Kant on, 14–15, 17; Mut vs. Gemüt, 127n19 Cousin, Victor, 81; on Bhagavad Gita, 148n15; Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie du dixhuitième siècle, 98, 146n4; on disinterestedness, 98, 99, 148n15

Index Culler, A. Dwight: The Victorian Mirror of History, 145n3 Darnton, Robert: on Brissot, 133n9; The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 133n9 Dastur, Françoise, 134n10 Delacroix, Eugène, 137n6 DeLaura, Davis J.: Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England, 145n3 de Luna, Frederick A., 133n9 de Man, Paul: on ambiguity of metaphorical reference, 136n17; on Arnold, 79–80, 81; on empirical sensation and nonempirical sentiment, 47–49; on figural language vs. cognition, 77–78; Gauss Seminar of 1967, 47; on Heidegger, 136n17; on Höderlin and Wordsworth, 78–79; on Höderlin’s “Celebration of Peace,” 46–47, 49–50; on Höderlin’s “The Rhine,” 47–49, 78; and Kant, 77–79; on Rousseau, 46–47, 49–50, 78; on sensuous things vs. being, 47, 49–50; on Wordsworth, 78–80, 81, 95, 144n1, 148n16 de Man, Paul, works of: Aesthetic Ideology, 77; Blindness and Insight, 148n16; “The Image of Rousseau in the Poetry of Hölderlin,” 47; Rhetoric of Romanticism, 47, 49, 79, 95; Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, 46–47, 136n17; “Wordsworth and the Victorians,” 144n1



DeQuincey, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 59– 62, 63, 64–65, 68, 139nn15–16; and Kant, 61, 139n15; on rest among urban masses, 60–61, 66; on tyranny of the human face, 61, 139n16 Derrida, Jacques: on Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money,” 140n23; and Bergson, 148n3; Donner le temps, 140n23; on faith and reason, 107–8; Foi et savoir, 107–8, 148n3; Force de loi, 125n8; vs. Foucault, 149n5; on globalization and reason, 108–9, 110–11; on Heidegger, 107–8; and Kant, 108–11, 112; on knowledge as power, 110; on nation-state sovereignty and reason, 110–13; on reason, 107–13, 148n3, 149n5; on teletechnoscience, 108, 148n3; Voyous, 109, 110, 111–12 Diderot, Denis: “The Paradox of the Actor,” 141n24 Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Philosophers, 150n8 Fenves, Peter: Arresting Language, 127n16; on Benjamin’s color theory, 128n26; on Benjamin’s critique of violence, 33; Late Kant, 133n8; Messianic Reduction, 33, 123n1, 124n4, 128n25, 130n38, 133nn4–6; on natural attitudes, 133n5; A Peculiar Fate, 129n35 Ferrari, Giuseppe: “Des idées et de l’école de Fourier depuis



Index

1830,” 137nn4,6; History of Reason of State, 57–58, 71, 137nn4– 7,9, 138n10; on multitudes, 58 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: on “absolute I,” 128n30, 131n48, 134n11 force (Gewalt): Benjamin on, 8–9, 17–19, 22–23, 33–34, 125n8, 133n4; Kant on, 1–2, 9, 12, 13–14, 34, 97, 126n12; vs. power Macht, 8, 9, 13, 125n8; vs. Recht, 125n9 Förster, Eckart: Kant’s Final Synthesis, 11, 126nn14,15, 127n17, 128nn23,26 Foucault, Michel: Du gouvernment des vivants, 149n5; on power, 149n5 Fourier, Charles, 137n6 Frank, Manfred: on Benjamin, 135n11; on Hölderlin and selfconsciousness, 134n11; Philosophical Foundations, 131n48, 134n11 French Revolution: Arnold on, 81–83; and Hölderlin, 45, 50, 133n10; Kant on, 36–39, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 81–82, 98, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116; revolutionary assembly, 44–45; War of the First Coalition/Peace of Basel, 31, 44–46, 50 Freud, Sigmund: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 55–56; on memory and consciousness, 55–56 Galland, Antoine: The Thousand and One Nights, 139n13 Geiger, Moritz, 133n6

Genesis 1:28, 35 Ginzberg, Louis: Legends of the Jews, 132nn2,3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 28; Parkanlage in Elective Affinities, 38, 133n7 Gramsci, Antonio: on the ethical state, 145n3 Grob, Alan: A Longing Like Despair, 146n3 Grün, Karl: Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, 138n12 Guyer, Paul, 150n9 Guys, Constantine, 58, 65 Hamacher, Werner: on Benjamin’s weak messianic force, 131n45; on fundamental philosophical operation, 75; Für–Die Philologie, 75–76; on philological affect, 75–76, 136n19; on philological community, 66 Hegel, G. W. F., 50, 126n13; dialectic of, 27 Heidegger, Martin, 126n13, 136n17; “Anaximander’s Saying,” 105–6; on being, 105–6; Being and Time, 105; on energeia vs. actualitas, 106; on faith, 105–8; Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” 129n31; and Kant, 105, 107, 116; Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 131n42; on metaphysics, 108; on Nietzsche, 106–7, 116, 148n2; on place, 105; on religion, 107–8; on science, 105–6; on thinking, 105–7; on truth, 106–7; on ­unforce, 69

Index Heimann, P. M., 126n15 Henrich, Dieter, 135n11; The Unity of Reason, 126n13, 134n11 Heraclitus, 113 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 126n13 Hertz, Neil, 144n1 Hölderlin, Friedrich: and Baudelaire, 70; Benjamin on, 6, 8–9, 17, 18–19, 22–26, 28, 39, 118, 128n27, 129n34, 130n41, 134n11; de Man on, 46–50, 78–79; exile in France, 20; on Fichte’s “absolute I,” 128n30, 131n48, 134n11; and French Revolution, 45, 50, 133n10; on Greek enthusiasm vs. Western sobriety, 70; on human progress, 45; on judgment (Urteil), 131n48, 134n11; and Kant, 20–22, 24, 25–26, 28, 45–46, 48, 49, 52–53, 54, 70, 113, 128n26, 129n33, 150n9, 151n11; on law of strict mediacy, 26, 51–52; letter to Böhlendorff, 20, 21; on peace, 45–47, 49–54; on Pindar’s “The Highest,” 51; Pindar translations, 131n44; on Rousseau, 46–49, 50, 78; on sensuous objects vs. sentiment, 47–48, 50; Sophocles translations, 130n37; and time, 21–22, 52–53, 136nn16,18; use of nationell, 20, 128n31 Hölderlin, Friedrich, works of: “As on a Holiday,” 136n17; “Celebration of Peace,” 45–47, 49–54, 135n15, 136nn16,18; Hyperion, 133n10; “Judgment and Being,” 128n, 131n48,



134n11; “The Rhine,” 47–49, 78, 135n14; “Timidity”/”Poet’s Courage,” 17, 18–21, 22–26, 37, 53, 118, 128n27, 129n34, 130n41, 150n9, 151n11; “The Walk,” 151n10 Homer: black cloud in, 51, 135n13; Iliad, 132n1, 135n13; Odyssey, 135n13 Howells, Bernard: Baudelaire, 137nn4,7 Hugo, Victor: and Baudelaire, 65, 70, 71–74, 143n28, 144n31; Benjamin on, 140n21; “Phantoms”/ Les Orientales, 71–74 Husserl, Edmund: Ideen/Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, 133n5; on natural attitude, 34, 133n5 Jacobs, Carol: In the Language of Walter Benjamin, 125n7 Jena group, 134n11 Joubert, Joseph: Pensées, 82; on right and force, 82, 83 Kant, Immanuel: on aesthetic judgment, 3–4, 5, 8, 10, 11–12, 13–17, 18, 19, 20–21, 24, 26, 30, 34, 36–38, 39, 45, 46, 77–78, 79, 98, 108, 113, 127n21, 140n21, 150n7; and Agamben, 87–88; on ambiguity, 5–6, 29–30; on analogies of experience, 5, 42; on appearance, 3–4; on a priori principles, 10, 16, 114, 115, 124n6, 126n14, 127n21; on architectonic, 130n39; and



Index

Arendt, 36, 113–18, 129n33, 150nn7,9, 151nn10,11; and Arnold, 81–82, 91–92, 97, 98, 99– 100, 113; and Baudelaire, 113, 140–41n23; on the beautiful, 3, 4, 11–12, 21, 39, 42, 45, 128n30, 140n21; and Benjamin, 6–7, 8, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25–26, 29–30, 31, 33, 36, 124n4, 128n26, 131n45, 133n6, 134n11, 140n21; on cognition and virtuality, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 150n6; on cognition vs. aesthetic judgment, 3–4, 10, 15–17, 18, 20–21, 37, 39, 77–78, 108; on communicability (Mitteil­barkeit), 8, 10, 15, 37, 42, 114–15, 145n2; on communio vs. commercium, 5–6, 114; on community (Gemeinschaft), 5–6, 14, 30, 42, 114–16; on Copernican revolution, 21–22, 129n35; on courage, 14–15, 17; and de Man, 77–79; and DeQuincey, 61, 139n15; and Derrida, 108–11, 112; on empirical vs. rational title of acquisition, 1–2; on evil, 38, 40–41, 88, 111, 133n8, 141n23; on examples and judgment, 116–17, 118, 129n33, 150n9, 151nn10,11; on faith, 43, 44, 105, 107; on force (Gewalt), 1–2, 9, 12, 13–14, 34, 97, 126n12; on forces of nature, 10–11, 17; on freedom, 11, 12, 21–22, 44, 77, 88, 126n12, 129n36; on French Revolution, 36–39, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 81–82, 98, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116; on God

as moral sovereign, 127n17; on God as supreme proprietor, 35, 52–53; on God’s existence, 13, 127n18; and Heidegger, 105, 107, 116; on historical progress, 39–41, 42, 45, 54, 117; and Hölderlin, 20–22, 24, 25–26, 28, 45–46, 48, 49, 52–53, 54, 70, 113, 128n26, 129n33, 150n9, 151n11; on human beings as ends in themselves, 99–100; on imagination, 3, 10, 12, 15, 42, 77, 107, 113; on immortality, 43; on intensive magnitudes, 131n45; on justice, 36–37, 38, 39, 42, 53; on leading-strings of the power of judgment, 129n33; on Leibniz, 126n16; on mathematical sublime, 77, 78; on mental capacities/faculties, 3, 9–10, 12; on moral fanaticism, 91–92; on moral law, 38, 39, 41, 83, 88, 91–92, 100; on moral predisposition (moralische Anlage), 35–36, 38–39, 40–44, 50, 107, 109, 110, 133n8, 149n6; on nature’s power, 13–14, 15–16, 20; on participation, 37–39, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 50, 87–88, 92, 109, 110, 129n36; on peace, 29–31, 34–35, 39, 44, 45–46, 112–13; on personification, 2, 123n1; on poetry, 3–4, 17, 30, 112; on political power and philosophy, 30–34; on possession, 1–4, 6, 32–33, 34–36, 39–40, 46, 52–53; on possibility, 6, 123n3; on power (Macht), 9, 12–15, 20; on practical reason, 11, 12,

Index 22, 34–35, 36, 127n17, 130n39; on property, 1–2, 28, 35, 52–63, 123n1; on purposiveness in human history, 39, 42, 54, 98; on purposiveness in nature, 3, 10, 11–12, 18, 21, 24, 26, 109, 110, 149n6; on reason, 1–2, 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 11, 15, 26, 31, 37, 42, 43–44, 77, 82, 83, 107, 108–10, 113, 116, 126n13, 127n16, 130n39, 149n6; on revolutionary feeling/enthusiasm, 36–37, 39, 48, 49, 70, 81–82, 83, 92, 98; on sensibility, 40, 116, 126n13, 127n16; on sensus communis, 5, 30, 37, 114, 115–16; on space, 16, 19, 24, 25–26, 41–42, 43–44, 77, 110; on state’s use of force, 32–34, 42, 46; on the sublime, 3–4, 9, 11–17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 34, 39, 77–78, 79, 113, 123n2, 127n18, 128n30; on subreption, 4, 123n2; on thinking (­Denken) vs. knowing (­Erkennen), 16, 20–21, 28, 34, 41–42, 44, 127n22; on time, 19, 22, 24, 25–26, 30, 39–42, 43, 110; on transcendental self-affection, 11–12, 18, 61; on ultimate purpose (letzter Zweck) vs. final purpose (Endzweck), 149n6; on the understanding, 3, 10, 11, 12, 15, 26, 126n13, 127n16; on universal hospitality, 110–11; on the warrior vs. the statesman, 14–15, 18, 127n20 Kant, Immanuel, works of: “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” 129n33,



150n9; The Conflict of the Faculties, 36–37, 38, 48, 49, 150n7; “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” 42; Critique of Pure Reason, 5–6, 9–10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 21–22, 25–26, 30, 34, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43–44, 105, 107, 114, 116–17, 123n3, 124n6, 126nn13,16, 127nn21,22, 128n26, 129n33, 130n39, 131n42, 150n9, 151n11; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 3–4, 5, 8, 9–10, 12, 13–15, 16–17, 20, 30, 36, 37, 45, 113, 114–16, 123n2, 127nn18,20, 128nn26,30, 133n6, 149n6; “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” 42, 126n12; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 10, 126n15; Metaphysics of Morals, 1–3, 27, 32–33, 36, 46, 123n1; Opus postumum, 10–11, 17, 26, 126n15, 127nn17,18, 128n23, 131n42; Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 35–36, 38–41, 43, 45, 52–53, 107, 111, 133n8, 146n5; “Toward Eternal Peace,” 29–32, 33, 34–35, 38, 44, 45–46, 110–11, 127n20 Kaulbach, Friedrich, 129n35, 130n36 Korah’s faction, 31–32, 33, 54, 132nn2,3 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe: on Badiou, 142n26; on Baudelaire, 70, 71, 141n24, 142–43n27; on community, 70; on desacralization, 71, 143n27; Heidegger



Index

and the Politics of Poetry, 142nn26,27; on Höderlin, 70; L’imitation des modernes, 142n25; on mimesis as supplement to nature, 69, 141n24; Musica Ficta, 143n27; Typography, 69, 142n25 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: on substance, 126n16 Leopold II, 44 Liver, Jacob, 132n2 Lloyd, David: Culture and the State, 145n3 Locke, John: on property, 28 Lucretius: De rerum natura 2.7–10, 98 Luther, Martin, 31–32 Makreel, Rudolf A.: Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 127n18 Mark, Karl: German Ideology, 138n12; La misère dans la philosophie, 138n12 Marx, Karl, 85 McGuire, J. E., 126n15 Meineke, Friedrich: on reason of state, 136n2 Menke, Christoph: on aesthetic equality, 57, 137n3; Die Kraft der Kunst, 56–57, 137n3; on play (Spiel), 57; on unconscious force vs. conscious faculty, 56–57, 71 Miles, Murray, 129n35 Milton, John: and Arnold, 98–99; “L’Allegro,” 98, 147n12; “Lycidas,” 98, 147n12 Myers, F. W. H., 144n1

Napoleon I, 45, 46, 50 Neuffer, Christian Ludwig, 128n30 Newton, Isaac, 126n15 Nietzsche, Friedrich: and Benjamin, 131n44; on faith, 106–7, 116; Heidegger on, 106–7, 116, 148n2; on life, 26, 131n44; on lordly right (Herrenrecht), 53; Will to Power, 148n2 Novalis, 146n6 Numbers: 16:1, 32; 16:9–10, 132n2; 16:31–35, 132n2; 17:5, 132n2 Parmenides, 113 Pascal, Blaise: Pensées, 78 Paul, St.: Agamben on, 85–87, 98, 146nn7,8; Arnold on, 83–85, 88–91, 93, 97, 146n7; on vocation, 85–87, 88–91, 97, 98, 146n7 Peace of Basel, 31, 44–46 Peace of Lunéville, 45–46, 50 Philippians 3:12–13, 85, 88, 146n8 Pichois, Claude, 71–72, 138n12, 139n13, 143n27 Plato: cave analogy, 114; Phaedo, 113; Republic, 110, 114 Poe, Edgar Allan, 60 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste, 57, 58, 137n9, 138nn10,11 power (Macht): vs. force (Gewalt), 8, 9, 13, 125n8; Kant on, 9, 12– 15, 20; of nature, 13–14, 15–16, 20; potential vs. actual, 12–15 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 71, 143n27; Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère, 138n12

Index Proust, Marcel: on Baudelaire’s “Little Old Women,” 74, 75, 144n31; Benjamin on, 125n7, 130n41; Contre Sainte-Beuve, 74, 144n31 reason: Arnold on, 80–81, 82, 92; Benjamin on, 1, 6, 27–28; Derrida on, 107–13, 148n3, 149n5; hypothetical vs. anhypothetical demands of, 109–12, 149nn5,6; Kant on, 1–2, 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 11, 15, 26, 31, 37, 42, 43–44, 77, 82, 83, 107, 108–10, 113, 116, 126n13, 127n16, 130n39, 149n6 reason of state: and Baudelaire, 55, 57–58, 136n1; Benjamin on, 55, 136n1; as poetic, 55, 136n1; in political theory, 55, 56, 57–58, 136n2 Redfield, Marc, 145n1; on Arnold, 81, 145n3; Politics of Aesthetics, 81 Reinhold, Karl Leonard: “Über das Fundament der Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” 129n35; Versuch einer neuen Theorie der menschlichen Vorstellungsver­ mögen, 131n48 Romans 11:1, 89–90 Ronell, Avital: Crack Wars, 139n15 Röttgers, Kurt, 125nn8,10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: de Man on, 46–47, 49–50, 78; “Fifth Reverie,” 47–49; Höderlin on, 46–49, 78; Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 47–49, 139n14; on sentiment of existence, 48, 135n12



Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 63, 81, 136n1, 140n19 Saner, Hans: on aesthetic judgment, 150n7; Widerstreit und Einheit, 150n7 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Baudelaire, 141n23; on evil, 141n23 Sattler, D. E., 134n11 Savary, Claude-Étienne, 77–78 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm ­Joseph, 50, 134n11 Schestag, Thomas, 135n14, 141– 42n25, 151n10 Schiller, Friedrich: on aesthetic theory, 142n25; “Anmut und Würde,” 128n30; “The Gods of Greece,” 151n9 Schlegel, A. W., 98 Schlegel, Friedrich, 135n11 Scholem, Gershom, 124n4, 133n4 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 128n26 Sieburth, Richard, 128n29 Smith, N. K., 150n9 Sng, Zachary: Rhetoric of Error, 123n2 Stephen, Leslie, 79 Stierle, Karlheinz, 134n10 Stirner, Max, 85 Stoicism, 113 Stolzenberg, Jürgen, 134n11 Szondi, Peter: on Hölderlin’s “Celebration of Peace,” 46, 51; Hölderlin-Studien, 46, 53, 128n31 Taillandier, Saint-René: “L’Athéisme allemand et le ­socialisme français,” 138n12 Thomas à Kempis: De imitatione



Index

Christi, 147n11; on resignation, 147n11 Thomas, Paul: Culture and the State, 145n3 Tonelli, Giorgio: Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 130n39 Trilling, Lionel: on Arnold, 145n3 Tucker, Herbert, 146n3 Valéry, Paul: on Baudelaire’s reason of state, 55, 57, 136n1, 137n2 violentia vs. potestas, 1, 9 von See, Klaus: on Recht and ­Gewalt, 125n9; on Vald, 125nn9,10 Wagner, Richard, 142n27 Waldrop, Keith, 144n29 Warminski, Anrej, 136n17 War of the First Coalition/Revolutionskrieg, 31, 44–46, 50 Weber, Max: on class, 85; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 85

Weber, Samuel: Benjamin’s – abilities, 7–8, 28; on Benjamin’s image, 7–8; on impartability, 7–8, 37; Targets of Opportunity, 128nn27,28 Weil, Simone: on force, 132n1; “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” 132n1 Wolff, Christian, 130n39 Wood, Allen W., 150n9 Wordsworth, William: Arnold on, 79–80, 81, 95, 99, 104, 145n2, 148n13; on communicability, 103–4, 148n16; de Man on, 78– 79; Lucy poems, 148n16; poetic power of, 80, 103–4, 145n2; “Tintern Abbey,” 95–96, 99, 103–4, 148n14; on the world, 148n14 Zammito, John H.: Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment,” 126nn13,14 Zeno of Citium, 113

M e r i d i a n

Crossing Aesthetics

Barbara Johnson, A Life with Mary Shelley Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government Paul Celan, The Meridian Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath Peter Fenves: The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time Giorgio Agamben, Nudities Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations Ruth Stein, For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation

Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology Jean-Luc Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus Carol Jacobs, Skirting the Ethical: Sophocles, Plato, Hamann, Sebald, Campion Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 2 volumes, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Literature and Law in the Time of a Truth Commission Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg Arendt, Hannah, Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… Ernst Bloch, Traces Elizabeth Rottenberg, Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: (Literature/Philosophy/ Psychoanalysis) Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork Shoshana Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages Peter Szondi, Celan Studies Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf Cornelius Castoriadis, On Plato’s ‘Statesman’ Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic Peter Fenves, Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin Jill Robbins, ed. Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

Louis Marin, Of Representation J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural Maurice Blanchot / Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System Emmanual Levinas, God, Death, and Time Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy Ellen S. Burt, Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book Deborah Esch, In the Event: Reading Journalism, Reading Theory Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays

Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics Francis Ponge, Soap Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus Maurice Blanchot, Friendship Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism

Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion Hans-Jost Frey, Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hölderlin Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field Nicolas Abraham, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis Jacques Derrida, On the Name David Wills, Prosthesis Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974-1994 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) Jacques Derrida, Aporias Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence