The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism [1 ed.] 0754608751, 9780754608752

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THE ROMANTICISM OF CONTEMPORARY THEORY

The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory

Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism

Justin Clemens

Studies in European Cultural Transition Volume Seventeen General Editors: Martin Stannard and Greg Walker

~~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Justin Clemens 2003 The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Clemens, Justin The romanticism of contemporary theory : institution, aesthetics, nihilism. - (Studies in European cultural transition) 1. Romanticism 2. Theory (Philosophy) 3. Literature (Theory) I. Title 809 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clemens, Justin The romanticism of contemporary theory : institution, aesthetics, nihilism/ Justin Clemens p. em. -- (Studies in European cultural transition) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7546-0875-1 (alk. paper) 1. Criticism--History--20th century. 2. Romanticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN94 .C59 2003 801 '.95'0904--dc21 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0875-2 (hbk)

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Contents General Editors' Preface Acknowledgments

vi vii

Introduction: The Embryonic Remains

viii

Part I Contexts

The Institution of Romanticism

3

2 Universal Anaesthesia

40

3 Nihilism, Aesthetics, and Institutions

71

Part II Interventions

4 Sex, Formalization, and Jacques Lacan

113

5 Aesthetic Multiplicity in the Work ofDeleuze and Guattari

133

6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the Family Romance of Queer Theory

154

7 Cultural Studies, Cultural Policy, and the Professed Anti-Romanticism oflan Hunter

170

8 Alain Badiou, or; From the Sublime to the Infinite

192

Index

216

General Editors' Preface The European dimension of research in the humanities has come into sharp focus over recent years, producing scholarship which ranges across disciplines and national boundaries. Until now there has been no major channel for such work. This series aims to provide one, and to unite the fields of cultural studies and traditional scholarship. It will publish the most exciting new writing in areas such as European history and literature, art history, archaeology, language and translation studies, political, cultural and gay studies, music, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The emphasis will be explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity of cultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues of cultural transition. Martin Stannard Greg Walker University of Leicester

Acknowledgments Following Friedrich Nietzsche's remarks in The Genealogy of Morals, it is tempting to identify the true ends of pedagogical practices with the corporeal transformations effected by disciplinary violence, rather than with the acquired 'capacity' and 'knowledges' that are supposedly the point of the whole procedure. Nietzsche's dictum that 'only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory' mingles here with his countervailing remark that 'that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts' - suggesting the pain inflicted by the internalized dead lives on, dissimulated but indestructible, in the ascetic practices of scholarly work. It is for their indispensable aid in my acquisition of such undead figures that I would like to thank the following people: Bridget Bainbridge, Geoff Boucher, Jonathan Carter, Benedict Clemens, Ruth Clemens, Susan Cohn, Bridget Costelloe, Catherine Dale, Oliver Feltham, Rachel Hughes, Liam Leonard, David Odell, George Papaellinas, and Dominic Pettman. I must thank Christopher Feik in particular, who not only painstakingly read and reread various drafts of this book, but whose suggestions and intellectual input were critical to its elaboration and completion. I would also like to thank Phil Hunter for his conversations and for his paintings: one of his images, Ghost Paddock II, is reproduced on the front cover of this book. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at Deakin University for their continued advice and support, particularly Brian Edwards, Ann McCulloch, David McCooey, Michael Meehan, Jeanette Shirley, David Turnbull, David Walker, and Ian Weeks. Russell Grigg has been especially helpful, and commented extensively upon an earlier version of Chapter Eight. This book began as a doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne, under the supervision ofDavid Bennett and Simon During. If it has been transformed, at points, radically, this is due in part to the comments and encouragement of my examiners, J. Hillis Miller and Frances Ferguson- for which I am extremely grateful. Finally, I would like to thank the staff at Ashgate Publishing for their professional support, especially Erika Gafthey and Jacqui Cornish. I am also grateful for the excellent copy-editing of Lindsey Brake. Earlier versions of Chapters Four, Five, and Seven- now substantially revised and at points unrecognizable- first appeared in, respectively, Umbr(a) 1 (1996); Antithesis 8:2 (1997); and The UTSReview4: 1 (1998).Asection of Chapter Three was rewritten as a collaborative piece with Chris Feik, and appeared as 'Nihilism Tonight .. .', inK. Ansell Pearson and D. Morgan, eds, Nihilism Now! Monsters ofEnergy (London: Macmillan, 2000). I am grateful to Andras Berkes-Brandl for permission to quote from the John Forbes' poems from Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 1998) reproduced here; and to the University of Queensland Press for permission to quote from Andrew Taylor's 'Travelling to Gleis-Binario', from Selected Poems I960-I985 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988).

Introduction: The Embryonic Remains A man who is after the truth sets out to be a man of learning; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity sets out, perhaps, to be [an artist], but what is a man to do who is after something that lies between. Robert Musil 1 It is undoubtedly more instructive to write with regard to that which we do not want to be at any price than under the suspect image of that which we desire to become. Alain Badiou2

The central contention of this book can be stated very simply indeed: contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic -despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought. The simplicity of this contention is, of course, only apparent. For it immediately poses such questions as: what is meant by 'contemporary theory'? What is meant by 'Romanticism'? How are these fields, tendencies, or movements to be delimited and analysed? Is Romanticism a primarily historical or theoretical determination? What other topics and evidence have to be introduced in support of such an argument? What does 'essentially' mean here? What theoretical tools are available for such a project? What status do they themselves have? What are the stakes involved in making such a claim? Whence the (intellectual or persuasive )force of designating such vast and intractable fields as 'Romantic'? If, as I maintain, these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered other than by working through my argument in its entirety, it is evidently still necessary to begin by defining terms, outlining a methodology, and providing justifications, no matter how introductory or provisional. My argument is that Romantic theory continually reproduces and proliferates itself in a regulated circulation between three insistent and uncircumventable 'problems'. These problems are very familiar ones today. They are the problem of the university; the problem of nihilism; the problem of aesthetics. For reasons that will become clearer as my argument unfolds, these could also be usefully rephrased as the aporia ofRomanticism 's institution; the aporia of its self-diagnosis; the aporia of its proposed solution. To shift vocabulary momentarily, it might also be said that these three problems are the 'environment' into which theoretical Romanticism finds itself thrown, and which- by way of an incessant proliferation 1 R. Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Volume I, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (New York: Capricorn, 1965), p. 302. 2 A. Badiou, Theorie du Sujet (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 13. My translation.

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ofthemes, theoretical procedures, and zones of engagement- it ceaselessly attempts to master, without ever being able to do so. In its necessary failure to master its environment, Romanticism tries to transvalue this failure as its own singular success. Romanticism, however, recognizing the insufficiency of the attempted transvaluation, then plunges itself back into the triple torments of its environment - whence the impossible cycle begins again. Ifthe content of this book is disproportionately restricted to the analysis of major theoretical texts- from Immanuel Kant through Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou - the story that I am telling remains emblematically Romantic, in a wider sense. Indeed, it might be suggested that it is poets who ultimately authorize the denomination of the system I describe as 'Romantic'. One of the relevant texts, William Wordsworth's, is short enough to be given in its entirety here: Lines WRITTEN WITH A SLATE-PENCIL UPON A STONE, THE LARGEST OF A HEAP LYING NEAR A DESERTED QUARRY, UPON ONE OF THE ISLANDS AT RYDALE. Stranger! this hillock of misshapen stones Is not a ruin of the ancient time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief; 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanc'd, Sir William having leam'd That from the shore a full-grown man might wade And make himself a freeman of this spot At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments of his unfinish'd task.The block on which these lines are trac'd, perhaps, Was once selected as the corner-stone Of the intended pile, which would have been Some quaint odd play-thing of elaborate skill, So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush, And other little builders who dwell here, Had wonder'd at the work. But blame him not, For old Sir William was a gentle Knight Bred in this vale to which he appertain'd With all his ancestry. Then peace to him And for the outrage which he had devis' d Entire forgiveness.- But if thou art one On fire with thy impatience to become An Inmate of these mountains, if disturb' d By beautiful conceptions, thou hast hewn Out of the quiet rock the elements Of thy trim mansion destin'd soon to blaze

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INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS In snow-white splendour, think again, and taught By old Sir William and his quarry, leave Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose, There Jet the vernal slow-worm sun himself, And Jet the red-breast hop from stone to stone. 3

Wordsworth's poem presents a number of emblematic Romantic motifs: ambiguous ruins, the figure ofthe traveller, solitude, failure and despair. These are introduced from the beginning by the call, 'Stranger!' The mode of address is an imperative, at once universal (it does not specifY anyone in terms of social hierarchy, profession, or gender) and singular (the narrator later adds 'if thou art one ... '). The very interpellation 'Stranger!' immediately renders the implied reader that singular universal. As it turns out, if the implied reader of the lines had in fact come to the place that the title and the mise-en-scene describe, then that reader must be, by definition, a stranger: the 'rocky isle' is uninhabitable, and the true master of the place is dead. The address, furthermore, evidently constitutes a warning. But of what? As the slogan from a notorious Australian police campaign aimed at schoolchildren once memorably put it: 'Stranger? Danger!' Wordsworth's poem says much the same thing, if more or less economically. There is danger for the stranger, yet the stranger is him- or herself a danger. But what kind of danger? At the most basic level, the danger is that of the stranger's own confusion or delusion: 'this hillock of misshapen stones/Is not a ruin of the ancient time ... '. The warning is a warning against misrecognizing the stones as remains from a distant and heroic human past. Such a misrecognition would be tantamount to an illicit aestheticization. The inscription at once interdicts the rash aestheticisation of temporal distance, and yet presumes that such an aestheticization is natural, even inevitable. As a stranger could know no better, these lines have been scribbled on the biggest stone as a kind of public service announcement. Read them closely, for they will save you from yourself ... The poem continues in this relentlessly de-idealizing fashion. Not only are the misshapen stones not heroic ruins, but they were intended as the materials for a recently planned folly. And not only has this folly not fallen down, but it was never built. The folly seems to have been planned as a hereditary knight's rather degenerate attempt at solitary enjoyment of his property. The knight, however, realizing that his attempt was doomed to failure - any adult male stranger might come to the place, day or night- abandoned his project before it was truly begun. The irony of the situation should not be underestimated. Sir William, seeking to ornament for his own delight 'this vale to which he appertained/With all his ancestry', would, 3 W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 189-90. The poem first appeared in the 1800 reprint ofLyrical Ballads. My reading here owes much to the superb interpretation given by Cynthia Chase, 'Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth's "Lines'", Diacritics XVII: 4 (1987), pp. 66-77.

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in the very completion of his project, thereby attract and admit others to the spot he desired to enjoy alone. Furthermore, for Sir William to even have contemplated such a deed he had already breached the very tradition that gave him the right to do so. Neither a good hereditary aristocrat nor a good capitalist, the knight had become a stranger to the lands that were nominally his. It seems that he did not, for instance, even realize that his island was a false island, that the water that appeared to separate and isolate it from the mainland was in fact a dissimulated bridge. A stranger need not submit to either John or Charon, belief or money, rebirth or death, to traverse these open waters. The lines 'Then peace to him', following as they do immediately after 'With all his ancestry', suggest that Sir William's quarrying directly spelled his death. The 'quarry and the mound' are indeed 'monuments', not just of the failure of the rather stateless pleasure-dome, but of Sir William's life itself. The graffiti scribbled in slate-pencil upon the cornerstone ('perhaps') of the knight's unaccomplished folly thus constitutes both a mocking epigraph and a profanation of the dead. The writer of the lines - despite the anxiously dismissive and patronizing tone -is not, however, altogether convinced of the lack of value of Sir William's project. On the one hand, and at best, it seems that the edifice would only have been a 'little dome', 'some quaint odd play-thing'. At worst, it would have been an 'outrage' (I will come back to this). On the other hand, there is still (an apparently) reluctant admiration on the part of the writer for the 'elaborate skill' that would no doubt have been involved in its making. Elaborate enough, that is, to impress the little avian builders of the locality. Wordsworth cannot make the irony here too sharp, for it would vitiate the assault on his real target. After all, the irremediable failure of Sir William provides a valuable moral lesson for the stranger: sacrifice your own 'beautiful conceptions' upon the mortifYing altar of these miserable fragments! Abandon your dreams, otherwise they will no longer be yours! The paradox of aesthetic imagination severs the knight from natural homeostasis; at the end, the birds and the worms, the bramble and the rose, will reassert the eternal and inhuman democracy of nature. The Knight's failure denotes the failure of human sovereignty. Setting himself against nature, his own ancestry, and the human community (not to mention the canons of good taste), Sir William tries to carve out of nature a site that is his alone, and thereby impose his values on the world. But his self-affirming values are vain and self-negating; their institution would be their destruction; mercifully abandoned, the ruins of his impotent imagination come to resemble the heroic ruins of real earthly power; the lines command that this false resemblance must be unveiled as such. Yet the actual place of the failed imposition of imaginative power remains powerfully scarred by this failure; this fact serves as the aesthetico-moral basis for the poem's Scene oflnstruction. Which only proliferates the interpretive difficulties. What is this place that is neither nature nor culture? How to speak of the temporality of a place that confuses 'now' and 'then'? If the rocks and quarry function as monuments of the master, they are nothing but empty tombs. Has the

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knight's body been misplaced or has he risen from the grave? When did Sir William die? If the lesson that the lines offer depends on making a strict distinction between the 'recent' and the 'distant' past, the attempted revivification of a past as just past can only confirm that all pasts are equally past- whether centuries or a day. And, indeed, the poem intensifies this sense of the timelessness of the past by neither speaking directly of the knight's death ('old Sir William was a gentle knight'), nor providing an estimated time of death. 4 What further complicates matters is that all of these complexities are instituted by the poem that represents them. If the fiction that the poem installs implies that the reader is actually at the site, scanning the lines scrawled 'with a slate-pencil' on the very rock, this fiction confesses itself as such. Unable to pass off its fabulous lines as mere transcription, the poem is itself manifestly invention. Every element in the poem is thereby at least doubled. The dead Knight, for instance, shares the same name as the poet, who has here imaginatively and spontaneously beknighted himself. By sharing his own proper name with the other of whom he writes, Wordsworth no longer occupies the singular universal position of the unnameable stranger to whom the lines are addressed. On the contrary, 'William' becomes a particularized plural - neither truly native nor foreign to the non-place in and on which he writes, and which he produces by that very writing. This doubling also functions to emphasize the ambiguous status of the implied signatory of the lines: only someone who was not a stranger could have written in and of this place, but this is a place where there are only strangers. Blood and soil do not ensure property-rights nor citizenship of the isle (which is thus neither a modem nor a feudal state). It is open to everyone and no one. But in order to enter this open place, one must bar one's own access by abandoning there 'thy fragments to the bramble and the rose'- whereupon one will no longer be simply a stranger. The material ruin ofthe poem is the cornerstone on which Wordsworth will fail to build his aesthetico-moral church. This failure will be his glory; it will be a false glory, and he knows it. And he will try to pass on the lesson he has and has not learned, a lesson which one only comes upon by accident: 'But, as it chanc'd .. .'.Walter Benjamin once concluded his famous book, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, with the statement that 'in the spirit of allegory [German TrauerspielJ is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.' 5 Wordsworth's form, however, preserves the image of its mutilated failure to the very last. Furthermore, this 'very last' may not be too far off (the elements will surely erase the slate-pencil scores), and- in its untrodden way - there would very few to praise it anyway. 'Stranger!' This imperative is therefore a siren call- even if the siren is mute, ugly, ruined. It calls to the stranger to come. Although it was precisely the possibility Actually, Sir William Fleming of Rydal Hall died in 1736. W. Benjamin, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, intro. G. Steiner (London: NLB, 1977), p. 235. 4

5

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of untitled and uninvited strangers that destroyed William's 'intended pile', such a stranger can now never arrive. The poem attempts to summon up a community of solitary strangers who will never meet and who, having been told everything and taught the most valuable of lessons, will learn nothing from it. Rather they will in their turn insist on communicating their universal singularity to one another by appending their transient lines on the worn lines of the rock. This graffiti will at once constitute a failed work of the imagination and the death warrant of its signatory. If you take the graffiti literally, you will be lost; yet misrecognizing, disbelieving or ignoring it will ensnarl you in a far worse delusion. The word 'outrage', which I noted above, has an extraordinary force in the context: only such an outrage can admit the wandering stranger into the fool's aristocracy of an unnatural death. Pedagogical failure, trace elements, depreciating remains: the movement that the 'Lines' thematizes and enacts- from the failed institution of a miserable dream, to the levelling of the values accomplished by the human world, to the subtle re-institutions of de-idealizing imagination, and round again- is precisely the movement of Romantic thought that I trace in this book. Indeed, this book begins and ends with Wordsworth's poetry, for a number of reasons. First, it has an important historical and institutional significance: Wordsworth is still the central canonical poet ofAnglophone Romanticism, and no viable account ofRomanticism can simply ignore, negate, or circumvent the claims of Wordsworth's thought. Second, it has a particular significance to my argument: though I concentrate on 'theoretical' Romanticism, my argument is calibrated to show how such Romanticism often takes its directives - whether willingly or unwillingly, consciously or not- from 'poetical' Romanticism, and continues to do so to the present day. If the theoretical system I describe of institution-aestheticsnihilism is already clearly functioning in Wordsworth, then this demonstration has consequences for historical understandings of Romanticism, which then cannot be a simple series of events or a delimitable epoch, but is better thought of as an involuted sequence of repetitions-with-differences. Moreover, it shows the dangers that imperil any account that fails to notice the peculiar relations and interferences that Romanticism forges between practices that are often thought under such broad (that is, unanalysed) distinctions as 'poetry' and 'prose', 'theory' and 'action'. If Wordsworth has already elaborated the very positions that Romanticism's enemies often try to array against Romanticism, whatever calls itself anti-Romantic is drawn from the heart of a Romanticism thus doubly disenfranchised. Yet Romanticism wouldn't have it any other way. In 'Contexts', the first section ofthis book, I detail my central claims. These both repeat and differ from the various standard accounts of Romanticism. The first chapter engages with the long-standing and seemingly never-ending debate over what ought to be considered the central problematics, themes, figures, and limits of Romantic philosophy. From A. 0. Lovejoy and Rene Wellek, through Morse Peckham and the Yale School to Frances Ferguson and David Simpson, the arguments over Romanticism's definition continue to rage today. By examining

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this established canon or tradition of Romantic commentary, I chart the limits and characteristic concerns of Romanticism's incessant redefinitions. I show how this history of Romantic commentary is fractured by two central antinomies, around which the debate has ineluctably unfolded. The first of these antinomies can be phrased thus: Romanticism can be defined: Romanticism is undefinable. The second is: criticism is still Romantic: criticism is not all still Romantic. I show the uncircumventability of this division, and conclude that it is peculiarly central to Romantic thought itself. I argue that this debate enables certain disavowed regularities to continue to pass under cover of irreducible dissension. These antinomies serve to occlude the fact that Romanticism is a discursive response to three aporetic exigencies which constitute the environment for philosophical and theoretical thought after Kant. As stated, these are the problems of the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism. My treatment here does not primarily involve producing a corrective genealogy of these 'themes', although I do to some extent speak of their parallel development. More importantly, however, I claim that Romanticism is a discourse that incessantly re-elaborates itself as a response to these three exigencies, which can only show up within Romanticism itself as moments of extreme and paradoxical torsion. Yet this book is not a detailed or exhaustive analysis of Romanticism as such; indeed, such a project could not be contained in a book of this (or any) length. Rather, I demonstrate the existence of a dynamic central to Romanticism, and then trace the repetition of this problematic- or ones closely related to it- in contemporary theory. My initial remarks lead into the problem that rethinking the academic institution poses for contemporary theory -which tends to characterize its own interests in this regard as 'anti-Romantic'- and thence back to Immanuel Kant, whose work provides the often unacknowledged discursive conditions and directions for these institutional studies. On the basis of this rereading, I at once demonstrate a certain complicity of contemporary theory with its predecessors and attempt to produce a refigured account of this complicity. The second and third chapters- on 'aesthetics' and 'nihilism', respectively - follow a similar logic. In addition to discussions of philosophers such as Fichte, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, I also examine some of the salient historical and institutional history (notably with respect to the Russian nihilists), as well as the work of many contemporary theorists, such as Giorgio A gamben, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Gianni Vattimo, among others. These chapters demonstrate how the bond between aesthetics and subjectivity is further knitted by the Romantics to a problematic of nihilism, in which the sublime immensity and force of world history overwhelms and is overcome by Romantic theory. In the giddiness of this overwhelming-overcoming, Romanticism scurries back to the grey and painstaking labour of institutional concerns, as it continues to dream of the liberatory powers of Imagination. The first three chapters of this book thus constitute a general delimitation of my field of research. I show how the problems of the institution, aesthetics,

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and nihilism are in fact co-supplementary, and how their complex imbrication continues to determine various contemporary formations that may seem to have surpassed or dispensed with their determinations. Of necessity, these chapters range quite widely over these fraught and difficult topics; nonetheless, I am concerned to demonstrate that there is a definite and describable logic at work in the major strands of contemporary theory, a Romantic logic which proceeds precisely by dissimulating its own characteristic traits - and whose self-dissimulation is therefore amongst the foremost of these traits. If- as I am arguing - the Romantic sense of the failure of the institution at its instituting moment determines a diagnosis that ultimately arraigns the entire world, and thereafter fails to find solace in the only therapy available, this narrative might seem to have its own natural trajectory, that is, institution, nihilism, aesthetics. Things are, however, not so straightforward. In a very real sense, every one of these stations presumes a prior account of its others: plotting a narrative about narratives that describe the impossibility of origins is itself an impossible task. For reasons that will hopefully become clearer in the course of this book, the order of chapters runs from institution to aesthetics to nihilism; the third chapter binds together the previous two. The second part of this book, 'Interventions' (Chapters 4-8), comprises a series of close readings of influential contemporary theorists, working in a number of disciplines. These readings examine in more detail the diverse workings of the Romantic circulation between the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism. The theorists I examine are Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter, and Alain Badiou. Lacan seems to me emblematic of a post-Kantian Romantic subjectivity pushed to its limits; Deleuze and Guattari try to eviscerate all traces of such a subject, at the cost of the revenge of aestheticism; Sedgwick's queer revisioning of Foucault and deconstruction forces her into a rhetorical impasse; Hunter's attempt to negate Romantic principles through an attention to the power-knowledge routines of modem pedagogical institutions requires that he disavow his complicities; Badiou's mathematical ontology drives him, on the one hand, to overly restrict the field of philosophy's operations and, on the other, to a selective reading of a central strain of Romanticism upon which his polemic depends for its force. From my point of view, these theorists have made important contributions to the debate about Romanticism (even if, as we shall see, not always explicitly), and both the value and limits of their contributions are better illuminated if they themselves are re-examined in the dark light ofRomantic concerns. Although there are always questions to be raised about the status of a sample set, such a list might still initially appear somewhat arbitrary; furthermore, the concomitant omission of certain key contemporary figures (such as Jacques Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, among others) may seem similarly arbitrary. There are, however, a number of reasons for both my inclusions and my exclusions. Many other commentators have examined

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the Romantic affiliations of my famous omissions, and I am concerned not to reproduce existing research on the topic. 6 (As it happens, however, I do make a number of remarks about such theorists as Derrida, de Man, Bourdieu, and Lyotard, although I do not dedicate them the space that I do others). Moreover, because my argument suggests that Romanticism supersaturates contemporary theory, then it must be possible to discern the former's effects in a variety of persons and places. Hence, I have chosen thinkers who are, at least nominally, from very different places (geographically, institutionally, disciplinarily, politically, and so on), and who often present themselves as hostile to each other. Part of my project is thus to show that the ceaseless polemics Deleuze and Guattari direct against psychoanalysis are the index of a propinquity and a complicity. Finally, the writers I read in detail are what Harold Bloom might call 'strong writers' (although he would undoubtedly cavil with my application of this concept to most of the figures in question)- if they are not all presently as well or widely known as each other, they have all offered powerful and novel theoretical propositions. My argument tries to show not only that should they all be read, but also how the very force of their writings still depends on their engagement with an essentially Romantic situation. These writers can thus function as exemplars of emergent-yet-apparently-divergent fields, nominally 'interdisciplinary' places that are still struggling over the proper 'proper name' for their practice and their place. Even the widespread sense ofthe exhaustion of 'high theory' that has accompanied these developments is not irrelevant to note here - for such a sense of enervation is itself exemplarily Romantic. In Natural Supernaturalism M. H. Abrams wrote that one of the 'prominent developmental patterns' ofRomantic thought is 'the self-moving and self-sustaining system'. This system is 'represented as a moving system, a dynamic process which is driven by an internal source of motion to its own completion' .1 I might, alternatively, characterize my own account of Romanticism as 'a dynamic process, which is driven by three ex-timate sources of motion to its own in-completion'. Yet, having said this it is necessary, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, to reiterate that my goal is not 'to establish the "contemporary relevance of romanticism"'. As the philosophers continue: The usual results of this sort of program are well known: a suppression pure and simple of history, the dubious immortalization of what is supposedly given 'contemporary relevance', the (far from innocent) occultation of the specific characteristics of the present. Very much to the contrary, what interests us in romanticism is that we still belong to the era it opened up. The present period continues to deny precisely this belonging, which defines us (despite the inevitable divergence introduced by repetition). A veritable 6 I am thinking here ofthe work of Simon Critchley, Peter Dews, D. A. Kaiser, David Simpson, Juliet Sychrava, among others. I deal with some of these writers at greater length in Chapter One. 7 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 173.

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romantic unconscious is discernible today, in most of the central motifs of our 'modernity'. Not the least result of romanticism's indefinable character is the way it has allowed this so-called modernity to use romanticism as a foil, without ever recognizing - or in order not to recognize - that it has done little more than rehash romanticism's discoveries. 8

It is, rather, in an attempt to specify further the ruses of 'romanticism's indefinable

character' that I turn first to the problem of its institution.

8 P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1988), p. 15. Nancy has come to modulate this position vis-a-vis romanticism in more recent work, for example, 'we are definitely no longer in the age of Enlightenment or Romanticism. We are elsewhere, which does not mean we are opposed to them or beyond them, as if we had dialectically surpassed them. We are in a sort of simultaneous drawing together of these two epochs; they are contemporaries of ours and we see them wearing thin. One is worn thin to the point of being an extremely dull platitude; the other is stretched out toward the night of extermination', Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 63.

PART I

Contexts

Chapter 1

The Institution of Romanticism You meet your daemon & respond with contempt for all depth & poetry driven by love and breath John Forbes 1

Answering the question: what is romanticism?

Romanticism is often described in terms of an unparalleled rupture; furthermore, as a rupture that unleashed, justified, and conditioned other, associated traditions of rupture. It is undoubtedly for such reasons that a number of major commentators will trace many contemporary phenomena to their roots in Romanticism. M. H. Abrams notes in his classic text, The Mirror and the Lamp (when attempting to convey the depth and extent of the Romantic revolution), that the long-term continuities of classical criticism were definitively 'broken by the theories of romantic writers, English and German; and their innovations include many of the points of view and procedures which make the characteristic differences between traditional criticism and the criticism of our own time, including some criticism which professes to be anti-romantic' .2 Abrams's statement has been echoed by any number of more recent commentators, working in a number of different disciplines. Renato Poggioli has insisted that 'romanticism is - in a certain way and up to a certain point -potential avant-gardism. If such a claim appears excessive, the hypothesis of historical continuity between romanticism and avant-gardism now seems irrefutable: there is not the shadow of a doubt that the latter would have been historically inconceivable without the romantic precedent. ' 3 The literary critic Paul de Man has declared that 'the problem of romanticism continues to dominate the other problems of historiography and literary criticism. The main points around which contemporary methodological and ideological arguments circle can almost always be traced directly back to the romantic heritage. ' 4 This judgment is echoed by Jonathan Arac: 'contemporary criticism is still significantly determined by its 1 J. Forbes, 'Anti-Romantic', in Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 1998), p. 41. 2 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. vii. 3 R. Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. G. Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1968), p. 52. 4 P. de Man, The Rhetoric ofRomanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 48.

4

CONTEXTS

romantic beginnings' .5 The historian Stephen Bann has argued that postmodern 'historical consciousness is the product of the Romantic period, when the whole range of our contemporary concerns with the past first became accessible to representation'. 6 The philosopher Simon Critchley agrees: 'My broad claim ... is that we are inheritors of what we might call a romantic modernity: that romanticism provides the profile for a modernity in which we are both unable to believe, but which we are unable to leave' .7 It is immediately noteworthy that this extensive critical concordance - which extends across apparently very different disciplines and approaches - is itself nothing new. Indeed, one of the questions that this book poses is: why are these interminable, repetitive declarations of a Romantic affiliation invariably couched in the terms of revelation? The pattern is too marked to be simply explained in the terms of historical ignorance, generic convention, or even institutional rivalry. I will come back to this. Another peculiarity is that the agreement tends to stop there, with the name 'Romantic' itself. Not that this name is itself immutable; its very lability is signified by the play between the capital and lower-case 'r' in the citations above, not to mention the promiscuous coupling of the word with such other eminently disputable terms as 'modernity', 'avant-garde', 'history', and so 5 J. Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 3. 6 S. Bann, Romanticism and the Rise ofHistory (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 5. S. Critchley, Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 97. See also A. Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997); D. A. Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); I. Livingstone, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); J. de Mul, Romantic Desire in (Post)modern Art and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); J. Sychrava, Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and P. Dews, Logics ofDisintegration (London: Verso, 1987), all of whom argue, in their very different ways, for the Romantic affiliations of contemporary theory. One should also cite here Kathleen M. Wheeler's book Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). lfWheeler explicitly declares that 'it would probably be mistaken to say that German Romanticism and the related English Romanticism of Coleridge, Blake, and Shelley was the origin of modem critical theory (since Romantic thought is based itself on Socratic Platonism, and was developed further in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche)' (p. 27), her whole book ceaselessly and simply coriflates the aforementioned Romantics with such writers as John Dewey and Jacques Derrida- and ultimately turns Plato himself into a Romantic. Finally, even Anthony J. Cascardi, concerned as he is to push the origins of contemporary theory back to the Enlightenment (and hence beyond Romanticism)- and willing to recognize the links between 'aesthetics' and 'nihilism'- still consistently has recourse to such locutions as 'the Nietzsche of the Will to Power is heir to Kant of the third Critique. Both are drawn equally to a romantic hope in the power of human passion to fill the world with a purposiveness it has lost and to the modernist awareness that the world is ultimately no more determinate than our passionate investments in it', Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 265.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROMANTICISM

5

on. If 'we' agree that we are 'still' 'Romantic', then, there is not necessarily any agreement as to the terms of this agreement itself, nor of the value or sense in designating an era or philosophical disposition in such a way. Indeed, there seems to be no possible agreement as to whether Romanticism is primarily or essentially a historical, aesthetic, philosophical, literary, political, sociological, or institutional phenomenon, or some peculiarly mutable aggregate of all these. This thoroughgoing dis-consensus about Romanticism has itself an impeccable historical pedigree. In a famous academic debate about the signification and significance of the term, Arthur Lovejoy and Rene Wellek clash on the very possibility of its definition. In his essay 'On the Discrimination ofRomanticisms' (first published in 1924), Lovejoy opens with a remarkably sarcastic survey of the state of contemporaneous commentary on Romanticism: if some Dupuis of to-day were to gather, first, merely a few of the more recent accounts of the origin and age ofRomanticism, he would learn from M. Lassere and many others that Rousseau was the father of it; from Mr. Russell and Mr. Santayana that the honor of paternity might plausibly be claimed by Immanuel Kant; from M. Seillic~re that its grandparents were Fenelon and Madame Guyon; from Professor Babbitt that its earliest wellidentified forebear was Francis Bacon; from Mr. Gosse that it originated in the bosom of the Reverend Joseph Warton; ... [I have excised many names here] ... and from Mr. Charles Whibley that the Odyssey is romantic in its 'very texture and essence', but that, with its rival, Romanticism was 'born in the Garden of Eden' and that 'the Serpent was the first romantic'. The inquirer would, at the same time, find that many of these originators of Romanticism - including both the first and last mentioned, whom, indeed, some contemporaries are unable to distinguish - figure on other lists as initiators or representatives of tendencies of precisely the contrary sort. 8

Lovejoy continues in this vein for some pages, noting that the 'offspring with which Romanticism is credited are as strangely assorted as its attributes and its ancestors' .9 Given the impossibility of dispensing altogether with the term, Lovejoy makes a number of related recommendations, including a projected meta-study of how such disparate phenomena came to receive a single name, a practical pluralization of the term, and, at all times, an acknowledgement ofthe irreducible differences between Romanticisrns. For Lovejoy, even those (philosophical, sociological, literary, and so on) traits that may seem to be shared by various Romantic movements have in each case a different status and function. Wellek, on the other hand, argues strongly for the fundamental unity of Romanticism. Rejecting the 'extreme nominalism' of such critics as Lovejoy, Wellek will insist that 'the major romantic movements form a unity of theories, philosophies, and style, and that these, in turn, form a coherent group of ideas 8 A. 0. Lovejoy, 'On the Discrimination ofRomanticisms', in M. H. Abrams, ed., English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 3-4. 9 Lovejoy, 'On the Discrimination ofRomanticisms', p. 5.

6

CONTEXTS

each of which implicates the other' .10 Wellek isolates what he believes to be three 'particularly convincing' criteria that sufficiently distinguish Romanticism from its predecessors and competitors - 'imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style' 11 - but his fundamental theoretical quarrel with Lovejoy hinges on the sense and value of period terms for scholarly research. Hence he will conclude that: we can go on speaking of romanticism as one European movement, whose slow rise through the eighteenth century we can describe and examine and even call, if we want to, preromanticism. Clearly there are periods of the dominance of a system of ideas and poetic practices; and clearly they have their anticipations and their survivals. To give up these problems because of the difficulties of terminology seems to me tantamount to giving up the central task of literary history. If literary history is not to be content to remain the usual odd mixture of biography, bibliography, anthology, and disconnected emotive criticism, it has to study the total process of literature. This can be done only by tracing the sequence of periods, the rise, dominance, and disintegration of conventions and norms. The term 'romanticism' posits all these questions, and that, to my mind, is its best defense. 12

What makes this apparently irresolvable debate even more paradoxical and intractable is that both Lovejoy and Wellek elsewhere seem to contradict, or at least severely modifY, their own opinions with regard to Romanticism. In The Great Chain of Being, for instance, Lovejoy will remark that there is indeed one (if only one) common factor linking together those diverse writers who have been denominated 'Romantic'- and this is nothing other than their valorization of 'diversity' as an excellence in itself. 13 For his part, Wellek writes in an essay entitled 'German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation' that- although he believes that he has indeed won his argument against Lovejoy, and although the apparently diverse manifestations of Romanticism show 'similarities and even deep affinities' -there are a number of striking, even incommensurable differences between and within German and English Romanticism that ought not to be prematurely shut down by critical inquiry. 14 Decades later, the terms of this confrontation - despite the incessant work of critical proliferation and revision since Wellek's riposte -remain essentially the same. 10

R. Wellek, 'The Concept of'Romanticism' in Literary History', Comparative

Literature 1: 1 (1949), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 172. 13 See A. 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain ofBeing: A Study ofthe History ofan Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 293. 14 SeeR. Wellek, 'German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation', reprinted in 11

12

Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 3-33.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROMANTICISM

7

In another major work, The Triumph ofRomanticism ( 1970), Morse Peckham poses the question as whether we can even dare to hope for a theory ofRomanticism. 15 The utmost confusion reigns in the whole field. In the past fifteen or twenty years, most scholars have done one oftwo things. Either they have given up hope for any sense to come out of this tangle and have stoutly denied that there was such a movement, or, less pessimistically, they have continued to use one or more concepts or ideas - theories which they feel to be unsatisfactory yet which they continue to employ because there is nothing better ... The situation is all the more discouraging in that it is generally conceded that Romanticism is a central problem in literary history, and that if we have failed to solve that problem, we can scarcely hope to solve any general problems in literary history. 16

Peckham then returns to the Lovejoy/Wellek debate, in an attempt to mediate between the two. Peckham accepts that Wellek has established that there is indeed a consistent, historically localizable movement that we can agree to call 'Romantic'; however, Wellek ultimately and paradoxically succumbs to the very scepticism he condemns in Lovejoy. On the basis of a new comparison ofthese two writers, Peckham believes that he can construct a viable theory ofRomanticism. The force ofPeckham's rather definite answer to his own question (as to whether a theory ofRomanticism is indeed possible)- Yes, absolutely! -is nonetheless somewhat mitigated by his own remark: 'I feel that we have it almost within our grasp- that one or two steps more and we shall have mastered this highly perplexing literary problem.' 17 Far more than one or two steps later, it seems that Romantic criticism is still stumbling. 18 Despite Peckham's heroic efforts, his intervention has manifestly failed to resolve the problem of Romanticism. Indeed, the abiding intractability of this dispute is once again underlined by the fact that, almost thirty years later, Thomas Pfau finds himself inexorably reprising Lovejoy and Wellek in his introduction to a recent anthology of Romantic criticism. Pfau writes: 'Most intellectuals ... will probably agree that the subject of Romanticism tends to give rise to complex questions, even strong convictions, yet offers few conclusive answers.' 19 Confronted 15 M. Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), p. 4. The essays in this volume range from 1950 to 1969. 16 Ibid., p. 5. 17 Ibid., p. 4. 18 Thus such interventions as those by Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, Jerome McGann, and David Simpson fail to escape the terms and limits of the debate I have been discussing above. SeeN. Frye, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1963); H. Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1961); F. Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957); J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979). 19 T. Pfau, 'Introduction. Reading beyond Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism', in T. Pfau and R. F. Gleckner, eds, Lessons ofRomanticism:

8

CONTEXTS

with the dizzying proliferation of proposed redefinitions of Romanticism, Pfau ends up by remarking that, The unending supersession of one critical paradigm by another- effectively adding up to a concise history of cultural institutions and politics over the last hundred and fifty years or so - also suggests that, being so intricately bound up with this irony, Romanticism has survived by continually reinventing itself through its belated other, the reader, the philologist, the critic, the cultural prophet, the liberator of marginalized or otherwise forgotten voices, forms, media, and traditions. 20

Certainly, the manifold ironies of the situation that I have been outlining seem to be just as intractable even if one concentrates merely on the. development of the word itself. As Mario Praz writes, The epithet 'romantic' and the antithetical terms 'classic' and 'romantic' are approximate labels which have long been in use. The philosopher solemnly refuses to allow them, exorcising them with unerring logic, but they creep quietly in again and are always obtruding themselves, elusive, tiresome, indispensable; the grammarian attempts to give them their proper status, their rank and fixed definition, but in spite of all his laborious efforts he discovers that he has been treating shadows as though they were solid substance. 21 A Critical Companion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 1. A glance at any of the other major contemporary anthologies or monographs would immediately encounter variants of Pfau's conviction, for example, John Beer's remark that 'The questions of Romantic criticism inevitably involve the question of Romanticism itself, a term that has proved notoriously difficult of definition', 'Introduction', in J. Beer, ed., Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. xi; Duncan Wu suggests that 'Like Romanticism itself, present-day criticism of the subject is neither cohesive nor unified. And that remains the source of its enduring strength', 'Introduction', in D. Wu, ed., A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. xi; Carol Jacobs writes, 'Ever since its inception (if such a concept makes sense) Romanticism has denied itself a historically limitable field. What Romanticism has come to mean in recent years ... is a yielding of its own temporal limits to register critical claims of a much more overwhelming kind', Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronte, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. ix. 20 Pfau, 'Introduction', p. 30. Unsurprisingly, many of the other essays collected in this volume make very similar propositions with regard to the ceaseless reinvention of Romanticism. 21 M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, second edition, foreword F. Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1. As Praz later remarks, following the publication of Jean Paul's Magie der Einbildungskraft, 'The word "romantic" thus comes to be associated with another group ofideas, such as "magic", "suggestive", "nostalgic", and above all with words expressing states of mind which cannot be described, such as the German "Sehnsucht" and the English "wistful". It is curious to note that these two words have no equivalent in the Romance languages- a clear sign of the Nordic, Anglo-Germanic origin of the sentiments they express ... The essence of Romanticism consequently comes to consist in that which cannot be described', p. 14. See also Wellek's discussion of the origins and development of the term in 'The Concept of"Romanticism" ', pp. 2-22.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROMANTICISM

9

This has, of course, hardly prevented anyone from making the attempt. And even if, as Marilyn Butler reminds us, 'It may be significant that far more twentiethcentury writers have been willing to call themselves late or post-Romantics than there were early nineteenth-century writers prepared to recognize Romanticism as a current phenomenon', 22 Butler herself cannot quite seem to shake its irresistible lures, nor successfully unravel the ruses of the 'significant' fact she has identified. Despite her own concerns about the peculiar temporality, even anachrony, of the term - and hence its possible meaninglessness as a critical denomination- Butler will conclude her book by remarking that ' "Romanticism" is inchoate because it is not a single intellectual movement but a complex of responses to certain conditions which Western society has experienced and continues to experience since the middle of the eighteenth century' .23 Once again, the very attempt to specify and historicize the problem of Romanticism ends up by at once retaining the term and dispersing its significations. The term is self-confessedly inadequate, yet indispensable - it is the name of a critical im-possibility (in a way that is only superficially similar to the Romantic treatment of 'nihilism', as I shall show in Chapter Three). Lovejoy, again: 'the one really radical remedy - namely, that we should all cease talking about Romanticism - is, I fear, certain not to be adopted'. 24 Confronted with the historical evidence of such unending supersessions and irresolvable discord amongst its commentators (who are also its participants and perpetuators), is it then possible to conclude anything about Romanticism except its essential undefinability? If this is the case, then what Slavoj Zizek has asserted of capitalism might also be true of Romanticism itself: The 'normal' state of [Romanticism] is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning [Romanticism] 'putrefies', it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want ofbalance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly- incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, 'contradiction'. Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus ofits development. Herein lies the paradox proper to [Romanticism], its last resort: [Romanticism] is capable 22 M. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 2. Butler also remarks

that 'We have come to think of most of the great writers who flourished around 1800 as the Romantics, but the term is anachronistic and the poets concerned would not have used it of themselves. Not until the 1860s did ''the Romantics" become an accepted collective name for Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and an agreement begin to emerge about what an English Romantic Poet was like', p. 1. Or, as Wellek puts it in his far broader and more subtle survey, 'The self-designation of writers and poets as 'romantic' varies in the different countries considerably; many examples are late and of short duration ... the history of the term and its introduction cannot regulate the usage of the modern historian, since he would be forced to recognize milestones in his history which are not justified by the actual state of the literatures in question', 'The Concept of"Romanticism" ', pp. 16-17. 23 Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 184. 24 Lovejoy, 'On the Discrimination ofRomanticisms', p. 7.

10

CONTEXTS of transforming its limit, its very impotence, in the source of its power- the more it 'putrefies', the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionize itself to survive. 25

The unique trait ofRomanticism would thus be its capacity to turn its limits into the power for its own selfovercoming, an overcoming which then itselfposits a new limit to be overcome in its turn. Such a definition- very abstract in itself- would evidently eviscerate Romanticism of any determinate or positive content, all such content being simply a transient, weightless moment in Romanticism's own self-elaboration. Furthermore, there would not be any teleology to this developmental logic (other than the endless end of the incessant heterogenesis-autopoesis of the system itself); even if such a teleology could be projected, it would be immediately revealed as contingent, a false or merely delusory fiction generated by the unpredictable becomings of that constitutive excrescence which is Romanticism. But such a conclusion - which may perhaps seem a necessary one, given the attestable evidence - would not only be insufficient and dissatisfactory, but essentially in-correct. The reason for this, paradoxically enough, is the exemplary jUnction that this non-definition is consistently invoked to serve. A quotation from Charles Rosen and Henri Zemer should help to throw this situation into relief. In their book Romanticism and Realism, in a chapter tellingly entitled 'Romanticism: The Permanent Revolution', Rosen and Zemer remark that: The history ofRomanticism is- to a far greater extent than the history of any other artistic or philosophical movement- a history ofredefinitions. For some decades after Friedrich Schlegel's first essay at definition in 1798, artists and writers seem to have had a profound need to clarifY the ideals and goals of Romanticism as a revolutionary movement- and then, of course, a little later to deny indignantly that they could ever themselves be labeled as Romantic ... What is most interesting about these successive definitions is not that they contradict each other but that they are intentionally self-contradictory, deliberately inconsistent and unstable, fluid and expansive. 26 25 S. Zizek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 52. I have simply replaced the word 'capitalism' with the word 'Romanticism'; what makes this substitution all the more justifiable here - indeed, perhaps more appropriate than the original - is that, as Nietzsche once suggested of the great philosophers in general, the judgments of Romantics about 'the world' can be better considered unconscious confessions on the parts of their authors. As I will show in Chapter Four, Lacanian psychoanalysis remains a Romantic phenomenon. See F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy ofthe Future, trans. with intro. and commentary R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 19. 26 C. Rosen and H. Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology a/Nineteenth Century Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 16. Or, as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy put it, 'Romanticism ... could never have protected, defended, or preserved itself from its "unworking"- its incalculable and uncontrollable incompletion: its incompletable incompletion', The Literary Absolute: The Theory ofLiterature in German Romanticism, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 59. Or, as Bann puts it, 'Romanticism was not simply a movement, but the movement to end all movements', Romanticism and the Rise ofHistory, p. 3.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROMANTICISM

11

What is most interesting about Rosen and Zerner's definition here (and which links it to many of the propositions already cited above) has at least a twofold import: on the one hand, the Romantics themselves insist on the essential undefinability oftheir project, which thereby cannot be considered a 'project' in any commonsensical or straightforward way; on the other hand, this undefinability constitutes an exemplary practice in itself. This exemplarity is itself double. First, for the Romantics 'themselves', the undefinability and constant reinvention ofRomanticism constitutes a central - perhaps even the highest - value, to be ceaselessly prosecuted and reaffirmed. 27 Second, for scholars of Romanticism, this undefinability is such that Romanticism has become the scholarly standard ofundefinability itself, given that Romanticism is so 'to a far greater extent than ... any other artistic or philosophical movement'. In this double, paradoxical movement of de-classificatory exemplarity, scholarly subject and Romantic object ultimately coincide through their mutual, incommensurable interferences. The work ofPaul de Man would itselfbe exemplary of such exemplarity, insofar as it at once relies on a sort of super-saturated historical erudition and recognizes the irreducibility of Romanticism to its own history- but can only conclude by repeatedly and ironically affirming the impossibility of satisfactorily treating or exiting Romanticism. In de Man's own words: one may well wonder what kind of historiography could do justice to the phenomenon of Romanticism, since Romanticism (itself a period concept) would then be the movement that challenges the genetic principle that necessarily underlies all historiography. The ultimate test or 'proof' of the fact that Romanticism puts the genetic pattern of history in question would then be the impossibility of writing a history ofRomanticism. 28

Romanticism, in other words, challenges, skews, and frustrates such distinctions as Peter de Bolla's, between a 'discourse on something' and 'a discourse of something' .29 To write on Romanticism, it seems, is necessarily to become unhappily Romantic oneself. 30 27 As Rosen and Zemer remark, 'Realism is both a direct outgrowth ofRomanticism and a reaction against it, a reaction that ... is predicted and accommodated by Romantic theory. If one wished (the question is academic), one could even consider Realism as simply a normal development of Romanticism, which had been constructed to absorb and appropriate just such extreme changes ... It is this measureless ambition of the Romantic artists to appropriate all forms of art, break down all barriers, that sometimes makes them seem so modem today, even anachronistically so', Romanticism and Realism, p. 23. 28 P. de Man, Allegories ofReading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 82. 29 SeeP. de Bolla, The Discourse ofthe Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 10. De Bolla, in fact, is very careful to distinguish his readings in eighteenth century British aesthetics from the mobilizations of the sublime by the Romantics. See, for example, Chapter 11 'Of the Sublime', pp. 281-300. 30 As Marilyn Butler remarks of Harold Bloom, 'Like many other latter-day pronouncements on Romanticism, Bloom's work seems itself ultra-Romantic', Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 185. See also the essays collected in M. Eaves and M. Fischer,

12

CONTEXTS

Thus we are returned to the very situation with which I began this chapter- the proclamation of abiding affiliations or identities between the 'Romantics and us'. Hence we find Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy declaring that: 'Romanticism does not lead us to anything that one might imitate or that one might be "inspired by", and this is because ... it "leads" us first of all to ourselves' .31 Or, as Marc Redfield puts it: 'If the term now primarily serves an academic institutional arrangement, it nonetheless comes burdened with enough cultural significance to pose the conundrum of our own historical identity.' 32 Certainly, one does not have to identify with or agree with this diagnosis in order to discern its prevalence. As Clifford Siskin writes of the work of Frances Ferguson, Thomas Weiskel, and David Simpson, among others: Although these were not specifically historical studies, both the displacements themselves and the assumptions about Romanticism they have left untouched, have focused our attention on a historical issue: the Romantic nature of criticism written about the Romantics. The closer the displacers looked, the more clearly they saw in Romanticism originary parallels to their own deconstructive assumptions regarding language and meaning. 33

Yet the history of Romantic criticism is also littered with attempts to write on Romanticism without thereby becoming Romantic; indeed, according to Praz, the word 'romantic' first appears as a condemnation, and we shall shortly meet contemporary theorists who have reactivated this sense of the word. 34 Which is why it is possible to state that the various positions that can be taken on Romanticism can initially be seen to fall under very definite rubrics, which can be formalized as antinomies: I) Romanticism is undefinable: Romanticism is definable; 2) Criticism is still Romantic: Criticism is not all Romantic (or, alternatively, it is now possible to describe Romanticism from a position of relative exteriority). For Kant, at least in the first Critique, the antinomies derive from transcendental reason - in accordance with its own nature - overflowing its proper limits, and thereby ensnarling itself in arguments whose thesis and antithesis are equally eds, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), in which most of the participants (including M. H. Abrams, J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Cavell, and W. T. J. Mitchell) affirm their own Romanticism, or discern its presence in others. On the other hand, and as we shall see, those writers who claim to escape or at least displace Romanticism in a way that has hitherto been impossible come to reproduce precisely the Romantic strictures they claim to have escaped. 31 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 2. 32 M. Redfield, 'Romanticism, Bildung, and the Literary Absolute', in Pfau and Gleckner, Lessons ofRomanticism, p. 41. 33 C. Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 5. Or, as Jerome McGann puts it, 'the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations', The Romantic Ideology, p. 1. Both Siskin and McGann strenuously wish to distinguish themselves from this Romantic affiliation; I will touch on their inability to do so below. 34 See Praz, The Romantic Agony, p. 12.

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demonstrably valid. Although the antinomies have no possible object of experience, they nonetheless cannot be considered mere fictions of thought; they differ from paralogisms insofar as the latter are single, subjective illusions, whereas the antinomies are objective ('cosmological', in Kant's terminology) and dual; they differ from sophisms insofar as the antinomies are essential and ineradicable results of reason. The Kantian solution to these dilemmas is to show that the propositions of the antinomies take for reality what is really only representation, and hence the pseudo-problems they pose are an irreducible effect of the motivated confusion of empirical with transcendental employments of reason. For Kant, reason in its empirical employment can finally only be regulative, not axiomatic - and yet transcendental reason ultimately determines the limits of empirical experience. If Kant's idealist solution is obviously untenable here, it does permit the provisional marking of Romanticism's disjunctive affiliation with the Kantian project, which Romanticism can ultimately neither affirm nor deny -yet it cannot elude that project's abiding force. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have argued, 'Kant opens up the possibility of romanticism ... it is because an entirely new and unforeseeable relation between aesthetics and philosophy will be articulated in Kant that a 'passage' to romanticism will become possible'. 35 I will be returning to the relations between Kant and Romanticism very shortly. What interests me here is that the possible positions enabled by these antinomies, although apparently irreducible, are in practice combined with one another, in all sorts of complex (not to mention contradictory) ways. If the thesis and antithesis of the Kantian antinomies cannot be maintained simultaneously without the most flagrant of contradictions, one of the most notable aspects of the Romantic theory I have been discussing is that it consistently attempts to affirm simultaneously - whether knowingly or not - such antithetical elements. In this affirmation, Romanticism tries to out-manoeuvre possible charges oflogical contradiction (with which it nonetheless also flirts), without simply reducing or relating contradictory elements to guiding principles of unity or totality. Hence, as we will see, various writers will in fact stake their positions on the claim that they are anti-Romantic, yet continue to work in ways that they themselves would consider exemplarily Romantic. It is my contention that the ways in which these antinomies function are often occluded, and that this occlusion further masks the subjacent conditions of such antinomian practices; that is, the interlocking problems posed by academic institutions, aesthetics, and nihilism. Which is also to say that the apparently irresolvable disputes that I have marked are de facto mobilized to mask equally uncircumventable and fundamental agreements. The irresolvable disputations about Romanticism are a central motif of Romanticism itself- and, through their selfproclaimed exemplarity, in a way that may be specific to Romanticism alone. As Pfau writes, 'the quest for a definition of Romanticism has bequeathed us a more precise sense of epistemological crisis, the historicist spirit in which localisms, 35

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 29.

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particularisms, and pluralism have been proffered as solutions perpetuates the (utopian) longing for a unified field-theory for Romanticism by dispersing it in a number of increasingly solipsistic specializations with political valences of their own'. 36 Romantic criticism, in other words, cannot help but be obsessed with redefining what it admits cannot be defined. Let me now return to those critics who - having acknowledged not only their own inability, but the ineradicable impossibility of writing on Romanticism tout court- immediately begin to re-establish Romanticism's limits. Despite all the conflicts I have already noted - for example, the stated or supposed differences in methodology, subject-matter, periodization, and so on - there are a number of shared features that constantly recur. I will begin by listing the most important of these traits, and then proceed to examine them in more detail; such a list requires an unavoidable naivety in its development- precisely because it has to contest the patency of Romanticism as exemplarily undefinable. Perhaps most strikingly, the historical periodization of Romanticism remains essentially the same, despite the ineradicable academic quibbles about precise dates, times, and places. From sometime in the late eighteenth century, to sometime early in the nineteenth, everyone agrees that an undefinable Romanticism erupted into the world as an event (as distinct from simply a 'state of mind' or a-temporal disposition). This historical schema is reproduced by a wide range of writers and across a range of disciplines. Often this periodization is simply assumed, its limits being so well set and incontestable. If Michel Foucault, for instance, can proclaim that 'the last years of the eighteenth century are broken by a discontinuity similar to that which destroyed Renaissance thought at the beginning of the seventeenth',37 or Paul de Man can reconfirm this periodization by way of an apparent complication, for instance, by remarking that 'French pre-romanticism occurs, with Rousseau, so early in the eighteenth century' ,38 their remarks remain utterly typical, and accord with every contemporary text on the issue. So if Romanticism as a 'real' event is a historical phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is also the event that ushers in History as a particular practice of writing itself. I have already cited Bann above on this very issue; as he further remarks elsewhere, 'the traditional way of accounting for the appeal of the 'new' history has been to point to the emergence, in the early nineteenth century, of a new, professional historiography, bringing with it unprecedented standards of critical accuracy'. 39 As we shall see below, the question Pfau, 'Introduction', p. 24. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 217. 38 P. de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 199. 39 S. Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 36 37

p.2.

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of the relation between 'history' and 'the writing ofhistory' proves a leverage-point for various institutional rewritings of Romanticism. Not just a historical phenomenon, then, nor simply a disciplinary development, Romanticism also simultaneously winds History into other discourses in a hitherto unprecedented fashion. This double drive ofRomanticism qua historically reflective historical phenomenon is integrally linked to the Romantic 'temporalization of the concept'. There is hardly a single commentator who has not noted this development. M. H. Abrams: 'The poet or philosopher, as the avant-garde of the general human consciousness, possesses the vision of an imminent culmination of history which will be equivalent to a recovered paradise or golden age.' 40 Michel Foucault: At the moment when a considered politics of spaces was starting to develop, at the end ofthe eighteenth century, the new achievements in theoretical and experimental physics dislodged philosophy from its ancient right to speak of the world, the cosmos, finite or infinite space. This double investment of space by political technology and scientific practice reduced philosophy to the field of a problematic of time. Since Kant, what is to be thought by the philosopher is time. Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. Along with this goes a correlative devaluation of space, which stands on the side of understanding, the analytical, the conceptual, the dead, the fixed, the inert. 41

At an altogether more abstract but entirely compatible register, Alain Badiou remarks that, 'Romantic speculation opposes Time, life as temporal ecstasy, to the abstract and void eternity of mathematics. If time is the "being-there of the concept", then mathematics is inferior to this concept. ' 42 It is important to note here that the importance of time and history for the Romantics hinges on their perhaps being determinations, and not simply conditions. 43 Whence another problem 40 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 255. 41 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 149-50. 42 A. Badiou, Conditions, intro. F. Wahl (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), p. 161. My translation. Or, as Foucault elsewhere puts it, 'In the nineteenth century, philosophy was to reside in the gap between history and History, between events and the Origin, between evolution and the first rending open of the source, between oblivion and the Return. It will be Metaphysics, therefore, only in so far as it is Memory, and it will necessarily lead thought back to the question of knowing what it means for thought to have a history ... It is enough to recognize here a philosophy deprived of a certain metaphysics because it has been separated off from the space of order, yet doomed to Time, to its flux and its returns, because it is trapped in the mode ofbeing ofHistory', The Order ofThings, pp. 219-20. 43 Or, as Abrams again puts it, 'the striking parallels, in authorial stance and persona, subject matter, ideas, values, imagery, forms ofthought and imagination, and design of plot or structure, which are evident in a number of the prominent poets, post-Kantian philosophers, writers of romances, authors of partly fictional autobiography, and exponents of the related form the Germans called Universalgeschichte- a philosophical scheme of the human past, present, and predictable future- in both England and Germany during that remarkable period of creativity, the three or four decades following the outbreak of the French Revolution', Natural Supernaturalism, pp. ll-12.

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immediately arises: where is freedom? This question of freedom rapidly becomes a question of the subjective transgression of established limits. The Romantic attack on logical identity is especially pertinent here. From Kant (who makes analytic logics dependent on the transcendental syntheses), through Hegel, all the way through Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, up to Deleuze and Derrida, Romantic thinkers have consistently contested the claims of exact knowledges to speak the truth in any adequate fashion. 44 This is a central point: if it turns out that Romanticism cannot be defined because it is in its essence historical; this fact logically prevents any definition from being offered of it. Or, to put this another way, Romanticism aligns itself with that swerve away from stasis that is constitutive of history and hence also is aligned with the supposed trajectory of the sel£ One can thus offer histories of Romanticism, but these histories can never achieve the formal clarity of a logical definition. Yet without such a definition, one cannot legitimately decide whether one is or is not indeed Romantic. And precisely because one cannot decide, this means that one is still Romantic ... With Romanticism- to rephrase this in a register whose particular significance will soon become clearer - a subject is always confronted with a singular experience of the undecidability and indiscemibility of its limit. The experience is probably double: it oscillates between a 'naive' experience of the world as knowable and an ironic apprehension of the ungrounded singularity of such an experience. One can thus immediately see the force and motivation of de Man's notorious declaration (cited above) with regards to the impossibility of writing a history of Romanticism- but also de Man's affiliation to Romanticism insofar as he takes this impossibility as exemplary. In accordance with Thomas Docherty's distinctions (in a book that is itself pre-eminently Romantic although it purports to be on postmodemity), we could refer to these three levels as, respectively, history, historiography, and historicity. As Docherty puts it, History I take here as the interiority of past events or of the referent of historiography as such. Historiography is the transcription of those events into some kind of narrative, with the concomitant loss of the referent as such ... Historicity is more difficult to describe in any simple formulation, but it involves the interior temporality of any historical referent or element of being, as in Bergson and Heidegger. 45

Such a convoluted understanding of history has any number of critical consequences, especially with respect to conceptions of the human subject. As Foucault writes in The Archaeology ofKnowledge: Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be 44 45

1990), p. 7.

This claim will be detailed in the remainder of the book. T. Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London: Routledge,

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restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject - in the form of historical consciousness - will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are two sides of the same system ofthought.46

Indeed, everyone agrees that Romanticism ushers in a new conception of the human subject. Certainly, the details of the constitution of this subject differ; just as certainly, its differences from those of'other' subjects are disputable. Nonetheless, the Romantic subject is different, and in quite particular ways. I will give numerous examples of this in the course of the book, but for the moment suffice it to provide several supporting quotations. Clifford Siskin: 'The manner in which a self written by the literary innovations of a Wordsworth became normal for Darwin, Freud, and every 'developing' individual indicates what is at stake.' 47 Or, as Tilottama Rajan puts it, 'the historical and etymological connection of the term "Romanticism" with "romance" points to a view ofliterature as an idealizing rather than a mimetic activity, a mode ofconsciousness that envisions the unreal and the possible across the barrier of the actual'. 48 Following the work ofLacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Foucault, it is even possible to say that the Romantic contests the primacy of the Kantian subject as an empirico-transcendental doublet, and this contestation is legible in every post-Kantian thinker, from Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, all the way up to Deleuze and Lacan. Furthermore, this contestation does not essentially elude Foucault's archaeological determination of modernity: 'Finitude, with its truth, is posited in time; and time is therefore finite. The great dream of an end to History is the utopia of causal systems of thought. ' 49 In its turn to history, and away from formal logics, Romantic criticism and philosophy ends by making a fateful compact with aesthetics. There are innumerable examples and evidences of this compact. As Andrew Bowie puts it, 'The rise of "literature" and the rise of philosophical aesthetics -of a new philosophical concern with understanding the nature of art- are inseparable phenomena, which are vitally connected to changes in conceptions of truth in modern thought.' 50 Stanley Rosen comments that 'the great revolution of modern philosophy, carried out in the name of certitude against the mixture of superstition and empty speculation practiced by the ancients, ended paradoxically in a philosophy of radical historicity, of poetry 46 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1986), p. 12. 47 Siskin, The Historicity ofRomantic Discourse, p. 14. 48 T. Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 13. My emphasis. 49 Foucault, The Order ofThings, p. 263. 50 Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, p. 1.

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rather than ofmathematics'. 51 Simon Critchley writes, 'Romantic naivete is the consciousness of the tranquillized bustle and anaemic pallor of everyday life, and the attempt to resist the disenchantment of the everyday with the violence of the imagination- imagination au pouvoir! ' 52 In this escalation ofthe scope and status ofthe aesthetic Imagination, Romanticism finds itself obsessed with difference, and with the differences of differences. 53 In this vertiginous meditation on difference, Romantic theory characteristically concludes by deciding that effective difference is non-predicative, unspeakable. Hence tropes of sublimity, silence, negation, catachresis, allegory, irony move- if more and more obscurely - into the centre of critical discourse. Furthermore, theory attempts to become an aesthetic act and practice in its own right. As an exemplary originary instance of such a state of affairs, one could hardly do better than invoke Samuel Taylor Coleridge's truly bizarre Biographia Literaria of 1817, which unleashes autobiography, literary criticism, philosophical remarks, table-talk and anecdotage, unpublished poetry, and travel writing, all unhappily yoked together by the bonds of a singular style. 54 My argument is that such an unstable confluence is still at work in contemporary theory.

Institution Until this point, my examination of the critical literature on Romanticism has been primarily directed towards the recurrent declarations of Romanticism's essential 51 S. Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xvi. He continues, in a number of remarks that are ultimately echoed by this book, that 'the difference between philosophy and poetry has today disappeared' (p. xvi.) and 'German philosophy from Kant to Hegel may be characterized as the attempt to combine Greek thought and Christian practice in the form of the philosophy of history . . . .it is important to emphasize the inner harmony in the great diversity of nineteenth-century postHegelian philosophy: the harmony derived from acceptance of Hegel's analysis of man as radically historical and rejection ofHegel 's doctrine of transcendental Time or History. PostHegelian philosophy from Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Marx to Nietzsche and Heidegger is for the most part the story of the development of an ontology of radical and immanent historicity', p. 103. 52 Critchley, Very Little, p. 99. Or, to cite Abrams again, 'At no other place and time have literature and technical philosophy been so closely interinvolved as in Germany in the period beginning with Kant. The major German poets and novelists (as well as Coleridge, and later Carlyle, in England) avidly assimilated the writings of the philosophers; many of them wrote philosophical essays; and all incorporated current philosophical concepts and procedures into the subject matter and structure of their principal works of imagination', Natural Supernaturalism, p. 192. 53 See Rosen, Nihilism, p. 94. 54 See S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, two volumes, ed. J. Shawcross, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

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undefinability. If one takes account of the force of these declarations - in order to compare them to the (at least as numerous) declarations to the contrary - one very quickly finds it necessary to come down in favour of the former. There are a number of reasons that justify such a conclusion; perhaps the most immediate being the simple performative contradiction involved in having to declare the possibility of Romanticism's definability at all, not to mention the historically recurrent nature of such declarations. Despite, however, the apparent legitimacy of such a conclusion (Romanticism is undefinable), I also showed how this conclusion is tacitly imbricated with a practice that demonstrates the opposite: that there is nonetheless a de facto agreement as to the historical limits, territorial locations, and theoretical procedures and tendencies ofRomanticism. This situation immediately provokes the question as to what function(s) the incessant explicit dispute over Romanticism's un-definability may serve- given that it is at once an apparently inexpungible phenomenon, and yet at odds with the practice with which it is articulated. It may therefore be suggested, in a preliminary fashion, that to belong to Romanticism entails that this belonging be explicitly thematized and called into question. But there is another, quite different question regarding the putative undefinability of Romanticism that might legitimately be posed here: is it possible to discern a consistency of place that underwrites the declaration of irreducible diversity, and from which place it would only be possible to see Romanticism as undefinable? This question has indeed been posed; its most forceful recent exponents have characteristically invoked something called 'the institution' as the primary support for their arguments. As Stephen Copley and John Whale remark in their introduction to the collection Beyond Romanticism, 'more recently there have been attempts to reassess Romanticism by posing it against other cultural institutions, notably the national, civic, military and imperial structures of culture with which it is implicated and which it is supposedly matched against' .55 Michel Foucault, for instance, famously turns not only towards the 'birth of the clinic' and the modem prison system, but also to the question of the social functions served by such 'institutions' as 'philosophy' and 'literature' and of their teaching. 56 An interest in the functionings of institutions manifests itself everywhere in Foucault's work, and he will return to the role that specific institutions play in the production of power/knowledge again and again, in what are considered his marginal as well as in his central texts. For Foucault, as is now well known, power does not necessarily function in big or 'macro' ways, but rather in very restricted and specific situations. Power is always a relationship of power, and is thus always reversible; it is, furthermore, uncircumventable. 'Power', in other 55 S. Copley and J. Whale, eds, 'Introduction', Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 56 See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) and The Birth ofthe Clinic: An Archaeology ofMedical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973).

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words, is a misnomer. There is no simple thing called power that is unified and singular, and emanates from a central point. On the contrary, effects of power issue from multiple points in the social fabric, and everyone is thus continually engaged in power struggles. Power does not repress; it produces. What such an approach enables, among other things, is the genealogical specification of the production of governmentally ratified identities. Hence we find Foucault analysing the institutional pre-conditions of modem writing, its attendant functions and functionaries: In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for contemporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic. And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely indistinguishable. 57

Foucault insists on the governmental aspects of 'literature': rather than opening the subject onto its ownmost potentialities, literature and the material sites in which it is produced rather function as a tool of social control. This institution produces typical figures (for example, those of the 'professor' or the 'universal intellectual'), whose role is essentially one of normalization. Thus 'students', during the course of their studies, are segregated from society at large, delivered over to a 'gamelike' way of life- and thereafter all the more successfully reintegrated into the reproductive circuits of society. In the wake of Foucault, Ian Hunter has argued that the teaching of 'culture' - itself derived from pedagogical-ethical techniques developed by the German Romantics- has proved a central, particularly insidious ruse ofmodem governmental power. On the one hand, Hunter can argue that 'the Romantics mark the point at which a stratum of intellectuals detaches itself from the emergent technologies of government and, in this regard at least, renders itself powerless by founding itself in a higher realm - morality, aesthetic completeness'; on the other, Hunter can show how this 'powerlessness' at the level of political decision-making nonetheless functions, despite itself, as a forceful technique of ethical self-fashioning in the service of the state. 58 Hunter's recommendation is thus 'to disengage from this practice of ethical hyper-critique that leads to no actionable outcomes' ,59 and to tum to a far more modest, 'professional ethos' which involves an 'anti-Romantic' 57 M. Foucault, Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), pp. 114-15. See also Simon During's detailed discussions of the relations between pedagogy, state power, and literature in Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy a/Writing (London: Routledge, 1992). 58 I. Hunter,' Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', in L. Grossberg et al., eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 371. See also I. Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence ofLiterary Education (London: Macmillan, 1988). 59 Hunter, 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', p. 366.

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detachment from personal concerns, a more nuanced understanding of institutional means-end rationality, and an adherence to bureaucratic procedures - finally, to produce sober, policy-centric work at the furthest remove imaginable from the stirring rhetoric of the traditional Romantic intellectual. For Hunter, the apparent indefinability of Romanticism is simply a consequence of the Romantic occlusion and dismissal of their own institutional conditions, and its projection of these very specific conditions onto groundless universal 'principles', such as 'the rights of man' or 'social development', and so on. In a consonant but slightly different vein, Pierre Bourdieu examines the constitution and constriction of thought through pedagogical inculcation in academic fields. Relying on the fact that the contemporary philosopher is almost always a homo academicus, Bourdieu exposes how the subtle hierarchies of canonical authors, recurrent conceptual oppositions, and ritual hostilities that traverse university disciplines function to occlude the capital investments that underwrite them. In the course ofhis demonstrations, Bourdieu consistently returns to post-Kantian thinkers in order to identify long-term continuities in this tradition. Hence he will declare that, beyond all their differences, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, 'have in common the annihilation of history by making alpha and omega, arche and telos, etc. coincide' .60 Bourdieu attempts to track the internal inconsistencies and errors generated by modem philosophy's diverse attempts to sever itself from its own institutional conditions through idealizing routines of auto-foundation. This is just to flag the general trajectories of a few major figures. But we also find Ian Reid discerning a Romantic 'Scene of Instruction' which continues to shape literary study today; 61 Clifford Siskin agues that 'it was during the eighteenth century that knowledge crucial to those kinds was first classified and written down within the subject-specific boundary lines that now configure the universities and the culture they helped to articulate'; 62 Friedrich Kittler shows that the discourse network of 1800 ends up as a dance of civil servants about the university of the modem educational state;63 Theodore Ziolkowski argues that the university is 'central to Romanticism'; 64 Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, and Jean-Pierre Pesron write: 'in the space of close to fifteen years, from 1802-1816, Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Hegel wrote on the University; and this intervention 60 P. Bourdieu, Meditations pascaliennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997), p. 55. My translation. 61 See I. Reid, 'The Instructive Imagination: English with Tears', in D. Coleman and P. Otto, eds, Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticisms (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1992), pp. 241-64. 62 C. Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 5. 63 See F. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer with C. Cullens, foreword by D. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 64 See the chapter 'The University: Model of the Mind', T. Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 218-308.

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reiterates that the greatest philosophers of the epoch are at the heart of debates relative to the University'. 65 I do not wish to analyse the often competing claims of these authors here, and will only outline the salient recurrent aspects of these institutional arguments. First, I wish to emphasize how such institutional critiques subordinate the explicit declarations of critical theory to the institutional circumstances of the latter's production and circulation. Following this initial circumscription and subordination, the institutional critiques tend to 1) emphasize the pedagogical aspect of theoretical work; 2) show how this pedagogical aspect is characteristically repressed, dismissed, or otherwise ignored by theory; 3) show that, in such a repression, theory falls into what Pierre Bourdieu calls a 'scholastic epistemocentrism' or into 'Romantic ideology' (theory thereby mistakes its dictates as speaking of the world itself, rather than as the simple mis-registration of the limits of its own institutional situation); and 4) show that such a scholastic epistemocentrism thereby comes to mimic or otherwise reproduce what it claims to be contesting or analysing from a position of neutral exteriority. Furthermore - and this will prove crucial later - in elaborating such arguments, institutional critiques tend to present themselves as effectively rupturing with the disavowed scholarly consensus that they analyse. Finally - and of especial import in the present context - many of these critiques explicitly denominate their opponents as 'Romantic'. What this comes down to is that institutional critique tends to have no truck with Romantic discourses of 'irreducible multiplicity' or 'essential undefinability'; on the contrary, it sees such declarations as symptomatic expressions of a self-deluding scholasticism. In the antinomian terms that opened this chapter, institutional critique most often (although not always) suggests that 1) Romanticism can be sufficiently defined or circumscribed by relating it to the institutions of the university and of literature/ philosophy; and 2) institutional critique is non or anti-Romantic. Despite the apparent divergences, however, these institutional critics of critical theory do share something with their opponents: the conviction that such theory has an irreducible relation to aesthetics, especially literature. I have already remarked this conviction in the previous section. Certainly, this conviction has been expressed in a number of modalities. Andrew Bowie, for instance, proclaims the relation as if even speaking of its existence was corrective or revelatory and his evaluation of this relation is hardly condemnatory. Critchley is even more partisan, insofar as he implicitly affirms the value of aesthetic critique. Ian Hunter, on the other hand, is damning. 'Theory', for him- emblematically literary theory- is merely the selfdelusive residues of an old professional ethos. On the other hand, all agree (along with the other critics already noted) that contemporary theory must be traced to its roots in German and English Romanticism. 65 L. Ferry, J.-P. Pesron, and A. Renaut, 'Presentation', in F. W. J. Schelling eta!., Philosophies del 'universite: l 'idealism allemand et Ia question del 'Universite, ed. L. Ferry, J.-P. Pesron, and A. Renaut, trans. G. Coffin eta!. (Paris: Payot: 1979), p. 9.

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What makes this peculiar dis-concordance all the more noteworthy in the present context is that the authorities also tend to be directly opposed on a particular central point: the force or effectivity of such theory. Hence we find John Guillory writing, in a chapter of his influential book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, that 'to speak of an "age of theory" is to recognize first of all the enormous significance of the word "theory", as the unifying name of manifestly heterogeneous critical practices'. 66 Guillory immediately continues: while the texts that constitute the canon of theory are not ordinarily literary texts, it is in relation to the literary syllabus that they can be constructed as the syllabus of'theory'. This fact is indisputable, but its significance has been missed because that significance is, precisely, symptomatic .. .The syllabus of theory has even now conquered only minor territories in disciplines other than literary criticism, and the agency for the dissemination of theory has remained departments ofliterature; for that reason the emergence of theory remains indissolubly linked to the discipline of literary criticism, and thus to the literary curriculum. Theory is last, if not first, literary theory. 67

Guillory's remarks are made in the context of a larger argument which is concerned to demonstrate a number of interconnected points. These include such claims as the emblematic theoretical proclamations regarding the supposed political effectivity of theory are themselves reflex moves within a certain kind of professional game; that this game occludes the actual functionings of the institutions in which it is housed; that such theory comes to supplement a 'certain defunctioning' in the status of literature itself, and implicitly models itself on the new technocratic procedures that have displaced literature's centrality in state and corporate life. Whatever the truth of Guillory's arguments, what interests me here is his certainty of the failure of theory to 'conquer' departments other than the literary. Although writing in the same academic context, and with reference to essentially the same central texts, David Simpson feels assured of the opposite; that the presuppositions of literary theory have insinuated themselves across the expanded disciplinary field of the humanities. Against Guillory's declaration that 'theory' has hardly spread outside the narrow confines of a literary education, Simpson - also speaking of the institutional determinations of current discourses about postmodemity- writes:

66 J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 177. 67 Ibid., p. 177. It might be suggested that Guillory's attempted restriction of theory to literature departments is somewhat insufficient and self-serving, insofar as, as LacoueLabarthe and Nancy (among many others) have argued, 'the birthplace of romanticism is situated in philosophy ... this birth resulted above all from the meeting of philosophy and literary criticism', The Literary Absolute, p. 103. That Guillory refuses to acknowledge such complicities is not simply the result of a subjective error; the remainder of this section attempts to analyse its necessity.

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CONTEXTS The major contention ofwhat follows is that the academy, which now mostly means the university, provides us with a very traditional set of terms within which to recast most of what we have to say about postmodernity, and that those terms come principally from the institutional vocabulary dealing with literature and literary criticism ... What can look like a completely new configuration of knowledge can also be understood rather more modestly as a result of the exporting ofliterary-critical categories into disciplines that had previously resisted them by being more confident of the sufficiency of their own. 68

Once again, I do not mean to adjudicate between such opposed claims here. On the contrary, I wish to argue two, related points. First, that such claims cannot satisfactorily be adjudicated. Second, that this essential irresolvability is an effect of a long-term discursive condition for theory that itself has been bequeathed to posterity by Romanticism. Indeed, the aporia, which I will note in almost every one of the writers I examine in this book - between the fraught recognition of the necessity for 'more theory' and of theory's essential insufficiency (which is most explicit in the diagnoses of nihilism I examine in Chapter Three) - is undoubtedly underwritten by these interlocking institutional injunctions. But recognizing such institutional conditions also, paradoxically, enables a more nuanced account of this turn towards institutions as an explanatory device; furthermore, it enables an explanation ofwhy such an approach tends to find itself remobilizing 'Romantic' as a denunciation. As I have already noted, the institutional turn figures itself as a rupture with more traditional critical routines. Rather than referring textual contradictions to 'social contradictions', 'the class struggle', or 'phallogocentrism', these institutional accounts tend to refer texts to the professional conditions of their production and distribution; further, to show how struggles for intra-institutional position are at once registered and disguised within the texts themselves. Such analyses often (if not always) presume that the institutional approach that they take constitutes a kind of epistemological break from the objects of their analyses; that is, that such analyses, to the extent that they are examining the pedagogical limits and regulated circulation of a certain genre of specified texts, think of themselves as doing something that their predecessors never did. This turn tends to justify itself by claiming that it is now dealing with actual empirical events in the university. 'Anti-Romantic' thus also means here anti-theoretical or, at least, opposed to a particular type of theory. Furthermore, in the course of its elaboration as a 'new' theoretical paradigm, institutional accounts require that it attack 'Theory', its immediate institutional predecessor and major rival. Hence Pierre Bourdieu denounces Michel Foucault; John Guillory exposes the coding of the inter-subjective, transferential relations on which Paul de Man's disciplinary success was founded; Ian Hunter condemns deconstruction and Fredric Jameson. For very good reasons, theory is then 68 D. Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule ofLiterature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1-2.

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(implicitly or explicitly) associated with Romanticism; 'Romantic' is reinvigorated as a term of scholarly abuse or, at the very least, as a distancing circumscription of that intimate otherness that one is trying to exceed or escape; and 'Theory' and 'Romanticism' become uncomfortably synonymous. Romanticism is rejected in favour of such supposedly unprejudiced ends as 'bureaucracy', 'the profession', or 'sociological objectivity', and so on. What, of course, has to drop out of these polemics is the possibility that such close attention to institutions, and to the specificities of their constitution and constituting power is itself a Romantic inheritance. Indeed, I would like to suggest that this massive contemporary anxiety about academic institutions is in fact nothing new; indeed, that such anxiety is one of the hallmarks of Romantic thought from the moment of its institution. Anxiety about academic domiciliation, in other words, is a foundational aspect of the Romantic project. The supposed sickness of Romanticism can by no means be cured by injecting a radical institutional solution -on the contrary, such a treatment tends only to inflame further Romanticism's characteristic tropings. Having said this, however, it is necessary to make several discriminations. First of all, I do not mean to reduce or elide the evident significance and specificity of recent institutional developments. On the contrary, something serious and unprecedented has evidently happened to 'the University'. For example, the new logic of western democracies today to call for all levels of education to define, justify, monitor and adapt themselves in accordance with the constantly shifting vocational and professional imperatives issuing from the sovereign shadows ofthe 'employment market' is evidently wreaking unprecedented transformations with all sorts of personal, political, disciplinary, and cultural consequences. 69 As Bill Readings puts it, 'It is no longer clear what the place of the University is within society nor what the exact nature of that society is, and the changing institutional form of the University is something that intellectuals cannot afford to ignore. ' 70 This ongoing transformation is so thoroughgoing and unprecedented that it has not only produced a slew ofhighly publicized, essentially transnational debates on possible directions and values that might or ought to be taken by the university as a whole, but it has impacted directly on the very possibility ofintra-disciplinary work. And it also further affects writers who would otherwise have ignored institutional conditions entirely (of whom more below). 69 For debates around these issues in a particular local (Australian) context, see I. Reid, Higher Education or Education for Hire? Language and Values in Australian Universities (Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1996); T. Coady, ed., Why Universities Matter: A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2000). 70 B. Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 2. See also J. Hillis Miller's reading of Readings's book in the chapter entitled 'Literary Study in the Transnational University', in J. Hillis Miller and M. Asensi, Black Holes/J.Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 3-183 (odd-numbered pages).

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Yet the theoretical prism through which such events are refracted remains Romantic. In order to demonstrate this, it will be necessary to look at the very abstract and formal logics of philosophical conceptions of the university, and compare them to the logics of contemporary institutional critique. What I wish to suggest is that these necessary and valuable attempts to rethink the institutional organization of the disciplines, and of institutions as essentially determining of what occurs within them, remain insufficient, at once compromised and enabled by their polemic against Romanticism. I have already given several reasons why this polemic has taken the form that it has; I now want to suggest that these accounts remain essentially correct- about both 'theory' and 'Romanticism'- but that they do not escape the conclusions they have reached about Romanticism, and in ways that they themselves necessarily fail to recognize. Furthermore, this motivated failure to escape Romanticism itself offers the opportunity to rethink Romanticism, and thereby show how its conditions are not simply institutional - at least in the ways that have hitherto been suggested.

The void at the heart of a cultured nation In the preface to the first edition ofhis magisterial Science ofLogic, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel condemns what he can only regard as the deleterious philosophical, institutional, pedagogical, personal, social, cultural, and national consequences of the Kantian metaphysical intervention: The exoteric teaching of the Kantian philosophy - that the understanding ought not to go beyond experience, else the cognitive faculty will become a theoretical reason which by itself generates nothing but fantasies of the brain - this was a justification from a philosophical quarter for the renunciation of speculative thought. In support of this popular teaching came the cry of modem educationists that the needs of the time demanded attention to immediate requirements, that just as experience was the primary factor for knowledge, so for skill in public and private life, practice and practical training generally were essential and alone necessary, theoretical insight being harmful even. Philosophy and ordinary common sense thus co-operating to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, there was seen the strange spectacle of a cultured nation without metaphysics -like a temple richly ornamented in other respects but without a holy ofholies. 71

It is symptomatic that Hegel - at the heroic inception of German Idealism - finds it necessary to introduce his summa and recapitulation of the entirety of western logic by contesting philosophy's apparent recent betrayal of its very raison d 'etre to the dictates of vocational guidance. Hegel's declaration has almost the tone of a manifesto: metaphysics has fallen; its desire to render itself merely ancillary to 71 G. W. F. Hegel, Science ofLogic, trans. A. V. Miller, foreword by J. N. Findlay (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1996), p. 25.

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the 'immediate requirements' of the present is to betray its ownmost telos; this auto-betrayal installs a void at the centre of the nation, hollowing out the latter's 'rich ornamentation' from within. Philosophy compacts with ordinary common sense, sells out its own heart as pure irrelevant fantasy, and in this unprecedented abdication and self-abnegation, condemns itself to the degraded role of speculative traffic-cop. Kant had already shown some apprehensiveness about this interpretative possibility. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, he writes: 'To deny that the service which the Critique render is positive in character, would thus be like saying that the police are of no positive benefit, inasmuch as their main business is merely to prevent the violence of which citizens stand in mutual fear, in order that each may pursue his vocation in peace and security. ' 72 For Kant, the apparently purely interdictory role played by his critical philosophy rather enables the severing of morality from speculative hubris, thinking from knowledge. The ideas of God, freedom, and immortality are thereby prophylactically sheathed from the injurious failures of'materialism,jatalism, atheism,free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition ... as well as of idealism and scepticism'. 73 Furthermore- as Kant was soon to experience for himself- what may appear to be a police philosophy is not necessarily in accord with a police state. In the preface to his 1798 tract The Conflict of the Facuities Kant cites the royal proclamation issued in 1794, which censured him for distorting and disparaging 'many of the cardinal and basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity' .74 The proclamation continues: 'We expected better things of you, as you yourself must realize how irresponsibly you have acted against your duty as a teacher of youth and against our paternal purpose, which you know very well' (p. 11 ). Kant also reprints in the 'Preface' his own defence to this governmental charge. Noting that, since he signs his name to his work he cannot be accused of any covert perfidy, Kant adds that his work was in any case too difficult and recondite for the general public. Kant argues that- in keeping with the dictates of his own critical philosophy- he would never have mixed any evaluation of philosophy and religion in his lectures. If biblical passages appeared at all (and Kant repeats here his 'great respect' for Christianity), they were cited in the service of reason's self-appraisal. According to Kant, his work could have done no harm to the public religion of the land, and such work remains both valuable and necessary given that the crown requires academic faculties to let the government know what these faculties think ought to be done. In order to clarity the relationship of the faculties to knowledge, to one another and to the state, Kant states that he has decided to publish three essays 72

p. 27.

I. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978),

Ibid., p. 32. Cited in I. Kant, The Coriflict of the Faculties, trans. and intro. M. J. Gregor (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1992), p. 11. All page references to this volume will hereafter be given in the body of the text. 73

74

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together in one volume. Despite these essays having been written 'for different purposes and at different times', they 'are of such a nature as to form a systematic unity' (p. 21). Thus framing his newly recomposed work with an account ofhis own framing, Kant launches into a discussion of his plan for a university - which is intended to reinterrogate philosophically the limits and justifications of the structures that relate university research and teaching to governmental ends. This university (much like the traditional University of Konigsberg at which Kant taught) is 'organized in terms of the four traditional faculties, the three "higher faculties" of theology, law and medicine, and the fourth or "lower faculty" ofphilosophy'. 75 Kant does not hesitate to note that this is a governmental division. Such a division, perhaps despite appearances, is not a merely empirical matter; on the contrary, it finds its grounds in the ground of reason itself. For Kant, the divisions of the higher faculties correspond to the following 'order of incentives' that governments can mobilize in pursuit of their own ends: 1) the eternal well-being of its subjects (theology); 2) their civil well-being (law); 3) their physical well-being (medicine). All three incentives deal with a different aspect of the life of the population. Teachings regarding the first have to do with guiding the interiority of subjects (their dreams, desires, thoughts); the second with regulating external conduct with public laws; the third with the vitality of the people. For Kant, however, the population, 'according to natural instinct', themselves think of these divisions in reverse order of their importance (p. 33). This inversion will prove of importance later. Each ofthe higher faculties specializes in one ofthese aspects of well-being, and each faculty is accordingly limited by the nature of its discipline. Despite these differences, however, the higher faculties are all united at a number of interlocking registers. First, their teachings are necessarily based on writings, 'as is necessary for a people governed by learning, since otherwise there would be no fixed and universally accessible norm for their guidance' (p. 33). The codes produced by these faculties are based on authority, and not directly on reason. Furthermore, these faculties require obedience for their dictates; the higher faculties are an arm of government, which can only act through them. Nonetheless, 'even when the government sanctions teachings, it does not itself teach; it requires only that the respective faculties, in expounding a subject publicly, adopt certain teachings and exclude their contraries' (p. 27). Precisely to the extent that these higher faculties are linked to external authority, to well-circumscribed disciplines and to written canons, the knowledges that they produce are public knowledges. Hence, for Kant: It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the government's command with regard to its teachings; one that, having no commands to give, is free to 75

H. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 13.

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evaluate everything, and concerns itself with the interests of the sciences, that is, with truth: one in which reason is authorized to speak out publicly. For without a faculty of this kind, the truth would not come to light (and this would be to the government's own detriment); but reason is by its nature free and admits of no command to hold something as true (no imperative 'Believe!' but only a free 'I believe'). The reason why this faculty, despite its great prerogative (freedom), is called the lower faculty lies in human nature; for a man who can give commands, even though he is someone else's humble servant, is considered more distinguished than a free man who has no one under his command (pp. 27-8).

The freedom of philosophy, however, is not the freedom to produce authoritative positive statements, at least in the terms accepted by the higher faculties and their government. Rather, philosophy freely examines, contests, and judges all claims in accordance with laws given only by reason (it has an end but no immutable canons of authority). If the higher faculties exceed their proper limits, philosophy strips away the veneer of truth and magical authority that these faculties thereby attempt to acquire in the eyes of the people who, Kant somewhat disturbingly claims, 'want to be led, that is (as demagogues say), they want to be duped' (p. 51). Philosophy's role is to prevent such an eventuality. But philosophy does not attempt to demolish the teachings of these faculties, or indeed their currency in civil society. Concerned only with the 'public presentation of truth', philosophy's 'public' nature bears centrally on learned intra-facultative conflict- which is and ought to be interminable. If it seems that Kant simply elaborates a series of metaphysical oppositions that the institutional conflict supposedly incarnates in its division of intellectualgovernmentallabour (that is, truth vs. utility, reason vs. authority, autonomy vs. heteronomy, and so on), he is equally concerned to stress that this conflict is not a war, that is, a dispute arising from conflicting final ends. Precisely to the extent that empirical means and ends are all ultimately founded in reason, empirical conflict provides evidence (perhaps the only evidence) of the activity of truth within a situation. But Kant's resolutely negative conception of the work of reason immediately ensnarls him in a serious topological aporia - where, exactly, does philosophy reside? If there are any number of subtleties and difficulties with Kant's account, I wish only to emphasize this one here: the consequent problem of the specific localization of the faculty of philosophy. Ian Hunter has perhaps been most condemnatory of Kantian critique as it bears on questions of education. In a recent essay Hunter provides a 'snapshot' of critique's 'first and central characteristic': 'Kantian criticism requires the mistrust or suspension of experiential judgments as the means of looking for their conditions in us- or in the empirical order of the world.' 76 Having underlined this central critical characteristic Hunter proceeds to draw out what he sees as its main 76 I. Hunter, 'The Critical Disposition: Some Historical Configurations of the Humanities', The UTS Review 3: 1 (1997), p. 28.

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corollaries. First, this quest for non-empirical conditions permits Kant to subordinate the 'is' to the 'ought', and hence to moralize his initial distinction. This moralepistemological distinction will then encourage Kantian critique's thoroughgoing problematization of positive knowledges (especially the hard sciences), which ends in its 'hermeneutic and developmental - in short its prophetic view of history'. 77 Hunter evidently finds the institutional consequences ofKantian critique particularly upsetting, blaming it for the displacement of the-just-as-critical-andless-metaphysical rhetorical curriculum of one such as Johann Sturm, as well as for giving birth to the principled distinction between 'instrumental' and 'critical' uses of reason. Hunter, furthermore, will argue that Kant's moral-epistemological division 'is itself a weapon in the critical problematization of the positive disciplines - the mark of a factional position within the conflict of the faculties rather than a rational resolution of it'. 78 For Hunter, Kant's 'reason' is simply a name for a particular ethical disposition with no more grounding than any other, and its subsequent success in the European university system is the index of the poverty of philosophy rather than of its ontological truth or of its opening onto a genuine subjective autonomy. Notably enough, Hunter ends up denouncing Kant for reasons that are at once very different and very similar to those proffered by Hegel (cited at the beginning of this subsection). For Hunter, Kant installs metaphysics at the heart of the discourse of the humanities; for Hegel, Kant empties the state itself of metaphysics. Hunter believes that Kantian critique is unduly moralistic; Hegel thinks of critique as utterly empty. Whereas Hunter professes 'more modest' institutional solutions in the wake of the default of critique, Hegelian dialectics turns this default into an opportunity for 'the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative' .79 For Hunter, a re-examination of Kant will show that there is not much more to modem philosophical life than a bureaucratic education; for Hegel, a bureaucratic education ought be so much more than that. I will speak more of these issues in Chapter Seven, where I discuss Hunter's work in detail; for the moment suffice it to say that neither position is entirely satisfactory, and neither evade the Kantian dilemma. What further interests me here is how both these projects, in some essential way, find themselves forced to return to the consequences of Kant's philosophical localization of philosophy in the university, and of which they cannot speak without forcibly attempting to reveal its inadequacies. As Jacques Derrida has explicated this (apparently most unsettling) aspect of the Kantian university: That the essence of the university, namely philosophy, should also occupy a particular place and a faculty within the university topology, or that Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 32. 79 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 10. 77 78

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philosophy in and of itself should represent a special competence - this poses a serious problem. It did not escape Schelling, for example ... According to him, there cannot be a particular faculty (or, therefore, power, Macht) for philosophy: 'Something which is everything cannot, for that very reason, be anything in particular'. It is a paradox of this university topology that the faculty bearing within itself the theoretical concept of the totality of university space should be assigned to a particular residence, and should be subject, within the same space, to the political authority of other faculties and the government they represent. 80

Kant, in other words, finds himself forced to localize philosophy as institutional de-localization, in which a singular place becomes the home of the universal. Yet this singular place is only the tip of the iceberg of reason, which goes all the way down. The impossibility, for Kant, of definitively locating philosophy is integrally linked to the impossibility of tracing the empirical limits of its power. As I have already indicated above, many of the contemporary disputes regarding the institutional dis-position of theory simultaneously find themselves incapable of satisfactorily delineating the extent and nature of its influence. I wish to suggest - and I will shortly give more examples of this state of theoretical affairs - that it remains im-possible for theoreticians to satisfactorily locate theory's place-power (the two problems are related), and that this is in part due to the ongoing theoretical incapacity to evade the Kantian description of the university. If, as Readings has written, the Kantian university is 'afictional institution. Reason can only be instituted if the institution remains a fiction, functions only "as if' it were not an institution', it would have to be added that Kant has evidently materially instituted a very powerful fiction of institution. 81 For, among other things, Kantian·thought marks the inaugural 'moment' at which philosophy is forced to acknowledge its sense of its own markedly declining power. But this is also the moment at which philosophy recognizes that if it is to have a home at all, this home can no longer be anywhere other than the State school itsel£ Indeed, modem philosophy will henceforth have an integral relationship to the academy; it will - and can - be nothing other than academic philosophy. From Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel through Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, this in-disputable fact will prove a constant source of anxiety about the 80 J. Derrida, 'Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties', in R. Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict ofthe Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 26. The entirety ofDerrida's essay is of interest in the present context. 81 Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 60. As Readings quickly adds, 'The achievement of the German Idealists is a truly remarkable one: to have articulated and instituted an analysis ofknowledge and its social function. On the basis of an aporia in Kantian philosophy, they deduced not only the modern University but also the German nation. The dialectic of permanent knowledge and historical tradition identified by Schelling and resolved by Schiller through the mediation of aesthetic ideology brought about an articulation of the ethnic nation, the rational state, and philosophical culture, which linked speculative reason to the reason of history itself', p. 62.

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scope, status, and force of academic discourse itself. 82 In-disputable: on the one hand, every philosopher must admit and submit to its necessity; on the other, no philosopher is able to assent to its consequences. What are the invariant hallmarks of this aporetic philosophical determination of philosophy's own role in the State academy? On the one hand, it is acknowledged that there is no longer any philosophy but academic philosophy; on the other, academic philosophy cannot be acknowledged true philosophy at all.

Contemporary analyses As Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it in a recent expression of this peculiarly fraught and contradictory position: the last two great philosophies in the history of philosophy - the works of Marx and Nietzsche which themselves, already, were not works in the proper sense ofthe word, were elaborated outside the University. This matter has nothing to do with institutions ... it is outside the University or on its fringes both that a doubly epigonal counterfeit version has noisily arrogated to itself the title of 'philosophy' and that thinkers of a quite other rigour and a quite other sobriety have continued to put being-able-to-philosophize to the test at its limit (Benjamin and Wittgenstein, Bataille and Blanchot for example). 83 82 See, for instance, the articles by Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and Hegel collected in Philosophies de I 'universite; A. Schopenhauer, 'Now, if governments make philosophy the means to their political ends, then scholars see in professorships of philosophy a trade that nourishes the outer man just as does any other. They therefore crowd after them in the assurance of their good way of thinking, in other words, of the purpose or intention to serve those ends. And they keep their word; not truth, not clarity, not Plato or Aristotle, but the aims and ends they were appointed to serve are their guiding star; and these at once become the criterion both of what is true, valuable, and worthy of consideration, and of its opposite. Therefore whatever does not comply with these aims, be it even the most important and extraordinary thing in their department, is either condemned, or, where this seems precarious, suppressed by being unanimously ignored', The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Books, 1969), p. xx.; K. Marx and F. Engels, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it', Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. S. Feuer (Glasgow: Collins, 1976), p. 286; F. Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions/Homer and Classical Philology, trans. J. M. Kennedy (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), and 'Schopenhauer as Educator' in Untimely Meditations, trans. R .J. Hollingdale, intro. J. Stem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 125-94; M. Blanchot, 'Following Kant, the philosopher is primarily a professor', L 'Entretien Infini (Editions Gallimard, 1969), p. 3; J. Derrida, The Ear of the Other, trans. P. Kamuf et al., ed. C. McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 'The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils', Diacritics XIII: 3 (1983), pp. 3-20; A. Badiou, 'What is a Philosophical Institution?', in Conditions, pp. 83-90. 83 P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 2. See also Lacoue-Labarthe's

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'This matter has nothing to do with institutions': Lacoue-Labarthe's summary dismissal ofinstitutions (in the introduction to his thesis defence, no less) might well appear to be nothing other than another instance of philosophy's a-philosophical repudiation of its own institutional conditions. I want, however, to highlight the words 'outside' and 'fringes': for Lacoue-Labarthe, these de-localizations are at least double. To be more precise: 1) the conjunction 'or'- irreducibly ambiguous here -bespeaks a subjacent anxiety that the 'outside' of the University is 'the fringes', that is, uncertainly or indeterminably outside, on the border of. 'On its fringes' simply cannot mean 'has nothing to do with' and therefore does not designate an outside-without-any-relation. What are here called 'limits'- as the conclusion of the sentence demonstrates- are of the most extreme importance for Lacoue-Labarthe himself, as for the thinkers he values. This ambiguity at once remains an index of the force ofLacoue-Labarthe's desire for an outside and constitutes a self-reflexive recognition of the im-possibility of such a desire. 2) This fringe-outside, however, is itself both good and bad. For Lacoue-Labarthe, it confronts us, on the one hand, with the noisy, illicit posturings of false, inauthentic, or bad 'philosophy' (which has no right to the name it has arrogated); on the other hand, it is also the place of those residues of that true philosophy-that-is-no-longer-philosophy (or which at least can no longer bear this name). 3) Nonetheless, there are no essential traits that would enable one to recognize this 'philosophy ofthe outside'. Indeed, it is impossible for Lacoue-Labarthe to offer any predicates that would specify such a non-philosophy; even those who produce it are 'quite other'. There is no philosophy inside the academic institution; there is no philosophy outside the institution; all that remains is the void of the name and an undefinable will-to-whatever-thatname-can-no-longer-designate, now lamentably disjunct. If the reader mistrusts Lacoue-Labarthe's somewhat apocalyptic tone, it is possible to find essentially consonant declarations in the work ofAlasdair Macintyre. Speaking of the establishment of the modern university, Macintyre remarks that liberalism 'appealed to two sets of premises, one true and one false': The true premises concerned those injustices to individuals and to groups of which the preliberal university was certainly guilty. The false premises propounded the thesis that human rationality is such and the methods which it has devised and in which it has embodied itself are such that, if freed presentation 'In the Name of .. .'in P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, Retreating the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. p. 64. This declaration repeats, in its own way, Heidegger's own practice. As Thomas Pepper has argued (in a fashion which also itself ambiguously repeats its subject), 'the ascetic tum ofHeidegger's postwar work, which insists that the 'activity' of thinking cannot fit into or be legislated by institutional constraints, boundaries or fiats, is consonant with a recognition of the need either to leave the university or to give up the university's mimetic function, in an auto-critical and sustained gesture the importance of which should not be underestimated. Heidegger may not give up the university's mimetic function, but his writing functions ever more forcefully in and as an ascesis from the university', Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67.

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CONTEXTS from external constraints and most notably from the constraints imposed by religious and moral tests, it will produce not only progress in enquiry but also agreement among all rational persons as to what the rationally justified conclusions of such enquiry are. 84

Macintyre thus essentially accuses the modern liberal university of nihilism (although he does not himself use the word). As an example of the consequences of such nihilism, he invokes the case ofMichel Foucault: Consider in this light Foucault's inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1970. There is a double movement within that lecture. On the one hand Foucault in the radical opening of the lecture catalogues the ways in which protection against the hazards and dangers of discourse has been afforded by organizational devices as different as the conventionalization of the functions of an author, the traditions of commentary upon established texts, and the standards of acceptability for propositions imposed within scientific disciplines. In so cataloguing them and thereby revealing them for what they are, Foucault neutralizes or seems to be about to neutralize their protective power, so that the dangers of the voices of discourse summoning up disorder almost become real- but not quite. For we suddenly realize that this is after all just one more conventional academic catalogue, itself an ordering, protective device, and where at the beginning Foucault had to resist the temptation to allow Beckett's Molloy to displace his own words, by the end he wishes that the voice which is to speak through his might be that of one more professor, his own teacher, Jean Hyppolite. 85

Macintyre's de-idealizing commentary here- despite its accuracy- nonetheless essentially rehearses the fundamental conviction that I have been identifying throughout this section. Macintyre shows how the most radical of modern philosophers, the most aware of the institutional impositions upon discourse, could not help but succumb to the strange exigencies he himself had been best at analysing. Yet Macintyre's own demonstration also relies on the strange aporia that I have noted: the only space for philosophy is in the academy; the academy provides no such space at all. Without explicitly saying so, Macintyre confesses that he has no real solution to this dilemma, and can only reiterate 'the importance ofthe task now imposed upon us, of continually trying to devise new ways to allow these voices to be heard' .86 The persistence of this determination is such that a good analytic philosopher such as Michael Dummett finds himself compelled to write in the introduction to a recent book on Frege that: British universities are in the course of being transformed by ideologues who misunderstand everything about academic work. The transformation is of course merely part of a transformation of society as a whole ... Those 84 A. Macintyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), p. 225. 85

86

Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 236.

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who compose what is known, in today's unlovely jargon, as academic and academic-related staff are now to be lured by the hope of gaining, and goaded by the shame of missing, extra payments and newly invented titular status. Their output is monitored by the use of performance indicators, measuring the number of words published per year. Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 having published only one short article after the Tractatus of 1922, would plainly not have survived such a system ... The universities have no option but to co-operate in organising the squalid scramble that graduate study has become, in introducing the new 'incentives' for their professors and lecturers and in supplying the data for the evaluation process. The question is to what extent they will absorb the values of their overlords and jettison those they used to have. Once more, it is the graduate students who are the most at risk, for they are in effect being taught that the rat-race operates as ferociously in the academic as in the commercial world, and that what matters is not the quality of what you write but the speed at which you write it and get it into print. 87

However true Dummett's dicta may be, it is worth emphasizing a number of points. First, the passage is worked throughout by a heightened rhetoric of outrage: 'unlovely jargon', 'goaded by the shame', 'squalid scramble', and so on. This rhetoric opposes 'good', qualititative evaluative procedures to the 'bad', mercantilist, quantitative schema required by the State. Yet Dummett's sense of moral outrage finds itself compromised by a sense of necessity: 'the universities have no option but to co-operate.' His conclusions are thus subject to a Hunterian critique insofar as they can lead to no actionable consequences, and all that Dummett ultimately has to present is nothing more than his aggrieved sense of entitlement itself. If the university, for Dummett, is becoming an impossible place, this fact hardly prevents him from maintaining his position at one of the world's most prestigious academic institutions (he is now emeritus), nor from continuing to write. Once again, we are confronted by the double logic of post-Romantic institutional critique: philosophy carmot stay; philosophy carmot go. Yet I do not mean to accuse Dummett of hypocrisy or rigorless moralism. On the contrary, I cite his remarks here in order to show how attempted accounts of recent 'empirical' developments in the university system end up falling back onto formal, essentially Romantic routines of critique - routines that, moreover, fail to live up to their own criteria of argumentative rigour. This is by no means a personal failure; my thesis, rather, presupposes that it is the symptom of more profound historical logics. Even Readings succumbs. Certainly he (no doubt correctly) points out that the University is becoming a different kind of institution, one that is no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture. The process of economic globalization brings with it the relative decline of the nation-state as the prime instance of the reproduction of capital around the 87 M. Dummett, Frege: The Foundations of Mathematics (London: Duckworth, 1991), pp. viii-ix.

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CONTEXTS world. For its part, the University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation'. 88

Yet Readings- if he himself criticizes the solutions and methodologies offered by Bourdieu and Guillory, and presents a more critical and nuanced account of what he calls the contemporary 'University ofExcellence' than does, say, Hunter- cannot but fall back into Romantic routines at the very moment that he attempts to distinguish himself from them. Hence we find Readings announcing that 'the modem University is a ruined institution. Those ruins must not be the object of a romantic nostalgia for a lost wholeness but the site of an attempt to transvalue the fact that the University no longer inhabits a continuous history of progress, of the progressive revelation of a unifying idea. ' 89 In an attempt to specifY just what he means, Readings adds: 'The late Paul de Man gave us the terms of a literary analysis that recognized the reading of literature as a necessary and impossible task; the same is true of the evaluation ofuniversities. ' 90 Readings's language and references here are themselves compromisingly Romantic, in their invocation of 'ruins', 'transvaluations', 'fractures', and aporetic formulations- this situation is compounded by Readings's evident desire not to be mistaken for a Romantic. In an analysis that confirms my own here, Niilo Kauppi has noted that even Bourdieu's success was dependent on his Romanticism. Kauppi states that 'the status of the researcher as a Romantic hero, who liberates him/herself from the chains of preconceptions and illusions, enables Bourdieu to demand larger legitimacy for his project' .91 Rather than present a supplementary or corrective account of the development of the modem university here, I wish simply to rephrase these recurrent philosophicotheoretical complaints about the academic institution in the terms that they have themselves provided. My point is thus not to refer these complaints to a more primordial zone in which they find their true conditions; on the contrary, I wish to take them as serious and fundamental problems for Romantic discourse in their own right. Taking them at their word, moreover, enables a more nuanced and less directly polemical account of Romanticism's relationship to the university than has been produced by Hunter, Bourdieu, Guillory, Readings, et al. For no matter what empirical material they adduce in support of their institutional tum, even these theorists remain caught in the post-Kantian problem of how to localize philosophy; the 'institution' itself is still ultimately figured in the aporetic terms that I have been outlining. Once philosophy has a home of its own- philosophy, after all, being responsible for the design of the modem academic institution - it is no longer at home Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 3. Ibid., p. 129. 90 Ibid., p. 133. 91 N. Kauppi, French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic Transformations in the Post-Sartrian Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 40. 88

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anywhere, at least not in the place that is most its own. Philosophy's sense of its own disappearance may then not so much be an effect of the new socio-political power accorded its emergent disciplinary rivals (which, furthermore, constantly encroach on philosophy's traditional domain), but rather the fact that philosophy has acquired too much power. Romanticism, to put this another way, reveals to philosophy the void of its own genuine, effective power. Indeed, following the nineteenth-century domiciliation of philosophy in State pedagogical institutions, the question of philosophy's own institution (in all senses of this word) thereafter becomes an uncircumventable problem for those concerned to remain within the philosophical tradition itself. Philosophy has henceforth principally to wrestle with the question of the state institutionalization of its pedagogical jUnction, and incessantly re-interrogate itself as to whether this institutionalization thereby vitiates or irremediably compromises philosophy's traditional power to speak compellingly on Being. This interrogation has not necessarily been explicit; however, it is worth repeating that the 'greatest' philosophers of modernity have all found it necessary to discuss the limits and value of the university. All of which is also to say that the modem European University, in its own founding moments, puts the value and force of the very philosophy that founds and designs it into question. But it also reorganizes and redetermines a number of other intra-philosophical topoi that may at first seem very distant from this problematic, for example, the new attention given to aesthetics, to time, and to the endlessly rehearsed lament that the era of systematic metaphysics is incontrovertibly over. 92 Lacoue-Labarthe, again: Philosophy is finished/finite; its limit is uncrossable. This means we can no longer - and we can only - do philosophy, possessing as we do no other language and having not the slightest notion of what 'thinking' might mean outside of 'philosophizing'. This pure contradiction defines an impossible situation; and in actual fact the limit is, here, as far as philosophy is concerned, that of its possibility. It is for this reason that neither adjuration nor renunciation are appropriate. 93

Such statements, as I will show throughout this book, remain an under-remarked consequence of philosophy's self-description of its domiciliation in the modem university. If, as I argued above, the institutional turn does bring out a fundamental 92 Hans Sluga points out that the declared impossibility of systematic philosophy has been a notable feature ofpost-Kantian philosophy. See H. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), esp. p. 22. 93 Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 4. As Alain Badiou comments of this end-of-philosophy position: 'It is never really modest to state an "end", a completion, a radical impasse. The announcement of the "end of grand narratives" is as immodest as a grand narrative itself, the certitude of the "end of metaphysics" immures itselfin the metaphysical element of certitude, the deconstruction of the concept of the subject requires a central category- being, for instance -whose historial prescription is still more determining, etc.', Manifeste pour Ia phi/osophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), p. 11. My translation.

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aspect of post-Kantian Romantic philosophy, at least four problems thereby also tend to be overlooked: 1) the 'academic institution' is not enough on its own to resolve the problems of defining and localizing such a philosophy; 2) this insufficiency is due to an a priori aporetic characterization of this institution, in terms that still have not been sufficiently deconstructed; 3) this aporia means that philosophy cannot simply think of itself as inhabiting the university, and this self-characterization compels it towards other zones in an attempt to re-ground itself; 4) in the grip of this compulsion, philosophy ends up: a) registering the entirety of world history as nihilistic in its essence, that is, everything (not just philosophy's own empirical home) is ungrounded; b) suturing itself to aesthetics. The next two chapters fill out this fourth claim in more detail. The void at the heart of the romantic institution

Let me conclude this chapter by repeating my hypothesis and summarizing my method. First, that those critics of Romanticism who insist on its undefinability immediately proceed to offer quite strict redefinitions ofRomanticism. Second, that, despite the polemics, these redefinitions tend to share certain recurrent features. Third, that the limits of these redefinitions can be assigned to archaeological conditions that are not strictly 'empirical'. Fourth, that these conditions are necessarily simultaneously occluded and revealed in and by Romantic theory itself. Fifth, that the registration of this situation enables not precisely its supersession or displacement, but its delineation and redescription in ways that have hitherto been impossible- that is, with respect to the topics of the academic institution, aesthetics, and nihilism. Sixth, this will ultimately enable me to categorize writers who would characterize themselves as anti- or non-Romantic as in fact Romantic. Seventh, this categorization will enable me to illuminate various aspects of work in and on Romanticism, and show how its critics are thereby forced towards certain axiomatic presuppositions, writing practices, recurrent themes, and non-conclusions. I therefore maintain that Romanticism is definable (albeit only in a paradoxical fashion), and that contemporary theory is still Romantic. However, as I also argue, being able to provide a definition ofRomanticism does not mean that one can simply become anti-Romantic by then doing the opposite; on the contrary, Romanticism - if not precisely a historical formation - still has an uncircumventable historical force. What I mean by this can only be clarified and justified by the general demonstrations and close readings that follow: for the moment suffice it to say that those who believe themselves still Romantic are essentially correct, but in ways that they are not necessarily aware of; on the other hand, those who believe themselves anti-Romantic fall back into Romanticism by way of the very gesture by which they believe that they escape it- but thereby discern something essential about Romanticism that a self-confessed Romantic might be unable to discern. The paradoxes of this situation ought not be underestimated. For if, as I am claiming,

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the Romantic problematic still cannot be surpassed, this does not mean that the denial of such an affiliation, or the contestation of what this affiliation entails, can be reduced to factors such as historical ignorance, conceptual inadequacy, or literary hubris. On the contrary, Romanticism often sustains itselfby dissimulating its own continuation in the guise of its closure. In this chapter, I have concentrated on a recurrent, paradoxical aspect ofpostKantian philosophy's institution which continues to dominate discussion today, and which might be telegraphically expressed as 'the void of its institution'. The following chapter shifts my argument to what I believe to be another determining pole for Romantic philosophy: the problem of aesthetics.

Chapter 2

Universal Anaesthesia And if it is true that [Nero] set Rome on fire in imitation of the Iliad, was there ever a more tangible homage to a work of art? In any case, it is the one example of literary criticism at work, of an active aesthetic judgment. E.M. Cioran 1

The centrality of aesthetics in romantic philosophy In the previous chapter, I examined how an anxiety about philosophy's domiciliation within State pedagogical institutions was crucial to Romantic philosophy's selfconstitution. In this chapter, I wish to complicate my introductory analyses by examining what I see as another aporetic zone for post-Kantian Romantics. To this end, I will focus on the apparently unrelated topic of aesthetics. If it is true that, as Terry Eagleton has put it, 'anyone who inspects the history of European philosophy since the Enlightemnent must be struck by the curiously high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions', the question then becomes: in what way has aesthetics functioned in and for such philosophies?2 How is it linked to the problem of the institution? Given the 'curiously high priority' of aesthetics for modem philosophy, it is noteworthy, as Alan Singer has remarked, that there is an 'increasing animus against the category of the aesthetic. This antagonism arises in art critical circles, where the pretext of political ends presupposes a reprise of the very dualism of sentiment and reason that ironically launched the aesthetic as a creditable political enterprise in the eighteenth century. ' 3 Further questions ought to be asked, however, about the status of what Singer here names an 'antagonism'. For this apparent antagonism, far from constituting a simple repudiation of 'the aesthetic', compels incessant and insistent re-elaborations of its scope and status. Very simply: on the one hand, whatever the aesthetic is, it is today impossible to assent unreflectively to it; on the other, it is manifestly impossible to leave it alone. As Hal Foster's introductory essay to an influential anthology entitled The Anti-Aesthetic has it: the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without 'purpose', all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter) subjective, E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. R. Howard, intro. M. Tanner (London: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 81. 2 T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 1. 3 A. Singer, 'Aesthetic Community: Recognition as an Other Sense of Sensus Communis', Boundary 2 XXIV: 1 ( 1997), p. 209, ft. 9.

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concrete and universal- a symbolic totality ... 'anti-aesthetic' marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid? ... More locally, 'anti-aesthetic' also signals a practice, crossdisciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g., feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular- that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm. 4

There is not a single line in the above passage that is not questionable -did the 'very notion ofthe aesthetic' ever really preswne a 'privileged realm'? Does questioning it in such a way really constitute a questioning? What does a sensitivity 'to cultural forms ... that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm' actually mean for a 'practice' (whether this practice is conceived ofas a 'theoretical' one, or otherwise)? And whence the necessity or value in any case, for such a declarative assertion, which simultaneously turns away and re-turns to an aesthetics that is at once supposedly dead and done with, and yet somehow remains un-finished? What can Foster's injunction mean for an 'aesthetics', that is, whose global generic forms are fundamentally opposed to, and discriminable from, other ('engaged political' or 'rooted vernacular') local forms, but which are or ought- the ambiguity is crucial- to be subordinated to or absorbed by the latter? As I will show, Foster's questions are themselves ventriloquized by precisely the aesthetics he would contest. His declaration provides more evidence that aesthetics invariably entails, first, a pre-reflective determination (sometimes conscious, sometimes not, sometimes surreptitious, sometimes self-evident) as to aesthetics's specific valency in this regard and, second, a similarly fraught recognition of the im-possibility of definitively separating aesthetics from its others. What, then, is aesthetics, such that it seems to entail such confusion about its scope, status, and strength? In his treatise on Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger interrupts his exegetical narrative in order to outline 'six basic developments in the history of aesthetics'. He there poses the fundamental question, 'What does "aesthetics" mean?' His answer is as follows: The term 'aesthetics' is formed in the same manner as 'logic' and 'ethics'. The word episteme, knowledge, must always complete these terms. Logic: logike episteme: knowledge of logos, that is, the doctrine of assertion or judgment as the basic form of thought. Logic is knowledge of thinking, of the forms and rules of thought. Ethics: ethike episteme: knowledge of ethos, of the inner character of man and of the way it determines his behavior. Logic and ethics both refer to human behavior and its lawfulness ... The word 'aesthetics' is formed in the corresponding way: aisthetike episteme: knowledge of human behavior with regard to sense, sensation, and feeling, and knowledge ofhow these are determined ... The true, the good, and the beautiful are the objects of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. 5 4 H. Foster, 'Postmodemism: A Preface', in H. Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p. xv. 5 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1. The Will to Power as Art, trans. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 77-8.

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Despite the considerable momentum achieved by his characteristic etymologizing, Heidegger nonetheless finds himself compelled to note: 'The name "aesthetics", meaning meditation on art and the beautiful, is recent. It arises in the eighteenth century. ' 6 This event of nomination- whatever one is to make of it- is somehow undeniably connected to the genesis of Romanticism itself and, more specifically, with the potentialities of the Romantic subject. The name, aesthetics, and the Romantic subject- qua empirico-transcendental doublet- are, in a very deep sense, born and bound together in the complicity of an interminable, radical neoteinia. Perhaps, following Heidegger, etymology can help to clarifY this point. As Michael Inwood puts it in his commentary on Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 'The Latinate aesthetica (later translated into German as Asthetik) was first used by A. G. Baumgarten (1714--62), in his Metaphysics (1739) andAesthetica (1750). It derives from the Greek aisthanesthai, 'to perceive', aisthesis, 'perception', and aisthetikos, 'capable of perception' _7 The aesthetic is thus at once act, fact, and capacity; it is integrally linked to the capacities and actions ofthe human psyche. To cite Heidegger again: 'aesthetics is consideration of man's state of feeling in its relation to the beautiful; it is consideration of the beautiful to the extent that it stands in relation to man's state of feeling. The beautiful itself is nothing other than what in its self-showing brings forth that state. ' 8 This theoretical bond between aesthetics and the subject manifests itself very rapidly. Although Baumgarten originally defined aesthetics as 'the "science of sensory knowledge" ... the term was soon restricted to designate the "science of sensory beauty." The term covers the beauty of nature, as well as of art. ' 9 Furthermore, by Hegel's time, the term undergoes a further restriction in the favour of the subject. At the beginning of his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel splits aesthetics from natural beauty, restricting the former to the theory of art- which, as a product of mind opens art onto those lofty vistas of freedom, which he refuses to the unthinking and brute facticity of the natural world. In Hegel's words, 6 Ibid., p. 79. Heidegger then adds 'But the matter which the word so aptly names, the manner ofinquiry into art and the beautiful on the basis of the state of feeling in enjoyers and producers, is old, as old as meditation on art and the beautiful in Western thought. Philosophical meditation on the essence of art and the beautiful even begins as aesthetics.' This opinion is echoed by Paul de Man, writing on Hegel: 'Nowhere else do the structure, the history, and the judgment of art seem to come as close to being systematically carried out, and nowhere else does this systematic synthesis rest so exclusively on one definite category, in the full Aristotelian sense of the term, called the aesthetic. Under a variety of names, this category never ceased to be prominent in the development of Western thought, so much so that its being left nameless until the end of the eighteenth century is a sign of its overwhelming presence rather than of its nonexistence', Aesthetic Ideology, ed. and intro. A. Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 92. 7 M. Inwood, 'Commentary', in G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. B. Bosanquet, intro. and commentary by M. Inwood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 98. 8 Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 78. 9 Inwood, 'Commentary', p. 98.

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Mind, and mind only, is capable of truth, and comprehends in itself all that is, so that whatever is beautiful can only be really and truly beautiful as partaking in this higher element and as created thereby. In this sense the beauty of nature reveals itself as but a reflection ofthe beauty which belongs to the mind, as an imperfect, incomplete mode of being, as a mode whose really substantial element is contained in the mind itself. 10

This Hegelian division of aesthetics from the natural world (which is thereby, and in an ecologically-incorrect manner, relegated to the sphere of mere utility) at once constitutes a radical departure from his predecessors (including Kant), and yet brings out, in the most direct and explicit fashion possible, what we might call the integrity of the aesthetico-subjective bond. Since Kant, to say 'aesthetics' is immediately to presume both the subject as determining-determinate empirico-transcendental doublet, and the subject as that which escapes and eludes its own determinations through the paradox of aesthetic Imagination. As Simon Critchley puts it, following Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's arguments in The Literary Absolute, 'the philosophical conditions for romantic naivete lie in the reception of Kant, specifically in the new articulation of the relation between aesthetics and philosophy that opens up in the Third Critique' .11 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 4. S. Critchley, Very Little . .. Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 87. See also A. Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy ofGerman Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997). This point can also serve to differentiate my project from that ofPeter de Bolla, The Discourse ofthe Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). This astonishing and erudite book, which makes (and justifies) the claim that 'the autonomous subject, a conceptualization of human subjectivity based on the self-determination of the subject and the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, is the product of a set of discourses present to the period 1756--63, the period ofthe Seven Years War', does so by showing how eighteenth century discourses on debt and on the sublime together produced 'a conceptualization ofthe subject as the excess or overplus of discourse itself; as the remainder, that which cannot be appropriated or included within the present discursive network of control', p. 6. What is interesting about de Bolla's book is that his history works forward, as it were; my argument here is much more restricted, and works backwards. My account is not, strictly speaking, historical; rather, I am interested in the abiding force of the specificities of the Kantian aesthetico-critical project insofar as the discursive exigencies that this text installed still regulate theoretical discourse today, and insofar as the latter still finds it necessary to take and mark its own orientation with respect to Kant, even in the mode of disavowal. To go back, 'behind' Kant in order to discern the origins of the modern subject-of-sublimity is to mistake the paradoxical gathering of very disparate traditions that Kant effected, for example, between 'taste' and 'aesthetics', and how this thereafter comes to be Romantically imbricated with the problems of the institution and of nihilism. Which, of course, is a point that de Bolla himself makes, 'The nineteenth century proper is characterized by what [Thomas] Weiskel terms ''the romantic sublime", but this I see as less a variant of the eighteenth-century enquiry than a completely distinct discourse which borrows many terms from it. It is not to be seen as a continuation or outgrowth of the discourse on the sublime since it functions and situates itself in very different ways', pp. 33--4. See also H. Caygill, Art ofJudgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), and the remarks on de Bolla's work by Francis Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics ofIndividuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. pp. 18-19. 10 11

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Or, as Frances Ferguson has argued: Kant's segregation of the aesthetic judgment enables him, somewhat paradoxically, to broach an argument that will make the aesthetic crucial to the most central aspects of inquiry in the phenomenological tradition. This involves more than formulating a definition of the aesthetic that can be defended in the name of culture or in the name of individual freedom ... the aesthetic becomes the site for an examination of the meaningfulness of the very lack of fit between objects and the individuals that perceive them. 12

The examination of Kant in this chapter relies on the validity of such diagnoses. However, I will also make a number of remarks as to where my own work departs from that of these authorities. Having isolated and identified certain regularities in discourses that proclaim themselves to be on or about aesthetics, if not 'aesthetic' artefacts in their own right, I will then demonstrate how such regularities continue to govern texts that would present themselves as repudiating or at least eluding the aesthetic dilemma. The human subject is centrally implicated in this dilemma: its essential finitude (at least according to Romantic thought) thereby comes to be- not negated or repudiated- but re-re-interrogated in a peculiarly intensive marmer, and at the same moment as aesthetics is seemingly put into question. The conclusion to this chapter- which will speak, perhaps somewhat peculiarly, of 'anaesthethics'- will then lead into Chapter Three, the final instalment in my staging of the institutional-aesthetic field around the problematic of nihilism. This conclusion will then enable me to revise the initial propositions regarding Romanticism broached above. Kant

I will begin with a brief overview of Kant's rather ponderous Critiques, in which he attempts to delineate the limits of all human knowledge whatsoever- whether cognitive, ethical, or aesthetic. Yet my objectives here are limited. For the purposes of my argument it is necessary only to delineate the basics of Kantian critique as they relate to aesthetics, the characteristic significations that the latter thereby acquired, and the range and status of the uses to which it was subsequently put; in a phrase, its retrospectively discernible Romanticism. I will summarize the relevant aspects of Kant's work, beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason, a book written in such a style that its own author would later remark that reading it was 'a disagreeable task, because the work is dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded'. 13 Kant writes that the Critique of Pure Reason will ' decide as to the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and determine its sources, its extent, Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, p. 5. I. Kant, Prologomena: To Any Future Metaphysics That Can QualifY as a Science, trans. P. Carus (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1994), p. 8. 12 13

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and its limits - all in accordance with principles' .14 With principles, that is, and not with experience. There are two formal conditions of such a critique, certitude and clarity. For Kant, all merely possible or assertorical opinions must be discarded: the critique aims, as we shall see, at the apodictic and necessary a priori foundations of all knowledge. There are two further introductory delimitations of his subject announced by Kant which must be mentioned here, although I have already implicitly presupposed them: the first is the famous distinction between purely analytic propositions or explicative statements, in which the subject and predicate of a proposition are in a relation of identity with one another (the predicate is already implicit in the subject), and synthetic statements, in which the relation of subject and predicate is not logically determinable a priori. Synthetic judgments are those whereby the predicate- though the knowledge it provides remains certain and necessary- in fact augments or increases knowledge about the subject, and which is utterly inaccessible by other means. 15 In other words, all empirical knowledge is necessarily synthetic, as - according to Kant - are all mathematical judgments. It is on the basis of this distinction that Kant asks the famous question, 'the general problem of pure reason', that will guide the remainder of the critique: how are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Kant's answer is basically, 'by means of the faculties'. But - and here is the second crucial distinction - these faculties are not themselves empirical, or rather their empirical functioning is subtended by more obscure operating programmes. These faculties are what Kant will call transcendental. That is, they provide the set of conditions whereby the empirical can appear as empirical in the first place. In Kant's words, I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts might be entitled transcendental philosophy ... such a science must contain, with completeness, both kinds of a priori knowledge, the analytic no less than the synthetic (p. 43).

('Transcendental' is not to be confused with 'transcendent', of which more later). On the way towards his transcendental philosophy, Kant delineates at least five different faculties or sub-faculties, distinct in their localization and functioning: these are Sensibility or Intuition, Imagination, Understanding, Reason, and Judgment. As the at least nominally universal faculties of the human mind, they supposedly work together to produce that (representational) realm of phenomena 14 I. Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 9. All further references to this volume will be marked in the body of the text. 15 For a detailed account of the antecedents and descendents of- not to mention the subtle mutations undergone by- this distinction, see J. Proust, Questions of Form: Logic and the Analytic Proposition from Kant to Carnap, trans. A. A. Brenner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

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which constitutes the universe as a universe for us, and which is opposed to the realm which Kant- with little or no apparent consistency- sometimes calls Thingsin-Themselves (the famous Ding an sich), and sometimes the 'noumenal'. I will go through all these divisions one by one.

Intuition. In the section entitled 'The Transcendental Aesthetic' Kant speaks of the first of the faculties, sensibility or intuition. This faculty turns whatever it receives into sensations that thereby seem to conform to spatio-temporal localization. Intuition is passive and receptive, but in being so receptive also forms or in-forms the given by distilling it through the pure and empty forms that are space and time. Neither space nor time for Kant are empirical concepts: in fact, they cannot be experienced at all, precisely because they are the necessary transcendental or a priori grids for the possibility of experience itself. However, these pure forms of space and time are not quite symmetrical: whereas space is the formal a priori condition of external appearances alone, time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever, including those internal to the subject itself. Kant states 'All our knowledge is thus finally subject to time, the formal condition of inner sense' (p. 131). Furthermore, the matter ofthe sensations formed by intuition are meaningless in themselves, nothing but a diverse sequence of aleatory sensations, colour and light, sound, taste, pleasure, and pain. Before the mind can do anything with them, these sensations must be further synthesized by the other higher faculties. Imagination. Presented with the sensuous manifold acquired by intuition, the imagination in turn shapes it and presents it to the understanding. The imagination thus plays at being, at least in the first Critique, a sort of mediator between intuition and the understanding, with all the sorts of secondary connotations that such a role usually implies: Kant himself says relatively little here about this faculty other than to affirm its role as that which reproduces and presents data to the higher faculties of understanding and reason. Yet: we must assume a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination as conditioning the very possibility of all experience. For experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances. When I seek to draw a line in thought, or to think of the time from one noon to another, or even to represent to myself some particular number, obviously the various manifold representations that are involved must be apprehended by me in thought one after the other. But ifl were always to drop out of thought the preceding representations ... and did not reproduce them while advancing to those that follow, a complete representation would never be obtained (p. 133).

It is critical to add that the imagination does not represent, but rather presents, and that its mediatory role in the first Critique will be radically expanded in the

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third, where Kant will even assign it 'Ideas' of its own. This is a very delicate point. 16 As Heidegger will claim, this apparently mediatory role of the Imagination functions to occlude its centrality in the structure of the subject: 'the transcendental power of imagination reveals itself more and more as structural possibility, i.e., in its making-possible of transcendence as the essence of the finite self' .17 Heidegger points out that Kant himself shrinks back from the full consequences of his original recognition, from the 'unknown root' that unsettles the imagination, and humankind itself. 18 This 'critique of the Critique' is of particular interest in the present context, given that it is precisely the Imagination that the Romantics will valorize in their more general contestation of the limits of pure reason. More on this later.

Understanding. We now come to the faculty of the understanding itself, which for Kant is really the only faculty that thinks. And it does this by way of the famous tables of categories; these categories are centrally involved in the production and structuring of experience. They therefore also provide the conceptual underpinnings ofall veridical discourses regarding phenomena. All such discourses must necessarily rout themselves through the elementary and foundational discriminations made available by these categories. Kant provides two tables of categories: the first concerns the modes ofjudgment pertinent to the understanding; the second draws on these modes in order to specify concepts of the object-in-general. There are twelve categories in all, which fall neatly under four headings: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality. According to the first table, that of the logical extension ofjudgments, Quantity can be assigned according to the functions of universal, particular, and singular, Quality can be affirmative, negative, and infinite. Relation is categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, and Modality alternatively problematical, assertorical, or apodeictical. In the second table, the 'transcendental table of the pure concepts of the understanding', we have under Quantity, Unity (the measure), Plurality (the quantity), Totality (the whole), under Quality, Reality, Negation, Limitation, under Relation, Substance, Cause, Community, and under Modality, Possibility, 16 See Howard Caygill's discussion of'Imagination' inA Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 246-9. 17 M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, fifth edition, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 109. 18 See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, especially '§31. The Originality of the Previously Laid Ground and Kant's Shrinking-Back from the Transcendental Power oflmagination', pp. 112-20. 19 See Kant, Prologomena, p. 61. Incidentally, Nietzsche- who absolutely abominated Kant, calling him variously 'an idiot', a 'catastrophic spider' and 'the greatest conceptual cripple who ever lived'- also disparagingly referred to these tables as 'a joke', adding that 'jokes like this belong in comedy, not philosophy'. See Twilight ofthe Idolsffhe Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. M. Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), and Beyond Good and Evil: Preface to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. with intro. and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 23-4. Or, as Hegel wrote in his own his famous Preface, 'the triadic form must not be regarded as scientific

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Existence, and Necessity. 19 For Kant, the categories are 'concepts of an object in general', and 'nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience' (p. 138): they thus determine the relations in a proposition or judgment: a) between the subject and the predicate; b) the ground to its consequence; and c) the elements of a set or members of a species to one another and, finally, to all things in general (p. 323).20 Understanding thus at once works with concepts which mesh with the sensuous manifold of intuition and ensures the unity of appearances by means of rules. Working together, these faculties mutually condition experience, and constitute the realm of appearances or phenomena (which are thus to be considered 'representations' in a specific sense of this word) for the subject: their primary modus operandi is that ofsynthesis. Passive in their receptivity, each faculty actively treats the empirical material that it is given according to its own specific synthesis. These are as follows: sensibility- synthesis of apprehension, which holds objects together in time and space; imagination - synthesis of reproduction, which 'reproduces' this object and presents it to the understanding; understanding- synthesis of recognition (the subsumption of a particular object under its general concepts). Thus, in Deleuze's words, 'Synthesis is the determination of a certain space and a certain time by means of which diversity is related to the object in general, in conformity with the categories' .21 Judgment. This is where the faculty ofjudgment comes into play. Although in the first Critique Kant will attempt to domicile judgment in the understanding itself, it soon becomes clear that the understanding cannot take responsibility for all possible judgments, some of which are necessarily a-cognitive. Howard Caygill has been particularly attentive to the peculiar aporetics of the Kantian text on this point. As he writes in his Art ofJudgement, In the first Critique the aporia of judgement manifests itself in two related guises. The first is in the difference between judgement's subsumptive and discriminative modes, and has already been encountered in the procedure of the critical tribunal . . . But how can judgement give itself a rule for distinguishing whether or not something stands under a given rule, or whether it can be made to do so? It cannot do so, in 'general logic', which when it is reduced to a lifeless schema, a mere shadow, and when scientific organization is degraded into a table of terms. Kant rediscovered this triadic form by instinct, but in his work it was still lifeless and uncomprehended', G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, with analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 29. I return to this play between 'threes' and 'fours' below. 20 As Deleuze puts it, 'The understanding makes use of a priori concepts which are called "categories"; if we ask how the categories are defined we see that they are both representations of the unity of consciousness and, as such, predicates of the object in general', Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 16. 21 Ibid., p. 18.

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is concerned only with the forms of concepts, because 'if it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in its turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgement' ... Judgementpower underlies and exceeds its distribution in terms of discrimination and subsumption. It evokes a similar aporia in transcendental logic, where it is deemed to give rules for its own application. 22

Hence Kant is finally forced to decide that, unlike the other faculties, judgment has no specific realm of its own but is rather put into play across the other faculties: it is, in Kant's terms, a bridge and a medium of transition. And as we shall see, if 'judgment' is not absolutely localizable, every judgment takes place under the aegis of one or another of the higher faculties, and its relative scope and status will thereby differ accordingly, depending on the type ofjudgment being offered. Now the validity of cognitive judgments, if certainly always subject to falsifiability and third-party verification, are such only insofar as they are applied to representations alone and do not illicitly become vehicles for smuggling the noumenal into the phenomenal realm. This is thus Kant's attempt to legitimate or ground scientific truths: such truths are produced when all three of the other faculties line up or harmonize with each other; errors involve an internal, subjective dissensus between the faculties. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, 'Kant substitutes, for the traditional concept of error (error as product in the mind of an external determinism), that of false problems and internal illusions.' 23 The truths produced by the understanding are determining to the extent that Kant will name them 'constitutive'. But this is not where the Kantian critique ends, and 'truth' for Kant is by no means simple or singular as it may seem (or has been held to be). Now the third and final of the aforementioned syntheses, that of 'recognition', is also strictly bound up with what Kant calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception', which seems to be identifiable with consciousness, or the I, itself: There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode ofknowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception. That it deserves this name is clear from the fact that even the purest objective unity, namely, that of the a priori concepts (space and time), is only possible through relation of the intuitions to such unity of consciousness. The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifoldness of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility (p. 136).

It is crucial to emphasize that this 'I think' is in no way empirical, for an empirical self-consciousness would be incapable of providing a base for anything other than an aleatory flux of disjoint sense-impressions. On the contrary, the transcendental 22 23

Caygill, Art ofJudgement, p. 4. Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy, p. 25.

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unity of apperception must be prior to and condition all possible experience, thereby referring all phenomena to a subject's identity. 24 The 'I think' thus allows intuitions to be taken as objects of knowledge and permits their ordering and synthesis by the understanding. The transcendental 'I think' finds its objective correlate in the famous 'non-empirical, transcendental object= x' (p. 13 7). This purely intelligible object (which is in no way intuitable) can be said to be 'given in itself prior to all experience' (441 ); it is the thought of the object in general.

Reason. Yet it seems that the status and location of this 'I think' and its object cannot be so simply elaborated, and even Kant himself cannot be satisfied with his apparently dogmatic initial localization of pure consciousness in the faculty that is the understanding. And the reason for this uncertainty is, ironically, Reason itself. As the highest of the faculties - placed even above the Understanding - Reason thus cannot be thought according to the forms of the three lower faculties, which can function only when filled out by the empirical experience that they synthesize. In other words, Reason has its reasons that understanding cannot know. Reason is thus transcendent to the understanding, and the concepts with which it deals cannot be submitted to any empirical employment. Indeed, it has no concepts, but rather only Ideas: the ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality. It is thus also the residence of the moral law. As Nietzsche sarcastically summarizes this aspect of Kantianism, 'The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative. ' 25 For Kant, reason's nature is such that it continuously attempts to exceed the transcendent realm that is its province in order to apply its Ideas to the real, phenomenal world. When this occurs reason gets itself ensnarled in all sorts of conceptual difficulties and errors, or what Kant often refers to as 'subreptions'. Hence the famous paralogisms and antinomies of pure reason, whereby understanding breaks down in an attempt to represent to itself and/or apply to the real world its own non-empirical and non-immanent Ideas. Reason, however, is not thereby completely divorced from the phenomenal world. As Kant puts it in the second Critique: The theoretical use of reason is concerned with objects of the merely cognitive faculty, and a critical examination of it with reference to this use deals really only with the pure cognitive faculty, because the latter raised the suspicion, which was subsequently confirmed, that it might easily pass beyond its boundaries and lose itself among unattainable objects or even among contradictory concepts. It is quite different with the practical use of reason. In the latter, reason deals with the grounds determining the 24 As Alain Badiou puts it, 'This supreme function of the understanding, guarantee of the general unity of experience - therefore the "law of the one" - is called "original apperception" by Kant', Court traite d 'ontologie transitoire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998), p. 154. My translation. 25 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, p. 50.

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will, which is a faculty either of bringing forth objects corresponding to conceptions or of determining itself, i.e., its causality to effect such objects (whether the physical power is sufficient to this or not). For here reason can at least attain so far as to determine the will, and, in so far as it is a question of volition only, reason does always have objective reality. 26

The division between 'pure' and 'practical' uses of reason, also finally corresponds to a number of other fundamental divisions in Kant; between efficient causality and teleological causality; between the real and the intelligible; between sensible and supersensible; between science and ethics, and so on. But this stringent division is also why Kant has such trouble localizing the ego. In Eagleton's words: The subject, the founding principle of the whole enterprise, slips through the net of representation and figures in its very uniqueness as no more than a mute epiphany or pregnant silence. If the world is the system of cognizable objects, then the subject which knows these objects cannot itself be in the world, any more than (as the early Wittgenstein remarks) the eye can be an object within its own visual field. The subject is not a phenomenal entity to be reckoned up along with the objects it moves among; it is that which brings such objects to presence in the first place, and so moves in a different sphere entirely.27

But if the 'I' of the subject cannot be phenomenal, it cannot, by the same token, be altogether noumenal either, for, as Zizek puts it, 'Kant is compelled to define the I of transcendental apperception as neither phenomenal nor noumenal because of the paradox of auto-affection; if I were given to myselfphenomenally, as an object of experience, I would simultaneously have to be given to myselfnoumenally. ' 28 But if this is the case, then the 'I' for Kant cannot be a unified or unifying force if one understands these determinations in their common-sense signification, but is rather a primordially bifurcated and paradoxical non-entity which sutures two ontologically incommensurable registers ofBeing. And yet these registers must somehow coincide. In other words, Kant's name for this primordial ontological dehiscence is, precisely, identity. But what then assures the unity and consistency of this peculiar identity, 'identity' at this historical moment being, as Rodolphe Gasche points out, 'only a conceptual tool for establishing differences, and not an ontological principle'?29 Ifl may be permitted to jump ahead for a moment, it is worth mentioning here that these difficulties with the transcendental unity of apperception have provided a target that many subsequent philosophers have attempted to hit. With reference to recent theorists whose work will concern us later, it might be noted that, when Deleuze, Lacan, and Althusser attack or give revised accounts of the workings of 26 I. Kant, Critique ofPractical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 15. 27 Ea~leton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 72. 28 S. Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique ofIdeology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 16. 29 R. Gasche, 'Yes Absolutely: Unlike Any Writing Pen', in E. Laclau, ed., The Making ofPolitical Identities (London: Verso, 1994), p. 82.

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'recognition', these critiques are levelled first at Hegel, and then at the Kantian faculty of understanding. For Hegel's 'model of the synthesis of social substance by mutual recognition', as Robert Brandom puts it, means that 'community constitutive recognition is transitive de jure ... one must recognize those who are recognized by those one recognizes'. 30 And if the Hegelian account of recognition thus also presupposes a reciprocal if hard-won symmetry of equal individuals before the law, the Kantian account presupposes - or seems to presuppose - that all individuals can only recognize according to the categories. As one can see, for example, for the French post-structuralists in particular, the ego is not only itself a pathological formation, but the supposed recognitions it engages in are always already 'misrecognitions ', whether these are considered to derive from imaginary narcissistic and intra-psychic relations (a Ia Lacan) or from the social law's interpellatory force (a Ia Althusser): hence there is never simply an object to bring under any concept, and the concepts themselves are skewed from the start. In other words, the subject is pathological, its concepts are deformed and deforming, and any possible applications of these concepts can never quite work as they are meant to, if they are not obscenely violent from the first. Lyotard, for instance, will attack understanding by recasting the nature of the imagination: sometimes the faculty of presentation does not present an excess to the understanding (which is bad enough), but in fact 'too little' or 'almost nothing', a presentation which cannot be recognized as anything (even if the categories functioned as Kant would like to claim) and with which understanding therefore cannot work. 31 This subjective split impels Kant to invoke the aesthetic. As he states at the beginning of the Critique of Judgement: 'Understanding and reason, therefore, have two distinct jurisdictions over one and the same territory of experience. But neither can interfere with the other. For the concept of freedom just as little disturbs the legislation of nature, as the concept of nature influences legislation through the concept offreedom.' 32 Kant continues: There must, therefore, be a ground of the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis of nature, with what the concept of freedom contains in a practical way, and although the concept of this ground neither theoretically nor practically attains to a knowledge of it, and so has no peculiar realm ofits own, still it renders possible the transition from the mode of thought according to the principles of the one to that according to the principles of the other (p. 14).

As de Man writes of Kant's remarks: 30 R. Brandom, 'Heidegger's Categories in Being and Time', in H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall, eds, Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), p. 53. 31 See, for instance, J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, foreword by F. Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 32 I. Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, trans. with analytical indexes J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 13. All further references to this text will appear in the body of the book.

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the third Critique corresponds to the necessity of establishing the causal link between critical philosophy and ideology, between a purely conceptual and an empirically determined discourse. Hence the need for a phenomenalized, empirically manifest principle of cognition on whose existence the possibility of such an articulation depends. This phenomenalized principle is what Kant calls the aesthetic. The investment in the aesthetic is therefore considerable, since the possibility of philosophy itself, as the articulation of a transcendental with a metaphysical discourse depends on it. 33

Or, as Lyotard puts it, The task assigned to the Critique ofJudgment, as its Introduction makes explicit, is to restore unity to philosophy in the wake of the severe division inflicted upon it by the first two Critiques. One reading, correct but overly confident in the letter, sees this task accomplished in the regulative Idea of a finality of nature that is introduced in the second part of the third Critique. 34

It is by means of this idea of a finality of nature, whereby Beauty - as for Plato but now in a totally reconfigured sense - becomes the symbol of the Good, that Kant hopes to bridge the gap that he himself has opened up between cognition and freedom. 35 Kant thus returns to Judgment afresh, in order to make of it a 'middle term between understanding and reason' (p. 15), and thus between the efficient causality governing appearances and the categorical freedom of the supersensible. This move will be effected through a new account ofthe scope and status of aesthetic judgment, and depends on a new distinction that fractures the faculty ofjudgment itself. Above I spoke ofhow the understanding judges by subsuming any particular object under the categories: this aspect of judgment will now be known as 'determinative', and is opposed to, or rather distinguished from, what Kant will call 'reflective judgment'. Whereas determinative judgment proceeds by way of universal concepts or categories that are, in a sense, 'hard-wired' into the faculty of the understanding itself and to which any particular sensible intuition is necessarily referred, reflective judgments begin from no such universality. On the contrary, as Derrida puts it, 'the reflective judgment has only the particular at its disposal and must climb back up to, return toward generality'. 36 Furthermore, determinative judgments are essentially 33 P. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. and intro. A. Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 73. 34 J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 1. 35 As Andrew Bowie puts it, 'In order to find a bridge between the causally determined world of appearances and the realm of reason, the realm of "purposes" led by moral imperatives, Kant has to appeal to an aspect of the world of appearances which cannot be finally subsumed into conceptual judgements', From Romanticism to Critical Theory, p. 50. 36 J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 51.

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judgments of recognition. A determinative judgment serves a discriminatory and critical cognitive function, and finds its grammatical expression in propositional forms: this thing is X. A reflective judgment is, in contrast, a judgment in search of its own principle. Such a 'transcendental principle', however, 'the reflective judgement can only give as a law from and to itself. It cannot derive it from any other quarter (as it would then be a determinant judgement)' (p. 19). Reflective judgment, in other words, proceeds by way of an inverted and purely subjective encounter or event, and provides Kant with a basis on which to refound the aesthetic. For Kant, aesthetics begins in a feeling of pleasure or unpleasure, and its concomitant expression in only apparently propositional forms such as 'X is beautiful'. It is important to stress the ambiguity of the Kantian text on this point, for it is finally difficult to tell whether the expression of the feeling 'X is beautiful' is indeed the expression of a feeling or subjective state of affairs, or rather ifthe act of expression coincides precisely with the state of affairs: in the latter case, the utterance 'X is beautiful' will have been the aesthetic judgment itself, as a determinant judgment domiciling itself according to the promptings ofthe reflective. It is also crucial to emphasize the different status ofthe copula in reflective judgment, which cannot yet be an assertion of identity or existence but is rather, in Lyotard's words, 'the synthesis we are able to make of random data without the help of preestablished rules of linkage' .37 It thus constitutes a parataxicallinkage. (An incidental remark here: as further evidence ofthat profound aestheticism that I will argue has insinuated itself into contemporary philosophy and theory, it is worth mentioning that both Deleuze and Lyotard will play on the homophony in French of the 'est' and the 'et' in order to plump in favour ofthe latter.)38 Like existence, then, beauty is not a predicate. And if the aesthetic judgment resembles the logical judgment in that 'it may presupposed to be valid for all men', and 'moral' in that it is experienced as freedom, it requires a necessity and universality 'without concepts'. Reflective aesthetic judgment is free, disinterested, a-conceptual, and absolutely singular, and it is the unpredictability and undecidability of the aesthetic encounter (and its almost necessary failure) that lends it its peculiarly slippery quality - at least from the point of view of categorical thinking. There is also a sense in which reflective judgment is the simulacra! repetition of the determinative, for the former constantly proceeds as ifit were determinative, all the while 'knowing' that it is not (there would then thus also be a strict homology 37 J.-F. Lyotard,Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 5. 38 See G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 16; and J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), for example, 'Parataxis thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defying it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention)', p. 66.

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here between reflective judgment and Gayatri Spivak's 'strategic essentialism', not to mention those Lacanian accounts of fetishism which define the latter as 'I know very well, but all the same .. .'). 39 Ifreflectivejudgment thus proceeds from the singular to the general by pretending to subsume the particular under the universal, this repetition can unfold only on the basis of a self-dissimulating temporal reversibility which, again, is reminiscent of the metaleptic reversal of Freudian 'deferred action': the effect is the cause of what appears to be the cause, due to an uncircumventable structural exigency which camouflages its own true operations. 40 As Kant will write in the second part of the Third Critique, 'The Critique ofTeleological Judgment': we are able to think a causal connexion according to a rational concept, that of ends, which, if regarded as a series, would involve regressive as well as progressive dependency. It would be one in which the thing that for the moment is designated effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it was said to be the effect. In the domain of practical matters, namely in art, we readily find examples of a nexus of this kind (p. 20).

If Kant is already trying to fudge the distinction between art and nature through a thoroughgoing organic metaphorization that ultimately renders real cause and effect an intelligible reciprocity of means and ends, he thereby only underlines all the more clearly the paradoxes of the aesthetic, its ineradicable in-betweenness, its faltering ambiguity, its susceptibility to contestation and reversal. And that this ambiguity of the aesthetic is truly nothing natural. For Kant, pure aesthetic reflection must be a question of the subject, not the object; furthermore, this irreducibly subjective aspect of the aesthetic must be in principle incapable of being brought under a concept: 'That which is purely subjective in the representation of an Object, i.e. what constitutes its reference to the Subject, not to the object, is its aesthetic quality ... that subjective side of a representation which is incapable of becoming an element of cognition, is the pleasure or displeasure connected with it' (p. 29). Yet this pleasure, however singular, must be communicable and in principle universal. Kant in fact states this in a 'definition': 'The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally' (p. 60). As Lyotard remarks, The pleasure of the beautiful promises, demands, gives the example of a communicated happiness. There will never be proof that this happiness 39 See, for example, Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 51, and the work of Slavoj Zizek, especially For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991). 40 See Lyotard on this point: 'Nachtriiglichkeit thus implies the following: 1) a double blow that is constitutively asymmetrical, and 2) a temporality that has nothing to do with what the phenomenology of consciousness (even that of Saint Augustine) can thematize', Heidegger and 'the Jews', trans. A. Michel and M. Roberts, intra. D. Carroll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 15.

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And what permits the aesthetic presentation to be universally valid is the 'free play' of imagination and understanding. Reflective judgment allows an accord between imagination, the faculty of presentation, and either reason (the faculty ofldeas) or the understanding (the faculty of concepts). Its dictates can only be regulative; they cannot be submitted to the verification procedures of empirical enquiry. It is at this point that Kant introduces his famous distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Although both the beautiful and the sublime are singular reflective judgments, and, in their quantity 'profess to be universally valid in respect of every Subject' (p. 90), are in their quality without-interest, in their relation have subjective finality, and are necessary in their modality, that is where the similarities end. The differences are spectacular: 'the beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid ofform, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality' (p. 90). The beautiful, tied to limitation and to form,. restful for the mind, involves the 'presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding' (p. 90). The sublime, on the other hand, tied to limitlessness and with no finality of form at hand, involves the 'presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason' (p. 91 ). There is no taste, only an abyss offeeling in the sublime, and Kant's descriptions of the effects and affects of the latter are exceptionally varied and vivid: 'negative pleasure', 'admiration/respect', 'outrage', 'chaos', 'disorder and desolation', 'movement of the mind'. As de Man puts it, 'instead of informing us, like the beautiful, about the teleology of nature, it informs us about the teleology of our own faculties, more specifically about the relationship between imagination and reason' .42 The sublime involves a kind of self-reflexive reflection, that 'recoils upon itself' (p. 100). Itself split into two subdivisions, the 'mathematically sublime' (what is 41 Lyotard, Reflections on the Analytic ofthe Sublime, pp. 18-19. See also Lyotard 's essay' Sensus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi', in E. Cadava et al., eds, Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), where he remarks of the 'unintelligence' of the sensus communis that 'if thought, insofar as it is philosophical, consists in thinking by concepts, then with the sensus communis philosophy touches on that thought that is not philosophical, touches on it precisely because it cannot handle it', p. 218. Eagleton tends towards a straightforward simplicity on this point, 'Aesthetic intersubjectivity adumbrates a utopian community of subjects, united in the very deep structure of their being', The Ideology ofthe Aesthetic, p. 97. 42 de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 73.

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absolutely great, beyond comparison) and the dynamic sublime (an apparition of nature as 'might without dominion', fear without danger}, the sublime provokes in us a 'respect for our own vocation, which we attribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our own self- the Subject)' (p. 106). 43 Hence also what might be called a certain perversion of and within reflective judgment itself: the ineradicable possibility that the feeling of respect attendant upon the sublime is diverted away from the subject by the subject itself, toward the non-object that was the occasion for the epiphany. In any case, the sublime encounter will only have been able to be recognized as such after the fact, given that, as Deleuze puts it, such an encounter 'is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible. It is imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition'. 44 With reference to the sublime, the aesthetic critique moves from the 'more than something' (pleasure at the form of beauty) to that 'almost nothing' (displeasure at the formlessness of sublimity) which is, in fact, 'more than everything' (freedom); moreover, all of this occurs in such a way that it is no longer possible to decide whether this is a matter best dealt with by empiricism or by formal idealism.

Some ramifications of Kantian aesthetics Let me briefly summarize the astonishing variety offorms and functions that Kant assigned to the aesthetic, in order to show how and in what ways his paradoxical and powerful conception still ventriloquizes contemporary theory. First of all, the aesthetic object is fundamentally an alienated object or, rather, the aesthetic event impels the affected subject into a supplementary elaboration of an object, which, strictly speaking, does not exist. Furthermore, it is precisely aesthetic judgment that self-reflexively reminds the very subject that that judgment is thereby in the process of constituting that the subject is itself the terrain on which an object qua object can appear at all. Nonetheless, it is also always possible that this reminder be perverted or go unnoticed (that is, in the tempting yet illicit attribution ofbeauty or sublimity to an object), and the subject can thus only ever be poised at the limits of its own essential forgetfulness. Aesthetic judgment thus frustrates all rational categories and all logical judgments. In a judgment of taste one is confronted by a representation of an object without determinable properties or, rather, by a 'presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding'. In a 43 I shall return to the distinction between mathematical and dynamic sublimes in more detail in Chapter Four, where it will prove indispensable in my examination ofLacan's 'formulas of sexuation'. 44 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 140.

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sublime judgment, one is presented with an object massively inferior to its idea and effects. Or, as Nancy puts it, 'One must learn- and this is perhaps the secret of the sublime as well as the secret of the schematism - that presentation does indeed take place but that it does not present anything ... One could no doubt say, in a certain vocabulary, that it presents nothing or the nothing. ' 45 (The nothing? The previous chapter examined how philosophy considered its localization in the modem university as an irremediable self-voiding; the following chapter examines the coterminous efflorescence of the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism - there are many nothings about!) In other words, reflective judgment reminds the subject that neither the subject nor its objects can function as a firm ground for cognition. The aesthetic object is thus subtracted from the net of efficient causality, and to this extent it must be considered free and autonomous- in a word, beautiful or sublime. Psychologically speaking, such judgment is merely pleasure or pain, or some paradoxical intermingling of the two, but it finally tends towards the eclosion of a subjective freedom that is essentially in-sensible. There are innumerable consequences of this attribution, which can perhaps be further clarified by examining the aesthetic judgment as a use of language. In its grammatical form, the aesthetic judgment mimes the form of determinant judgment (that is, s is p ), yet this very mimicry engages what Derrida might call 'the supplement of copula' .46 Given that, as Lyotard points out, the aesthetic judgment then happens, grammatically speaking, acijectively or adverbially, such a manner can only promise, without ever truly delivering the subject. 47 (This promise, as I will show in the following chapter, is integrally linked to the extraordinary priority accorded images of childhood, of infancy, of in-communicability, of subjective finitude, by Romanticism. 48 ) Because a true determinant judgment is apodictic, it is essentially incontestable (other than by the delusions or malice oflies and madness); in contrast, the adverbial or adjectival status of aesthetic reflective judgment places it in the register of rhetoric (and not simply in those of grammar or logic). And, as rhetorical utterance, reflective judgment must function as both trope and persuasion, for judgment's object does not really exist (hence the irreducible troping involved in the judgment at all), and its force must be indeterminate (there is no possible proof of a successful aesthetic judgment). 45 J.-L. Nancy, 'The Sublime Offering', in J.-F. Courtine eta!., Of The Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. with afterword by J. S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 47. 46 See J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. with notes A. Bass (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 175-205. 47 See Lyotard, Reflections on the Analytic of the Sublime, p. 20. 48 Not only Lyotard, then, but Nancy, 'The unlimited begins on the external border of the limit: and it does nothing but begin, never to finish ... it is the infinity ofa beginning', 'The Sublime Offering', p. 35.As mentioned, I will return to this ubiquitous Romantic image of philosophico-cultural rebirth in the next chapter.

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From psychology to linguistics to politics to temporality, aesthetic judgment thus always intervenes in a field of competing forces; the ratification of its truth can only ever be to come. More precisely, the aesthetic enables a philosophical attack on 'vulgar notions' of time in at least two ways: 1) the 'objects' with which it is dealing have an unspecifiable quality of timelessness or untimeliness; and 2) of an aesthetic judgment, it can only be said that it will have taken place (in the future perfect). It is thus the aesthetic that binds time and subject together. A quote from Schelling- speaking of music- can make this particularly clear: 'The principle of time within the subject is self-consciousness, which is precisely the informing, within the ideal, of the unity of consciousness into multiplicity. ' 49 If aesthetic judgment is then radically non-mimetic, it is not simply nonreferential. On the contrary, aesthetic judgment forces an auto-interrogation of the ontological status of the object; the status of the subject; the relationship of the subject and its object; and their relation to a human community always yet to come. The aesthetic thus remains the in-between of science and ethics, ethics and politics, the subject and object, and so on. It binds together, or permits the ambivalent cobelonging, of psychological, linguistic, temporal, ethical, political, and ontological factors. For that very reason, it is impossible to separate it definitively (in all senses of that word) from its various Others, and this fact makes it constitutively liable to being either confounded with or referred to these indistinct zones. One can already easily see the appeal and impact of such ideas upon contemporary theory which, as I will now demonstrate, is thereby forced- whether explicitly or covertly, knowingly or unconsciously- towards an aestheticizing of the category ofidentity in general in order that it politically affirm certain identities in particular. 'Identity'- at least when so thoroughly aestheticized that its aesthetic foundations have become invisible -cannot appear to be ontological, because the post-Kantian aesthetic subject and its events supposedly exceed this determination. Which is precisely how aesthetics most effectively provides a disavowed ontology to Romantic thought, and why I wish to speak of the Romantic an-aesthetization. Anaesthetizations

As I have shown, 'aesthetics' functions within the Kantian system in an extremely complex way; it opened up an astonishing range of philosophical possibilities that subsequent thinkers have not hesitated to explore. Until now, I have been explaining the structure of the aesthetic in Kant in order to gesture towards some of its argumentative preconditions and subtleties. What interests me here is how the philosophical limits imposed by Kant's intervention still regulate contemporary theory (in perhaps unexpected ways), and how aesthetics has come to function in and 49 F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed., trans., and intro. D. W. Stott, foreword by D. Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 109.

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for such theory. I wish to claim that the structuring logics of the Kantian aesthetic have been absorbed and naturalized to the extent that they are often rendered imperceptible; furthermore, in this very absorption, that the 'aesthetic' can be treated as if it no longer affected the logics of that theory itself. My claim here is that it is possible to define a paradoxical 'table of aesthetic functions', which organizes the ways in which aesthetic theory axiomatically constitutes its objects. I will identity four functions: although they are necessarily co-implicated, one or more functions will dominate in the work of any particular theorist. I will begin by listing and defining these functions, and indicate how they arise from the Kantian text. Following these definitions, I will provide illustrations of their workings, drawn from a range of contemporary theorists. These illustrations will therefore serve a dual role, being at once clarificatory and demonstrating the continuing activity of these functions in contemporary theory. These functions are: 1) an isolatory or separative function (that is, aesthetics autonomizes); 2) a binding function; 3) a dissolutory function; and 4) an onto-logical function.

I Isolation. At its most general level, this function determines the a priori theoretical presumption that objects are irreducible to their received determinations. As we saw above, the Kantian critique is obsessed with isolating and localizing forms of judgment in their appropriate realms. In Kant's attempts to do so, he quickly runs into the various aporias of judgment that his own treatment entails. He thus turns to aesthetic judgment in an effort to resolve his critical difficulties; in this turn, he finds it necessary to isolate and singularize aesthetics in a way that runs counter to strict logical analysis. For instance, aesthetic judgment has no settled realm of its own; it has no determining categories; it has to search for its rule. Indeed, an aesthetic judgment does violence to logico-rational categories: the supposed object of such a judgment cannot be adequately brought under a concept. What such a judgment effectively accomplishes is that object's isolation; it detaches the object from whatever categories and fields in which it may have been enmeshed, and declares that that object is autonomous- if only by insisting that objects are in some sense produced by the forms of attention brought to bear on them. This isolatory function conditions the capacity of theorists to return to familiar objects in order to discern or unleash hitherto under-remarked or overlooked differences. The object can thereby be separated off from the fields in which its was previously localized, and, on the basis of this separation, it can be demonstrated that the phenomenon in question is causally or genetically irreducible to that field. The sublime, in particular, comes to be absolutely crucial here. Given that it is singular, unique, idiomatic, private, and bears no relation (and certainly not a mimetic one) to, say, the circuits of power from which it is Romantically necessary to take one's distance, it permits the singularization of its object- a singularization which is not, thereby, a simple identification. After all, this object does not truly exist.

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2 Binding. In Kant, aesthetic judgment permits a reconciliation of pure and practical reason; it (supposedly) bridges the gap between the 'is' and the 'ought', without a simple reduction to either. Aesthetics thus underwrites a binding function: once an initial separation has been effected between the object and its others, aesthetics opens up the possibility of its non-alienated reattachment, for example, to a genuine human community to come (as we have seen, the regulative aesthetic judgment is uttered 'as if' it were universal, all the while well-aware that it is not). 50 To the extent that the singularization accomplished by the isolatory function is itself transient and unverifiable (even nonexistent), binding can then either forge new relations between the singularized entity and its equally in-determinable others or, alternatively, return the entity to a different field from the one it originally inhabited. Materialist critics have been particularly susceptible to the blandishments of this function, which in some senses completes the previous one. Once something has been isolated, it can then be 'properly' reattached by the aestheticizing critic - if sometimes only in the mode of disavowal. 3 Dissolution. Because the Kantian aesthetic judgment must be able to traverse the division imposed on thought by the stringent division between empirical and transcendental realms, it not only unleashes objects from the grip of the categories, but disposes the judging subject in such a way that it is no longer even possible for this subject to delineate definite limits in itself and its objects without contradiction. Furthermore, this impossibility of deciding on limits opens the subject onto a possible reality and universality of this impossibility. In other words, aesthetic judgment effectively dissolves limits without reimposing any other limits whatsoever. Aesthetics has a dissolutory function: it traverses, transgresses, and ultimately contests the definitions and limits that the power of the understanding, in particular, is keen to enforce. Aesthetics thereby becomes a question of indeterminate membership, of fuzzy sets and partial belongings. The strand of thought loosely denominated 'deconstructive' has been particularly interested in exploiting the possibilities of this function. 4 Onto-logy. Aesthetics serves an onto-logical function, insofar as 'aesthetics' thereby becomes not only the ultimately determining instance ofhuman activity, but also what Lacanians might call the 'quilting point' of the theoretical discourse itself: the point at which all explanation stops. Being and thinking (as Parmenides once claimed, although he was presumably not speaking of critical theory) now finally find their accord in the fundamental discord of theory's sublime offering. Because 50 My point here can serve to bring out the truly aesthetic nature ofSlavoj Zizek's Lacanian 'politics'. See The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), and For They Know Not What They Do, which, as its subtitle suggests, examines 'Enjoyment as a Political Factor'.

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for Kant the highest principle of philosophy is discursively unrepresentable, it can only be designated negatively. But this movement of negation then, paradoxically, permits access to this highest principle precisely insofar as the subject is denied (or denies itself) any positive route: aesthetics comes to present, as the quote from Nancy above suggests, the nothing. Let me now provide a few contemporary examples of the ways in which these functions inhabit and regulate a variety of works in contemporary theory. The function of isolation, interestingly enough, comes to regulate sociological arguments, such as those ofRobin Kelley. These arguments depend on showing that the cultural productions of marginal cultures neither represent in a ciphered form the truth of their alienated socio-economic situation, nor perform a release-valve function, nor model their values on those of the supposedly dominant class (whether in the form of negation or disavowed repetition). 51 One cannot, by definition, enumerate or quantify the ruses and subtleties of such aesthetic non-experience; one can, however, productively demonstrate what it is not. It is for similar reasons that, in Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, the almost nugatory, self-dissolving artworks of modernity (most notoriously, the novels of Samuel Beckett) remain the last, almost illegible, gasp of modernity's attempted, radically emancipatory contestation of actuality. Writing from a historical position which is self-consciously one at the historical fag-end of aesthetics, Adorno writes, 'Society today has no use for art and its responses to it are pathological. In this society, art survives as reified cultural heritage and as a source of pleasure for the box-office consumer, but ceases to have relevance as an object. ' 52 Art- which, being intrinsically historical, cannot therefore be adequately captured in a concept - is presently in the grip of its supersession by an as yet invisible and uncharacterizable new formation. Yet, poised at this moment of art's final disappearance, it is then possible to adumbrate a number of theses with regards to its historical development: 'works ofart become what they are by negating their origin. It was only fairly recently, namely after art had become thoroughly secular and subject to a process of technological evolution and after secularization had firmly taken hold, that art acquired another important feature: an inner logic of development.' 53 Providing belated and transformed images of empirical social life, art functions (or has functioned) as both windowless monad and social fact; it 51 SeeR. D. G. Kelley's great book, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), in which he mobilizes aesthetics to contest readings ofAfrican-American 'cool' and 'hip-hop' as expressions of counter-racism or class resentment. 52 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 22. See also the essays collected in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MlT Press, 1983), especially 'Cultural Criticism and Society', pp. 17-34, and T. Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by F. Jameson (London: Verso, 1980), which includes extracts of the correspondence between Adorno and W. Benjamin.· 53 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 4.

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currently only survives by presenting itself as a failed, ruined actualization of its own failed utopian projections. Adorno thus thoroughly 'isolates' the residues of art: first, in the autonomy ofits institution; second, in each work's autonomy from this institution; third, in each work's isolation from itself. In this incessant process of singularization, it is no longer possible to speak of any direct relationship of art to the empirical world of capital in which it nonetheless remains a social fact. But this function is also evident in the work of one such as Friedrich Kittler, who writes 'the mass-media are always already ahead of aesthetics', insofar as the limits of the senses are today conditioned by the rift between marketing exigencies and the current microphysical restrictions on electronic digital technology. 54 (Or, as Lyotard makes a similar point, 'Data banks are the Encyclopedia oftomorrow. They transcend the capacities of each of their users. They are 'nature' for postmodern man.' 55 ) It is thus the technical details, forms, and potential capacities of media that are determining for human being, not the content-based uses that seem to be made of the former by the latter; in Kittler's work 'media' themselves become the true subjects of history, subjects that engage in an incessant information war amongst themselves. Humans, on the other hand, are finally revealed by the modern technical dispensation to be utterly at the mercy of soundless, imageless, furious Number: 'All data flows end in a staten ofTuring's universal machine: numbers and figures become (in spite of romanticism) the key to all creatures.' 56 Kittler, the scholar who begins with heroic Romanticism, ends by acknowledging its unending ending in the nullifying aleph unleashed by contemporary terminal hardware. Hegel's circle of Absolute Spirit is thereby finally unbound in the bad infinity of indiscriminable digits; aesthetics becomes nothing more than the out-moded mediatic entertainment still provided at the software edge of the deal. The problem, however, is that Kittler can only arrive at these conclusions by isolating and subjectivizing 'media' themselves, which are now covertly assigned the capacities that Kant himself would have assigned to the individual human subject. Kittler, in other words, can only resituate what he calls 'aesthetics' through a covert aestheticizing of the ultrasubjects that are media. It is, by contrast, in the spirit of binding that Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes the foundational role that dirt and disgust has played in aesthetics since Kant. As he points out, philosophical aesthetics gets itself going by repudiating all those predicates assigned by 'the dominated fraction of the dominant class' to the 'uncultivated' populace: vulgarity, animality, immediate enjoyment, ignorance, and so on: 'it could be shown that the whole language of aesthetics is contained in a fundamental refusal of the facile, in all the meanings which bourgeois ethics 54 F. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, ed. and intro. J. Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), p. 34. See also Kittler's book Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteerwith C. Cullens, foreword by D. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), which argues these points in much greater historical detail. 55 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 51. 56 Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, p. 49.

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and aesthetics give to the word; that "pure taste", purely negative in its essence, is based on the disgust that is often called "visceral".' 57 These are all, of course, predicates which the working class will then aggressively reaffirm as their own, thereby kick-starting the vertiginous, self-confirming, and self-perpetuating dialectic of class struggle - registered here at the level of taste. 'Aesthetic distance', in other words, comes to be the auto-disavowal and unconscious acting out of class privilege, a consequence Bourdieu attempts to capture with his famous concept of the 'habitus'. 58 An attention to disgust, the 'repressed' of the Kantian aesthetic system, enables Bourdieu's reading to take Kant seriously and nonetheless open high philosophical discourse onto that empirical world, the real one, purportedly better treated by sociology. In his more recent books, Bourdieu will be even more careful to refer aesthetic production to its institutional and political contexts. The Rules ofArt, for instance, opens with a close topographical reading ofFlaubert's Sentimental Education which, it is claimed 'supplies all the tools necessary for its own sociological analysis: the structure of the book, which a strictly internal reading brings to light, that is, the structure of the social space in which the adventures of Fn!deric unfold, proves to be at the same time the structure of the social space in which its author himself was situated'. 59 The 'field of aesthetic production' is, above all, a social institution founded on a violent illusio, whose most elevated commodities tend - as Bourdieu later writes of Mallarme - 'to enunciate this seminal nothingness only in the mode of denegation' .60 This isolate nothingness -which cries out for its reincorporation into the social body- can then be rebound by Bourdieu's own covert aestheticization to the institutions from which it seemed to take its distance. 57 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 486. The entire section (pp. 488-500) is of relevance here. 58 An attention to habitus, or what Bourdieu also frequently refers to as 'learned ignorance' (presumably after Nicholas of Cusa's de docta ignorantia), is- as I shall show in the next chapter- an ethico-logical consequence (and not exactly an adequate knowledge of the real), that stems from Bourdieu's own supposition that 'An internal analysis of the structure of a system of symbolic relations is soundly based only if it is subordinated to a sociological analysis of the structure of the system of social relations of symbolic production, circulation, and consumption in which these relations are set up and in which the social functions that they objectively fulfil at any given moment are defined', P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 123. This is not an empirical assertion (indeed, how could it be?) and I am, accordingly, not interested here in contesting or verifying Bourdieu's empirical data and findings; on the contrary, this entire chapter is dedicated to asking what lends such axiomatic declarations their discursive traction and force. 59 P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. S. Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 3. See also P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intro. R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 60 Bourdieu, The Rules ofArt, p. 277.

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We could also cite Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Eagleton discerns the origins of modem aesthetics in the origins of capitalism, and the latter's ceaseless uprooting of traditional moral bulwarks. For Eagleton, at the moment that morality ceases to be intelligible against a background of well-defined social and historical roles, 'decisionism, intuitionism and finalism' begin to run amuck amongst now free-floating ethical norms. The aesthetic thus comes to be proposed as a supplement to the ethical, regulating such theoretical conclusions as, for instance, Kant's notorious dictum that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good: 'The moral, that is to say, is tending towards the autotelic nature of the aesthetic - or, what amounts to the same thing, the work of art is now becoming ideologically modelled on a certain self-referential conception of ethical value. ' 61 Eagleton will himself mobilize this insight to track the persistence of the Kantian conception of aesthetics in the most abstruse or foreign theories, finding in Jfugen Habermas's notion of an 'ideal speech community an updated version of Kant's community of aesthetic judgment'. 62 Eagleton, in response, can only offer a conclusion, which, while noting the uncircumventable importance of the aesthetic in Ia chose humaine, makes of it a detour on the way to 'political' ends. Having acknowledged the essential isolation of aesthetics from any direct determination by ethical or social norms, Eagleton refers and redomiciles aesthetics in the more primordial zone of political struggle. (That Eagleton can offer no positive images of this political good, other than in the vaguest terms of a barely disguised humanism, is by no means a criticism; rather, this necessary 'vagueness' on Eagleton's part is, once again, the index of a Romantic philosophical legacy to which I will return in the chapter on nihilism.) Other positions rely on the dissolutory routines machinated by aesthetics. Paul de Man writes, aesthetics is in fact, ever since its development just before and with Kant, a phenomenalism of a process of meaning and understanding, and it may be naive in that it postulates (as its name indicates) a phenomenology of art and of literature which may well be what is at issue. Aesthetics is part of a universal system of philosophy rather than a specific theory. 63

De Man, however, will then use this supposed belonging-to-philosophy of aesthetics in order to show a) that it is a part that exceeds or fractures the whole; 61 Eagleton, Ideology ofthe Aesthetic, p. 81. Eagleton's decision to treat 'ethics' and 'morality' as fundamentally synonymous is neither entirely blameworthy nor accidental, if not entirely rigorous. I will return to this conflation in the next chapter, for it bears critically on the problem of nihilism. See also Eagleton's other work, especially Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978), and Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), as well as the aforecited Against the Grain. 62 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 405. 63 P. de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 7-8.

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b) that aesthetics, in its very function of excess, fails to ground itself, and itself implicitly comes to rely on a material (to put de Man's argument in the most simplistic of terms, language) that is essentially un-totalizable. Hence such statements, to be found everywhere in de Man's work, as: 'the bottom line, in Kant as well as in Hegel, is the prosaic materiality of the letter and no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment'. 64 Hence 'literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories' .65 De Man's superior empiricism finally ends up dissolving the very distinctions between literature and criticism, poetry and philosophy, the world and the critic, in the sublime infinity of its own uncontrollable matter. 66 Jacques Derrida has also presented a number of peculiarly influential rereadings of high European aesthetics, notably with respect to Kant and Heidegger. 67 Derrida will show, for instance, how Kant's distinction between 'free' and 'industrial' art necessarily founders on a number of aporias; simultaneously entangled in the metaphysical routines of opposition and ofhierarchy, Kant cannot coherently decide whether industrial art is simply inferior art or, rather, not art at all. Ultimately, Derrida's claim hinges on the demonstration that political economy is, at least in Kant's text, un-opposable to any possible mimetic economy that presumes a prior distinction between art and nature, techne, and physis. 68 Economimesis, to use Derrida's terms. Aesthetics, politics, economics, in still other words, are all ultimately co-supplementary, parasitically delusory, and doubled quasi-formations on a non-foundational differance that constantly erases and retraces their limits. However, despite the very prevalent misreading of deconstruction as simply the undoing of binaries, the overcoming of metaphysics qua irreducible desire for Presence, and the liquidation of the subject, deconstruction is rather the persistent demonstration that metaphysics and philosophy are never quite the same, that 'Plato' is, for instance, the retroactive invention of a tradition that thereby produces its own intervention as a betrayal, that even the literalizations of formal logic betray their own systematicity through this literalization itself, and so on. Most importantly in this context, however, Derrida does think of metaphysics as governed by a necessarily frustrated desire for presence, and that philosophy's de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 90. de Man, Resistance to Theory, p. 10. 66 'Literature as well as criticism- the difference between them being delusive - is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself', P. de Man, Allegories ofReading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 19. 67 See, for example, the essays collected in J. Derrida, The Truth in Painting and Acts ofLiterature, ed. D. Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992). 68 See J. Derrida, 'Economimesis', in S. Agacinski eta!., Mimesis des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975), pp. 57-93. 64 65

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essential lapses in this regard can be ruptured most effectively by recourse to art and to literature, particularly poetry. 69 This rupture enables nothing less than the dissolution of every limit that would be illicitly imposed on writing by its determining others. Finally, we come to onto-logy. Any one of the aforecited positions runs the risk (if that is what it is), of finally relying on this function. We could quote here David Carroll's own neologistic concept ofparaesthetics (and which is strongly reminiscent of Hal Foster's own remark, cited earlier), generated on the basis of readings ofNietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard: Paraesthetics indicates something like an aesthetics turned against itself or pushed beyond or beside itself, a faulty, irregular, disordered, improper aesthetics - one not content to remain within the area defined by the aesthetic. Paraesthetics describes a critical approach to aesthetics for which art is a question not a given, an aesthetics in which art does not have a determined place or a fixed definition. 70

Aesthetics thus reacquires a quasi-ontological determination, even if its name can no longer be directly spoken, but requires the neologizing supplement of a prefix. In Frances Ferguson's explicitly Kantian account, aesthetic judgment inscribes within itself the fact of its own authorization and, furthermore, makes a difference to the object insofar as the judging subject was in any position to make a judgment about the object in the first place. Aesthetics thus contributes to the uses of the subject. On Ferguson's account, the post-Enlightenment educative project was not merely concerned with teaching contents but with teaching the form of reflective judgment itself. In this reflective pedagogy, measurement itself comes to be an aesthetic procedure, and makes the enumerating subject pay attention to the measuring unit itself. Thus aesthetic experience alienates the subject from the very object which supposedly gives rise to the experience, and makes such an experience primarily a question of the relation among the subjective faculties. Aesthetics thus deals with experiences that do not in fact have a real world correlate, being radically nonmimetic. The ultimately determining instance ofjudgment thus becomes a subject giving a value to an object to which the value is attributed as inhering - although strictly speaking the object does not possess this value at all. Hence Ferguson can write: 'Aesthetics thus concerns itself less with telling differences between real and artificial things (or the place of appearances) but, rather, with the way one determines anything as a thing - as being a unit - without resorting to the self69 Derrida's recourse to poetry and literature is obviously critical to mark in this context, and I will come back to it. His 'poeticizing' procedure is especially evident, not only in the works just cited, but in texts such as Glas, trans. J.P. Leavey and R. Rand (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1986), The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 70 D. Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. xiv.

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confirming (and indeed, ultimately self-comforting) movement that accompanies even the most apparently skeptical moves of empiricism. ' 71 Hence the incessant invocation of something that has hitherto been essentially unrepresentable - as opposed to unrepresented- and that resists all positive attributions, qualities, or predicates, only showing up in the current representational framework as a moment of extreme or paradoxical torsion which must itself ultimately give way before the prevailing winds ofhistory. In a word, these critics become proselytizers for the sublime. Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's work provides some excellent examples of this approach. In his book Heidegger and 'the Jews' he will, for instance, write: The Forgotten is not to be remembered for what it has been and what it is, because it has not been anything and is nothing, but must be remembered as something that never ceases to be forgotten. And this something is not a concept or a representation, but a 'fact', a Factum: namely, that one is obligated before the Law, in debt. 72

Lyotard explicitly links the Fact of this Forgotten to the Kantian sublime (which, it must be remembered, is itself divided between its two possible non-expressions, the 'dynamical' and the 'mathematical'.) Aesthetics, finally, is ontology for Romantic humanity. Ultimately, the value of the aesthetic for our new Romantics is that it constitutes, in the terms of their supposed opponents themselves, the in-divisible and errant borderline that sutures the conceptual to the corporeal ('sense', the intelligible, to the sensible or intuitable), the interior ofbodies with their outside (encounters between things now involving a clash of surfaces, as opposed to their regulation by deep laws, such as strict causation), and the past-future (or future perfect) to the now (the aesthetic event being indiscernible in the present). As Carl J. Posy puts it, 'Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment, and particularly his theory ofthe sublime, was highly influential in the romantic era, and is popular now again among postmoderns. I suppose this is partially because of the sense of being unfettered that is associated with the 'free play' of imagination and because sublimity seems to liberate us from the "bounds of sense". ' 73 We shall later encounter certain, related difficulties in the various critical attempts to prevent the aesthetic from being shut down by supposedly more fundamental ethico-political concerns; even those theorists who are very attentive to the ruses of the aesthetic cannot avoid avoid unconsciously effecting a short circuit between the ethico-political and the aesthetic. Aesthetics remains- as I declared at the beginning of this chapter- a contemporary name for im-possibility. 71 See F. Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, p. ix, but especially also the preface and the introductory chapter, 'An Introduction to the Sublime', pp. vii-xi, 1-36. 72 Lyotard, Heidegger and 'the Jews', p. 3. 73 C. J. Posy, 'Imagination and Judgment in the Critical Philosophy', in R. Meerbote and H. Hudson, eds, Kant's Aesthetics, Volume 1 (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1991), p. 27.

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If examples could be multiplied further, it is once again necessary to emphasize that ifmany ofthe putative revisionings of aesthetics (and implicitly ofthe value of beauty itself) might seem concerned to displace aesthetics tout court, this is not simply the case. To speak of 'aesthetics', then, invariably engages the four functions I have identified, which are bound together in an antagonistic complicity, and which provide an implicit structuring armature for theory. As I have already indicated, and depending on the theorist, one or more function is dominant in any particular mobilization of the category; yet each function has its role to play. And all are arrayed against the precision and quantificatory drives of the 'exact sciences', especially formal logic itself. I believe that these four exemplary functions have set the limits of all recent aesthetic revisions in cultural theory; they can themselves ultimately be considered one of the hallmarks of that single, paradoxical discursive process that I am here calling Romanticism. But these tendencies do not divide the field up either evenly or neatly: some texts partake of all equally; other texts, which may look like they share numerous similarities (that is, various Marxist accounts), can actually privilege different models. It is also crucial to note that my account implies no a priori evaluation or hierarchization: my procedure here has been simply an introductory, heuristic description of their very abstract limits. The study of how such functions combine with one another, and the specificity of such combinations - if obviously of interest to my project - is unnecessary here. I hope merely to have demonstrated their persistent existence and manifold uses in texts that may at first seem to have dispensed with them. This is also why I have interspersed, in the course of my elaboration of the functions, examples drawn from a range of influential contemporary theorists. Such interpolations are intended neither to dismiss nor to 'correct' the work of these writers; nor do they provide detailed close analyses of the requisite texts. What my rapid sweep of examples is intended to demonstrate, however, is the abiding force and extent of these aesthetic functions within the texts of an apparently diverse group of writers. These preliminary punctuations also serve to point towards some of the basic directions that I take in the close readings that constitute the second half of this book. In these more fulsome close readings I will, for example, show how aesthetics underpins various of the notorious contemporary 'returns' - to rhetoric, to multiplicity, to institutions - that are often invoked against aesthetics itself. I will thus examine the continuing activity of this 'four-fold' in a variety of texts and contexts (although I will not necessarily emphasize its presence). As we shall see with Lacan in particular, this quartenary functioning is often reduced by its commentators to a tripartite, or even a dual, structure; the reason for this is the discursive problem posed by the sublime- the apparition of which is often indiscernible, and its existence undecidable. It serves as a fourth function, which nonetheless cannot-be-counted-as-one. Corrosive, unlocalizable, eventful, unconditioned: how did aesthetics, philosophy's supplement, ever come to so evasively occupy the axiomatic heart of theory? I want to argue that the answer, surprisingly, can be given in a word,

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nihilism. My first chapter gestured towards some of the exigencies imposed on theory by its institutionalization; the present chapter demonstrated the historically coterminous re-turn of theory onto an aesthetic non-ground; the next chapter, the third and final instalment in my general delineation of the field, will show how the fact of institutionalization and the efflorescence of aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of 'nihilism'.

Chapter 3

Nihilism, Aesthetics, and Institutions Under mid-winter light in an antique hall 'the fall of because' scrawled on a wall suggests why Europe's just a highbrow jokethey invented causation in place of hope ... ' John Forbes 1 'You have no values. Your whole life, it's nihilism, it's cynicism, it's sarcasm and orgasm'. 'You know, in France I could run on that slogan and win'. Woody Allen2

The imbrication of aesthetics, history, and nihilism In this chapter, I wish to show that the insistent subtle relocalizations that aesthetics inflicts upon theory are irreducibly if covertly imbricated with the problematic ofnihilism. 3 As I will demonstrate, the nihilistic problematic has to do, first and foremost, with an aesthetic determination of the limits, matter, and ends of any possible History - which, of course, in no way prohibits the proliferation of supposedly antagonistic histories. On the contrary, I argue that the ubiquitous contemporary proselytizing for multiple, dispersed, antagonistic histories - as distinct from the supposed teleological linearity of 'History' itself- has a kind of covert globalization ofaesthetics as one of its primary discursive conditions. My argument, however, must be rigorously distinguished from the still all-too-common criticisms of theory as 'relativistic' and 'nihilistic'. As far as I am concerned, such criticisms 1) ignore or seriously misunderstand not only the arguments, but the force of theory's arguments in this regard, condemning themselves to reactionary posturings; 2) thereby misunderstand and obscure the true relations that inhere between recent theory and nihilism, and which are only visible to the extent that theory's arguments are taken seriously; 3) finally founder on their own complicity 1 J. Forbes, 'Warm Snipers', in Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 1998), p. 37. 2 W. Allen, Deconstructing Harry, Miramax Films, 1997. 3 Much of the work for this chapter was first developed in an article on nihilism written with Christopher Feik, now published as 'Nihilism Tonight! A Revolutionary Catechism', inK. Ansell-Pearson and D. Morgan, eds, Nihilism Now! Monsters ofEnergy (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 18-36. Although the work in this chapter is my own, and differs in form from the article, I am crucially indebted to Feik for the directions that my argument takes here.

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with precisely the positions that they are (purportedly) attacking; and 4) are therefore essentially correct, but in a symptomatically skewed or insufficient way. I will return to these points shortly. Once again, my argument is ultimately directed towards a delimitation and redescription of recent theoretical claims regarding the scope, status, and force of their own projects, in terms that would have to be rejected, for foundational reasons, by these projects themselves. This chapter will thus attempt to complicate the schema offered in the previous chapter, by way of an attention to the imbrication of aesthetics, history, and nihilism. I will begin my account of 'nihilism' today by returning to the origins of nihilism in German Romanticism, and thence to the crucial intervention made by Friedrich Nietzsche, which thereafter becomes the central reference for all subsequent discussions of nihilism (including the influential reinterpretation ofNietzsche offered by Martin Heidegger). Having briefly outlined this state of affairs, I will return to various major present-day representatives of new theoretical formations, in order to show how their work is still bound up with an an-amnesiac relation with nihilism - to show how, in other words, nihilism persists in zones that may at first seem foreign or hostile to such concerns. After examining the dominant significations and uses made of the term by Nietzsche, I will then catalogue the limits of its uses to date, uses that are, at first glance, irreducibly contradictory. Through this close attention to the nihilist heritage, I will finally show that nihilism is a fundamentally institutional problem, that it works the entirety of Romanticism in a way that the Romantics themselves misrecognize in a forceful manner, and that it is integrally linked to pedagogical and administrative restructurings of modem State institutions. It is necessary again to emphasize that my project is not intended to offer a 'materialist' genealogy of philosophical and theoretical categories. Although my arguments may certainly turn out to be compatible with - and indeed at certain points rely upon - such approaches, my aim here is simply to analyse and delimit the internal, ambiguous, and often very abstract relations that institutions, aesthetics, and nihilism entertain with each other in the discourse ofRomantic criticism. In still other words, what I have been calling Romanticism is a discursive formation whose characteristic expressions are regulated by a circulation between the topics of institutionalization, aesthetics, and nihilism. It is, moreover, precisely this 'foundational circulation' that at once conditions Romanticism's intense drive towards becoming a philosophy of-and-at-limits and its constitutive inability to specify the nature of its foundations in this regard. Indeed, I believe this is one of the central reasons why Romanticism was able to dissimulate its limits at the very moment of its most savage and compelling auto-interrogation- given that it was institutionally localized as institutional delocalization. This was a delocalization, furthermore, that could only register its own logics in the dissembling modalities of a ramified aestheticization- an aestheticization that is at once essentially correct, and yet misrecognizes the precise ways in which it itself operates. I cannot emphasize this final formulation too much; it is the fundamental contention of this book.

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This chapter is thus intended to articulate the situations and tendencies delineated in the prior two chapters, by showing how they are co-implicated with the philosophical diagnosis of 'nihilism'. I will also outline some of the effects that this co-implication has on Romantic theoretical practice. Of the early modern employment of the word

It is impossible to speak of nihilism today without confronting the Nietzschean corpus. This is true to the extent that even the most informed and rigorous attempts to contest the primacy ofNietzsche's account immediately find themselves having to remark the distance that they are attempting to take from it. The diagnosis of nihilism and the proper name, 'Nietzsche', are thus perhaps even entirely reducible; a fact evident from the title of a recent book by Michael Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche. 4 This very title- which proclaims the possibility of nihilism before Nietzsche as both a new historical investigation and as scholarly contestation of the dominant problematic - thereby only underlines all the more the depth and extent ofNietzsche's legacy. But the title also bespeaks another confusion- endemic to discussions ofnihilism -between 'discourses about' and the 'reality of' nihilism. Does 'nihilism before Nietzsche' promise an account of what was said about nihilism before Nietzsche, or what nihilism was before Nietzsche said what he thought it was, or what nihilism really means, despite Nietzsche, and so on? Gillespie is unable to put these questions to rest - if, indeed, he is consciously aware of them at all. As he puts it, 'I am interested in the development ofthe concept of nihilism in the period before it was given its determinative definition by Nietzsche. As will soon become evident, I believe that Nietzsche misunderstood nihilism and that this misunderstanding has misled nearly all succeeding thought about nihilism. ' 5 I want to mark the covert slippage in this passage between 'the development of the concept of nihilism' and Nietzsche's supposed misunderstanding of the development of the reality of nihilism, but, far more importantly, I also want to emphasize the necessity of such a slippage. In other words, it is crucial that this slippage is not the consequence of 4

1995).

M. Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

5 Ibid., p. vii. It is no accident that, at the very moment that Gillespie is criticizing Nietzsche for the latter's supposed misunderstanding of nihilism, Gillespie gets Nietzsche wrong. For example, when Gillespie writes 'I seek to show that nihilism is not the consequence ofthe death of God and the diminution of man as Nietzsche claimed, but the result of a new concept of divine omnipotence and a corresponding concept of human power that arise in the late Middle Ages and come increasingly to characterize modern thought', p. vii., he misses the fact that, for Nietzsche, nihilism is not a consequence ofthe death of God, but the contrary: the death of God is in fact a consequence of nihilism, that is, the Platonic-Christian dispensation. Indeed, the birth of God is for Nietzsche perhaps the nihilistic event par excellence .... More on this below.

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any personal insufficiency on Gillespie's part; it is rather the index of a hitherto determining theoretico-institutional exigency. In an attempt to circumvent the most unfortunate consequences of this situation, I would like to begin by asking quite directly, not simply about the origins of the concept or the thing, but about the initial employment of the word itself. This at once enables me to begin with an awareness of the Nietzschean problematic, yet without a priori or unconsciously placing myself in a position which simply involves its ratification or contestation. Just as in the previous chapter I was concerned to mark the moment at which 'aesthetics' comes to be named as such, and to link this nomination with the birth of Romantic aesthetics, I wish now to tum to the link between the nomination of 'nihilism' and the birth of the modem academic institution. Of course, the origins of this nomination are as shady and conflictual as any other. The established scholarly consensus is that it is of relatively recent date. As Karen Carr puts it, 'There is some dispute about where the term first originated: some credit its creation to J. H. Obereit (1787), while others point to F. Jenisch ( 1796) or Friedrich Schlegel ( 1797). All agree, however, that the word first received sustained philosophical attention in the first decade of the nineteenth century in the debates about the implications of German idealism.' 6 Furthermore, as Johan Goudsblom reminds us, 'nihilism' was also originally a pejorative charge, and rhetorically mobilized against one's perceived enemies: ' ''Nihilist" was originally a term of abuse. The oldest known records of its use date from the time of the French Revolution. Dictionaries of the period give definitions which range from "one who is politically impartial" to "good-for-nothing", but their tenor is invariably negative. ' 7 Despite the scholarly conflict over the precise dates and sites of the origins of the term, it already seems clear that nihilism is, first, a modem artefact - as Carr puts it, 'the fact that the word "nihilism" was coined within the last two centuries suggests that nihilism and modernity are somehow coextensive phenomena' ;8 second, that it is a pejorative term that denotes a privation, either of understanding or of action; third, it is a primarily scholarly obsession (in both an objective and a subjective sense). The third aspect is (apparently unwittingly) highlighted by Simon Critchley. Speaking of those authors who are still working in the peculiar troughs that have followed what he denominates the 'peak experiences' of'philosophical modernity' 9 -Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger- Critchley points out that this philosophical tradition has, from and in its very foundations, been dogged by the unshakeable demon of 6 K. Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 13. 7 J. Goudsb1om, Nihilism and Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 3. 8 Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism, p. 10. See also Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, p. 110. 9 S. Critchley, Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature

(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

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nihilism: 'the first philosophical employment of the concept [of nihilism] occurs in Jacobi's 1799 "Letter to Fichte" '. 10 Of course, there remain academic disputes as to the exact date of Jacobi's first use of the term, but, crucially enough, the disputants still seem to agree as to its extension and applicability. As Giinter Zoller glosses Jacobi's letter, For Jacobi, the transcendental idealism introduced by Kant and radicalized by Fichte dissolves reality into a mere figment of the mind. Rather than combating skepticism, Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre is seen as supporting doubt in everyday reality by replacing the realist worldview of ordinary consciousness with the idealist production of a world that is nothing but appearances and hence appearances of nothing. In his earlier critique of Kant, Jacobi had already coined the term 'nihilism', which he reuses in the letter to Fichte to brandish the metaphysical and moral implications of transcendental idealism. 11

Whether Kant or Fichte is the original inspiration for Jacobi's critique, Jacobi himself seems in no doubt as to its true provenance and target: philosophy (or rather philosophies) that conceive the subject and its representations as the fons et origo of the world, that is, what Foucault calls 'empirico-transcendental reduplication' . 12 In any case, the fact that Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre in particular comes under attack is noteworthy. For at the very moment that the philosopher is giving private lectures on his revolutionary scientific system, he is simultaneously delivering a public series oflectures at Jena on 'the Scholar's Vocation' (1794). Remarking on the translation of the title of this series, Einige Vorlesungen ilber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten into English, the editor Daniel Breazeale writes: What is a Gelehrter? Though translated as 'scholar', a Gelehrter is, above all, an 'educated person'. Insofar as 'scholar' suggests a somewhat narrow professional preoccupation with texts and editions, it is an inadequate rendering of the German term. A Gelehrter is not only an 'educated' person; he is also one who, as Fichte puts it in the fourth lecture, 'dedicates his life' to the acquisition of knowledge. But he is not merely a 'researcher'; he is equally concerned to share his knowledge with others. Der Gelehrterstand might thus be rendered as 'the academic community', and ein Gelehrter Ibid., p. 3. G. Zoller, Fichte 's Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21. As Goudsblom also notes, 'Heinrich Jacobi remarked in a critique of the philosophy ofFichte that, carried to its logical conclusion, Fichte's celebration ofhuman reason as the only source of knowledge must lead to a bleak subjectivism. According to Jacobi, this theory constituted "an idealism which deserves no better name than nihilism". The word was launched here as a contemptuous epithet, and contemptuous it remained for a long time', Nihilism and Culture, p. 4. See also A. Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. chapter 1, 'Philosophical Origins: Kant, Jacobi, and the Crisis of Reason', pp. 28-52, and Critchley, Very Little . .. , p. 3. 12 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 336. 10 11

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CONTEXTS as 'an academic'- though it must be admitted that Fichte goes on to make demands upon his 'scholar' with which few contemporary 'academics' would be comfortable. 13

There is no need here to examine the text of Fichte's lectures in great detail: all that is necessary for my argument is to mark the integral relation between the birth of nihilism, the philosophy of the subject, and the evident anxiety of the latter's proponents with regard to their prospects and effects within (and without) the academic institution. 14 As Fichte proclaims, What is the scholar's vocation? What is his relationship to mankind as a whole, as well as to the individual classes of men? What are his surest means of fulfilling his lofty vocation? ... The answer to the question What is the scholar's vocation? thus presupposes an answer to another question: What is the vocation of man within society? The answer to this latter question presupposes, in turn, an answer to yet another, higher one: What is the vocation of man as such? 15

The ambitious project already discernible here provides- in a highly developed if programmatic form - the divided matrix of what Lyotard will later identify as the two principle legitimatory metanarratives of modernity, that is, humanity as the hero of liberty, and the university itself as a speculative institution which binds all the sciences together in the universalizing momentum of spirit. 16 If Lyotard locates these two great metanarratives in two different zones (the first in Napoleonic bureaucracy, the second in Humboldt's University of Berlin), the university is already envisaged here by Fichte as simultaneously jUnctional - in the sense of providing occupational training - and spiritual - in that it contributes both to 13 D. Breazeale, 'Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation: Editor's Preface', in J. G. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. D. Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 14~1. 14 Not coincidentally, but for very different reasons, Karl Lowith also sites Fichte at the origins of the European sense of nihilism: 'Ever since the middle of the previous century, the construction of the history ofEurope has not proceeded according to the schema of progress, but instead according to that of decline. This change began not at the end of the century but rather at its beginning, with Fichte's lectures On the Essential Characteristics ofthe Present Age ( 1804), which he saw as an age of"perfected iniquity". From there, there proceeds through European literature and philosophy an uninterrupted chain of critiques, critiques of contemporary issues as well as self-critiques, which decisively condition not simply the academic but the actual intellectual history between Hegel and Nietzsche. The state ofBeing in decline along with one's own time is also the ground and soil for Heidegger's "destruction", for his will to dismantle and rebuild, back to the foundations of a tradition which has become untenable', Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. R. Wolin, trans. G. Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 192. 15 Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, pp. 145-Q. 16 SeeJ.-F. Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, foreword by F. Jameson (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984), esp. pp. 31-7.

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the ideal of knowledge as a higher end and to the progression of humanity. But Fichte's disquisition also contains at least a third, critical implication: one which- in accordance with much of German Idealism - considers the empirical actualization of humanity's proper drives as absolutely unachievable. We will see later how Ian Hunter considers such apparently resolutely negative and ethical convictions as among the more insidious ruses of modem pedagogical power. (Fichte's own subsequent career is of some interest in this context: forced to leave Jena after a succession of academic scandals, he, about a decade later, is instrumental in the design of the University of Berlin, where he becomes the inaugural occupant of its prestigious chair of philosophy.) But my main point remains: despite the evident institutional consequences and motivations of the philosophical disputatio between Jacobi and Fichte, the debate comes to be explicitly prosecuted in questions around the status of the political and ethical consequences of idealist Romantic thought, insofar as the latter's most explicitly revolutionary moments are constantly menaced by its inexpungible tendency towards solipsistic idealism. And it is thus also no accident that early political uses of the term quickly came to designate precisely those who were the students and putative successors of such philosophies. Goudsblom is particularly careful on this point: 'The two terms 'nihilist' and 'nothingist', which came into use at approximately the same time, met the need for a dismissive label appropriate for those people -young, disillusioned intellectuals, it would appear- whose conduct and opinions were regarded as worthless'. 17 To be more precise, it is not quite the academic institution tout court, but disillusion about the status and ends of academic studies that will henceforth regulate the development of the problematic of nihilism, trapped as it is between the Scylla and Charybdis of philosophy's anxieties about the status of its own (and others') ethics and politics. In a collaborative article, Christopher Feik and I investigate the logics of this oscillation, which we contend remains essentially aesthetic. As we argue, what is commonly understood as Russian political nihilism begins with a crisis in the educational apparatuses, and culminates in incessantly proliferating demonic fictions. 18 It is also noteworthy that it was such radical movements as Russian nihilism that reinvigorated the term, after it had fallen into disuse for much of the century. 19 The case of Russian nihilism is of interest for a number of reasons, historical and theoretical. It not only gives, as already noted, a new life and a new force to the word 'nihilism', but also provides a particularly clear example of nihilism's integral links with Romantic pedagogy, and to the nihilist's lack of any positive, consistent, politico-philosophical position. An examination of this issue will also enable me to point to nihilism's regulating fantasy- the creation

18

Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, p. 3. I hereafter summarize the salient points of this article, already referred to

19

See Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, p. 7.

17

above.

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of a self and society ex nihi/o - and to the subsequent theoretical occlusion of the institutional settings in which nihilism emerges. Following its defeat in the Crimean War (1856), and under economic and social pressure to liberalize in accordance with West European models, Russia and its new tsar, Alexander II, engaged in a series of so-called 'Great Reforms' in the mid-1850s. The most important reform was the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, but the transition from a feudal to a modem order necessitated radical changes in all social institutions - notably the Imperial bureaucracy, and the educational facilities required to train the required managers. 20 Indeed, Russia's lack of a middle class was to be filled by bureaucrats educated in institutions such as St Petersburg University. From 1855 universities were opened to all who could pass the qualifying examinations, and their intake consequently shifted from a tacit restriction to the gentry to a broader influx of raznochintsy - the 'people of various ranks' -made up of' children of priests, doctors and medical functionaries, marginal landowners, and lower bureaucrats'. 21 In the words ofDaniel Brower: The Russian system of education brought together a diverse student body and offered an intellectual training on the basis of which they were to become constructive members of the state apparatus or to enter professional occupations. 22

The symbolic consequences of this reform on potential students cannot be underestimated. For the first time in Russian history- and in a way unthinkable anywhere else in Europe - a genuine chance at rapid, upward, unconditional professional, economic, and hence class mobility was being offered. However, throughout the 1860s and into the 1870s, many of the initial opportunities for advancement were gradually revoked, and the liberalizing project was increasingly politically and culturally marginalized. 23 It is out of the frustrations of this context that nihilism emerged as, primarily, a student movement; furthermore, it developed and flourished without any real positive political programme. Many commentators have noted the peculiar ambiguity and incoherence in the nihilists' demands. Gillespie, for example, writes: 'the positive or constructive side of nihilism was never clearly defined. For some radicals, it was vaguely socialist, based on the idea of the village commune (mir). Others saw a managerial class as the basis for the new order. ' 24 Feik and I argue -against the more traditional Marxist, sociological, and philosophical accounts of 20 See H. Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia 1855-1914 (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 48. 21 B. Gleason, Young Russia (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 120. 22 D. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 108. 23 See J. Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia 1801-1991 (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 70. 24 Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, p. 140. See also Gleason, Young Russia, pp. 133-4, and Brower, Training the Nihilists, pp. 18-19.

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the nihilist movement- that this strange lack of definition of the nihilist programme is a direct consequence of an academic rupture. Halted suddenly and unforeseeably between training and employment, family and state service, one class and another, the nihilists had nothing to fall back upon other than a rejection of every available positive option. Stuck between the village community, to which nobody wished to return, and the managerial class, which it seemed nobody could really attain, the nihilists fell back on the most negative motifs they could draw from their own interrupted education. Which, as it turns out, was nothing other than the German Romanticism of their schoolrooms: Negation for the nihilists is never mere negation, but is always understood in Fichtean or Hegelian fashion as the ground of freedom. This freedom is both negative and positive, a freedom from the autocratic restraints of the past and a freedom for the as yet unimagined wonders of the future. It combines revulsion and negation with a faith that a better world waits just beyond the horizon. 25

This thoroughgoing negation - which does not constitute anything really recognisable as organized political activity26 - could thus only manifest itself as aesthetic practice. Russian nihilism was less a politics than a style: it appeared as a fashionable label, worn by a disparate group, a kind of cultural youth style linked to the new culture of the opened-up and bureaucratized university. Hence the characteristic apparel of the young nihilist, which involved a deliberate refusal of the class or 'estate' markers of Russian society. Female nihilists cut their hair short, wore men's boots with plain black dresses, and smoked heavily. The men dressed in the style of the workers, and grew their hair. 27 Like the category of the aesthetic itself- which resists teaching and paraphrase - the nihilists were born of their own unteachability. Positioned on the fringes of the university, they came to live out in an exemplarily aesthetic fashion the contradictions that fracture the emancipatory dreams of liberal-idealist aesthetics. What is also to the point here is the extent to which the nihilists thereafter became the unwitting centre ofliterary-cultural attentions, by way of novels by those such as Chernyshevsky or Dostoevsky. 28 Indeed, it is as a direct result of the literary Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, p. 140. As Goudsblom remarks, 'The nihilists declared their allegiance to all kinds of modem ideas which bristled with rebellion, but they did not actually engage in agitation', Nihilism and Culture, p. 9. 27 S. Boym, CommonPlaces (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 58. 28 See, for example, N. Chemyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1986); F. Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 1994); I. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. R. Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). As Isiah Berlin points out, in Russia at that time - and as a result of State political censorship- 'literature became the battleground on which the central social and political issues oflife were fought out', Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 265. 25

26

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depictions of nihilism, that nihilism is unexpectedly re-imported as a viable term back into Western Europe. 29 I have engaged in this rather summary survey of the pre-Nietzschean uses ofthe nihilism in order to demonstrate a number of interconnected points. These include: 1) nihilism is a modem word; 2) from the very beginning it is a pejorative word, and marks the apparition of the greatest danger; so dangerous, in fact, that those who use it cannot preclude the possibility that it will recoil upon their own assertions. Nihilism - to vary the vocabulary - thus originarily signifies the inability of any specific subject to master its own intentions, or the ineradicable perversion or destitution ofthe will (in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive); 3) it is a scholar's word, eminently learned and self-reflexive, and linked to questions of interpretation; 4) as a scholar's word, it comes to be applied to ambiguous aesthetic phenomena in a way which misrecognizes them as political or ethical threats- and precisely by scholars whose work is at once centrally involved in provoking and disseminating such 'nihilism', yet is itself aesthetic to its roots. As I will now show, all of these links between Romantic philosophy (its concepts, aims, and institutional relations) and nihilism - in any case irreducible - have only been rendered more immutable by the Nietzschean intervention, which capitalized on the word's aforementioned potentialities. Indeed, I maintain that Nietzsche's subsequent intellectual success is at once contingent upon his ingenious historical recomposition ofthese sedimented, implicit potentialities, and his concomitant (albeit ambiguous) occultation of its institutional conditions. For when Nietzsche identifies the 'Christian-moral interpretation' of the world as the root cause of nihilism, or when Heidegger later discloses that Plato is responsible for our present forgetting of (the forgetting of) the question of Being, what is itself occluded in these astonishingly forceful and erudite analyses is that, as Goudsblom straightforwardly states, 'the word nihilism has gained its [current] respectability largely through academic channels'. 30 In other words, what I am claiming has been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed in discussions of nihilism to date is the integral link between the dissemination of Romantic philosophizing and the expansion of European educational bureaucracies. So what exactly is it that that exemplary scholar Nietzsche has to say? Nietzsche The literature on Nietzsche and nihilism continues to grow at an exponential pace. This would make Nietzsche difficult enough to write on, if it were not for the fact that much of the secondary commentary makes it clear that Nietzsche is impossible to write on. As Paul de Man once wrote in a classic essay, Nietzsche's 29 30

See Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

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'text deconstructs the authority of the principle of contradiction by showing that · this principle is an act, but when it acts out this act, it fails to perform the deed to which the text owed its status as act' .31 Or, as James Winchester has more recently argued, 'Nietzsche's irreverence toward truth and systematicity, and his emphasis upon his own partiality, lead me to suggest the paradigm of an "aesthetic turn" as one way of approaching his last works. ' 32 Aphoristic, ironic, self-confessedly partial, often flagrantly contradictory- the general consensus seems to be that Nietzsche's work is essentially uninterpretable. On the other hand, this supposed essential uninterpretability has hardly prevented anyone at all from baldly stating such things as 'the key words of [Nietzsche's] own vocabulary (Will to Power, Nihilism, Overman, Eternal Return) elude conceptual logic. Whereas a concept, in the classical sense, comprises and contains, in an identical and total manner, the content that it assumes, most of Nietzsche's key words bring forth ... a plurality of meanings undermining any logic based on the principle of identity. •33 What is interesting in such statements is their attempt to distance Nietzsche from any logic of classical logic, and which covertly makes him the purveyor of an a-logics that is fundamentally aesthetic. Which is not to say that aesthetics- as we saw in the previous chapter - does not have a logic of its own. Aesthetics, in fact, is not grounded in any principle of identity or adequation. Furthermore, the proclamation of such an anti-identitarian logic can thereby immediately free the prospective commentator to speculate as they like about the Nietzschean text. Or - more insidiously - the dismissal of any univocal meaning in the Nietzschean text can just as well ensure its return, but now in an invisible, disavowed, or more intractable form. This will essentially be my claim about the destiny of the Nietzschean problematic of nihilism; ifNietzsche's already difficult and complex diagnosis of 'nihilism' has now found itselfmultiplied across extraordinarily diverse approaches, it nonetheless conceals a regulative kernel which continues to govern the limits of its contemporary reinterpretations. This is also why the present section will be relatively brief: I will only be able to provide a full analysis ofthis regulative kernel following an account of our contemporaries. In a certain sense, Nietzsche adds very little to the already current significations of nihilism. Hence he can write such things as 'What does nihilism mean? That the 31 P. de Man, Allegories ofReading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 125. 32 J. J. Winchester, Nietzsche Aesthetic Turn: Reading Nietzsche after Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1994), p. xii. Or as AnseliPearson and Howard Caygill put it in their preface to their edited collection, 'When ... Nietzsche requested his readers not to mistake him for someone else, he presented them with a difficult, if not impossible, task', On the Fate ofthe New Nietzsche (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993), p. 1. But see also the other essays in this volume, almost all of which turn around this issue. 33 M. Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. and ed. M. Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 3.

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highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; "why?" finds no answer' ,34 and 'skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive' 35 - neither of which would have come as any surprise to Jacobi. For Nietzsche, nihilism can express itself in a variety of forms: psychologically, in feelings of apathy, mistrust, and hopelessness; physiologically as weakness and degeneracy; 36 culturally as decay; and so on. Furthermore, nihilism is still linked to the internal exhaustion or inverted falseness of moralizing interpretative procedures: 'the socialist, the anarchist, the nihilist- in as much as they find their existence something of which someone must be guilty, they are still the closest relations of the Christian, who also believes he can better endure his sense of sickness and ill-constitutedness by finding someone whom he can make responsible for it. ' 37 What Nietzsche does introduce into the already existing nihilist problematic is, however, determining for every subsequent interpretation - History. As Critchley puts it: 'For Nietzsche, the cause of nihilism cannot be explained socially, politically, epistemologically, or even physiologically (i.e. decline of the species), but is rather rooted in a specific interpretation of the world: Christianity. ' 38 After Nietzsche, nihilism is a destiny. Ansell-Pearson: 'The ultimate causes of nihilism lie deep within the history of Western religion and philosophy. ' 39 Howey: 'Nihilism is not a sudden event, rather it is deeply rooted in the historical development of mankind and the same is true of the death of God. ' 40 Heidegger puts it even more forcefully: 'we do not mean merely that what we call nihilism "has" a "history" inasmuch as it can be traced historically in its temporal course. Nihilism is history. ' 41 What Heidegger, in particular, makes clear is that Nietzsche does not simply historicize nihilism but also nihilizes history. This nihilization ofhistory obliterates 34 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 9. 35 Ibid., p. 7. 36 See R. Brown, 'Nihilism: "Thus Speaks Physiology" ', in T. Darby et al., eds, Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), pp. 133-44. 37 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 201. 38 Critchley, Very Little . .. , p. 7. 39 K. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 37. See also the final chapter of Ansell-Pearson's Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), in which he writes 'while nihilism may not be quite the a priori of universal history- or maybe it is as a parody of history that makes buffoons of humans - it can be recognized as the virtual truth of all human history to date. It is for this reason that Nietzsche claims that the causes of nihilism lie in our faith in the categories of reason by which we have measured the value of the world in accordance with categories that refer to a purely fictitious world', p. 161. 40 R. L. Howey, Heidegger and Jaspers on Nietzsche: A Critical Examination of Heidegger sand Jaspers 'Interpretations ofNietzsche (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 122. 41 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 4: Nihilism, trans. F. A. Capuzzi, ed. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 53.

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the philosophico-theological fantasy of attaining a transcendent or transcendental ground, it bars any access to the possibility of traditional ontology, and it repudiates any notion of teleological progression. Which is why the Nietzschean diagnosis of nihilism is closely articulated both with 'will to power' and with the 'eternal return', which Deleuze glosses thus: 'Return is the being ofbecoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance. ' 42 And what is thereby unleashed in the eternal return is not any truer truth, but rather the chaotic play of antagonistic forces that become the matter to be formed by the great artisans ofthe future. Nietzsche thus all-too-effectively historicizes the inherited nihilist problematic, in accordance with his own directives elsewhere that 'we need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements' .43 For Nietzsche, nihilism is the result of the false projection of once-useful moral ideals onto the cosmos itself; with the internal breakdown of these ideals- driven, in the Christian-moral case, by its own compulsion to 'truth' - comes a final irony. The irony is that it is not the status of these ideals, but the world itself that comes to be condemned as meaningless, though the entire process has been the history of an interpretative error. Nihilism is thus an essentially ambiguous phenomenon: it can become both active (in the sense of mutating into a violent force for destruction), or passive (a Ia the Buddhist yearning for nothingness). Furthermore, the impending 'completion' of nihilism is not only necessary, but desirable: 'nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals - because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had - We require, sometime, new values. ' 44 Nihilism is at once considered the terminus of history and a transitional moment, itself uncertainly divided into stages, and poised on the brink of the unprecedented. Nihilism offers, at the very least, the desirable-necessary chance for a new beginning; as Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'the soul must first become a lion, then a camel, and finally a child' .45 I will return to Nietzsche's proposed aestheticizing solution to the problem of the development of new values, but I wish to pause momentarily to note Stanley Rosen's objections to Nietzsche's historicizing. For Rosen, what is nihilistic is neither simply the present age nor the idealistic presumptions of interpretative phenomena that deny Becoming and Eternal Return, but the present age's obsession 42 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 189. See also H. Caygill's essay, 'Affirmation and Eternal Return in the Free-Spirit Trilogy', in K. Ansell-Pearson, ed., Nietzsche and Modern German Thought (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 216-39. 43 F. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. J.P. Stem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 59. 44 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 4. 45 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 45.

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with historicization per se: 'I have tried to show, in general but fundamental terms, the nihilist implications of what are perhaps the two most influential philosophical movements of our time. These movements share a grave defect, which I called historicism, or the inability to distinguish between being and time. ' 46 If Rosen is speaking here ofWittgenstein and Heidegger, it is certainly also Nietzsche whom he has in his sights. Rosen's analysis is echoed by Peter Sloterdijk: Historicity is thus the philosophical concept for despair ... We can conjecture that the romantic generation, consisting of survivors of the French Revolution, had already drained this problematic to the dregs. For them, the evil of the century lay in the feeling that the historical world is only a graveyard of enthusiasms - in it, every project, no matter how energetically begun, decays. To think historically, since that time, means to accommodate oneself to a world situation in which life is no longer a match for its own reflexivity. 47

Both Rosen and Sloterdijk, despite their (very different) recognitions ofthe problems posed by too much history, are equally unable to elude its now-Nietzschean inflections - insofar as the former demands a return to Platonic moralizing, and the latter can only offer the 'amusing' concept of 'Eurotaoism' (which would presumably have appeared to Nietzsche as nothing more than a symptom of'passive' nihilism). What neither of these critics consider, despite their attempts to contest 'history', is that Nietzsche, in the nihilization ofhistory that his own account entails, himself opened up the im-possibility of their own projected solutions. Nietzsche's valorizations of 'active forgetting', 'untimeliness', and, most compellingly, the 'eternal return', are essentially opposed to the exhaustion and enervation incumbent on the sense of belatedness endemic to nihilistic historical culture. With regard to the constant confusion between the concept and the reality of nihilism that I already noted above, Nietzsche makes it possible to see that this confusion is itself nihilistic, precisely an effect of nihilism's being an interpretative phenomenon, an educated phenomenon. We might add: perhaps nihilism's being a disciplined phenomenon ... ? For the 'problem', as I see it, with Nietzsche's conception of nihilism is, paradoxically, that it is far too powerfUl a doctrine. Whereas Nietzsche had, of course, always been an acute critic of institutions and their ideological treacheries, his posthumous account of nihilism renders such particular aspects of a degenerate culture just another, miniscule expression of what is supposedly a gargantuan western error. Philosophy, furthermore, is identified by Nietzsche as the origin of such an error, and it is an error that only a philosophical aesthetics can identify and overcome. As such, what comes to be elided is the fact that the repudiation of institutions, and their subsumption into grander 46 S. Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 56. See also his 'Remarks on Nietzsche's "Platonism" ', in Darby eta!., Nietzsche and the Rhetoric ofNihilism, pp. 145-63. 47 P. Sloterdijk, 'Eurotaoism', in Darby eta!., Nietzsche and the Rhetoric ofNihilism, p. 99.

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historical schema, in no way constitutes their overcoming. 48 On the contrary, the modem academic institution installs and encourages precisely such conclusions; internal diagnoses of 'nihilism' are integral to its continued functioning - and without that functioning necessarily remaining an effect of the Platonic-Christian dispensation. Nietzsche's historicization of nihilism has effectively prevented the institutionalization of nihilism from hitherto receiving the attention that it undoubtedly requires; indeed, he will even ironically cite - in an emblematically Romantic dismissal of the nature of state bureaucratic and educational institutions -the question of 'administrative nihilism'. 49 It is thus Nietzsche's very (real) radicality that returns his texts to that tradition of Romantic philosophizing which he often professed to abhor. I will return to this problem following a demonstration of the abiding force and extent ofNietzsche's revisioning of nihilism. The peculiar re-insistence of nihilism as topos in contemporary theory

That our age is 'nihilistic, only too nihilistic' remains a strangely widespread judgment. As I have already mentioned, in the wake ofNietzsche's declaration of the 'death of God', and his concomitant recognition that man would rather will nothingness than not will at all, the quest has been on to displace or supplement his account of nihilism and its genealogy. This has most often been attempted by tracing its origins to Christianity itself, to 'the Socratic injunction', to the 'oblivion of Being', to Enlightenment moralizing, to the development of Capitalism, and so on. These incessant retroactive re-elaborations of the Nietzschean diagnostic -which function, among other things, as indispensable conceptual and disciplinary ground-clearing operations for professorial careers- thereby free the contemporary analyst of nihilism to discern in the manifold historical recesses of the West a variety of relay points supposedly crucial to its development. Could Callicles be the ultimate nihilistic Ur-Father, or can we rather identify in Gnosticism certain illuminating analogies between it and modem existentialism? Or, again, are Plato and Christ the real precursors and installers of this hard drive? Can we include Machiavelli or Pascal in such a lineage? Does nihilism characterize a specific 48 See especially, the essays 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', and 'Schopenhauer as Educator', in Untimely Meditations, pp. 58-194. Of course, Nietzsche -the man who had become professor of classics at the age of24- eventually left the university system about which he had, during his occupation, written various scathing accounts, for example, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions/Homer and Classical Philology, trans. J. M. Kennedy (New York: Gordon Press, 1974). See also Derrida's remarks on this text, in The Ear of the Other, ed. C. McDonald, trans. P. Kamuf and A. Ronell (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1988), esp. pp. 28-38. 49 See F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy/The Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Goffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 209-11.

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historical dispensation, or does every historical era have its own specific nihilistic characters?50 But my point is not simply that those directly interested in the problem of nihilism are still in fee to Nietzsche's dictations. I would, further, claim that Nietzsche's nihilist problematic continues to ventriloquize fields and topics that may at first seem very far from his concerns. My argument, in other words, much more resembles that of Geoff Waite who, in his remarkable recent book Nietzsche sCorps/e, argues that Nietzsche has somehow, through an unprecedented subliminal programming, infiltrated almost the entirety of contemporary critical thought, including what Waite sometimes calls 'Left-Nietzscheanism'. As Waite writes, 'Since, in Gramsci's terms, under neocapitalism a general law legislates that political and economic questions "are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become insoluble", the apparent contradictions that are Nietzscheanism tend never to be "superseded" or "sublated" but rather only "perpetuated", leaving both the economic base of capital and Nietzsche himself not merely intact but positively rejuvenated. ' 51 One does not need to assent wholeheartedly to Waite's methodology or his specific conclusions to agree that it is possible to discern a constant recurrence 50 These debates are very much in evidence in all of the authorities that I have cited so far. See, for example, Ansell-Pearson, Darby et al., Carr, Critchley, Gillespie, Goudsblom, Lowith, Rosen, and so on on these points, as well as the essays collected in G. Banham and C. Blake, eds, Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), and the important text by Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message ofthe Alien God and the Beginnings ofChristianity, second edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), especially chapter 13, 'Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism', pp. 320--40. By far the most influential commentator has, of course, been Martin Heidegger, whose later work is entirely bound up with analysing, in his own fashion, what Nietzsche calls nihilism. In the previous chapter, I cited from Heidegger's work on Nietzsche, which perhaps constitutes the centrepiece ofhis meditations on this topic. But see also M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), as well as such commentaries on Heidegger's revisioning of Nietzsche as C. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis ofHistoricism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); R. E. Havas, 'Who is Heidegger's Nietzsche? (On the Very Idea of the Present Age)', in H. Dreyfus, and H. Hall, eds, Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 231--46; and G. B. Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 51 G. Waite, Nietzsche Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture ofEveryday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 4 7. This book, often irritatingly repetitive and disorganized, and which lurches from the imprecision of one rhetorical flourish to the next, is nevertheless compelling in its erudition, scope, and (some of its) conclusions -and is certainly correct in its discerning of the intense fascination accorded Nietzsche by contemporary theorists of all ideological stripes. In Waite's words, 'Nietzsche is the ultimate adversary of communists because he designed his writing subliminally to program his readers to act in ways and for a single ultimate purpose that in theory they (we) can never fully grasp, and that works against the best interests of most of them (us)', p. 15.

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of nihilist motifs in contemporary theory of all kinds. 52 As an indication of the extent of this influence, one might glance quickly at the Anglophone reception of so-called post-structuralism. In one of the central texts responsible for introducing the English-speaking world to recent developments in Continental theory, Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom anxiously charges one of his cocontributors to the volume with 'serene linguistic nihilism' .53 Another contributor, J. Hillis Miller, is just as anxious to defend deconstruction from this charge. In his famous essay, 'The Critic as Host', Miller writes, 'Nihilism - that word has inevitably come up as a label for "deconstruction", secretly or overtly present as the name for what is feared from the new mode of criticism and from its ability to devalue all values. ' 54 Invoking Nietzsche, Ernst Jiinger, and Heidegger in order to 'help' his analysis, Miller concludes by stating that' "Deconstruction" is neither nihilism nor metaphysics but simply interpretation as such, the untangling of the inherence of metaphysics in nihilism and of nihilism in metaphysics by way of the close reading oftexts.' 55 It seems, however, that theory is not quite off the hook. Almost two decades after the initial publication of this book, another member of the Yale School, Geoffrey Hartman, finds himself returning to the topic. If, as Hartman wants to claim, ' "Culture" has become our most prevalent "complex word" ', 56 one might then wonder as to the relations pertaining between this word and the nihilism that Hartman also perceives as everywhere threatening: 'We continue to sense an incipient nihilism. This nihilism can tum against culture as well as nature, renounce all hope in secular incarnation, and become near-apocalyptic. ' 57 What Hartman, of course, does not consider is that 'nihilism' may well be the ineradicable underlining of any Romantic investment in 'culture' itself, becoming all the more insistent 52 Barry Smart, after citing Baudrillard, Feyerabend, Foucault, among others, notes that their works 'betray the continuing powerful influence on contemporary analyses of Nietzsche's controversial reflections on (post)modem conditions', Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 118. 53 H. Bloom, 'The Breaking of Form', in H. Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1986), p. 4. 54 J. Hillis Miller, 'The Critic as Host', in Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 226. 55 Miller, 'The Critic as Host', p. 230. See also Derrida's essay, 'On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy', in I. Kant and J. Derrida, Raising the Tone ofPhilosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 117-71. 56 G.H. Hartman, The Fateful Question ofCulture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 29. 57 Ibid., p. 28. Later in this book Hartman will write, 'As the dream of an unmediated vision recedes, as an emphasis on agency or the means of disclosure displaces transparency of truth, our creative nihilism becomes more explicit. The human imagination, in Coleridge's famous definition, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create"; the energy of genius, in Emerson, is not on the side of stability but of transition and revolutionary intellectual classification; in Goethe's Faust, the lure of the eudaemonic ideal is contested even as it grows stronger', p. 173.

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and unspeakable the more ramified and self-reflexive that 'culture' becomes. Yet Hartman's sensitivity to nihilism is hardly a peculiarity ofhis highly tuned literary sensibilities, given that such sensible sociologues as Barry Smart would undoubtedly agree with him. 58 This ubiquity of the problematic of nihilism becomes, paradoxically, even more legible if we turn to texts in which the word itself does not appear. For if nihilism often goes unremarked, this is not because it is no longer an issue for contemporary philosophy and theory, but- on the contrary- because it is just so uncircumventable and dominating. Indeed, nihilism's abiding domination is such that it can even be mentioned as an aside or in passing, as if the author was simply and summarily designating a proven argument and an incontestable state of affairs. Hence we find Christopher Fynsk writing, in his foreword to the English edition ofJean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, that the latter's work: consists in returning to themes that play a crucial role in all discourses concerned with politics or the grounds of social existence but that have become abstract - the prey of ideology - by virtue of the fact that the philosophical presuppositions defining their meaning (Nancy will speak of the metaphysics of subjectivity, referring thereby to the philosophical underpinnings of humanism) have succumbed to the nihilism that inhabits them. A political imperative whose grounds are necessarily obscure nevertheless dictates that themes such as 'freedom' and 'community' be rethought ... Nancy's gesture is to confront the distress generated by the haunting abstraction of such terms by pushing them toward limits he defines with his understanding of the closure of metaphysics and of what this closure reveals: the finitude of Being. 59

Or we find Giorgio Agamben claiming that: Perhaps the age of absolutely speakable things, whose extreme nihilistic furor we are experiencing today, the age in which all the figures of the Unspeakable and all the masks of ontotheology have been liquidated, or released and spent in words that now merely show the nothingness of their foundation; the age in which all human experience of language has been redirected to the final negative reality of a willing that means (vuole-dire) nothing - perhaps this age is also the age of man's in-fantile dwelling (in-fantile, that is, without Voice or will, and yet ethical, habitual) in language. 60 58 'Appeal can no longer be made to "guarantees" - to secure foundations, incontrovertible grounds, and law-like propositions - the conditions we encounter, conditions which may not be quite as novel as we are sometimes inclined to believe, require a different strategy for sociology, one involving what might be called an "ethical tum"', Smart, Postmodernity, p. 77. 59 C. Fynsk, 'Foreword: Experiences ofFinitude', in J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. P. Connor, trans. P. Connor et a!. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. ix. My emphasis. 60 G. Agamben, Language and Death: The Place ofNegativity, trans. K. E. Pinkus with M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 92. In the previous chapter I flagged the theme of the 'in-fant' in Romantic aesthetics.

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I will return to the shared specificities of these otherwise very different declarations later- especially the 'themes' of 'negativity', 'language', 'closure', 'ethics', 'politics', and 'infantilism'. Once again, I wish to emphasize the centrality of 'nihilism' in and for such abstract philosophical accounts, as well as the ultimate 'obscurity' of the 'imperative' that nihilism supposedly issues to them- and the fact that they either hardly mention the term or fail to mention it altogether. Of course, nihilism is also often foregrounded and affirmed. Gianni Vattimo has perhaps been the most vocal and explicit contemporary proponent of nihilism. Denouncing what he sees as the residues of a 'pathos of authenticity' in the work of the Frankfurt School, among others, Vattimo proudly outs himself as an accomplished nihilist: 'I believe that our position in regard to nihilism (which is to say, our location in the process of nihilism) can be defined by making recourse to a phrase that often appears in Nietzsche's work, namely that of an "accomplished nihilism." The accomplished nihilist has understood that nihilism is his or her sole opportunity. ' 61 Vattimo here- apparently radically innovative in that he embraces this, the most apparently pejorative of all philosophical condemnations as if such an embrace were almost an ethical imperative - has no interest in freeing himself from its strictures. Furthermore, such an affirmation of nihilism enables Vattimo to elude some of the consequences of the uncircumventable aestheticization I have already noted in the work of others (more on this below). As yet another indication of the unsettling persistence and extent of these debates, one might turn to Klaus Neumann's article, 'Remembering Victims and Perpetrators'. Neumann, writing about the volatility of recent acrimonious critical debates in Australian 'Aboriginal history', suddenly interrupts his exposition to defend himself against possible accusations of 'nihilism'. Neumann writes, rather defensively, 'so rather than inviting epistemological nihilism, the brand of ethnographic history I am advocating here, calls for a sensitivity toward one's own historicizing which is prone to demask a very specific politics and ethics behind any self-declared relativism'. 62 There are a number of noteworthy aspects to such an apologia. First, it is important to note that it is impossible for Neumann to specify precisely the criteria by which one could recognize, let alone practice, a 'sensitivity toward one's own historicizing'. Which is also why it is not too speculative to 61 G. Vattimo, The End ofModernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. with intro. J. R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 19. 62 K. Neumann, 'Remembering Victims and Perpetrators', UTS Review IV: 1 (1998), p. 13. As an interesting example of what might be called the super-saturation of nihilism in the modern aesthetic solution, one might point to the poem that is consistently cited as the most popular and influential of all Australian poems, Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells'. Explicating the line 'We argued about blowing up the world', Slessor remarks of the poem's protagonist, Joe Lynch, that he 'was a devout nihilist and frequently contended (over a pint of Victoria bitter) that the only remedy for the world's disease was to blow it up and start afresh', K. Slessor, Selected Poems (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertsons, 1988), p. 137. That Lynch, an illustrator, drowned in Sydney Harbour only rehearses what might be seen as the typically farcical ends of nihilism.

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discern in Neumann's apparently unmotivated apologetics and clunkiness of style the symptoms of an ineradicable academic anxiety about, precisely, the impossibility of evading 'nihilism'. For 'nihilism', as we have seen, designates the impossibility ofits opposition -a state of affairs which, unsurprisingly, generates a great deal of anxiety. For Neumann, apparently, the question of nihilism at once cannot and must be evaded; nihilism requires, at the very least, apotropaic discursive rituals which summon it up as possibility, only immediately to dismiss it by way of an invocation of 'politics' and 'ethics' (whatever these might be). Neumann, necessarily, leaves their content unspecified - because, tellingly enough, he is implicitly constrained to acknowledge that the very possibility (let alone the existence) of nihilism entails their propositional unspecifiability. What is perhaps most interesting about accounts such as Neumann's is that the impossibility of specifying any possible positive content to ethics and politics is experienced as in itselfabhorrent (which is precisely the situation that Nietzsche, as we have seen, attempts to designate and overcome with the fable of the eternal return, and with which Vattimo attempts to identify). What is going on here? As I have already shown, these contemporary disputes - however sophisticated or naive, self-conscious or unaware - are still in fee to the Romantic dispensation. Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that the contemporary disputes about 'culture' and about 'nihilism' are, despite all appearances to the contrary, bound together in an antagonistic complicity. Is it now possible to specify this Romantic kernel in more detail, and in a way that does not simply fall back into the circuits of the Nietzschean directive?

On the self-confessed banality and insufficiency of 'nihilism' as a diagnosis The very persistence and viability of the discourse of nihilism immediately confronts us with a further paradoxical turn of the nihilistic screw- almost every recent text that attempts directly to speak of and about 'nihilism today' is quickly forced to acknowledge that the term itself has perhaps become meaningless, if not utterly useless in any descriptive, evaluative, or diacritical sense. Karen Carr, for instance, will even go so far as to pronounce that 'Nietzsche's "uncanniest of all guests", the bane of the nineteenth century, is becoming an unremarkable, even banal, feature of modem life ... Nihilism, I will argue, comes full circle - as its crisis value diminishes, as it becomes accepted with an indifferent shrug, it devolves into its antithesis: a dogmatic absolutism.' 63 On Carr's account, something unexpected has obviously occurred, a 'devolution'. So if- as Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it - 'today it remains as necessary as ever to think through the problem of nihilism and perform Nietzsche's demand for a revaluation of all our values', 64 then how does this devolution vitiate the forcefulness of the term? For, as the very same texts 63 64

Carr, The Banalization ofNihilism, p. 10. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, p. 8.

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point out, nihilism is not yet a word that can simply be dispensed with; nothing else seems quite as appropriate for any possible global critique of contemporary capital, modem technology, western democratic ideology, nuclear proliferation, ecological mismanagement, World administrative politics, mass-media hyperbole, and so on. 65 Nihilism's global im-pertinence, it seems, comes at the cost of its rhetorical dis-traction. For the term has dropped almost completely out of establishment political discourse in favour of such appellations as 'anti-democratic', 'terroristic', 'fundamentalist', and so on. Ifit is deployed in such situations, it is as an indifferently substitutable term whose value resides merely in its capacity to be chained with a number of other derogatory, supposedly synonymous words. A recent Economist, for example, employs this associative procedure in order to describe a 'new terrorism' that replaces revolutionary programmes with a 'nihilist brand of fanaticism'. 66 Even in those rare public moments when its use does seem absolutely consistent and justifiable, 'nihilism's' force and signification are immediately swept away in and by the startling fact of its appearance at all. Greil Marcus, recalling (as he drives down the freeway) Elizabeth Drew's use of the word 'nihilistic' in the 1980 US Elections, writes: What was Drew talking about? She's famous for her reasonableness, her blandness, for numbing transcriptions of interviews and cherry-blossom reports, and as a violation of her normal discourse this word made no sense. It was loud and violent, but like the crash of a falling tree nobody hears. 67

'Like the crash of a falling tree' ... the current reality of nihilism is that it is nothing in reality: even the word itself has become as nugatory and inexplicable in its aleatory violence as the unhappy figures and events it and its cognates were once held to designate. On one hand, Marcus is confronted by the apparent impotence of the term, and, on the other, with the fact of its recurrent apparition and unpredictable tiny effects. Indeed, Marcus himself, musing on Drew's utterance, suddenly changes radio stations, and is shocked into automotive immobility by the irruption of Laurie Anderson's '0 Superman' through the speakers. My procedure in this subsection has been to highlight the almost universal uncertainty regarding the critical purchase of 'nihilism' now. In throwing doubt on nihilism's status as a politically forcefUl philosophical discourse, such a challenge 65 See, for example, the presentations collected in Darby eta!., Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism; R. Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983); A. Gare, Nihilism Incorporated (Bungendore, NSW: Eco-Logical Press, 1993), as well as the many texts already cited above. 66 'The New Terrorism', Economist, 15 August 1998, p. 16. 67 G. Marcus, Ranters and Crowd-Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music 1977-92 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 351.

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raises a set of valuable questions. Is an attention to nihilism still the most compelling or sophisticated way to characterize contemporary social phenomena? Or does the current situation rather require ways of thinking that depart from the critical heritage in which nihilism has played such a crucial role? Indeed, a willingness to think such questions through, to re-examine the devolution and marginality of nihilism against the background of its institutional and political history, may paradoxically be a condition of returning to nihilism its critical force. In fact, the apparent banalization of which I have been speaking is itself the historico-institutional condition for discerning nihilism as a historico-institutional condition, and not as a lamentable condition of the World itself. This banalization permits, in other words, the apparition of the limits of Romanticism - which has always thought of itself as a thought with-out limits. In my explication of the post-Nietzschean nihilistic heritage, I was concerned to show at least three things. First, that the Nietzschean diagnosis has been accepted as complex, ambivalent, and perhaps ultimately unreadable; second, that it nonetheless remains uncircumventable; third, that this diagnosis has itselfbeen incessantly complicated, revised, and contested. These contestatory re-elaborations ofNietzsche have finally, in their turn, banalized his diagnosis. In this banalization, the limits of the nihilist diagnoses have become clearer, and now permit the delineation of that paradoxical 'generative matrix' which regulates their apparently very different differences. It is to a discussion of this matrix that I now tum. The nihilistic matrix In the many attempts to distinguish between or classifY various forms of nihilism, a wealth of apparently incommensurable taxonomies have been produced, which make distinctions between such categories as 'active' and 'passive' nihilism; between scepticism, relativism, pessimism, and nihilism; between 'epistemological', 'alethiological', 'metaphysical', 'ethical', and 'existential' nihilism; 'cultural', 'sociological', and 'psychological' nihilism, and so on. 68 My point is that the writers who deploy these (however necessary, useful, or forceful) discriminations refuse an analysis of nihilism which would see it as integrally imbricated with a very particular institutional and aesthetic formation. In this subsection, I therefore want to show I) the systematic solidarity ofthese accounts with one another, which is legible in their prosecution of small differences which at once function to unveil and veil this solidarity; 2) that this solidarity bears upon the relation between Romantic thought and its institutional conditions; 3) that such thought is at once 68 See, for instance, R. Brown, 'Nihilism: "Thus Speaks Physiology" ', in Darby eta!., The Rhetoric of Nihilism, pp. 133-44; Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism, esp. pp. 16-22; Critchley, Very Little . .. , pp. 10-11; Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, pp. x-xi; Howey, Heidegger and Jaspers on Nietzsche, esp. pp. 97-8; Sloterdijk, 'Eurotaoism'.

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correct about its relation to the institution, but in the wrong register; and 4) that the exhaustion of this thought, or rather its degeneracy into banalized repetition, is the condition for my own critique. For despite the distance that these critiques often try to take from Nietzsche, as well as from each other, they all remain thoroughly in fee to the limits that their master has himself delineated with regard to the historical and conceptual determination of nihilism. 69 We are only now in a position to see that the postNietzschean sense of nihilism invariably boomerangs back upon the following determinations: 1) As an analytic description, nihilism designates the status of the era in which we are now living, and in which the ungroundedness of every ethico-ontological prescription becomes at once manifest and occluded. 'Nihilism' is thus a historicalhistorial determination that is held to bear primarily on the essence of a present which has lost, precisely, its essence. Commentators as different as Rosen, Sloterdijk, and Vattimo find themselves in agreement on this point. 70 But it is not simply that nihilism is integrally bound up with the fact ofhistoricization: indeed, it seems that one cannot even pose the question of nihilism at all without immediately presuming- and in a variety of ways- that it is, above all, a question of nihilism today, an Apocalypse Now. A quote from Giorgio Agamben should suffice to show the persistence of this determination: 'Today we live on that extreme fringe of metaphysics where it returns - as nihilism - to its own negative foundation (to its own Ab-grund, its own ungroundedness).' 71 Nihilism is therefore not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that occurred long ago. 'Our' era subsists definitively 'after virtue>n; the paradoxical temporality ofnihilism today is that of a not-quite-already-Now. However, nihilism is also necessarily held to be a non- or a-historical, an 'untimely' designation; it designates the irruption of contingency into the dissimulating ruses of teleological narrative.

69 Even the astonishing recent work of Alain Badiou cannot evade all the consequences of the Nietzschean analysis. See, for instance, his L 'Ethique: essai sur !a conscience du mal (Paris: Hatier, 1993), esp. chapter III, 'L'Ethique, figure du nihilisme', pp. 29-36, and Manifeste pour !a philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), esp. chapter 5, 'Nihilisme?' pp. 33-40. I will return to Badiou's work in more detail later in the book. 70 See, for example, S. Rosen, Nihilism, p. 56; Sloterdijk, 'Eurotaoism', p. 99; and Vattimo, The End of Modernity, p. 19. 71 Agamben, Language and Death, p. 55. My emphasis. 72 The inescapability of Nietzsche's determination of nihilism is such that even Alasdair Macintyre's professedly anti-Nietzschean analyses can do little more than rehearse the former's judgments regarding the present era, if in a slightly different vocabulary. See, for example, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, second edition (London: Duckworth, 1985), and Three Rival Versions ofMoral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990).

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2) As a performative declaration, 'nihilism' is originarily both condemnation and injunction: nihilism is that which must be overcome or contested, or, at the very least, 'delineated'- even though this involves the paradox that 'nihilism' can only ever be invoked to designate the pressing contemporary instability, impossibility, or indeterminacy of every 'must'. The modality of this must can no longer be ethically, ontologically, politically grounded, or at least cannot be with regard to the degraded and weakened status of these categories in the present. 3) Given 1) and 2), the question then arises as to the situation of those who can utter and comprehend the significance of the word at all, and - for Nietzsche as for his heirs - only those who have themselves passed through nihilism are in a position to recognize, affirm, and surpass it: He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect ... the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself. 73

Hence the alienating imperative to embrace nihilism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the motivated denial or indifference of the era towards acknowledging its ownmost nature. The era is nihilistic not only because it is witness to the ungroundedness of all values, but also because it refuses to or cannot properly recognize that this is what it is and has become. For those, then, who have accomplished or have had the necessary work of dissociation, isolation, and alienation forced upon them, the refusal of the age to recognize the nothingness betrayed by its 'accelerated grimace' (as Ezra Pound put it), often becomes the (or a) proof a contrario of the essential correctness of their analyses. 4) Given 3), then, the continuing validity of the word derives from its very appearance, already remarked above, as uselessly indispensable; its terminological insufficiency-exigency, voided force and tractionless ubiquity then come to regulate -more or less consciously- the various positions that can be taken on nihilism today. Nietzsche's argumentative power has been to render the word 'nihilism' irrevocably self-reflexive; as Marcus's anecdote makes clear, even if it is spoken by an idiot, 'nihilism' now cannot mark anything other- for the few with ears delicate enough to hear it - than the genuine insistence and persistence of thought in the midst of the disaster itself This terminological self-reflexivity thus provides justification for a constant recoiling of thought upon itself, and hence another legitimate basis for further, literally interminable discussions of nihilism's scope and status. Nihilism begins in reflexion, and is applied both by and to those who are supposedly eminently self-reflexive. Such apparently different statements as the following are thus still regulated by this aetiological conditioning: 'Nihilism is not just the spontaneous expression of personal malaise; it includes an interpretation of this 73

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 3.

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malaise'; 74 'Because of the wide variety of usages "nihilism" has had historically and can have conceptually, it is important to disentangle and clarify the various layers of this notion. ' 75 Clarifying and convoluting in the same breath, the most interesting and forceful analyses of nihilism finally all find their absent ground in the following negative position: 'nihilism' marks the irreparable shattering of universal evaluative criteria, critical descriptive purchase and effective power, at the very same time that the term draws whatever impotent force it still possesses in the very assertion that the current situation can only truly be denominated as such. 'Truth' is no longer- if it ever was- master in the house of Being, and all there is or remains are multiple idioms and discrete historical sites, local knowledges, and institutional administrative procedures, subject to no transcendental principles whatsoever. And because the fall of the Platonic-Christian realm 'beyond' also entails, as Nietzsche points out, the destruction of the 'real world' itself, the problem of the 'revaluation of all values' becomes paramount: on what non-basis and with what tools can values be imposed, given that there is no other world but this?76 5) Since it is the status of this this that remains presently undetermined or indeterminable, philosophers tend to succumb to a romantic optimistic pessimism that vacillates uncontrollably between a joyful apocalypticism and a disappointed utopianism - for which the innumerable contemporary philosophical calls for a 'community to come' can stand as an index.7 7 Such communities, which definitively resist any possible positive predication, supposedly impel us to attempt to think them in and through this very in-accessibility. Nihilism's legacy to the notion of political community has thus entailed a return to traditionally aesthetic motifs (of silence, auto- and hetero-fashioning, irreducible multiplicity, and so on). Looking to their putative forebears or dreaming of an unimaginable future, such philosophers end up, at best, focusing on the pragmatics of the here-and-now (the 'today'). This situation is a direct consequence ofNietzsche's own solution to the dilemma which hinges on aestheticizing figurations, most notoriously that of the Obermensch. With regard, for example, to the functions and forces that this figure engages, it is necessary to point out that it is not simply the role of the Superman to obliterate or go beyond the polarities of Good and Evil, for the world is already Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, p. ix. Carr, The Banalization ofNihilism, p. 16. 76 F. Nietzsche, Twilight ofthe Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. M. Tanner (Harrnondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 51. 77 See, for example, G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993); Nancy, The Inoperative Community; P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. S. Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997). It is no accident, furthermore, that Bill Readings entitles his final chapter 'The Community ofDissensus', The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 180-93. On the extremely interesting question of the role that deictics (especially 'this' and 'that') play in philosophical discourse, see Agamben's Language and Death. 74

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way beyond them. The Superman's task is also to denounce and overcome, in his untimely fashion, the present in the name and guise of the monstrous future that he heralds. 78 To pronounce on 'nihilism' today, then, is also necessarily to maintain - if only in a subterranean and disavowed fashion - that a passage can only be effected between, say, the twin failures of philosophy and politics, by way of a committed renovation of aesthetics. Vattimo - and precisely to the extent that he considers himself an accomplished nihilist - can be most explicit about this 'globalization of aesthetics': All this seems to me to signal the emergence in contemporary epistemology of an aesthetic model of historicity opposed to the notion of a process of cumulative development; furthermore, it leads also to the acknowledgement of a particular 'responsibility' for the aesthetic itself. This responsibility belongs not so much, nor only, to aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, but rather to the aesthetic as a domain of experience and as a dimension of existence that assumes exemplary value as a model for thinking about historicity in general. 79

Vattimo is further able to criticize other writers (such as Deleuze), who participate in an unconscious glorification of aesthetic motifs and thereby misunderstand the true nature of the aesthetic, reactivating ancient ontological topoi in their very drive to overturn them. 80 To recapitulate the central trajectory of my argument in this subsection: the current situation is such that the word 'nihilism' seems at once le mot juste and yet radically insufficient; those for whom the word functions in such a way remain the tributaries of Romantic philosophy and, more particularly, of the Nietzschean intervention; for Romantic philosophy (or philosophies), the problem of nihilism is determined in essence as a question of and for history/temporality themselves, and marks the current im-pass between philosophy, and ethics and politics; the 'dis-solution' proffered by these philosophies is an aesthetic one. I thus return to the conclusions arrived at in the previous chapters, in order to link them more directly with the nihilist problematic I outlined above.

See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Vattimo, The End ofModernity, p. 95. 8 For example, 'The experience that opens up for an accomplished nihilism is not, however, an experience of fullness, glory, or ontos on, which has only been detached from any claim to the supposedly highest values and attached instead - in an emancipated fashion- to the values that the metaphysical tradition has always considered base and ignoble, values which in this way may be restored to their true dignity. Examples are easily found to show that, in the face of devaluation of the highest values and the death of God, the usual reaction is one which makes a grandiose metaphysical appeal to other, "truer'' values (for example, the values of subcultures or popular cultures as opposed to dominant cultures, the rejection of literary or artistic canons, etc.)', Vattimo, The End ofModernity, p. 25. 78

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Excursus: of aesthetic daemonology Much of the previous chapter was dedicated to an exposition of Kant, and to the continuing influence ofKantian aesthetics upon contemporary theory, an influence that is too often denied, contested, and/or elided by precisely those working in its wake. Certainly, this influence is self-divided, multiple, contestatory; just as certainly, its very division and multiplicity do not constitute the overcoming of its limits or the radical transubstantiation of its consistency. This chapter has so far shown how a thoroughgoing concern about nihilism also continues to govern -if in a not particularly evident or direct fashion - such Romantic accounts. One of the primary aims of this book is to link these two concerns with a third, that of the institutionalization of philosophy. In my first chapter, I showed how Romantic philosophy, following its localization in the modern University, was thereafter only able to consider this localization - when it explicitly considered it at all - in the aporetic terms of necessityimpossibility. The discursive limits that were thereby imposed on Romantic thought by this philosophical self-description drove it inexorably towards the diagnosis of nihilism. As Alain Badiou has put it (in a different but related context): It is never really modest to announce an 'end', a completion, a radical impasse. The announcement of the 'end ofmetanarratives' is as immodest as the metanarrative itself, the certitude of the 'end of metaphysics' immures itself in the metaphysical element of certitude, the deconstruction of the concept of the subject demonstrates a central category- being, for example -whose historial prescription is yet more determinate, etc ....The contrite prosopopoeia of abjection is just as much a posture, an imposture, as the trumpeting cavalry of the parousia of Spirit. The end of the End ofHistory is clothed in the same stuff as this End. 81

What Badiou here identifies as 'metaphysical immodesty' is as good a syntagm as any to explain how Romanticism rendered itself incapable of reappraising its own limits in another register, and misrecognized its dissatisfaction with its institutional localization as the symptom of a more profound historical development. My argument is that, propelled towards nihilism as an (equally dissatisfying) account of its institutional dilemmas, philosophy attempted to plug the resulting ontological gap by way of recourse to aesthetics. The question of how aesthetics comes to provide the only acceptable way through the nihilist aporia is obviously crucial, and I wish to specify further the results of my preceding chapter by examining here one of the most important imaginative figures that typically attend the philosophical call for an overcoming of nihilism, that is, the daemon (and its ineradicable double, the angel). I have already briefly flagged some of the other figures involved in such a project (the 'child', for instance, or the 'community to come'), but the reasons for my isolating 81

Badiou, Manifeste pour Ia philosophie, p. 11. My translation.

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the daemon in this context should quickly become apparent. 82 For it is precisely in these terms that nihilism qua institutional phenomenon was correctly registered by Romantic thought. I will begin by gesturing towards the prevalence of the image of the daemon across a number of diverse contemporary contexts; I will then show how and why it was indeed so appropriate for speaking about the bureaucratic functionaries ofthe modern European state- but could only do this by aesthetically reinvigorating ancient onto-theological motifs that seemed to hold out the possibility of a transcendence-to-come. In a sense, this subsection is simply intended to relate the image of the daemon to the problematic of nihilism in a way that has hitherto been overlooked and thereby gesture to the fact of the institution's aestheticization by Romanticism. Many scholars have noted the recurrence of images of daemons in Romantic writings. As Gillespie puts it, the Romantic fascination with the daemonic impelled the thinkers of this period to develop an increasingly concrete and comprehensive notion ofthe demonic that brought it evermore centrally into human life and politics. Blake's poetic tiger in this way becomes a practical and ultimately terrifYing political and social force. This transformation was achieved not only by those who were most attracted to the demonic but 82 To give some indication of the role that the aesthetic figure of the reborn child (which figures the nascency of a radically new, presently indefinable philosophico-cultural beginning) has played in Romanticism, see G. Agamben, Infancy in History: Essays on the Destruction ofExperience, trans. L. Heron (London: Verso, 1993). Or Peter Sloterdijk, 'Whoever traces back the tracks of the unhomely to their starting point ends up at the human drama ofbirth. The way in which humans come into the world already contains, I conjecture, the entire key to the problem of nothingness. The concept of nothingness ... is a hint that it does not suffice for humans to be born in order to come into the world', 'Eurotaoism', p. 105. Or Maurice Blanchot, 'So let us be, even in the anguish and the heaviness of uncertainty, from time to time, these children', 'Who?' in E. Cadava eta!., eds, Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991 ), p. 60. Or De leuze and Guattari, 'The child is a metaphysical being', Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley eta!. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 48. Typically, these accounts tend to mobilize the child in an attempt to figure a figure without a history that it is nevertheless within, and which is therefore 'untimely'. This is merely to stick with contemporary European philosophers, yet from Rousseau and Wordsworth to Nietzsche to Freud and beyond, the 'infant' proves a crucial aesthetic resource for literature, psychology, and fine art - and thus to culture in general. As CassiAlbinson and Anne Higonnet write, 'The image of the naturally innocent child body - what one might term the Romantic Child - simply did not exist before the modem era. This historical fact has been forgotten partly because the Romantic Child has gradually permeated popu1ar consciousness over more than two centuries. Spreading from its elite origins in English academic painting, the modem image ofthe child moved into popular early and mid-nineteenth-century painting, from there into mass-reproduced prints, and on outward through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commercial illustration into the photographic mass media of the present', 'Clothing the Child's Body', Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 1: 2 (1997), p. 122. See also J. Cook, 'Romantic Literature and Childhood' in D. Aers eta!., eds, Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing, 1765-1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 44--63; and P. Otto, 'Forgetting Colonialism', Meanjin No.3 (1993), pp. 545-58.

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also by those who most feared it, including many ofthe most profound and powerful thinkers of the period. They tried to refute or reshape this notion of the demonic, but even they were ultimately unable to reject it. Indeed, it was precisely these opponents of Romantic nihilism who unwittingly and unwillingly became its most powerful advocates, and it was their efforts to check this nihilism that served to enthrone it. 83

Daemons prove a crucial figurative resource, all the way from Goethe through Dostoevsky, to Mikhail Bulgakov. 84 The question still remains as to why the Romantics would consider demonology the most apposite resource for figuring nihilism, and why these figurations also proved so influential - even determining -for subsequent accounts. For there are monsters and there are monsters- why was it necessary that the monsters of nihilism be modelled, whether consciously or implicitly, on a subjacent paradigm of the daemon? To begin it is worth mentioning that, despite the supposed death of God under the pressure of the globalization of capitalism, techno-scientific innovation, and the ongoing bureaucratization and corporatization of everyday life- in a word, nihilism - daemons are everywhere in contemporary western culture, and often mingle happily, if incoherently, with other preternatural apparitions drawn from a range of incompatible religious and cultural traditions (ghosts, spectres, vampires, zombies, aliens, and so on). Indeed, if the philosophes of the Enlightenment tended to oppose 'common-sense', empiricism and materialism to the depredations of religious nonsense and vicious superstition, our own era is witness to the disintegration of this opposition. 85 One need look no further for confirmation of this development than to the uses to which the characteristic products of information technology are usually put: far from finally obliterating the gods, the internet - seething as it is with diverse deities, inhuman intelligences, and religious propaganda of all kinds - evidently compels their return. 86 Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, p. 103. See, for example, M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. M. Glenny (London: Collins Harvill, 1988); Dostoevsky, The Demons; F. Sologub, The Petty Demon, trans. and intro. S.D. Cioran (London: Quartet, 1990); S. I. Witkiewicz, Insatiability, trans. L. Iribarne, intro. C. Milosz (London: Quartet, 1985). See also Walter Benjamin's remarks on the daimon in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, intro. G. Steiner (London: NLB, 1977), esp. pp. 226--35; and the section entitled 'demon' in his famous essay on Karl Kraus, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. E. Jephcott, ed. and intro. P. Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 250-60. 85 It is worth rereading in this context Voltaire's diverse and scathing entries on religion in his Philosophical Dictionary, ed. and trans. T. Besterman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), that is, under 'Angels'. 86 In a slightly different but related context, the sociologist Michel Maffesoli suggests that 'we are witnessing a veritable re-enchantrnent with the world', The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. D. Smith (London: Sage Publications, 1996), p. 28. That Maffesoli also speaks of 'demonic wisdom', and returns to theorists of religion (notably Durkheim) to ground his arguments ultimately demonstrates his complicity with the forms of thought that I am analysing here. 83

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There are three aspects of this so-called contemporary 'return of the sacred following the death of God' that ought to be emphasized in this context, given that angels and daemons seem to have provided ideal images to figure. 1) The status of, and roles played, by the mass-media. There are at least two major points to be made here. First, the ontological status of information stored, transmitted, and formed by the electronic mass-media cannot easily be reconciled with traditional opinions regarding the essential differences between speech and writing, orality and literacy, aspiration and inscription. If, as the Latin proverb has it, verba volant, scripta manent [spoken words fly away, writing remains], whatever the content ofthe data that comes to be luminously represented on a myriad computer screens is rendered at once peculiarly immutable and evanescent - as well irremediably veridically suspect- in such a transmission. 87 So-called 'virtual reality' challenges, in other words, the very grounds for making any sustainable distinction between the really real and the really imaginary. 88 As do angels and daemons, it occupies the no-man's land between God and the world itself. Second, and as a variety of writers never tire of reminding us, the very word 'angel' originally meant 'messenger' in Greek, and, given that such creatures invariably served as the indispensable intermediaries between otherwise incommunicable regions of being, their role - so the argument often goes - is strictly analogous to the role played by modem media themselves. 89 As the phrase has it, a medium is a medium is a medium. Furthermore, at the very moment that a technology is invented, it is immediately felt to provide the royal road to the hereafter-beyond, and mobilized as such by those trying to get in touch with spirits from the Other World. 90 When, 87 As Friedrich Kittler writes in the course of a commentary on Hegel's famous discussion of the phrase 'Now is Night', 'The sentence spoken for the record is put into the record - but not without the formulaic concession that writing something down is an act without consequences for truth, or in other words is not an act at all. Such is the logic of a discourse network that never quite drops the pretense of not being a discourse network. But what sees the light of proverbial day twelve hours later is the fact that writing and archiving are concrete discursive practices and are fatal to truth. In RAM philosophy nothing that people have said is correct any more', Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer with C. Cullens, foreword D. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 165. 88 This is, of course, by now one of the most banal remarks that could possibly be made with respect to the realm of the mediatique, whose locus classicus is J. Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). 89 The ne plus ultra of this tendency is surely Michel Serres' stupefying coffeetable book, Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. F. Cowper (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). However, as Kittler reminds us, 'Angels have no need to reflect on temporo-serial and spatio-discrete data; machines have no possibility of doing so. The former skip over the problem; the latter over its solution', F. Kittler, Literature, Media, Iriformation Systems, ed. and intro. J. Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), p. 131. 90 See, on this point, F. Kittler, Discourse Networks, and A. Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1989).

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of course, it is not deliberately calculated to simulate the appearance of such spirits in this World, in the name of pedagogy or commerce. 91 2) The machinery of capital. 'Fetishism', for instance, which remains a crucial Marxist and psychoanalytic category, was itself first derived from western contact with 'primitive' religious practices, and it retains its slightly dismissive, pathologizing, anachronistic yet still somehow sacralized connotations in the central texts that attempt to describe, say, the most modem developments and effects of European economies. 92 Thus as Marx famously put it: A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties ... The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, its stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. 93

The implicit move in the Marxian logic here, which depends on a fundamentally condemnatory metaphysical stance towards the disturbing becoming-incorporeal of matter itself, is explicitly rehearsed by - of all people - the German poet Rilke, who explicitly links this transubstantiation to the Angel of his own Duino Elegies. As Giorgio Agamben, commenting on this link, puts it: 'From this point of view, the Rilkean angel is the symbol of the transcendence in the invisible of the commodified object, that is, the cipher of a relation to things that goes beyond both the use-value and the exchange-value. As such, it is the metaphysical figure that succeeds the merchant. ' 94 91 For example, 'The specter-shows of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . mediated oddly between rational and irrational imperatives. Producers of phantasmagoria often claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the new entertainment would serve the cause of public enlightenment by exposing the frauds of charlatans and supposed ghost-seers ... [But] Even as it supposedly explained apparitions away, the spectral technology of the phantasmagoria mysteriously re-created the emotional aura of the supernatural. One knew ghosts did not exist, yet one saw them anyway, without knowing precisely how', T. Castle, 'Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie', Critical Inquiry XV: 1 (1988), p. 30. 92 See the essays on this topic in E. Apter and W. Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), as well as Derrida's rereadings in Specters ofMarx: The State ofthe Debt, the Work ofMourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf(NewYork: Routledge, 1994). 93 K. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 163-4. 94 G. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. R. L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1993), p. 39. Another, exceptionally famous angel is Walter Benjamin's: 'AKlee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel

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3) Sex and sexuality. Angels and daemons appear, again and again, in work dedicated to the possible revisionings of the ruses of sexual difference. Such revisionings have been most compellingly elaborated in such psychoanalytically inflected philosophies as those ofLuce Irigaray and Jacques Lacan. 95 In such work, angels come to function at once ontologically, ethically and politically insofar as, in their role of intermediaries between the sexes, they can be evoked against theories which would either reduce or make sexual difference insuperable. For if -as such theorists hold- there is not a single objective predicative trait (whether biological, empirical, sociological, and so on) capable of satisfactorily bearing on the truth of human sexual differentiation, angels can nevertheless be invoked to ensure that there be at least some kind of communication between the sexes, albeit a communication that is always already mediated, and necessarily deformed in and by the very fact of its mediation. Hence angels-daemons ensure not the transmission of a determinate or determinable content, but rather the self-dissimulating transmission of the possibility of the communicability of this asymmetrical relation itself. One does not, of course, have to assent to the principles or presuppositions of such discourses in order to discern this role that the angel plays within them. Indeed, as Alain Badiou points out, the necessity to elaborate a third position between the sexes, and from which place their truth can be told, inevitably brings the realm of the imaginary and its attendant angels into the picture. Given that neither sex can veridically reflect on the other from within the situation itself without partiality or question-begging, 'the discussion on the sex of angels is crucial, since its stakes are to pronounce on the disjunction [between 'man' and 'woman']'. 96 The logic which drives these otherwise very diverse studies of capitalism, the media, and sexuality towards angels and daemons is conditioned by the following, looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress', W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 249. As Peter Osborne comments, 'the image is central to Benjamin's politics of time, in so far as that politics is constructed at a point of tension between an avant-garde, action- and future-oriented impulse ... and an angelic, backward-looking, memorializing cognitivism of redemptive rememberance', P. Osborne, 'Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats', in A. Benjamin and P. Osborne, eds, Walter Benjamin s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 90. 95 See, for instance, J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar ofJacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits ofLove and Knowledge: BookXX:1972-1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. with notes B. Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), and L. Irigaray, The lrigaray Reader, ed. M. Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 173-4. 96 A. Badiou, Conditions, intro. F. Wahl (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), p. 258. My translation.

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essentially interconnected qualities traditionally attributed to these spiritual beings: 1) angels-daemons are neither really One nor Multiple; each is at once absolutely individuated, singular, and yet utterly generic at the same time. Or, rather, they are really distinct, but rationally, logically, and practically indiscernible and hence innumerable;97 2) angels-daemons occupy a ou-topos, a limbo or non-place whose limits cannot be satisfactorily determined by way of the terms appropriate to more settled or familiar realms of Being, and through which they move in unpredictable ways; 98 3) angels-daemons are always emissaries; they are neither the source or origin nor the destination or end of the enigmatic messages they bear; they are not creators in their own right, but their otherworldly powers are nonetheless indisputable and il-limitable; and 4) they are linked to intimations of a genuine human freedom-as-yet-to-come. This fourth point is, as I intimated above, in many ways determining for the nihilism of our era, insofar as this freedom is conceived in a resolutely non-traditional, and purportedly anti-Kantian fashion: not primarily a freedom of decision, action, desire, will, or reflection, but rather a paradoxical freedom of reception, or, as a widespread post-phenomenological tendency often puts it - freedom conceived as a necessarily belated response to the insensible call of the irrepresentable Other.99 This non-humanistic freedom is at once pre- or 97 Hence the evident anxiety suffusing the interminable medieval disputatio concerning the enumeration of the angels, and the Gust as anxious) modem parody of Scholastic philosophy as that which asks such risible questions as: 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?', and so on. 98 As Massimo Cacciari puts it, 'The dimension of the Angel is ou-topic. Its place is the Land-of-no-where, the mundus imaginq/is, whose fourth dimensio (axis) lies beyond the sphere that delimits the axes of the visible cosmos. No one could point to the path that leads there. Only the Angel, guardian of the divine Word, icon of the ad-verbum, indispensable intermediary of all the prophets up to Muhammad, can undertake long journeys from the invisible No-where, from its Caelum Caeli (Heaven of Heaven), unchanging and eternal Domus (dwelling) and Civitas (city) of the Lord, towards the interior temple of man, enter his darkness, and help him recover his proper Orient', The Necessary Angel, trans. M. E. Vatter (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1994), p. 1. Furthermore, the passages of angels bear an integral relation to the passing of time, as Cacciari implies with his reference to the 'fourth dimension'. This link between angels and time is so crucial that in Book 12: 16 of City of God, ed. D. Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Augustine will even make the movements of angels the very condition of fallen time; without them, time would not exist! And, to link these capacities to an apparently more contemporary discourse of 'aliens', of 'posthumanity', see I. Livingstone, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. pp. 18-20. 99 Despite the stated anti-Kantianism of such approaches, one might feel, as does David Farrell Krell, 'the need to take all the questions of daimon life back to the analytic of the sublime in Kant's Critique ofJudgement. The tension there between, on the one hand, life-forces (Lebenskrafle) and the power of nature (die Macht der Natur) and, on the other hand, the movement ofheart-and-mind (die Bewegung des Gemuts), negative pleasure, and the attunement of spirit (Geistesstimmung); in short, the entire question of the sovereignty of mind in the face of the violence of nature and the uncertain solace of infinity, the entire question of Ge-walt; these matters compel daimon life with some urgency', Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 296.

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an-individual and that of a 'community of those with nothing in common', which begins by acknowledging and assenting to an inexpungible kernel of the inhuman in humanity itself. 100 Nonetheless, and whatever its indisputable novelty, this schema still- and perhaps without realizing it- repeats an age-old philosophical tendency to broach the question of the possibility and causes of freedom/compulsion in humanity by recourse to angels-daemons. 101 The Romantics, in particular, seem to oscillate wildly between their dreams of angels and daemons, but the dominant figure for nihilism is certainly the daemon. 102 Why? In Paradise Lost Milton coins a new name for Satan's 'high capital': Pandaemonium. 103 As is often the case with neologisms, its roots are very old; it literally transliterates from the ancient Greek as 'all the daemons'. Pandaemonium is the place where all the demons can, according to their own laws, make complicated plans, plot effectively, strategize creatively, and regulate one another without interference from God. Yet despite its rigorous organization, Pandaemonium is not 100 An exemplary recent formulation of this position would be Agamben's: 'Being-called- the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist) - is also what can bring them all back radically into question. It is the Most Common that cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are expropriated of all identity; so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign E. Tricksters or fakes, assistants or 'toons, they are the exemplars ofthe coming community', The Coming Community, pp. 10-11. See also J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), especially the 'Introduction: About the Human', pp. 1-7. 101 'In patristic thought, and sometimes in later Christian thought, the fall of the angels plays an important part in the explanation of cosmic or physical evil: though no other Christian thinker goes as far as Origen in making the whole creation depend on the fall of the spirits who, according to the depth of their fall, became angels, men or devils: a doctrine which he is enabled to reconcile with his firm anti-Gnostic faith that the creation is essentially good, because it is the work ofthe perfectly wise and good Father working through the Logos in whom there is no fault or failing, by his vision of the whole creative process as one of redemption, education and purification which will bring all the spirits back to that original state form [sic] which they, freely and of their own motion, in no way impelled by God, chose to fall', A. H. Armstrong, 'Dualism: Platonic, Gnostic, and Christian', in R. T. Wallis, ed., Neoplatonism and Gnosticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 49. Augustine's procedure in City of God is exemplary here: it is with respect to the fall of the apostate angels that the Saint attempts to resolve the problem of evil- which is not considered as an efficiency, but as a deficiency, a defection from good which is bad in itself, without requiring a bad object to compromise the act. See Bk 12, esp. Chapters 6-9. 102 On the differences between angelology and demonology, see Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, p. 31. 103 See J. Milton, John Milton, ed. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 356. As Jeffrey Burton Russell has commented, 'It was John Milton who made the traditional story of the fall of angels and humanity into a scenario so coherent and compelling that it became the standard account for all succeeding generations', J. B. Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 95.

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a State, it is not the harmonious Polis or Civitas Dei, but a revolutionary Counteror Anti-State constitutively arrayed against its glorified others. It is, in its dark and seething heart, dedicated to the overthrow of established laws, conservative knowledges, moral strictures, supposedly immutable and correct social practices, and so on. Pandaemonium is the final end, the dream of total knowledge, all the demons unleashed everyelsewhere, all at once. But this disarray or unruliness is in no way without rather stringent orderings of its own. It is, on the contrary, thoroughly regulated, hierarchical. Daemons are, not coincidentally, the most reliable and efficient of bureaucrats, a fact which testifies also to their constant melancholic suffering. But also, thereby, to their amorousness and creativity. Daemons are functionaries. 104 And it is also no coincidence that the very word hierarchy was invented in the first place by Pseudo-Dionysius to explain the divine ordering of angels - which daemons of course once were, and will always somehow remain. And Dionysius further uses the military term taxis to refer to this celestial organization of beings that are neither God nor Man, beings that are warriors, messengers, scholars, administrators, guardians. 105 Yet, though exemplary accountants themselves, there is something about such beings that escapes enumeration. Neither really rulers nor slaves, angels and demons occupy intermediate realms; they are intermediate beings, ineradicably divided, divisive, in-between. Furthermore, this transhistorical chain of linguistic inventiveness - daemon, taxis, hierarchy- is already imminent in and determined by the very word daemon itself. Derived from daiomai, meaning to distribute or divide, daemons not only parcel out individual fates, but divide being endlessly in their drive to study and to know. 106 Maxwell's Demon, after all, is a sorting device, and a daemon is essentially one who sorts in order to know. Or, more precisely, one who sorts in order to sort further .... The entirely negative implications and connotations that might attach themselves to this conclusion (regarding the daemonic provenance of nihilism) are a function of this newly aestheticized onto-theological motifwithin Romantic metaphysics itself. 107 104 See A. Fletcher, 'Daemons, as I shall define them, share this major characteristic of allegorical agents, the fact that they compartmentalize function. If we were to meet an allegorical character in real life, we would say of him that he was obsessed with only one idea, or that he had an absolutely one-track mind, or that his life was patterned according to absolutely rigid habits from which he never allowed himself to vary. It would seem that he was driven by some hidden, private force', Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 40. 105 See H. Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996). 106 See the entry for Daimon, in M. C. Howatson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 167. See also G. Rose, Dialectic ofNihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), esp. pp. 73-7. 107 See M. Praz, 'Chapter II: The Metamorphoses of Satan', in The Romantic Agony, second edition, foreword by F. Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 53-94, which turns mainly on the figure of Byron.

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Which is no doubt why John Forbes can write, in a poem entitled 'Anti-Romantic', 'You meet your daemon &/respond with contempt' .108 And which is also why a writer as critical as Dostoevsky turned to nihilism as the basis for a judgment on the modern state. The State, for Dostoevsky, stands revealed for what it is in the reflected dark light of nihilism - a kind of erratic non-place, which spreads the heresy of reason-over-God. Or again, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen points out, nihilism as a political movement is so horrific for philosophy insofar as the former moves against the dominant integrative trajectory ofRomantic philosophy; nihilism proceeds from an ethics prohibited it, to a politics that becomes political insofar as it destroys the foundations of all ethics and community. 109 But, we should add, Romanticism also cannot help but be fascinated by the flecks of (negative) utopia that it discerns in such ambiguous movements. This is also to say that nihilism's status as a politically forceful philosophical discourse is tied to the aesthetic fantasy that, whatever nihilism is, it might genuinely foster pandaemonium. Its twinning with bureaucracy is what places it at the heart of the modern state, giving it its essentially modern character. My argument has so far presumed that the character of nihilism is formed in the interactions of state bureaucracies, especially educational ones, with their subjects. These interactions tend to produce characteristic figures or types, paradigms of professionalism or contestatory force. 110 They give rise to the paradoxical aesthetic community of Romantic philosophy, Russian 'political' nihilism, as well as to the character of the perfect nihilist embodied by Nietzsche- whose own overcoming of nineteenth century academia reproduces the very genealogy of nihilism itsel£ 111 The supposed 'ungroundedness ofall values', in other words, is simply the aesthetico-philosophical registration of a professional dissatisfaction with the new centrality of rationalizing institutions in modern academic life.

Conclusion: ' ... Bureaucratically man dwells ... ' What makes my critique of the limits of nihilism all the more difficult to elaborate is that those I have identified as being entirely bound up in its analysis - that is, Romantic philosophers -have, for their own part, never said anything else. Indeed, one of the reasons why the diagnosis of nihilism is so difficult to shake is because it is so subtle, complex, and self-reflexive. Furthermore, given that this is the case, it remains strictly speaking undecidable whether such Romantic thought can still offer Forbes, Damaged Glamour, p. 41. See Mikk:el Borch-Jacobsen, 'The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics', in Cadava et al., Who Comes After the Subject?, pp. 61-78. 110 See Macintyre, After Virtue, pp. 27-31, and G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu 'estce que Ia philosophie? (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991), pp. 60-81, for relevant philosophical definitions and justifications of such characteristic-conceptual 'figures'. 111 See Macintyre, Three Rival Versions ofMoral Enquiry, pp. 32-5. 108 109

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a genuine way to think beyond its own aporias, or whether its indefinitely exciting quasi-apocalyptic hesitations are themselves simple reflex moves of more trivial institutional shifts. For- as I have also been implying throughout the preceding exegeses- if the 'problem of nihilism' is today linked to a very specific site of thought, the question may well be asked as to the material conditions that support and determine this apparently more virtual site. As already stated, I believe that the position I have been analysing is very institutionally and professionally restricted, a restriction that furthermore works in such a way that it can only ever register the political impotence of its own self-dissimulating a-positionality as a serious failure of the Other (for example, 'the Christian-Moral interpretation ofthe world') and not as a mere secondary effect of personal localization and training in particular institutional structures -that is, preponderantly state-funded and -managed tertiary educational apparatuses. As Ian Hunter remarks, 'The Romantics mark the point at which a stratum of intellectuals detaches itself from the emergent technologies of government and, in this regard at least, renders itself powerless by founding itself in a higher realm- morality, aesthetic completeness.' 112 Indeed, the abiding Romantic hostility to bureaucracy, State power, and to the automatism of administrative procedures has always been strongly invested in misrecognizing the conditions and limits of its own institutional dissociation as the index of a historical and subjective destitution. 113 Goudsblom - one of the few commentators to remark on the importance of this link - puts it thus, 'the fact that, despite all differences, a common denominator links the various meanings ascribed to the word nihilism provides a clue. Those who write about nihilism are intellectuals, people who review the problems of men and society with concem.' 114 To the genealogical account I have given, there is of course an impeccable philosophical response: the discourse of nihilism projects an analysis and embodies an injunction that cannot simply be disarmed by analysing the conditions of its emergence and the apparent limits of its forms. But such a response misses the point of such a genealogy, which considers nihilism's effect on philosophy as 112 With regard to the speculative possibilities of such critique, Hunter will also, rather nastily, remark that 'intellectuals can make good careers out of this sort of daring and are in little danger ofbecoming politically significant', in 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies' in L. Grossberg et al., eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 371 and 368. 113 If, as Paul Hamilton glosses Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's The Literary Absolute, 'Literature's symbolic function is to excuse Kantian philosophy's failure by locating its idealist self-presentation "outside philosophy". But then literature's apparent autonomy is merely the aesthetic displacement of philosophical incoherence .... Philosophy creates literature to escape from its own limiting devices; literature redeems aesthetically, as Schlegelian irony, the embarrassing poverty ofthose devices, thus endowing with philosophical gravitas its own poetic license', my account supplements theirs by relating these procedures to the question of the institution. SeeP. Hamilton, ' "A Shadow ofA Magnitude": The Dialectic of Romantic Aesthetics', in S. Copley and J. Whale, eds, Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 17. 114 Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture, p. 16.

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precisely rendering im-possible analyses that take their own rational force for granted. On my account, then, the analysis of'nihilism' has been one of the central ways that philosophy has blinded itself to its own contexts, and in the guise of its most thoroughgoing (auto) critique. I would rather say that the nihilist, Romantic aesthete-philosopher, and bureaucrat are characteristic figures of modernity, embodying representative life-practices; they are linked practically, pedagogically, and conceptually, and their fortunes are directly linked to the expansion and new centrality of governmental organizations and pedagogical institutions in the modem state. I have thus tried to show that nihilism is its history, a history encompassing German Idealism, the Russian nihilists, Nietzsche, their inheritors, and the institutional imbrication of these figures with the training of bureaucrats and teachers. Furthermore, I have tried to show that, for those who offer the diagnosis of nihilism, aesthetics has been offered as the only viable cure. As I have also shown, nihilism in its manifold forms has regularly taken as its generic mode the terminal diagnosis: 'The nihilist is a doomed man', for instance, or 'God is dead'. But, as I noted above, nihilism's diagnoses have become unavoidably self-reflexive, and, following its irremediable contemporary banalization, the term's diagnostic force has itselfbeen vitiated. I have argued at length why I do not believe in such diagnoses anymore, and why the continuing attempts to prosecute them ironically end up proving mere intra-institutional repetitions of their predecessors. Nonetheless, the nihilistic problematic still remains uncircumventable: the other side of my critique is simply a reminder that the era of Romanticism is as yet incomplete, and that it is still currently impossible to evade the institutional, aesthetic, and nihilistic circuit of Romantic thought. These first three chapters have indicated how, in the regulated succession between the aporetic topoi that are the institution, nihilism, and aesthetics, Romantic theory sustains itself through what might be called its own ex-cession: it produces itself as a negative writing, proliferating aesthetic figures and modes which it misrecognizes as binding together, or forging passages between those zones which institutional power would supposedly illicitly separate. It unfolds on the basis of such equations as history for the past = aesthetics as a model for the future. Yet its constant pressing at limits of all kinds, its denigration of precise, scientific, or managerial knowledges, can also at any moment- through a turn to nihilism or to such 'material conditions' as institutions - seem to invert, deform, or savagely repudiate its own characteristic projects. The 'later' Foucault, for instance, in his turn to the relations between aesthetic self-fashionings and regimes of power-knowledge, remains just as Romantic as the Foucault who writes 'it is quite likely that the approach of death -its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory- hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak'. 115 115 M. Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works ofFoucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2., ed. J.D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley eta!. (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 89.

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My procedure has suggested that what Foucault calls 'the void toward which and from which we speak' designates nothing other than that im-possible place that philosophy assigned itself in the modem university; equally, that the institution of this strange utopia - which was thereafter registered as the final development of the world-historical epoch of nihilism - inspired philosophy to suture itself to aesthetics as its only chance, however dissatisfactory, of a daemonic salvation. Or, more precisely, the void that Romantic critical theory confronts is in fact triple: the void of its institution (the university), the void of its diagnosis (nihilism), and the void of its solution (aesthetics). What I have been calling 'theoretical Romanticism' can be identified with those attempts that, first, experience these voids as the most pressing of theoretical problems; second, attempt to elude, overcome, or surpass the injunctions these problems present; and third, in their failure to do so, constantly return to and cycle endlessly through these problems - without ever being able to reflect on the precise nature of their own constitution. Indeed, it is my contention that these problems subtend those more often supposed to be fundamental to theoretical Romanticism (for example, 'imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style' 116). One of the uncircumventable consequences in elaborating such an argument is its generality. My procedure so far has been to outline three genealogies, so as to isolate the relevant long-term continuities in Romantic philosophy and theory which can be traced back to Kant. If I have, throughout this account, gestured towards the links that I claim inhere between my three topics, these links will remain too broad and speculative if they cannot be supported by more concrete evidence. In order to verify in detail the ways in which contemporary theory remains subject to the exigencies imposed upon it by the triple void of its institution, aesthetics and nihilism, I now tum to a series of close readings of selected authorities- Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter, and Alain Badiou.

116 R. Wellek, 'The Concept of"Romanticism" in Literary History', Comparative Literature 1: 1 (1949), p. 147.

PART II

Interventions

Chapter4

Sex, Formalization, and Jacques Lac an Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men. Jorge Luis Borges 1

WhyLacan? One of the most interesting aspects about the work of Jacques Lacan is that he explicitly contests many of the directions taken by Romantic thought, such as its critique of logic or its temporalization of the concept. His rereading of Freudian psychoanalysis is notoriously atemporal, and rarely - if ever -has recourse to any of the characteristic historicist moves. If Lacan often draws his examples from particular historical formations, for example, from courtly love, Greek tragedy, or baroque art, these examples immediately seem to become exemplary, in the fullest sense of that word. Even when he insists on the necessity of history, it is still necessarily subordinated to the logics of subjectification, for example, 'The death drive is to be situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature. ' 2 Furthermore, Lacan has constant recourse to mathematical formulations, and cites scientific discoveries in a way that goes against the tide of Romanticism in general; indeed, the problem of 'science', as ideal and reality, is in some way integral to his project. And when French intellectuals were still engaging in, or at least publically proclaiming their support for, direct political action, Lacan notoriously upbraided rioting students at Vincennes University in 1969: 'If you had a little patience, and if you were willing for our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one.' 3 Furthermore, Lacan never sought employment as an 1 J. L. Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby, preface by A. Maurois (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 27. 2 J. Lacan, The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis (1959-1960), trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 211. See also Joan Copjec's Lacanian arguments against 'historicism', in J. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 3 J. Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. J. Copjec, trans. D. Hollier eta!. (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 126.

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academic, and his work always- due in part to the exigencies of the psychoanalytic profession- ran counter to, or had to be elaborated at a certain distance from, State educational and establishment medical facilities (as, indeed, from establishment psychoanalytic institutions). Which has not, of course, prevented his work from becoming extraordinarily influential within university systems themselves, or from being disseminated across a number of fields that, at first glance, would seem remote from clinical psychoanalytic issues: feminism; queer theory; literary, film, and cultural studies; art history; political theory; and so on. What I wish to do in this chapter, then, involves a rereading ofLacan that brings out his complicity with Romanticism. This rereading necessarily requires that I at once attend very closely to the letter and logics of the Lacanian text and depart quite radically from the currently dominant interpretations ofLacan. My exegesis will take as its basic objects two ofLacan's more famous papers, one which stands close to the beginning of Lacan's career, 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience' (hereafter referred to as 'The Mirror Stage'), the second near its end, 'Encore' .4 If any number of major Lacanian theorists have recently begun to emphasize Lacan's 'final phase' over those preceding, in the name ofhis new and very different account of the status of the Real, my own trajectory in this chapter will be different again: I wish to argue that 'The Mirror Stage' essay has, almost uncannily (as they say), already predicted and destined the emergence of the famous 'formulas of sexuation', supposedly only adumbrated much later. 5 Finally, I will suggest various linkages that can be made between Lacan and classical rhetorical theory, in order to produce a matheme to which Lacan himself might not assent, but which certainly follows as closely as possible the letter of his text. The apparent idiocy of my strategy here is hopefully not merely the index of a subjective insufficiency, but rather derives from the inadequation and idiocy oftwo different institutional discourses (that of psychoanalysis and ofthe university) with respect to each other. Indeed, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan develops a purified, logical revisioning of his own doctrines at the very moment that Lacanian psychoanalysis begins to be taught in the state-fuelled and driven French university system: the mathemes thus function as the constitutively foreign 'alimentary particles' ofpsychoanalytic knowledge, and precisely insofar as they fail to conform to the standard exigencies of academic research and teaching. Further, they also necessarily fail (albeit in a very different way) vis-a4 See J. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1980), and J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. with notes B. Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Page references to 'The Mirror Stage' essay will hereafter be given in the body of the text. 5 On the various phases ofLacan's conception of the relationships between the Real and Symbolic, see S. Zizek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989), esp. Chapter 4, 'You Only Die Twice', pp. 131-49.

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vis psychoanalysis itself: as we shall see, the mathemes succeed only to the extent that they are miserably deficient. ... 6 An idiot done with mirrors

Idiocy, for Lacan, is not something that one might possibly avoid, but rather an empty slot in the subjectivity-machine: Lacan himself constantly refers to 'the ineffable, stupid existence' of the barred subject, which remains always an imbecilic and therefore culpable bystander of its own life. As he rather convolutedly expresses it, explicating his famous 'schema L': 'He [the subject] is, indeed, a participator, in that he is stretched over the four comers of the schema: namely, S, his ineffable, stupid existence, a, his objects, a', his ego, that is, that which is reflected of his form in his objects, and 0, the locus from which the question of his existence may be presented to him. ' 7 For the moment, however, I wish to concentrate on how this void, cleft, unreflective subject witnesses and participates in its own life very differently according to which sexual position it assumes. For Lacan, how one comes to be sexed is a tragi-comedy of failure. As Judith Butler puts it: 'Lacan disputes the primacy given to ontology within the terms of Western metaphysics and insists upon the subordination of the question "What is/has being?" to the prior question "How is 'being' instituted and allocated through the signifying practices of the paternal economy?" ' 8 If, as many recent commentators have pointed out, Lacan's 6 See E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. trans. J. Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 375-406. 7 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 194. The question of'idiocy' must be rigorously distinguished from the common, quasi-psychologistic understanding, and returned to its properly philosophical determinations. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, 'Cowardice, cruelty, baseness and stupidity are not simply corporeal capacities or traits of character or society; they are structures of thought as such ... Philosophy could have taken up the problem with its own means and with the necessary modesty, by considering the fact that stupidity is never that of others but the object of a properly transcendental question: how is stupidity (not error) possible?', Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 151. Or Jacques Derrida writes, explicating a poem of Baudelaire's, that 'The stupid perversion of the friend, the "evil out of stupidity", did not consist in doing evil or in not understanding, but in doing evil while not doing all he ought to have been able to do in order to understand the evil he was doing, but that he was doing by not doing everything that he ought to have been able to do in order to understand the evil he was doing, but that he was doing by that very fact', Given 1ime: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 169. See also Clement Rosset, whose book, Le Reel: traite del 'idiotie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977) ultimately shows- although not always in a consistent or conscious fashion- that idiocy is fundamentally an aesthetic determination. 8 J. Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 43.

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characterizations of the interminable failures attendant upon sexuation change dramatically throughout his career, just as many critics continue to refer to his characterization of male and female as ideal positions to which of course any particular instantiation must necessarily fail to measure up. However, this latter view, while not altogether incorrect, remains at the level of what Lacan called the imaginary, or mirror stage, in his famous article ofthe same name: furthermore, as I shall argue, such a view is also predicated on what is quite an egregious misreading of the scope and status of the imaginary. For if it is true, as Elizabeth Grosz puts it, that 'The Mirror Stage' is Lacan's 'first, and most accessible, intervention into the "reading" of Freud' ,9 it is also precisely because of this essay's supposed ease and accessibility that its abiding difficulty can continue to pass without comment. Although most commentators recognize the centrality of 'misrecognition' in that essay, there are a number of only too familiar errors that crop up again and again: for example, the common emphasis on the dyadic nature of the mirror stage (as opposed to the triadic structure of the symbolic), or on its nature as a spatial and/or temporal stage through or across which one passes and which is thereby finally surpassed. 10 I wish to suggest that most of the standard accounts remain significantly insufficient in that they conflate or confuse the various levels at which this misrecognition occurs. I am now going to proceed to an account of the very precise ways according to which I think the mirror stage functions: I will list, somewhat tendentiously, eight analytically distinct 'orders of misrecognition' (this list is perhaps not itself exhaustive) which are nevertheless tied together in various ways in practice - the psychotic, for instance, will get knotted according to procedures that radically differ from those of the pervert or the neurotic. Before proceeding further, however, it is also important to stress the dimension of genuine 'identification' in the mirror stage drama: the infant at this moment and as if for the first time identifies itself as a delimitable being-in-the-world, and thus one object among others. Again, Lacan makes clear that he is playing also on the ambiguity of the word 'identification': the child identifies as and identifies with. However- and this is also a point to which I will return below - it is also crucial to emphasize the 'active' and 'performative' nature of this identification, which is by no means the simple registration of a neutral fact, but has rather the status 9

p. 31.

E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Sydney: Allen and Unwin),

10 This tendency is particularly evident in texts designed as introductions to the Lacanian corpus. See, for example, M. Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991 ); R. Harland, Superstructuralism (London: Methuen, 1987); J. S. Lee, Jacques Lacan (Boston: Twayne, 1990); K. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Vince Crapanzano, who has emphasized the 'triadic structure' ofLacan's thought, ' "Lacking Now Is Only the Leading Idea, That Is - We, the Rays, Have No Thoughts": Interlocutory Collapse in Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness', Critical Inquiry XXIV: 3 (1998), pp. 737-67.

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of cutting and suturing. Thus, for Lacan, identification and aggression are born together, as an asymmetrical doublet: as Catherine Clement puts it, 'aggressiveness is constitutive of the subject'. 0 Finally, I wish to note here a common criticism that has often been directed against the mirror stage: that the very notion of 'misrecognition' presumes that there is already a subject that misrecognizes its own image, when this notion was invoked principally to explain how the subject came to be formed in the first place- thereby catching Lacan in a vicious circle. To give another, related example of common critiques of the mirror stage: the mirror stage supposedly also presumes a distance between the child and its image, although distance itself will only be produced as such after the mirror stage. However, these criticisms tend to miss what is precisely the point- 'misrecognition' for Lacan should rather be conceived as a paradoxical structural exigency that produces as effect, by means of a dissimulation-that-hasnothing-to-dissimulate, a subject that is a subject only insofar as it masquerades as its own quasi-cause. More simply, one could say that the mirror stage is a structure that seems to contradict logic, or at least common sense: for rather than the model preceding its image, the mirror stage image instead precedes its putative model, that is, the body of the infant qua unified unit. 12 The 'primordial dehiscence' of the subject is thus the 'non-identical siamese twin' of a fundamentally bifurcated spatiotemporality, and the mirror stage thus ought to be read not only as the paradoxical event which constitutes the subject, but as the essentially impossible 'moment' at which space and time themselves come into non-being. This final point - which may simply seem to restate a paradox rather than answer an objection- involves a recurring (and evidently uncircumventable) logical problem for structuralism more generally. Indeed, the latter repeatedly finds itself analysing the origin-myths of others so as to out-manoeuvre questions of empirical genesis in the name of the determinations of an immutable, onto logically ambiguous 'structure' . 13 By the same token, Lacan's work certainly cannot avoid such questions; however, as we shall see below, his own response to this difficulty renovates the mystical foundations oflaw by way of an attention to the rhetorics of sex and institutions. Indeed, I wish to show how this provisional response ultimately proves critical for Lacan's re-elaboration of sexual difference and the sublime. 11 C. Clement, The Lives and Legends ofJacques Lacan, trans. A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 95. 12 On this point, see S. Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. M. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 13 Indeed, this vicious circle recurs in all sorts of contexts, some of which we will encounter again in the course of this book. To give only one example, drawn from a very different thinker than Lacan: Niklas Luhmann is impelled to state that, given that the operations of systems are themselves without reason, 'It takes an observer to see the paradox of a beginning that presupposes itself, to recognize the self-implicative structure of the distinguishing act', Art as a Social System, trans. E. M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 31.

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Eight orders of misrecognition

The first order ofmisrecognition is very simple, and is primarily a spatial one: the child, 'caught up in the lure of spatial identification' (4), sees its image 'over-there' as if it were 'over-here'. The first order ofmisrecognition thus involves what one might call a 'stationary transport', and a misrecognition of the fact that, as Sartre put it in a different context, that 'the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another.' 14 The second order of misrecognition is the child's mistaking its own fragmentation for a unified self. Now throughout the essay Lacan is at pains to demonstrate what he calls 'a real prematurity ofbirth in man', in that the infant cannot at the moment of the mirror stage stand up by itself, or control itself in any consistent manner, but is rather held up by means of a artificial prosthetic device ( 1). Thus the supposedly single entity the child sees in the mirror is by no means simple: it is already an aggregate and an artefactuality. This particular misrecognition thus consists in the child overlooking the external, material supports of its image and covertly misassigning the exterior nature of the support to the vitalism of a selfgenerating interiority. The infant thus misrecognizes this image as a manifestation of an interior self-sufficiency, rather than the directorial effects of a domestic mise-en-scene, which requires, to give only the most minimal of determinations, a baby-walker, a stage, a reflecting surface: this confusion of inside and outside is generated on the basis of a misrecognition of part for whole. Which also means, in Clement's words, that 'the identity of the subject, then, is a kind of prosthesis. Something added, something that did not exist at birth that helps you to stand up straight within yourself. It is a carefully located form, the form of the totality of the body, which the child sees for the first time in the mirror. ' 15 The third misrecognition follows from the above: the image is misrecognized as human, despite the fact that it is rather an artifact and, in Jane Gallop's words, 'an illusion done with mirrors'. 16 This misrecognition thus illicitly renders the inhuman human, by giving a face to a Thing. The fourth order of misrecognition devolves from the fact that the image of unity that the mirror reflects for the child comes, for Lacan, from the future: as Marcel Duchamp says with respect to his own Large Glass, 'the apparition is the mould of the appearance'. 17 Or, to put it another way, the mirror stage is the moment at which the hommelette thinks that it is already Humpty-Dumpty and in control of 14 J.-P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. and intro. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1987), p. 31. 15 Clement, Lives and Legends, p. 91. 16 J. Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 83. 17 M. Ducharnp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 85.

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its movements and destiny. Furthermore, the image itself is nothing other than the prefiguration or promise of the phallus or Name-of-the-Father that is linked, in Lacanian terms, with the realm oflanguage, the symbolic, the unconscious, a stage which 'succeeds' that of the imaginary. The child looking into the mirror is thus, quite literally for Lacan, looking into the future per speculum in aenigmate, and the mirror stage or imaginary is itself governed by a strange temporal structure, that of the already/not-yet. Hence the fourth order ofmisrecognition: the futurity of the image is misrecognized in the time of the now. As Grosz puts it: 'It is during the identificatory blurring of self and other that . . . the penis becomes regarded as a "detachable" organ ... [and thereby] prefigures the function of the phallus. It produces the penis as an object of signification, rather than a biological organ. ' 18 Or, as Gallop puts it, the child 'appears already to be what she will only later become'. 19 If the fourth order ofmisrecognition involves the mistaking of a promise for an already accomplished fact or possible manifestation, the fifth order involves the misrecognition of the status of this promise. To be more precise: the promise of the phallus that the mirror gives to the infant is in fact the promise of a promise, and not something that might ever receive actualization. For Lacan, the phallus does not, technically speaking, 'exist', and remains eternally elusive and out of reach. The phallus, in this particular order, names nothing other than the effaced and necessary failure of a promise to ever coincide with itself. Thus, the fourth order misprision of futurity neatly flips over into the fifth: not only does the child mistakenly think that the future is now, but it also implicitly misrecognizes the future as something that can possibly become a now. If the promise is thus always a promise of a promise, then the child also mistakes what the promise seems to hold out: the child greets its apparition with jubilation. But, as everyone knows, what is promised is not reconciliation or harmony or any such cause for jubilation, but rather the phallus in its role as castration: fear and trembling and a sickness unto death .... Indeed, Lacan's lifelong suspicion of reformers and revolutionaries (already remarked above) stems precisely from his analysis of the ideals that such reformers claim as their good: the desire to reform is always for Lacan doubled by and complicit with a disavowed aggression and pleasure in the suffering of others through a misrecognition of what it is precisely that the phallus promises. This is then the sixth order of misprision: a misrecognition that proceeds by inverting the image's significance and value. Up until now, I have pretty much been treating the imaginary within its own terms, or rather, within the terms that Lacan himself sets up as crucial to the drama itself. But, as any number of commentators have pointed out and several of the orders canvassed above suggest, the mirror stage - which supposedly predates the child's acquisition of language- is nevertheless only accessible within the 18 19

Grosz, Jacques Lacan, p. 117. My emphasis. Gallop, Reading Lacan, p. 78.

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terms of the symbolic itself. Now this point, apparently rather banal in itself, has a number of quite important and complex consequences. Lacan himself explicitly announces the fictionality that governs the unfolding of the mirror stage, and the dramatic quality of the event. 20 Given that, in the symbolic, there are supposedly no oppositions or fixed points, this symbolic characterization of the imaginary can hold only if the imaginary (which is held to think in dualisms and according to the primacy of vision) is here covertly ventriloquizing the symbolic. In other words, the imaginary masquerading as the symbolic comes to make the distinction between imaginary and symbolic as ifthis distinction was something that preceded it, and then effaces or conceals the traces of its own processes. And if this is the case, then the mirror stage cannot simply be something that is traversed and surpassed, but something that 'persists', and further, something that cannot simply precede the acquisition of the symbolic. I have already alluded to this paradox in my delineation above of the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages, in which an apparition of the phallus-to-come is in a very specific sense already present - the symbolic itself is already/not-yet prefigured in the imaginary, but all this occurs from the point of view of the symbolic itself, or rather the imaginary-masquerading-as-thesymbolic-in-the-symbolic. Thus the very notion of a mirror stage is itself already a misnomer, and this is the seventh misrecognition I wish to mark here, the flawed if necessary misrecognition of the mirror stage as stage. This misrecognition is more complex than the six preceding in that, though it is self-reflexively aware of its own status as fiction and misrecognition, it nevertheless necessarily proceeds as if it were not. The event-encounter that is the 'mirror stage' therefore undoubtedly occurs, but cannot ever be satisfactorily grasped. Which leads us to the eighth misrecognition, perhaps even more thoroughgoing and convoluted than the last: the mirror stage is impossible, and does not exist. This misrecognition is at odds with the seventh, which still presumes that, despite the impossibility of naming the event without injustice, there subsists something unnameable to which the appellation 'mirror stage' thereby unsatisfactorily refers. Rather, the eighth misrecognition is founded on a self-reflexive recognition of the preposterousness of asserting its existence: as simply as possible, Lacan can say anything that he damn well pleases about the mirror stage, precisely because his assertions in this regard, as an apocryphal American psychiatrist is said to have remarked of Freudian psychoanalysis more generally, are just not testicle. 21 I now want to link these two later forms of misrecognition with what Lacan says in his famous 1973 seminar Encore about the formulas of sexuation, but I will first make a number of remarks about the scope and status ofLacan's famous 'mathemes'. 20 My analysis in this section derives in no small part from the accounts of the mirror stage given by Samuel Weber, in his Return to Freud, and by Jane Gallop in Reading Lacan. 21 Quoted in T. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 162.

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A remark on the rna theme There has evidently been a great deal of interest in Lacan's predilection for mathematical formalization, which ultimately generated an astonishing number and variety of diagrams, schemas, equations, and so on. Very few commentators, however, have been able to read Lacan's various formulas as anything other than a parody of- or a borrowing from - scientific method, without immediately slipping themselves into the extreme and unproductive postures of either sectarian affirmation or self-righteous condemnation. The most recent proponents of the latter view are Alan Sokal and Jean-Pierre Bricmont, who in their book Intellectual Impostures dedicate a great deal of energy to show -like others before them - that Lacan was essentially a charlatan.22 Less hostile interpreters, on the other hand, have seen the mathemes as, in Jot!l Dor's words, 'an abstract vehicle suited for a complete transmission of something germane to psychoanalysis' .23 As Dorremarks, Lacan's 'idiosyncratic use of these topological objects involves a metaphorical illustration . . . that is essentially dynamic because it actualizes the representation itself as it practices it. Nonetheless, in no way are we led, on the basis of this dramatics of representation, to speak of a mathematization. More precisely, we are dealing with an epistemological acting. ' 24 More interestingly, perhaps, Alain Badiou has attempted to circumvent the characteristic directions taken by this debate by, on the one hand, taking Lacan's mathematical tendencies absolutely seriously, and, on the other, explaining the apparent naiveties or incoherencies in Lacan's mathematics in terms ofLacanian theory itself. Hence, in an essay entitled 'Sujet et infini', Badiou analyses a number of contradictions in Lacan's mobilization of set theory, with especial reference to the 'formulas of sexuation' (of which more soon). Badiou points out that Lacan explicitly relates feminine jouissance to 'infinity', and the formulas to Cantorian settheory, yet simultaneously declares that the formulas rely on a variant of intuitionist logic (which denies the existence of any actually completed infinity, and hence 22 See A. Sokal and J.-P. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile, 1998), especially Chapter 2, pp. 17-35. Or, as Clement suggests, 'It may be that all these mathematical devices and equations served merely to hide the shabby state of a theory that had come to the end of its rope', Lives and Legends, p. 181. 23 J. Dor, 'The Epistemological Status ofLacan's Mathematical Paradigms', in D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul, eds, Disseminating Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 117. Hence such readings, already cited above, as those ofCopjec, Felman, Grosz, Macey, and Zizek, which proceed as if the mathemes simply provided exemplarily pithy statements of what Lacan says more lengthily elsewhere. See also B. Fink's scattered remarks, in The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and N. Charraud 'Matherne', in H. Glowinski et al., eds, A Compendium ofLacanian Terms (London: Free Association, 2001 ), pp. 110-13. 24 Dor, 'The Epistemological Status ofLacan's Mathematical Paradigms', p. 117. Dor will conclude that, although Lacan never wished to render psychoanalysis mathematical, Lacan's abiding attachment to formalization is the symptom of a desire for 'structural coherence'.

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is anti-Cantorian). 25 Badiou explains how the contradiction can be resolved by recognizing that Lacan's own project doesn't require the existence of infinite sets, because it needs the infinite as nothing more than a virtual point subtracted from the exigencies of finite existence.26 Whatever the force or interest of these debates, what interests me more here are the functions served by the matheme in the formation of a scholarly community that is not, strictly speaking, an academic one. I already noted above that, according to Roudinesco, the mathemes receive a new, decisive determination from the moment that Lacanian psychoanalysis begins to infiltrate the university of the French state. They can thus be seen to serve, first, a legitimate cognitive and mnemonic function, insofar as they ensure the integral, very condensed transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge. But they thereby also serve a separative function, insofar as they depart from the standard humanities presumptions as to how knowledge should be inscribed - in their enigmatic materiality, they designate the ineradicable fragmentation and specialization ofknowledges, and their essential inaccessibility to any fantasies of 'popular understanding'. The mathemes, first and foremost, declare that one needs to be trained in order to comprehend them; and, in the context, such training also supports an uncircumventable political exclusion: those-presumed-to-know from those-presumed-not-to-know. Yet the mathemes are nothing but letters; as such, they are also mobilized to strip any lingering theological prestige from the knowledge they supposedly transmit. In principle, then, anyone can understand them; in practice, hardly anyone does understand them. This is why, on the one hand, they seem to mime the procedures ofthe hard sciences, mathematics, and formal logic, yet, on the other, are directed towards the specificity of psychoanalytic knowledge. By a paradox of exposition, however, this very institutional specificity then lends to the matheme the powers of producing quasi-mystical effects (that seduce or repel the subjects they affect, and whose functionings they purport to formalize) - the inscription of knowledge is in excess of the institutions in which it circulates, and this excess bears ultimately on the question of sex (and transference-love). This is 25 'Intuitionistic logic', associated particularly with Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, differs from classical, Aristotelian logic insofar as the former contests the principle of the excluded middle. As Wun Ruitenburg puts it, 'Brouwer argues that logical principles should not guide but describe regularities that are observed in mathematical practice. The Principle of Excluded Third, A v ~A, is an example of a logical principle that has become a guide for mathematical practice instead of simply describing it: the Principle of Excluded Third is observed in verifiable ''finite" situations and generalized to a rule ofmathematics. But according to Brouwer mathematics is not an experimental science, in which one only has to repeat an experiment sufficiently often to establish a law, so the Principle of Excluded Third should be discarded', 'The Unintended Interpretations oflntuitionistic Logic', in T. Drucker, ed., Perspectives on the History ofMathematical Logic (Boston: Birkhiiuser, 1991), pp. 134-5. 26 See A. Badiou, Conditions, intro. F. Wahl (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), pp. 274-305. See also Badiou's 'Complementary Note on a Contemporary use of Frege', a discussion of J.-A. Miller's work, in Le Nombre et /es nombres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990), pp. 36-44.

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one reason, at least, why all those condemnations ofLacan's supposed 'pseudoscience', elitism, and obscurantism go astray. If these condemnations are correct in discerning something of a divine mystery in Lacan's work, they go astray insofar as they cannot accept the fact that the mathemes themselves function to demonstrate that scientific knowledge can never be total, and what knowledge one has has always been learned. The mathemes show, among other things, that if the inscription of specialized knowledges can come to look like groundless, anti-scientific magic or mysticism, this appearance is the effect of a political ignorance; further, that politics is subtended by the incommensurability ofknowledges (we could even say, with Lacan, of 'discourses'), and that this incommensurability bears directly upon the coupled problems of sexuation and institutionalization. Which leads me to my final remark vis-a-vis the mathemes: even for 'thosewho-know' (that is, card-carrying Lacanians), the mathemes remain fundamentally lacking- that is, permanently open to the possibility of their re-inscription and reinterpretation in constitutively uncontrollable ways. The mathemes, in other words, are finally inscriptions ofa failure (in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive); they are void, not full, ofmeaning. 27 Or again: the possibility of their excess is the index of an ineradicable default in actualization. As Lacan puts it: Foliowing the thread of analytic discourse goes in the direction of nothing less than breaking up anew (rebriser), inflecting, marking with its own camber- a camber that could not even be sustained as that oflines of force -that which produces the break (faille) or discontinuity. Our recourse, in llanguage (lalangue), is to that which shatters it (Ia brise). Hence nothing seems to better constitute the horizon of analytic discourse than the use made of the letter by mathematics. The letter reveals in discourse what is called- not by chance or without necessity- grammar. 28

At once cognitive-mnemonic, political, pedagogical, and -as we shall see-sublime, the discontinuities effected by the mathemes serve a number of important, interconnected functions. It is to one of the most important such mathemes that I tum. 27 As John Guillory puts it, 'Nothing seems more evident in the aftermath of the Lacanian school's dissolution than the fact that it was the matheme which conveyed the desire of the master; what "remained an x" in the scene of analysis colluded in the seminar with the "algorithm", the quasi-mathematical formula ... the matheme went, so to speak, over the heads of the disciples. Its formulaic propositions could be reproduced, the science transmitted, without depending upon the intervention of the disciple's understanding. By reducing transmission to a rote process the doctrine was supposed to escape a certain contingency of the transference, its constitutive ambivalence, its love-hate. But the reception of the matheme marked a greater investment in the transference than ever before, even as both master and disciple deferred to the impersonal form of the algorithm', Cultural Capital: The Problem ofLiterary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 202. 28 Lacan, Encore, p. 44. As he adds later in the seminar: 'The analytic thing will not be mathematical. That is why the discourse of analysis differs from scientific discourse', p. 117. For another view of Lacan's relation to mathematization, see J.-C. Milner, 'The Doctrine of Science', Umbra 2000, pp. 33-63.

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The formulas of sexuation

I now wish to explicate the famous 'formulas of sexuation', that provide the centrepiece of Lacan's later seminars (I will rely here on the exposition in his 1972-1973 Seminar, Encore) and which continue to guide subsequent critical accounts of how sexual difference functions in Lacanian psychoanalysis. 29 My account of these formulas derives primarily from the reading offered by Joan Copjec in her essay, 'Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason', but I have also implicitly drawn upon the accounts of theorists such as Charles Shephardson, Alice Jardine and Catherine Millot. 30 An adapted version ofLacan's table- written using the symbols of propositional logic- appears below; the symbol '3' is commonly taken to mean 'there exists'; the symbol 'V' means 'for all' or 'for every'; the symbol '-,'(slightly different in the Lacanian version) designates 'not' or negation; the symbol '' is Lacanese for the 'phallic function'. The left hand of the table is the 'male' side; the right hand is the side of 'Woman'.

3x -,x Vx x

-,Vx x

I will deal with the left-hand side of the table first. It can be rendered as: 'There is at least one x not submitted to the phallic function/All xs are submitted to the phallic function.' Man, according to Lacan, can therefore be completely defined (every man is subject to the phallus). However, the limit that founds Man's 'consistency', that is, the 'father function', is absent or exempt from this phallic order. This 'father' is, of course, nobody other than the primal father of Totem and Taboo, who, in the speculative Freudian anthropo-mythology, oversees his sons that are the primal horde, restricting their access to the women of the tribe. The brothers eventually get together, kill this 'master of enjoyment', and then belatedly realize that daddy is stronger dead than he was when alive.

29 The formulas had also been discussed by Lacan in previous seminars (XVIII and XIX); they appear in Encore on p. 78. 30 See Joan Copjec, 'Sex and the Euthanasia ofReason', and Charles Shepardson, 'The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex', both in Copjec, ed., Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994); A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configuration of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and C. Millot, Horsexe, trans. K. Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990).

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It is necessary to emphasize the complexities of this murder. In order for the brothers to re-enter the system they are already part of, it is not only a question of killing the father but, paradoxically, of simultaneously excluding themselves from the (symbolic) system by way of the very same gesture that permits their inclusion. Now this anthropological fantasy underwrites the male side of the table in two ways: 1) it is just that, a fantasy; 2) it is not a fantasy in the sense of wishful thinking or of an absurd, extreme, or offensive content, but rather an empty and fractured frame that is organized according to eminently logical exigencies, and devolves from logic running up against its own limits (I will come back to this question of logic below). As Copjec puts it, 'The initial cause cannot be tolerated by, or disappears from, the mechanical field that it founds.'31 In other words, one can certainly make claims about what constitutes man, who unquestionably exists, but 'his ex-sistence, or being, remains inaccessible nevertheless, since it escapes the conceptual or symbolic field in which his existence takes shape'. 32 In more strictly psychoanalytic terms, the male side is, in Copjec's words, 'an illusion fomented by aprohibition', 33 that is, castration. Again, the paradoxical nature of this prohibition must be stressed: castration is not simply the fear oflosing an organ (the phallus/signifier), because Lacanian doctrine hinges on the axiom that man never really has it at all. Instead, the threat of castration functions precisely because it makes no sense - the terror which the phallic prohibition inspires is not the terror of a possible loss, but the terror that devolves from the tautological incoherence of its demand, 'You could never have had the phallus, therefore you can lose it.' According to Lacan, since man possesses the phallus only in the mode of dispossession, castration-anxiety is delusory, and furthermore, a self-reflexive delusion: those sexed male in some sense already know this. However, it is because the prohibition is redundant that it works: and this is why recent rereadings ofLacan through Kant have invoked the Kantian dynamic sublime - whereby one is terrified from a position of absolute safety. The links between the male side of the table and what I called the seventh order ofmisrecognition are thus clear: man exists, but his being remains expressively inaccessible. Furthermore, this fact emphasizes why the phallus- as a famous piece of graffiti at a major Melbourne train station neatly puts it - must be considered to be 'a pleonastic neoplasm'. With regards to the female side of the table, we are confronted, as Copjec puts it, not by a contradictory opposition, but rather by contraries. 'There is not one x that is not submitted to the phallic function/Not-all xis submitted to the phallic function.' If contradiction entails a mutual exclusivity at the moment that it divides the entire field, contraries, though still mutually exclusive, nevertheless leave open the possibility of a third option that escapes the determinations of both -it is thus a question of extremes rather than reciprocal exclusion. 'The negation, 3t 32 33

Copjec, 'Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason', p. 38. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 41.

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which bears this time only on the predicate, does not exhaust all the possibilities, but leaves behind something on which it does not pronounce. For this reason both statements may simultaneously be false.' 34 Woman, for Lacan, does not exist, and according to Copjec this must be read as a Kantian indefinite judgment, that is, as 'an affirmation of a negative predicate'. To extend this chain of reasoning, 'this means that everything can be and is said about her, but that none of it is subject to "reality testing" - none of what is said amounts to a confirmation or denial of her existence, which thereby eludes every symbolic articulation' .35 Thus woman functions as the failure of the limit that is castration in the symbolic economy, and can therefore appear within the Big Other only as the constitutively inconsistent 'not-all' formulated by Lacan. Hence also woman's 'impossibility' and nonexistence, but also her freedom- she 'escapes' the law precisely by inhabiting it absolutely. Copjec explicitly links the Woman question to that of the Kantian mathematical sublime. What must be emphasized about these final two misrecognitions is their paradoxical imbrication: while the first six work 'together' as it were, the final two are in fact at once mutually exclusive and yet simultaneously 'ghosted' by their other: one fails in either the male way or the female way, but never both at once. They are therefore not positive misrecognitions in any straightforward sense, but can rather only show themselves in a 'negative presentation' (as Kant says of the Sublime), as the specific mode offailure ofthe first six. 36 Copj!;!c, again: 'The sexual relation fails for two reasons: it is impossible and it is prohibited. Put these two failures together, you will never come up with a whole.' 37 In other words, there are not exactly eight misrecognitions, but rather seven plus one, which, in Lacanian arithmetic, equals not eight, but six plus one minus one (7 + 1 = 6 + 1 - 1).

Catachresis, metalepsis, catalepsy I outlined above eight very specific and analytically distinct ways in which misrecognition functions for Lacan in and around the mirror stage essay. What is of most interest in this context is that- in line with Lacan's own practice- these orders of misrecognition might be conceived of according to the terms of classical rhetorical analysis or tropology, and thus as a sequence of rhetorical tropes. 38 Such a procedure is, as will quickly become apparent, at once absolutely in accord with Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 35. 36 Zizek also notes that the formulas of sexuation are structured like the Kantian antinomies, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham:, NC Duke University Press, 1993), p. 56. 37 Copjec, 'Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason', p. 35. 38 I would like to thank, in particular, Jonathan Carter for this suggestion: Liam Leonard and Bridget Bainbridge should also be recognized here. 34 35

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Lacan's own procedures (for example, his development of metaphor and metonymy) and wildly divergent. So if, as Samuel Weber puts it, 'Lacan's 'return to Freud' ... draws attention to itself, not so much as a faithful rendering of a self-identical original, but as a turn of phrase or trope' ,39 let's return to Lacan by returning to Lacan. Allow me to list the orders again, and provide a quick explanation of the linkages I am going to effect amongst them. The spatial 'stationary transport' effected by the first order, of the over there/over here, is a perfect example of metaphor. The prosthetic supplementation of the second order misrecognition involves mistaking a part for a whole: this is precisely the definition of the trope of synecdoche. The third order, which involves the personification of a radically inhuman image as one's own corresponds to prosopopoeia, perhaps more popularly known as anthropomorphization, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as 'a rhetorical figure by which an inanimate or abstract thing is represented as a person, or with personal characteristics' .40 The fourth-order misrecognition, which consists of the making-now of the phallus-yet-to-come and is thus an anticipation of the future, corresponds to the trope ofprolepsis. The fifth-order misrecognition was a misrecognition of the status of this future, and of the fact that the promise that the phallus holds out was a promise of a promise. This redoubling links the fifth order with the trope of metalepsis or transumption which Quintilian characterizes as providing 'a transition from one trope to another ... It is the nature of metalepsis to form a kind of intermediate step between the term transferred and the thing to which it is transferred, having no meaning in itself, but merely providing a transition.' 41 (He goes on to remark 'it is by no means to be commended ... I can see no use in it except ... in comedy'. 42 ) This is put more simply by Harold Bloom: 'we can define metalepsis as the trope of a trope, the metonymic substitution of a word for a word already figurative. >4 3 Promise of a promise or a trope of a trope, the phallus thereby finds itself squared (mathematically speaking, of course). Weber, Return to Freud, p. 5. Or, to slightly adapt Paul de Man here, an anthropomorphism 'takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of specific entities prior to their confusion, the taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given', The Rhetoric ofRomanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 241. See also J. Hillis Miller's essay on prosopopoeia, 'Face to Face: Faces, Places, and Ethics in Plato', Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 57-79. 41 Quintilian, Quintilian sInstitutes of Oratory: or, Education ofan Orator, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson (London: Bell and Sons, 1882), VIII, vi. 37-8, p. 323. 42 Quintilian, VIII, vi. 37 and 39, p. 323. 43 H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 39 40

p. 74.

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The sixth-order misrecognition proceeded by mistakenly inverting the significance and value of the phallic apparition- what else is this but the trope of antithesis, defined by the OED as a 'direct or striking opposition of character or functions'? Or, as the dictionary has J. Smith reporting it in 1657: 'Antithesis is sometimes a figure, whereby one letter is put for another', in order to make the word or phrase more melodious.' The seventh misrecognition, which resided in the necessarily flawed characterization of the mirror stage as a distance to be traversed, or a moment to be passed through, a stage on which one is seen and begins to see, corresponds to the trope of catachresis or mis-naming. I have already argued above that the seventh and eighth orders of misrecognition are qualitatively different from the preceding six. And, as we have already seen vis-a-vis the male side of the table, though 'man certainly exists, his being remains inaccessible'. (In other words, it is precisely a question of words.) For, as Kant would have it, 'existence is not a predicate', and any predications or propositions that one might adduce with respect to man will necessarily fall short of the mark. It is thus possible to rewrite this side of the table in rhetorical terms: as a deictical failure that, while recognizing its own status as a necessary failure, nevertheless sustains itself on the paradoxical presumption that the unnameable referent 1) exists somewhere, but elsewhere (that is, the primal father); and 2) is retroactively produced and uncontrollably transformed in and by the very act of naming. The male failure is thus a catachrestic one. The eighth-order misrecognition presents the entire scene as if it, despite all the complexities and complications, took place despite its impossibility: this is thus an absolute irony- for as you rabbit on straight-faced about the limits of history and sexuality, what you are referring to has no claims to existence whatsoever. Which is not, of course, to say that the event does not occur, but rather that it transpires precisely because of its non-existence. Again, though irony is a self-reflexive trope, all the commentators on irony agree that irony cannot function unless there is the possibility that it can be taken literally, or overlooked: hence, it also fails in two senses - if one recognizes the irony, one is left with only the slick patina of a nothingness which masks a nothingness, while if one does not, the failure itself fails to materialize as failure. We can thus refigure the so-called female side of the table in the terms of irony. Which, incidentally, makes Lacan's debt to Hegel almost 'a little too self-evident' (as Dupin puts it in Poe's 'The Purloined Letter'), given that, for Hegel, 'woman' is, notoriously, the 'everlasting irony ofthe community' .44 Yet this 'irony' also owes, as we have seen, a debt to the Kantian notion of the mathematical sublime. The rewriting of the mirror stage and the formulas of sexuation in terms of rhetorical tropes also enables the opening of a series of unexpected connections, and an appreciation ofLacan's distance from the common doxa of post-structuralism. 44 G. W .F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 288. See also Badiou, Conditions, p. 273.

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First of all, whereas various Romantics have attempted to contest the supposed primacy of logic (which is often caricatured as the ultimately forlorn attempt to identify and ground Being) by recourse to the ruses of an agonistic or playful rhetoric, Lacan inverts and complicates the relationship between the two. For Lacan, it is precisely rhetoric that attempts to ground Being, whilst logic (qua the formulas of sexuation) is simply the modality of rhetoric's inevitable failure in this regard. As Lacan puts it, 'the universe is a flower of rhetoric'. 45 Yet it is also precisely through this rewriting of logic as the failure of rhetoric that Lacan rejoins the Romantic aesthetic dispensation - insofar as he at once redefines logic as something other than the precision and exactitude required by scientific discourse, and redirects his definition towards the ruses of the Kantian sublime. Now, there are obviously a number of ways in which the orders ofmisrecognition can be organized and reorganized, and the structure that I am about to offer returns to the incessant, undecidable, and irreducible play between 'threes' and 'fours' that I have already noted in Kantian aesthetics. Let me reslot these eight tropes into four pairs, and offer some justification for doing so (Harold Bloom slots his six tropes into three pairs, following the Lurianic Cabbalistic triadic sequence: contraction-catastrophe-restitution: unsurprisingly, what his sequence cannot account for is sexual difference). I am going to call each pair a phallomatrix, thereby efficiently combining the senses of phallus, mother, womb, generation, domination (dominatrix, phallomatrix), quantification (speedometer, phallometer), and mathematical vector analysis. What justifies the pairing of these tropes is that, at least in the implicit Lacanian conception of them, metaphor, synecdoche, and prosopopoeia are essentially spatial tropes, whereas prolepsis, metalepsis, and antithesis are temporal. Hence they can be coupled in the following way: 1) the Phallomatrix of Stationary Transport (metaphor/prolepsis); 2) the Phallomatrix of Supplementarity (synecdoche/metalepsis); 3) the Phallomatrix of Uncanniness (prosopopeialantithesis); with this final pair, space/time oscillates uncontrollably into its uncanny other, in a sort of unhinged Hegelian sublation. These three phallomatrices work at the level ofhistory itself(what Lacan calls 'the universe'), and are thus able to generate objects of predication and desire in an everyday sense: one can quite easily slot historical evidence into the matrices, which regulate the transformations that occur at the intersection of the an-existent barred subject and the fissured big Other. However, the final 'pair' are rather a 'dispair' (in the senses of not-pair, despair, disparity and disappearance) in that they cross each other (being mutually exclusive and, indeed, qualitatively different) and thus cross out the preceding six, on the basis of which they can nevertheless appear in the first place. They thus 'double-cross' the first six tropes, as aforementioned, as two different modalities of the same failure - the failure of rhetoric to coincide with itself or ground Being. As Copjec points out, these two [sic] tropes cannot provide or produce objects that might become the subjects of predication: rather, 45

Lacan, Encore, p. 53.

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they simultaneously open up and fracture the very field of history which determines their actualization as they escape its spatio-temporalization. Despite, then, both subject and Other being essentially void- struck by the bars of a division- it is paradoxically at their intersection (what Lacan would call their 'non-relation') that a transient and evanescent positivity erupts into its own traumatic dissolution. Indeed, the intolerable suffering necessarily attendant upon sexuation derives from the nailing of any subject to this peculiarly wrought cross. 46 But what is the point of rereading or rewriting Lacan in this way? First of all, it provides a way of reading Lacan against himself that at once assents absolutely to all ofhis procedures and propositions and nevertheless demonstrates an irreducible primordial schism in his own discourse. Hence the motivation for refiguring the orders of misrecognition as tropes: compared to the consequent lush tropical profusion, Lacan's own later rewriting of the symbolic order in terms of metaphor and metonymy begins to look miserably impoverished, and on its own terms. Indeed, in Ecrits Lacan at once explicitly unhinges and covertly confirms what is held to be his own characteristic practice in a much under-cited passage: 'Ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition- these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, autonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche- these are the semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read the intentions ... out of which the subject modulates his oneiric discourse' (p. 58). However, despite Lacan's seeming contestation ofhis own practice here, he still propounds or maintains a distinction between syntactics and semantics, which he elsewhere associates, respectively, with displacement and condensation - in other words, syntax works metonymically, and semantics metaphorically. A very bizarre claim, then, given that Lacan here identifies both metonymy and metaphor with semantic condensation, and thereby ensnarls himself in a vicious circuit of untenable nominations. Indeed, the mistake, if that is what it is, is too marked not to be deliberate, and the most generous reading of this passage is a reading that would see it as an example of the very oneiric discourse to which it refers: there is no contradiction in the unconscious, and the truth must speak through error, that is, by means of the impossible ruses of an ungrounded tropology. Further on this point: Lacan's delineation of the three orders of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic can now be read, not as the primary matrices of subject-formation, but rather as his own secondary narcissistic revisions of a less strictured, more primordial, more Romantic tropology. My rewriting also enables the production of a Lacanian matheme that, on the one hand, evades the criticisms of Lacan offered by everyone from Deleuze and Guattari to Judith Butler and, on the other, can provide an account of the ways in 46 If the discerning reader suspects that this crossing might itself be regulated by yet another trope, perhaps chiasmus, that consequently ought to be added to the list, they are certainly free to do so - on the proviso that this addition can only be a subtraction. To put it, again, in the form of the inconsistent Lacanian arithmetic: 7 + 1 = 6 + 1 - 1 = 8 + 1 - 1, and so on.

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which these readings tend to miss the mark. For example, Deleuze and Guattari claim against psychoanalysis that 'the three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error'47 and that: If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set ofpassive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it. 48

In other words, the Lacanian principle that 'all desire goes from one lack to another' derives, for Deleuze and Guattari, from an illicit initial affirmation of the primacy of the subject and its constitution through repression, rather than beginning from desire itself. As such, psychoanalysis is not so much incorrect as itself caught up in a normalizing misrecognition of the fact that desire is in fact more primordial than the subject which, though it seems to give rise to it, is just one more secondary by-product ofmachinic desire. However, it seems that Deleuze and Guattari have mistaken Lacan 's point: psychoanalysis does not simply conceive of desire as lack, but rather simultaneously as both lack and a productive positivity: as I have argued above, the tropes, prior to any subjectivity whatsoever, produce both the subject and its objects as themselves simultaneously lacking and as bloated plenitudes: further, the subject itself is never thereby simply 'fixed', as Deleuze and Guattari claim, whether by repression or otherwise. 49 When Lacan talks then of desire as going from one lack to another, he does not simply mean that desire is that of a subject that lacks an irretrievable and phantasmatic object, but rather that the lacks between which a positive desire shuttles are precisely subjects themselves. I invoke Deleuze and Guattari here for a number of reasons - the most important being to mark that their hostility to Lacan cannot serve as the index of a detachment of any of these theorists from a Romantic heritage. On the contrary, as I show in the next chapter, Deleuze and Guattari also remain thoroughly Romantic, and the very public hostilities suggest that such contestations can serve to mask more fundamental complicities. 47 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley eta!. (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 111. 48 Ibid., p. 26. 49 Lacan, in fact, is the irreducibly ambivalent repository of both good and bad transferences on the part of Deleuze and Guattari; see the various positions that they take towards his work in the interviews collected in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), for example, 'there's no question that we're all the more indebted to Lacan, once we've dropped notions like structure, the symbolic, or the signifier', p. 14.

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It is also possible to use the orders of misrecognition to renegotiate the fraught relationship between Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, who for a number of years now have been engaged in a peculiar exchange of'love-letters', whereby each criticizes the other's brilliant misunderstandings ofLacan. 50 Once it is recognized that the dominant rhetorical figure that underwrites Butler's work is in fact catachresis (the male failure), and that Zizek's characteristic mode is in fact irony (the female failure), the dispute between the two reduces to this: they are both absolutely correct about the other's supposed misreadings, but only to the extent that they (necessarily) miss the fact that the other's implicit account ofhow being is un-grounded is at once infinitesimally close and infinitely distant - irony and catachresis being eternally fated to miss the other on which each depends. But finally, and most importantly in the context of this book, what my rereading ofLacan enables is his repositioning within those Romantic discourses from which he may often seem to have departed. Whatever the propaganda to the contrary, Lacan is still evidently engaged in an analytic of subjective finitude, which returns to the grounding claims ofKantian aesthetics to side-step the competing claims of logic and rhetoric, affect and understanding, history and nihilism, psychology and sociology, meaning and being. In Lacan's work, an exemplarily Romantic grappling with the mysteries of sex and institutions, their convoluted antagonisms and their covert couplings, asserts its continuing force.

50 See, for instance, J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. Chapter 7, or S. Zizek, 'Identity and Its Vicissitudes: Hegel's "Logic of Essence" as a Theory of Ideology', in E. Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994), p. 71, ft. 9, and Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), pp. 202-3. Ifl could be permitted a moment of self-congratulation here, I first wrote these lines in 1995. Since then, Zizek and Butler have hardly been able to leave each other alone. A recent example of their insistent forcing of the non-relation would be J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Zizek, Universality, Hegemony, Contingency (London: Verso, 2000), where the unwitting Laclau plays at being the extra leg or third party in this strange menage a trois.

Chapter 5

Aesthetic Multiplicity in the Work of De leuze and Guattari [W]e are also (most of us) speaking from within an institution (the academy) in some parts of which these insights are familiar to the point of being banal. And when we get excited, and begin to proselytize for these views as views of the world, then we are responding as much to an internal redistribution of institutional capital as to any outside motivation. David Simpson 1

Romantic multiplicity

In an astonishing sentence (or two) from his classic work, The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy writes: There have, in the entire history ofthought, been few changes in standards of value more profound and more momentous than that which took place ... when it came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that of art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by mankind in all ages, but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is, actually or potentially, in nature and human nature, and - for the function of the artist in relation to his public -the evocation of capacities for understanding, sympathy, enjoyment, which are as yet latent in most men, and perhaps never capable of universalization. And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are the one common, factor in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed 'Romantic'. 2

If we could put Lovejoy's sentence more succinctly, it might read: Romanticism is obsessed with multiplicity. Multiplicity, moreover, is itself considered in its multiplicity by the Romantics; as origin or principle, as transcendental condition and empirical determination, as source of value or desirable end, as quality and quantity, foundation and description. And, as Lovejoy also indicates, there is something irremediably aesthetic about such attributions; not only art, but life D. Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 2. 2 A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 293.

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itself becomes, for the Romantics, a question ofthe production, proliferation, and affirmation of tiny, even imperceptible differences. In a theoretical context marked by such an obsession with multiplicity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (hereafter referred to as DaG) are exemplary. Throughout the work that they have produced, both together and apart, there is a decided emphasis on the primacy of multiplicity. Multiplicity is not only mobilized in a polemical fashion (against 'Platonism', for instance), but comes to refigure, redeploy, and rearticulate the supposedly more traditional philosophical relations between philosophy and its others, words and things, being and its simulacra, and soon. My procedure here will be to follow a particular thread- that ofDaG's attempted displacement of central traditional philosophical presumptions regarding the 'one and the multiple'- which provides, as I have already indicated, an excellent entry into their oeuvre. 3 I will therefore necessarily also be presuming at least some familiarity with DaG's central concepts and general trajectory; this requires that my procedure intervene at a rather recondite level of their text, which, I will argue, is ultimately grounded in an aestheticizing rereading of the classical philosophical tradition with which it is evidently complicit, and which, as a consequence, affects everything that they have to say. In the course of my interrogation of the scope and status of the uses that DaG make of 'multiplicity', I will pause to examine its appearance in the work of one of their own stated precursors, Henri Bergson. This excursus is intended to serve a number of functions: first of all, to reconstruct a context and a lineage that is self-confessedly essential to the development ofDaG's own work; second, to emphasize certain striking continuities that run deeper than -and possibly elude- commonplace understandings of 'influence'; and third, to bring out, beyond the continuities, a number of key operating procedures and concepts that might otherwise remain obscure. In other words, I ask ofDaG a question that they themselves claim to be interested in posing: not 'what does it mean?' but 'how does it work?' My general argument is that, in asking this question of DaG themselves, it quickly becomes apparent that they only invoke this second question in order finally to evade it, thereby remaining within the defiles of signification from which they would supposedly like to effect 'a line of flight'. Such an evasion further testifies, I believe, to the abiding Romantic obsession with aesthetic multiplicity that I have been analysing across a number of different registers throughout this book.

3 In this chapter, I often associate or identify concepts that appear in the texts of Deleuze and Guattari with concepts that appear in Deleuze's solo work. This identification is, I believe, perfectly legitimate- precisely because it highlights the aspects ofDeleuze's work that both Deleuze and Guattari found themselves especially impressed by.

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Anti-Platonism as an antidote to nihilism The question of the one-multiple is crucial to A Thousand Plateaus. So what do DaG say of it, and why? First of all, it is linked to DaG's professed 'anti-Platonism', that is, Plato's emphasis that the beingness of being is necessarily subjected to the non-sensible immutability and eternal One of the Forms, such that all multiplicity and change belong merely to the degraded world of appearances and of simulacra. 4 DaG's emphasis on simulacra, then, is an attempt to counteract the dualism of true Being versus duplicitous appearance by way of the proliferating irreducible differences that any affirmation of simulacra purportedly involves. 5 Indeed, DaG thereby hope to contest all stratified dualisms. Simulacra are thus invoked to disable any foundational distinction between the universality and individuality of the model and the plurality of its supposed copies: simulacra can thus only be conceived paradoxically, as heterogeneous differences without any resemblance between and within themselves. These heterogeneous differences are literally intense. As Ronald Bogue puts it, 'the simulacrum is the intensity ... [it] possesses no identity, since it is a difference in itself, and it only appears by disguising itself'. 6 Hence also DaG's concomitant affirmation of multiplicity, which is arrayed against any understanding of the self-identity of the One, whether this One is understood as a transcendental originating inhuman principle, or the unifying trajectory of a subject that is itself unified (although, as we shall see, the One does not vanish altogether). In Deleuze's philosophizing, 'the multiple becomes a substantive- Multiplicity- and philosophy is a theory ofmultiplicities that refers to no subject as preliminary unity'. 7 This emphasis on multiplicity as a substantive then feeds directly into the major chapters ofA Thousand Plateaus, whereby everything -including the empirical field- is considered to be gathered up, stratified, according to what DaG call 'assemblages'. And what, then, is an 'assemblage'? Briefly, assemblages are of two interlinked orders: either ofmachinic content- the terrain of 'bodies'- or enunciative expression- the realm oflanguage-events. In DaG's words, 4 It is probably also necessary to mention here that the Deleuzian 'anti-Platonism' will nevertheless deliberately draw much of its force from the Platonic text itself. On this point, see G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), for example, 'The task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn Platonism. That this overturning should conserve many Platonic characteristics is not only inevitable but desirable', p. 59. 5 See G. Deleuze, Appendix I, 'The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy', in The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 253-79. As Vattimo has noted, such an 'anti-Platonic' proselytizing for simulacra is a direct response to the problem posed to philosophical culture by nihilism. See Vattimo, The End ofModernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. with intro. J. R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. 25. 6 R. Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 63. 7 G. Deleuze, 'A Philosophical Concept', in E. Cadava eta!., eds, Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 95.

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'an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand, it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling ofbodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. ' 8 These two levels are coordinated by something called an 'abstract machine', which is itself neither formal nor substantial, but rather 'diagrammatic' - basically something that 'destratifies', generates new functions, and so forth. Furthermore, this abstract machine is 'tetravalent', and has two other poles, those of de- and reterritorialization. In any case, both orders of the assemblage are comprised of multiplicities, even multiplicities of multiplicities, in constant differential redistributions occasioned by the force of incorporeal events which run imperceptibly between and within machinic and enunciative assemblages, simultaneously linking, dividing, and transforming them. But this is not the end of it: multiplicities can be divided again into two further kinds: On the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious - and on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular intensive multiplicities composed of particles which do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold. 9

Again, we see the tendency in DaG's work to 'repeat with a difference' their fundamental distinctions, by way of interlinked nominations that proliferate as their text shifts from one register of Being to another. Hence - though they are obviously not, strictly speaking, 'the same'- such concepts as the 'rhizome', the 'Body without Organs' (BwO), the 'molecular', the 'intensity', 'becomings', and so on all finally find themselves thoroughly imbricated, and arrayed against their others, the 'arborescent', the 'organism', the 'molar', the 'quantitative', 'history', and so on. As should already be apparent, how these conceptual series are held to diverge and converge is one of the fundamental problems ofDaG's text. 10 And- already again- these conceptual distinctions are explicitly anti-Platonic insofar as the apparent rupture between 'actual reality' and 'virtual reality' is, 8 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 88. 9 Ibid., p. 33. 10 My own account of these divergences/convergences here- which follows from my decision to read, so far as it is possible, DaG's texts in the terms which they themselves provide - is derived from Deleuze's own reading of Bergsonism (but can also be found elsewhere in Deleuze's texts). For example, 'there is only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (generalized pluralism) that necessarily participate in the same virtual whole (limited pluralism)', G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988), p. 82. See also pp. 78-106.

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according to DaG, no rupture at all, and thus cannot be refigured according to any transcendent hierarchy ofBeing. 11 As Brian Massumi has it, virtual intensities have neither form nor substance of their own, but are pure intensity: 'The virtual has only intension ... The virtual as a whole is the future-past of all actuality, the pool of potential from which universal history draws its choices and to which it returns the states it renounces. The virtual is not undifferentiated. It is hyperdifferentiated'. 12 And as such, the virtual is an intensity that, in its most radical manifestations, cuts through every sedimented structure and organization, angling towards the famous BwO, or, in another register, the 'Plane of Consistency' which must itself be constructed, 'machined', as something supposedly immanent to every occurrence. The BwO is, as John Protevi remarks, in some ways a misnomer; it is not a question of 'a body without organs', but rather that ofa 'body without an organism' .13 For DaG, a 'body'- whether physical, chemical, biological, or otherwise - is ultimately constituted by a relation offorces. It therefore exhibits both a certain singular consistency (otherwise it would not be 'a' body) and a certain general overrunning of all existing limits, that is, it cannot be differentiated from the cosmos according to the (essentially false) stratifications that have been erected upon it. Such a body cannot be considered, strictly speaking, as either 'human' or 'animal', 'metaphysical' or 'physical', 'subject' or 'object.' Indeed, the unleashed 'organs' of a body are operators or 'singularities' that translate or transmute forces into other forces, changing their speed, strength, direction, and so on. What DaG call an 'organism' is precisely a stratified organization ofa set of organs- an arrangement which canalizes and regulates the immanent multiplicity of forces distributed by interrelating organs into particular forms with particular functions for particular ends. To produce a BwO, a zone of pure immanent matter without hierarchy, organization, or subjectivity, is for DaG both a goal and a limit of a process of becoming. 14 It is a goal, considered as the project of an extra-intentional, practical strategy of experimentation that unsettles the 'actually existing' organization of a 11 On the relations between the virtual, actual, possible and real, see M. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), for example, 'The possible is never real, even though it may be actual; however, while the virtual may not be actual, it is nonetheless real', p. 17. 12 B. Massumi, A User~ Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 60. 13 See Protevi's excellent clarification of the BwO in' A Problem of Pure Matter: Fascist Nihilism in A Thousand Plateaus', inK. Ansell Pearson and D. Morgan, eds, Nilhism Now! Monsters of Energy (London: Macmillan, 2000), esp. pp. 169-172. I rely to some extent on his account here. See also E. Grosz, 'A Thousand Tiny Sexes', in C. V. Boundas and D. Olkowski, eds, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater ofPhilosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. pp. 200--6. 14 Gayatri Spivak has been particularly scathing about this concept: 'the antiOedipal argument in France seems to assume a certain body without predication or without predication-function. (The celebrated "body without organs" is one product of this assumption ...). I have not yet been able to read this as anything but a last-ditch metaphysical longing', In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 154.

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set of organs; but it is also a limit, insofar as it cannot actually be attained. The BwO is a limit because, if attained, we would no longer be dealing with the same body (in a manner of speaking, the BwO is both impossible and necessary). Moreover, organization cannot ever be entirely or absolutely dispensed with- for that would lead to a destruction of the very organs and intensities to be freed in the process of producing a BwO. Like the liver of Prometheus, 'You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn.' 15 A BwO is thus something that becomes but never is. A successfully machined BwO would be pure, unformed matter, seething with singular intensities, over whose 'body' the latter would freely pass. The dualism of the one-multiple is thus displaced by a non-dialectical conception of singularity/ multiplicity, whereby multiplicity itself splits again into the 'differences in kind' between actual and virtual multiplicity. This dualism -which is also a pluralism of multiplicities - is finally reconciled once more into a kind of paradoxical monism, the 'the univocity of Being' now conceived of as an essentially temporal quasiSpinozist 'absent cause' that actualizes and singularizes itself in its becomings, passing-betweens, imperceptible affects, and so on. 16

Bergson, Romanticism, and critical theory Bergson is a crucial reference point here, and for a number of reasons. First of all, he has been of extreme importance for DaG themselves. Second, the analysis of Bergson's role in this restricted context then permits the generalization of aspects of his work. In KeithAnsell-Pearson words, 'an encounter with it [Bergson's oeuvre] can be shown to be of crucial importance for any attempt to comprehend and work through some ofthe central problems ofphilosophical modernity'. 17 Or, as Joan Copjec has pointed out, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160. Certainly, this 'monism' is not strictly 'Spinozan' (whatever that might mean), and it is not even that 'monism of desire' for which DaG have been much criticized, but it remains, nonetheless, a monism for all that. And despite all the proclamations regarding Deleuze's putative radical evolution throughout his career, on this point at least he remained remarkably consistent (or insistent), even if it is true that the vocabulary in which this belief is elaborated did undergo certain mutations. A late example of this can be found in What is Philosophy?, where DaG assert- presumably in response to Alain Badiou- that, where it is a question of the one at all, it is not simply nonexistent, but functions only in its subtraction, for example, 'n- 1' dimensions. Despite this (very basic) arithmetic, Deleuze was always -as Badiou points out- a philosopher of 'nature', whose implicit paradigm of multiplicity was, accordingly, 'organicist'. See A. Badiou, 'Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque', in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater ofPhilosophy, p. 55. 17 Ansell-Pearson immediately continues: 'It is through Bergsonism that Deleuze seeks to re-invent this modernity and to articulate a radical project for philosophy', K. AnsellPearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. 15

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the contamination of modern thought by Bergsonian evolutionism is so thorough that it often goes unnoticed and unquestioned. The Derridean notion of difference has, as a consequence, been employed all too often in support of an apolitical (naive) optimism regarding the inevitability of change: nothing can ever appear twice the same because the context that determines meaning is always different from the context of a moment before. 18

I am interested in extending these suggestions here, for reasons that ultimately hinge on the possibility of the discemability of aesthetics itself. Most importantly, this entire structure bears on the double question of the viability of contemporary academic practice in the humanities, and how it comes to figure itself, its polemical opponents, and its institutional conditions. As I now want to show, this attribution of 'Bergsonism' to DaG will serve a number of connected argumentative functions: it will localize DaG's project in a Romantic genealogy founded on 1) an a priori suspicion of the ontological claims ofthose knowledges it deems 'scientific', 'mathematical' or 'logical', and against which 2) it arrays a conception of multiple, heterogeneous, pre-individual differences, thereby 3) displacing the initial distinction in favour of a utopian conception which aims at re-binding, in a non-fusional or non-dialectical manner, those zones illicitly dispersed by dominant forms of power/knowledge- 'politics', 'aesthetics', and 'everyday life', for example; 4) this requires it to return constantly to the fraught question of the relationships between representation and the real, the virtual, and the actual, in order to; 5) affirm a conception of freedom which is at once ubiquitous, necessarily alienated by knowledge procedures, and which can thus be theoretically designated only negatively. However, 6) the practice of writing itself, in its hesitations and allusions, then comes to allegorically trace the utopian interleaving of art and politics and cognition and epistemology and everyday life and so on, that otherwise would remain disjoint and impotent. We are thus returned to the situation that the first three chapters of this book were concerned to delineate. Romantic philosophy- unable to discuss the institutional conditions of its practice without finding itself immediately destituted by the uncircumventable exigencies of nihilism - thereby also forbids itself any directly positive form of ontological saying. Philosophy thus has recourse to negation and paradox; it ultimately finds that only aesthetics can provide it with an acceptable solution to its dilemma. A further word must be said to justify the invocation of Bergson in particular in this context. For if I am here following Copjec's suggestion regarding the hitherto overlooked or under-remarked influence of Bergson on contemporary theory, Bergson himself ought not thereby be understood as a simple point of origin for such theory. On the contrary, his own work itself obviously takes place on the basis of, and draws its justification from, the major philosophical names of 18 See J. Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 58.

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German Romanticism. 19 Moreover, to adapt Heidegger here, Bergson provides an ideal point of entry because not only does the Romantic tradition of anti-logical theory converge in him in an independent new form; he becomes at the same time the stimulus for posing new questions, providing suggestions for tasks which are in part taken up only in recent times. From Bergson we can create for ourselves perspectives reaching back to the ancients and forward to the present, perspectives important for the foundational problems of theory. 20

To push this claim a little further: it is even a question, not so much of returning to Bergson as a particular figure, or as the author or signatory of a cluster of central propositions, but rather as the author of an anonymous sheaf of plural tendencies. That is, as Deleuze himself puts it, of a generalized Bergsonism. Having said this, it is also true that Bergson's own work is notoriously monotonous: throughout his oeuvre he returns, again and again, to the division between 'science' and 'metaphysics', which he simultaneously desires to maintain and displace. 21 This division, as is well known, initially corresponds quite strictly, and insofar as it can be propositionally put, to the interlinked distinctions 'technicalpurposive-intelligence-matter-space-repetition' (science) versus 'free-intuitivememory-time-invention' (metaphysics). 22 In this sense, Bergson's work still seems to be implicitly governed by the Kantian division of the faculties, even if in Bergson there is no faculty psychology, and consciousness does not simply actively synthesize the given. However, for Bergson, what he often calls 'intelligence'- and which seems to conform to technical-purposive thought and activity - precisely presumes a repetition-mechanism of matter, and therefore functions much like the 19 I will speak more of this below. It is, however, worth noting here Bergson's evident debt to Schelling and Schopenhauer- which he himselffinds it necessary to underplay or deny. See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature gfHuman Freedom, trans. J. Gutmann (La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1986), and S. Zizek, 'Selthood as Such is Spirit: F. W. J. Schelling on the Origins of Evil', in J. Copjec, ed., Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 1-29. Ifl am concerned here to replace Bergson in a particular philosophico-literary context, he himself was obviously crucial in vitalist biology and evolutionary theory, and still seems to exert an occult influence on contemporary biology. SeeP. Atkinson, 'The Morphology of Time: Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation', Antithesis VIII: 2 (1997), pp. 217-36. 20 See M. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 22. 21 The major texts of Bergson on which I am relying here are Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1911 ); The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992); Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988); and Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Kila: Kessinger, n.d.). 22 For example, 'To metaphysics, then, we assign a limited object, principally spirit, and a special method, mainly intuition. In doing this we make a clear distinction between metaphysics and science. But at the same time we attribute an equal value to both. I believe that they can both touch the bottom of reality', The Creative Mind, p. 37.

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Kantian faculty of understanding- bringing the flux of experience under the general laws which have always governed it. On the other hand, the Kantian distinction between Reason (as practical freedom) and intuition (as pure form of perception) undergoes a strange mutation in Bergson: freedom is duration is indetermination is memory; it is at once the highest activity of thought, and yet remains necessarily aesthetic, that is, an intuitive apprehension of the continual creation of novelty. However, for Bergson, though we may be constantly sensing this great flux of becoming, the intelligence 'represses' such an intuition in order that it may itself take place. Freedom is therefore at once directly linked with sense experience, and yet cannot be identical to it: it often seems for Bergson that the intuitive apprehension of freedom involves a double, paradoxical return- to the irrevocable co-presence of oneself and the world. 23 In other words, the whole procedure is regulated by the presumption that the two modem senses of the word 'aesthetic' are fundamentally one, or, rather, it is governed by a decision to model absolute freedom on the work of art considered as indivisible organic process. 24 For Bergson, the truth of sense perception qua duration finds its highest expression in mysticism and art, and in such a way that the latter practices are held to resonate with the most negligible of quotidian perceptions. Bergson's constant recourse to aesthetic and organic metaphors (reading, music, bells, animals, and so on) is thus no accident, for only for an organic aestheticism can these metaphors function to suture the self to nature without dispersing the singularity of the former or rupturing the global scope of the latter. Which is also why Bergson can talk, on the one hand, of actively breaking through the 'crust of intelligence', the realm of idle chatter in which one can take the 'reasonable advice of friends', and so on, and yet hold, on the other, that the free act can drop - almost passively- from its situation 'like an over-ripe fruit' .25 Consciousness must break with habit-knowledge so as to return to the super-natural experiential (intuitive) invention of novelty that is freedom. 23 'The intuition we refer to then bears above all upon internal duration. It grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future. It is the direct vision of the mind by the mind - nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism, one of whose facets is space and another, language. Instead of states contiguous to states, which become words in juxtaposition to words, we have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life. Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence', The Creative Mind, p. 32. 24 Deleuze, obviously another late heir of this persistent Romantic desire, will often proclaim that 'Aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality. On the one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. For these two meanings to be tied together, the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience; in this case, the work of art would really appear as experimentation', The Logic ofSense, p. 260. 25 H. Bergson, Tzme and Free Will, p. 176.

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Bergson thus attempts to produce a radically new account of freedom, and it thus no surprise that he returns in the conclusion to Time and Free Will to the most influential modem philosophy of the subject, that of Immanuel Kant. But this very return is also somewhat suspicious, insofar as, for Kant, freedom is primordially moral, and is bound to the subject's ability to intervene in the chain of efficient natural causes - albeit in an empirically unverifiable way. Indeed, most modem philosophy will also settle for this distribution, which stems at least from Descartes: the moral freedom of the ambiguously individuated thinking subject versus the law-governed mindless extensionality of matter (a degenerate form of this distinction has been consecrated by the modem university as the 'two cultures' of science and liberal arts). Hence those philosophers who array themselves against this distribution will most often try to resolve the fraught mind/body dualism by attacking or displacing the priority of causation.26 Indeed, for Bergson, as for Hume, there doesn't seem to be any causal chain in the first place: the belief in causation supposedly derives from a reductive, intelligent decision (or a habit) that implicitly affirms representation and the priority of 'law' over 'fact'. Bergson's is thus a critique ofthe division that modem philosophy has inflicted on Being, and hence of such fundamental related distinctions as epistemology/ontology and subjective moral freedom/external necessity. For Bergson, causation is founded on intelligence-habit (whereby the understanding takes its external, quantitative, spatial representations for the things themselves), whereas duration is founded on intuition-memory. Why this equation, in any case, of freedom with novelty? (Especially because freedom may also seem to be precisely the ability to insist on, or maintain, identity in the face of all the experiences or factors which seem to contravene it.) And if, despite all attempts, Bergson still implicitly subscribes to the Kantian division of the faculties (Reason/Understanding/Intuition) in order to displace them again, one might ask where imagination (in Kant, the synthesis of reproduction, intermediate between intuition and understanding) functions in Bergson's system. 27 26 This remains true today to the extent that a writer such as Elizabeth Grosz finds herself drawn to the image of the Mobius strip in her attempts to refigure the mind/body dualism. Such an image apparently 'enables the mind/body relation to avoid the impasses of reductionism, of a narrow causal relation or the retention of the binary divide', E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994), p. 210. My emphasis. · 27 In the first edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, under the rubric 'Deduction of the Concepts of the Pure Understanding', Kant remarks of his division of faculties that, 'knowledge is [essentially] a whole in which representations stand compared and connected. As sense contains a manifold in its intuition, I ascribe to it a synopsis. But to such a synopsis a synthesis must always correspond; receptivity can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity. Now this spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis which must necessarily be found in all knowledge; namely, the apprehension of representations as modifications of the mind in intuition, their reproduction in imagination, and their recognition in a concept', Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 130-31.

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It seems that it is a covert escalation of the imagination that provides Bergson with the non-methodical method he requires to detach intuition from understanding and return it to Reason in a non-fusional manner, without succumbing to Kant's critique ofLeibniz and Locke (for, respectively, intellectualizing appearances and sensibilizing the intellect). For Kant, this redistribution would be impossible: intuition/understanding together deal with the realm of the is (that is, with nature), reason with the realm of the ought (or practical freedom). And if, for Kant, these two realms ultimately find their unity and totality in the unconditioned, neither is capable of being derived from the other, except at the cost of a 'transcendental subreption'. So when Bergson attempts his own reorganization of the faculties, he is thereby also compelled to redistribute the relations between existence and morality. The problem is then also to distinguish his own position from that of Hegel, who- as Alain Badiou points out- not only requires that the ought be necessarily immanent to the is (thereby turning a philosophical decision into a law ofBeing), but also treats the becoming of Spirit as an operator of absolute memory, from which nothing is ever lost. 28 For, as is well known, Bergson also has a profound investment in such a total, or 'true', memory. 29 Bergson's own solution to this dilemma is, of course, to emphasize the irreducible and unrepresentable multiplicity ofbecoming against what might be called the Hegelian becoming-one-of-the-already-one-other. Is and ought thus find themselves wound together in the ecstasy ofduration, without any reduction to the same. But this is why Bergson can simultaneously declare that 'freedom is a fact', and yet has to proselytize for it as if it were a value. Bergson, in other words, generates a philosophical ethics of intuition. The problem then is that Bergson's recourse to imagination involves him in a redoubling, a reproduction, of duration precisely in the attempt to follow its ruses in a non-representational manner. So imagination must thereby also undergo a mutation. In Kant's first critique (at least), imagination is necessarily always behind intuition (in both logical and chronological senses); however, Bergson's 'imaginatized intuition' rather apprehends sensuous apprehension, preventing or reminding it not to succumb to the 'conscious automatism' of intellect-habit that 28 See A. Badiou, L 'etre et /'evenement (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), pp. 181-90. See also his book on Deleuze, Deleuze: 'La Clameur del 'etre ', (Paris: Hachette, 1997), esp. pp. 96-7. As we shall see in Chapter Eight, De leuze and Badiou are ultimately opposed on almost every point. 29 For example, 'That is to say, it [the complex organization of the nervous system] is only the symbol of the inner energy which allows the being to free itself from the rhythm of the flow of things and to retain in an ever higher degree the past in order to influence ever more deeply the future - the symbol, in the special sense which we give to the word, of its memory', Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 222. Or, as Deleuze explicates Bergson, 'The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass ... each present goes back to itself as past. The only equivalent thesis is Plato's notion of Reminiscence. The reminiscence also affirms a pure being of the past, a being in itself of the past, an ontological Memory that is capable of serving as the foundation for the unfolding of time', Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 59.

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is nonetheless required to live in the world at all. (Imagination consistently serves a therapeutic function, for Bergson, as it does for the Romantics more generally.) Intuition thus splits in two: an intuition that can be reconciled with freedom, and an intuition that must always betray freedom to the intellect. But this is a consequence that Bergson would very much like to avoid. Bergson's own procedure thus generates a certain ambiguity with regard to the relation between freedom and intuition, and precisely insofar as they must/cannot be reconciled in order for the entire system to function consistently and effectively. Bergson's characteristic 'solution', for example in The Creative Mind, is to rebroach the Kantian route: time is the form of inner sense, whereas space is pure externality (or what Bergson there calls 'intuition' versus 'perception').30 Whatever Bergson's own originality with regard to time and freedom, his necessary metaphorical recourse to a spatial inside-outside distinction in order to delimit the regime of a supposedly non-spatial time reattaches him to one dominant modern philosophical tradition, in which the subject= internal time sense: the object= external dead spatiality. 31 To make matters worse, this situation can only be demonstrated by a 'work of imagination', which subtracts itself from, and appears nowhere in, its own account. With Bergson, philosophy becomes the insubstantial shadow of real Time. Bergson's response to this apparent difficulty is to go through the difficulty itself, and affirm its irreducibility as such. We can rephrase this situation in a more classically rhetorical fashion: Bergson's repeated arguments against psychological 'associationism' also lead him to reject (at least implicitly) metonymy and metaphor, which precisely function by, in the first case, an association by contiguity of quantitative representations (part to whole), or, in the second, by the confusion in association of two qualitatively incommensurable registers (that is, the relation of the conditioned to conditions; here representation/being, or quantity/quality) with one another. Hence he is compelled to an implicit acknowledgement of the priority of catachrestic and allegorical speech, or, in other words, to presenting the necessity of the unsayability of freedom in a language that knows that it necessarily betrays its own failed presentation of the necessity ofbetrayal. 32 This language, as 30 As Kant has it, 'All our knowledge is thus finally subject to time, the formal condition of inner sense', Critique ofPure Reason, p. 131. 31 'Intuition gives us the thing whose spatial transposition, whose metaphorical translation alone, is seized by the intellect', The Creative Mind, p. 71. However, Bergson is equally concerned elsewhere that this apparently spatial distinction be considered purely from the point of the temporal, for example, 'Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms oftime rather than space', Matter and Memory, p. 71. Bergson's emphasis. 32 Such an apophatic but professedly a-theological trajectory is obviously a staple motif of all post-Hegelian Romantic literary philosophy - for example, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Bataille, Levinas, Blanchot, 'early' Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, de Man, Harold Bloom, and so on. On this regulated 'literariness' of modern philosophy, see A. Badiou, Manifeste pour Ia philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989). Closer to us, and in accordance with the arguments that I have already made with respect to Lacan - and will

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aforementioned, is that of an organicist aestheticism (it is obviously no accident that Bergson won the Nobel Prize for literature). The problem is, again, that- as Bergson confesses- one has necessarily to do this in language, necessarily external and representative, whose paradigm is number, and hence remains lifeless, inert, a delusory imposition on the living real that is true temporality. Thus Bergson comes to imply that the less one says directly, the more one becomes.33 This philosophy therefore essentially shares a (mute) language, but most of all a manner - that of intuition - with mysticism and the fine arts: it is certainly of interest that Bergson, with respect to this path they share, will elevate mysticism to one of the highest degrees of human freedom. (An almost classical Romanticism!) But this once again raises questions as to the status and limits of philosophy as an activity, which in Bergson authorizes itself, again and again, to affirm enthusiastically the priority of novelty and to condemn itself to a purely negative project: that is, by way of a demonstration ofthe confusions and limits of logic, a demonstration which thereby unsatisfactorily designates the freedom that it nonetheless practices and which escapes it to some degree. The fictions of mysticism, art, and philosophy thus touch on the absolute. In Deleuze's words, 'as Henri Bergson was able to see, fabulation- the fabulating function- does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.' 34 Hence philosophy comes to function as an idealizing repetition of a radically non-subjective real (Freedom), which relates to other works of the imagination insofar as they are also unrepresentative (and unrepresentable) expressions of this real. Whence Bergson's implicit question: is the difference between philosophy and art/mysticism one of kind or of degree? But whence also the double trajectory of Bergson's account of multiplicity: at once a predicate appropriate to the fundamental qualitative operation of duration and the secondary quantifications oftechnoscience-habit, 'multiplicity' is the crucial mediator between the internal consistency of Bergson's metaphysical system, and the autodifferentiator that distinguishes it from its philosophical rivals and aesthetic fellow travellers. Multiplicity is the being of the aesthetic, which the aesthetic does not need to say (having it in high degree), requiring philosophy to say it for it. But philosophy, equally, cannot say this directly, but can only show this (in a relatively extend to Cultural Studies and Queer Theory in subsequent chapters, we might cite such figures as Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Rosi Braidotti, and Meaghan Morris, all of whom, in one way or another, have frequent recourse to the tropes of allegory, irony, metalepsis, or catachresis. 33 Once again, this emphasis on the impossibility of assigning any positive predicates whatsoever to 'freedom' at the very moment that intimations of freedom can discerned everywhere in the processes of thought and action, still underpins a great deal of contemporary criticism. To cite Lee Edelman in this context, 'utopic in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly toward a realization that its realization remains impossible', 'Queer Theory: Unstating Desire', GLQ II: 4 (1994), p. 346. 34 G. Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', Critical Inquiry XXIII: 2 (1997), pp. 227-8. See also his Bergsonism.

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impoverished fashion), by way of a critique of science and a negative account of freedom. Nevertheless, philosophy's necessary recourse to an apparently circuitous rhetoric in fact enables it to go straight to the heart of the matter, that is, towards the qualitative intensities of duration, in which everything 'interpenetrates'. 35 But it thereby, finally, overcomes the very oppositions with which it began: science/ metaphysics, habit/memory, representation/real, necessity/freedom, space/time. Or: 'Science and metaphysics then meet in intuition. A truly intuitive philosophy would realize the union so greatly desired, of metaphysics and science.' 36 At once partial, incomplete, negative, indecisive, this refolding of zones (supposedly separated in the work of analysis) through the supple practice of a method, not only directly links itself to invention and inventiveness (for example, of concepts), but also - at least implicitly - to an affirmative evaluation of transgression as such. 37

35 Once again, this conception of qualitative interpenetration, of everything folded into everything else in such a way that it supposedly frustrates analyses which wish to keep things separated affects a great deal of contemporary theory, which thereby remains Romantic at the very moment it claims to escape Romanticism. As Brian Massumi puts it, explicating Deleuze, 'Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x =not y (I= I= not you) with an open equation: ... + y + z +a+ ... ( ... +arm+ brick+ window+ .. .)',A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from De/euze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 6. 36 Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 192. 37 I will once more insist that my account of DaG/Bergson can be immediately generalized. See, for instance, Alexander Diittman's account of Walter Benjamin, which objects- against Habermas- that Benjamin's is not simply a descriptive project, but engaged in 'inventing' concepts unable to be appropriated by Facism. Diittman does not hesitate to add that 'invention is a political gesture. But it is not a gesture which can be reduced to voluntarism, as if invention were evidence only of a will to opposition', 'Tradition and Destruction: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Language', in A. Benjamin and P. Osborne, eds, Walter Benjamin s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, trans. D. Keates (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 36. Benjamin is a crucial figure in this context, insofar as he makes the famous distinction- for him determining- between a (Fascistic) 'aestheticizing of politics' and a (revolutionary) 'politicizing of aesthetics'. My whole argument here is dedicated to showing that such a distinction itself remains too 'aestheticizing'. Furthermore, it seems that such Romanticisms run the constant risk of appearing (whether rightly or not) voluntaristic, that is, implicitly considering political action as ultimately reducible to an internal subjective dialectic ofthe will. See also Terry Eagleton's remarks on the question of style: 'Style in Jameson, then, both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed, goals as yet politically unrealizable ... the ambivalence of Jameson's writing, stranded somewhere between ecriture and ecrivance, can also be read as a curious doubling of commentary and critique', T. Eagleton, Against the Grain (London: Verso, 1986), p. 69. Eagleton immediately goes on to cite Benjamin and Adorno, in order to show how, within a long Marxist tradition, 'it was by such scriptive acts that the old problems of"base" and "superstructure", text and context, were to be practically resolved', p. 69.

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Of proliferating dis-organization It is at this point that my reading ofBergson can rejoin my interrupted interpretation ofDaG. Having shown such fundamental continuities in their shared contestation of Kant, their turn to aesthetics and multiplicity, and so on, I now want to show how the apparent complexities ofDaG's metaphysical system are in fact organized by a very simple initial decision, that is, the repudiation of organization, which DaG extend everywhere, even to their own text itself. 38 As Massumi puts it in his foreword, A Thousand Plateaus is arranged like a record; you may like some tracks, hate others, but hey, that's you! Hence DaG's opening gambit and primary refusal, to which the great Bruce Lee himself would have assented: take what is useful and discard what is useless! Therefore also, of course, Deleuze's image of philosophy as a tool box, a heterogeneous collection of strange concepts. Which is further why DaG claim that they ought not to be treated as authorities, but merely as proffering an invitation, which the reader is absolutely free to refuse. And so their work has apparently no centre, it is not organized, as they say, 'arborescently', it is not organized at all. Or it tries to avoid such an organization. And this is precisely its value. I believe that this repudiation of organization and concomitant affirmation of 'crowned anarchy' is the fundamental orientation ofDaG's ontology. However, their affirmation of irreducible self-heterogeneity by no means constitutes an especially novel philosophical proposition (it is, equally, held by many of their avowed enemies), and neither can it successfully sustain their own practice. Precisely because they begin with this repudiation of organization, itself thereafter considered as a secondary affair of the strata, 'God is a lobster' and so forth, they can no longer ask the question as to the meaning of this repudiation. In other words, their initial decision can therefore only function to install the BwO, say, as a founding and unconditional value. But this is then also why they are pleonastically or redundantly forced to repudiate the question of meaning again, for to broach this question would put into question the value of their repudiation itself. Their procedure thus makes the question of meaning impossible in order that they might then forbid themselves it. Which means, paradoxically enough, that they then find themselves everywhere talking of meaning, but- to use one of their own favourite terms of abuse- they botch it badly, since, as far as they're concerned, they can't possibly have anything to do with meaning, it's impossible-forbidden. And as such, it erupts everywhere. Which is also to say that they never really make 38 An example of this repudiation is easily legible in such declarations as: 'The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers ... the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism - and also a signification and a subject - occur', A Thousand Plateaus, p. 155.

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a decision at all, insofar as it is immediately suspended by the disintegratory logics of an unavoidable indecision. And because such a paradoxical indecision underwrites the entirety ofDaG's text, it is unsurprising to see such categories as 'nomadology' wildly oscillating between the poles of impersonal philosophical conceptuality on the one hand, and pure ethical value on the other. And if a great deal ofDaG's work is presumably interested in stitching up the wounds inflicted upon thought by the lashes of the arborescent binary tree, it is, by the same token, uncertain whether these wounds can in fact be healed, on the one hand, and are even really wounds at all, on the other. It is further difficult not to suspect that every single distinction that DaG propose manifestly remains a binary opposition. And even if we accept that they're not binaries, why then do DaG feel compelled to reassert constantly that they're not? Are they scared of being misunderstood? What would be the conditions and consequences of misunderstanding their work? But haven't they already said that readers should take what they like? Do they mean this unreservedly? Or are there limits? If so, how can they delimit these limits, within the terms of their own practice? And what's so wrong with binary oppositions anyway? Whence the necessity to go beyond such? Because of their ethics of the BwO? Isn't this a little circular? And so on. Once again, we are reminded that DaG's founding gesture itself takes place on the ground of a strict covert identification of authority with organization, and organization with oppression. This classically anarchistic a priori, short-circuiting the distinction between concept and value, ontology and ethics, presentation and representation, and so on then motivates and authorizes their entire series of meditations on everything under the sun. However- consonant with their declared hostility to 'state philosophy' and to disciplinary boundaries per se (themselves positions necessitated by the aforementioned identification) - this unreflective anarchism quickly propels them into talking about things they manifestly know nothing about. And despite DaG remarking in What is Philosophy? that philosophy is by no means superior to the arts and sciences, this apparently does not in the least prevent philosophy from delineating the latters' limits and proper zones. Without, it seems, ever really having to learn their languages or modi operandi. And because DaG have claimed to forego the question of meaning, they then are not themselves in any position to acknowledge that that is what they are de facto still interested in. To begin with a single example: as Alain Badiou points out with respect to Deleuze's apparently straightforwardly programmatic remark that 'The multiple is not what has many subsets, but also what can be folded in many ways' .39 : One is immediately tempted to make an objection: to begin with, a multiple is not composed ofits subsets, but ofits elements. Furthermore, the thought 39 This has been altenatively translated as 'The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways', G. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. and foreword by T. Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3.

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of a fold is its spread-as-multiple, its reduction to elementary belonging, even though the thought of a knot is given in its algebraic group. Finally, how can 'what is folded many ways' be exposed to the folding, topologized into innumerable folds, if it was not innumerable to begin with in its pure multiple-being. 40

There are, to unpack Badiou's rather condensed paragraph, a nwnber of difficulties in Deleuze's little sentence (I will content myself with listing four): 1) Deleuze, attempting to array his own concept of the fold against the axiomatic apparatus of set-theory, misrepresents (whether deliberately or not) the stakes of the antagonism. It is perhaps not going too far to read this particular misrepresentation as symptomatic of more global anxieties, insofar as the relation between elements and subsets is, first, integral to the new spin that set-theory gives to the onemultiple problem and, second, concords with other apparent slips that Deleuze makes elsewhere. More on this below. 2) Indeed, Deleuze thereby also demonstrates a slip in consistency with regard to his own metaphors: given that his concern here seems to be to link the notions of the multiple and the fold according to a logic of intensive difference, it then seems odd that folding is something that befalls the multiple, rather than the fold/unfold itself being the very being of the multiple- as he elsewhere suggests. 3) Not only an inconsistency in expression, however, this apparent possible exposure of the multiple to folding further begs the question of what it is a multiple of Perhaps of those quantitative atomic particles that the event-fold was precisely constructed to work against? Or something else again? Deleuze, in other words and in a nwnber of senses, makes his inability to count a point of honour. One supposedly cannot count the event-fold, for instance, not only because it is a nonquantitative torsion of multiplicity, but also because 'everything is event'. These two apparently very different claims are thus profoundly linked. For Deleuze to count an event as such is to immediately betray its intensive differential becomings to the representative suppositions of a structure (in this, most minimal case, a structure of enwneration). Which is why everything must be an event, an event of an event involving multiplicities of multiplicities, and essentially hostile to all rationalist categories. But this is a claim that he himself rebukes when he professes that multiplicities undergo folding. In other words, 'everything is event' would then, paradoxically, make sense only insofar as it is can no longer function as a guarantor of the primacy of the virtual. 4) Furthermore, and in the same vein, if 'everything is event'- a proclamation whereby Deleuze explicitly refigures and reaffirms Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient 40

Badiou, 'Gilles Deleuze', p. 52.

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Reason - he thereby explodes any possible distinction between fact and event at the price of making functional effectivity the meaning of the event. For if there are no facts, there are by the same token no neutral or inert situations, and nothing that can be registered as such. In other words, one is reduced to exclaiming ad infinitum 'it's an event! it's an event!', though there is absolutely no position of experience from which this can be verified, or even needs to be verified, except through - to use the language of A Thousand Plateaus - reterritorializing on and in the strata. Deleuze thus nails himselfto the cross of all philosophical empiricisms, by on the one hand wanting to limit the claims of reason in the name of the virtual inexhaustibility of experience- hence his Stoic emphasis on the indefinite temporality of the verbal infinitive, and the absolute unpredictability of the virtual event4 1 - while on the other having to explain how a singular experience, or an experience of the singular, can be apprehended as such. This recurrent philosophical problem- which rationalism (thinks that it) can easily answer by recourse to its foundational logics and structures42 -is: how to distinguish between events? And what is the status of such distinctions between events? And because empiricism tends to get going by a foreclosure, rejection or displacement of the ontological question, it remains caught in the rift between the one and the multiple in its susceptibility to affirming both poles: all being is an incalculable One and yet simultaneously seething with difference. This is statistically the point at which an apophatic mysticism rushes in to fill the void, and DaG prove no exception: BwO, PoC, lines of flight, the diagram, absolute deterritorialization, smooth space, intensities, haeccities, events, and so on come to fulfill the functions once assigned by negative theology to the dissimulating traces of an unspeakable God (now itself active-passive, non-existent, in-consistent, and so on). 43 Or perhaps See Deleuze, The Logic ofSense, esp. pp. 4-11. I am here following Joelle Proust's terminology: 'By "rationalist" I understand here any doctrine that postulates the intrinsic rationality of scientific knowledge- that is, one that presents it as universal and necessary, these two conditions guaranteeing the objective legitimacy of knowledge (whether the foundation of this legitimacy is ascribed to an a priori structure of reason or to a universal structure of syntax). "Rationalist" is contrasted here with "empiricist", by which I refer to any doctrine that subordinates the critical analysis of knowledge to the types of genesis that actually made it possible, and thus does not posit an absolute criterion of objectivity. For objectivity it substitutes objectification, which is relative to the natural conditions (historical, linguistic, psychological, etc.) in which cognition occurs, and thus typically brings in something going beyond the given that escapes any rational legitimation', Questions ofForm: Logic and the Analytic Proposition from Kant to Carnap, trans. A. A. Brenner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 263, n. 5. 43 Hence the strange status of such (excellent) exegeses as: 'perception is neither a relation between subject and object, nor an identity of self-awareness ... that which is perceived is neither the same as, nor different from, the perceiver. It is the "prehension" . . . of one line of becoming by another, and the presence of one haecceity in another. Perception is an event of encounter', P. Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), p. 108. Ah, the varieties of religious experience! And, as Goodchild himself admits, until the Cinema books, 'De leuze 41

42

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even a late, 'expressive' variant of the absolute spirit of the Hegel DaG apparently despise?44 One does not have to subscribe to Badiou's own 'set-theory ontology' to find such terminological inconsistencies symptomatic of more profound discursive factors. I have already cited Badiou on DaG; DaG return the compliment in the chapter on logic in What is Philosophy? Although there isn't the space here for an account of their interpretation, their account is so confusing that a stupefied Franvois Wahl, meditating on the differences between Badiou and DaG, will write 'it is impossible to recognize Badiou in Deleuze's reconstruction' .45 Perhaps more compellingly, DaG provide a little footnote to their own account, which reassures the reader that 'Badiou's theory is very complex; we fear we have submitted it to excessive simplifications'. 46 (I will let this remark speak for itself.) But one can make similar charges all the way down the line: DaG seem to be bad readers of psychoanalysis in general and Lacan in particular - Elisabeth Roudinesco, in the course of an explication of Anti-Oedipus, finds herself in the strange position of having to explain why it caused such a stir in France, when its claims vis-a-vis psychoanalysis were so manifestly preposterous. 47 Everything I have been saying thus seems to hinge on the peculiar status that DaG give their examples, which are also examples of misrepresentation. DaG's wealth of examples may initially seem to be directed against the resolute abstractions that supposedly characterize philosophical discourse, but rather retroactively demonstrates that this recourse to examples to be a moment in a dialectic internal to philosophy itself. Their examples are thus directed against philosophy from inside it, and this fact verifies that one of the essential ways in which philosophy (or a philosophy) engages in its self-differentiation is at the cost of a radical and deliberate in-discrimination of its others. Into the bargain, DaG's hostility towards State philosophy drives them in a direction whereby their categories become so broad and abstract that they can immediately be applied to anything whatsoever. Which unfortunately leaves the lacked any concept of self-awareness, of a transcendental "I" which is able to designate the thisness of this perception, affect, or thought, not merely as a principle of individuation, but as a principle of reference, spatio-temporal designation, identification, or differentiation', p. 120. 44 See C. Malabou, 'Who'sAfraid ofHegelian Wolves?', in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), pp. 114-38. But see also Ansell-Pearson's Germinal Life, in which he defends Deleuze's understanding ofthe event from the critiques of Alain Badiou and myself, pp. 131-2. 45 F. Wahl, 'Soustratif', in A. Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Editions du Seiul, 1992), p. 20. 46 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu 'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 144. 47 See E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. and foreword by J. Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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reader with a dilemma: either what DaG say is close to useless, or they themselves are exemplary State philosophers. In fact, they are at their most interesting when they engage in what is clearly rationalist typologizing, for example, their delineation of different signifying regimes. But, by the same token, it also regulates their constant tendency to make moralizing judgments about a range of matters, such that these judgments are de facto indistinguishable from the most reactive, commonsensical propositions, for example, when they denounce drug addicts as 'botching' the BwO. Furthermore, it is precisely to the extent that they are State philosophers that they can presume it utterly legitimate to overlook the institutional conditions of their own practice. 48 In other words, when they ask 'how does it work?' their answers can immediately refer back to the same pure philosophical tradition which they would nevertheless want to claim to be attempting to displace. This is not at all to give, say, sociology the royal road to comprehension, but to repeat my basic contention: that DaG's claim for function over meaning is an attempt to prohibit the question of meaning by having already made it impossible, an affair of the strata posterior to that of the plane of consistency, and so on. Having done so, however, they then continually fall back into questions of meaning without any longer being able to acknowledge that they are doing so. And to the extent that they cannot explicitly acknowledge this situation, they end up asking these questions poorly and repetitively, and due precisely to their fundamental presumption that organization is the enemy.

Failed successes This chapter has attempted to bring out DaG's complicity with Romanticism. Taking off on the basis of a suggestion of Lovejoy's - that Romanticism involves an unprecedented meditation on diversity- I traced DaG's own interests in this regard back through Bergson, and ultimately to an emblematically Romantic contestation of the Kantian critique. Having demonstrated what I called the 'organicist aestheticism' of this notable intellectual lineage, I concluded my exegesis by remarking how this tendency underwrites DaG's hostility to 'State philosophy'. This last point returns my reading of DaG to the major contention of this book: that Romantic philosophy, constitutively incapable of accepting its actual domiciliation in the University, can only experience and describe this situation in the aporetic and a-historical terms of an originary default in philosophy itself, that is, 'nihilism' (as I have already noted at several points throughout this book, 48 As Terry Eagleton, somewhat nastily, writes of Anti-Oedipus, 'it is Deleuze and Guattari, for all their insistence upon desire's diffuse and perverse manifestations, who are the true metaphysicians in holding to such covert essentialism. Theory and practice are once more ontologically at odds, since the schizoid hero of the revolutionary drama is by definition unable to reflect upon his own condition, needing Parisian intellectuals to do it for him', Eagleton, Against the Grain, p. 142.

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nihilism is coded in DaG's texts as 'Platonism').49 Confronted with the simultaneous force and corrosive senselessness of this diagnosis, Romantic philosophy typically responds by at once denouncing various forms of State power and by suturing itself to aesthetics. Hence such statements, to be found everywhere in DaG, as 'writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived.' 5° DaG's own texts are, accordingly, saturated with racy polysyllables and striking neologisms, massively ambitious, and resolutely utopian in a quasi-revolutionary way. They are, in a word, exemplary Romantics.

49 As Ansell-Pearson argues, 'For De leuze it is always a question of two nihilisms, namely, the one kind which destroys old values in order to conserve the established order and which never produces anything new, and the other kind which extracts from nihilism something that "belongs" to the untimely, to the monstrous future, remaining faithful to the promise of a "time to come"', Germinal Life, p. 19. Again, Ansell-Pearson's superb interpretation ofDeleuze only corroborates the analysis of nihilism that I have been offering throughout this book, whereby Romantics typically supplement the 'bad' nothingness of world nihilism with the 'good' nothingness of aesthetic production. He misses, however, what I would call the 'third nihilism' of the state institution. 50 Deleuze, 'Literature and Life', p. 225.

Chapter 6

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the Family Romance of Queer Theory 'Rudi hurled the shot glass into the fire place. Jack swore the difference didn't matter ... What's become of those large, stylised instruments made of wood & used for serving salad? 'Are we all just bits of reconstructed bliss?' wailed Anthea the newly appointed Lifestyle Professor'. John Forbes'

The violence of the letter

One of the historically recurrent debates in the modem university takes the form of questions regarding the violence supposedly done to bodies by apparently neutral or objective 'representations'. As Jonathan Arac once commented, the problem of 'representation' remains 'one ofthe most vexed areas in contemporary theory'. 2 Against what is so often considered this 'irreducible violence of signification', much critical work then dedicates itself to revealing and attempting to displace the material social inequalities that are apparently supported or ratified by such self-dissimulating, 'incorporeal' linguistic practices. This insistent academic theme is evidently still of crucial importance today, as the interminable and noisy contemporary debates regarding, say, the proper deployment, limits, and status of the signifier 'Queer' continue to testify. 3 The stakes of this debate are, crucially J. Forbes, 'Queer Theory', in Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 1998), p. 52. 2 J. Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 294. 3 See, for example, J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993); 'Against Proper Objects', differences VI: 2+3 (1994), pp. 1-26; 'Critically Queer', GLQ 1: 1 (1993), pp. 17- 32; E. K. Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); 'Gender Criticism', inS. Greenblatt and G. Gunn, eds, Redrawing the Boundaries (New York: MLA, 1992), pp. 271-301; 'Queer Performativity', GLQ 1: 1 (1993), pp. 1-16; L. Edelman, Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994); D. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), as well as the introductions and numerous articles in such anthologies as D. Fuss, ed., inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories (New York: Routledge, 1991); D. Stanton, ed., Discourses of Sexuality From Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); H. Abelove eta!., eds, The Lesbian and Gay

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enough, most evident- not necessarily at the rarefied level of high 'theory' itself -when such theory turns to the question of how the ruses of signification interact with, and impact upon, the historical constitution of certain pathologized identities and practices. 4 What I wish to do here, then, is to give a close analysis of the most influential and ubiquitous of these analytico-political techniques. However, I can hardly hope to resolve or even contribute anything much to this debate in any straightforward way, given its evident intractability, perpetual recurrence in all sorts of different contexts, not to mention its philosophical complexity. On the contrary, I wish, first, to mark that this debate remains uncircumventable in cultural criticism and theory today (despite all protestations to the contrary), and, second, to outline the characteristic rhetorical ways in which such (quasi) philosophical questions of the ruses of nomination then come to be imbricated with historical evidence of various kinds. And, finally, to ask how and why the coupling of these two (conceptually) very different problems- of' language' and 'history'- remains an unavoidable topos for contemporary cultural criticism. It is on the basis of such an analysis that I wish to show how these issues still revolve around the problem of aesthetics, and unfold on the basis of an implicit (and in this case covert) diagnosis of nihilism. My procedure further enables an account of how and why the various authorities I examine all find themselves - and again, despite their differences -forced to a recognition of 'aesthetics' as an appropriate, powerful, and interesting explanatory schema. My investigation will focus here on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Whereas the previous two chapters- on Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari- dealt with writers who were self-consciously intervening in a high European philosophical tradition, this chapter attempts to trace the presence of consonant philosophicocritical approaches and motifs in writings that are produced and circulate in very different geographical, political, academic, and disciplinary contexts. To this end, my reading is concerned with bringing out these consonances at a relatively abstract level of the texts I engage with; my question is thus as to the internal discursive logics that condition the specific local force of such texts. Once again, and in line with the governing argument ofthis book, I aim to show how the logics of Queer Theory remain Romantic.

Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993). For a good overview of some of the major positions, see A. Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996). Not one of these books or articles fails to intervene in the debate of words versus things, and for many it is absolutely central. 4 As will already be evident, I am using the terms 'nomination', 'representation', 'signification', and so on as ifthey were synonymous. What primarily authorizes this apparent sloppiness of expression here- for every one of these terms can be, and has been, given an exact and technical sense - is the fact that, in recent cultural theory, they almost invariably end up corresponding to the first term of the global division language/real.

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Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet Rather than give a summary overview of a number of different authors, I am going to concentrate on one of the most powerful, interesting and influential recent texts which finds itself forced to confront precisely these questions: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology ofthe Closet. Although my account will of course presume a familiarity with other relevant sources, and cite or reference them when pertinent, my focus here on Sedgwick's text in particular can be justified for the following reasons. First, Epistemology ofthe Closet has rapidly become a foundational text, not just for the sub-discipline of 'Queer Theory', but also for cultural theory more generally. Its range of evidence, rhetorical manoeuvres, and logical argumentation have been widely imitated (if not necessarily convincingly reproduced or extended). It is thus an excellent place to examine several of these aspects in detail. Second, the book provides a number of especially strong arguments (themselves directly derived from post-structuralist work), for the structural dominance of one particular definitional binary- the 'homo/heterosexual distinction'- in the West over the last hundred years. Sedgwick's work is thus centrally concerned with the knotting together ofthe themes oflanguage, bodies, and power, and she attends in detail to the possible ways in which one particular, historically based principle can accomplish such a knotting. Finally, and most importantly here, Sedgwick is one of the very few contemporary theorists who attend, in any acceptable explicit detail, to the question ofhow aesthetics is articulated with politics. This point has already arisen in the course of my analyses of other critics, and also, of course, bears upon the central contention of the book itself. My argument below will thus ultimately be dedicated to answering the question: how and in what ways does Sedgwick find herselfforced to deal with the 'paradox of aesthetics'? This reading of Sedgwick's work as exemplary will not only attempt, then, to determine her foundational presuppositions, recurrent methodological strategies, and central claims, but to localize her practice, first in a more general, still emergent academic field (that of 'Queer Theory', but also of 'Cultural Studies'), and, second, in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can ultimately be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism. What I hope to accomplish through showing the continuing force of such genealogical affiliations is how they at once condition and limit Sedgwick's practice and conclusions; for example, her 'mandarin' aestheticism, her mobilization of a sophisticated theoretical via negativa, her totalizing account of culture and her confessions of partiality (in all the senses of this word), her utopian politics, and her attention to the ruses ofnomination. Furthermore, such a genealogy also enables a generalization and displacement of her questions: that is, a demonstration oftheir simultaneous necessity and their insufficiency, which may provide further directions as to how we can and cannot proceed with reference to the problem of aesthetics. But let us now turn to Epistemology of the Closet, to verify these correspondences and conditions in detail. The text opens with the following statement:

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Epistemology ofthe Closet proposes that many ofthe major modes ofthought

and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured -indeed, fractured- by a chronic, now endemic crisis ofhomo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modem Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modem homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modem gay and antihomophobic theory. 5

As we shall see, I am in fundamental accord with Sedgwick's position: however, my interest for the moment is simply to analyse the conditions, presuppositions, and affiliations that underwrite the rhetoric of this introduction, in terms of the problematic of localization that I have flagged in previous sections. Indeed, I will be returning to Sedgwick's work- and to this passage in particular- later in the chapter, but I wish only to mark here the status of the 'axioms' (the entire introductory chapter ofher book is entitled 'Axiomatic') and argumentative linkages that are required to justify this ambitious declaration. Certainly, the matter of this passage immediately foregrounds the following. 1) The insistence and necessity of the theoretical debate regarding the interrelations between linguistic nomination and the 'real' practices thereby nominated and transformed. Furthermore, it is a debate that Sedgwick implicitly acknowledges ('modes of thought', 'an understanding', 'definition', 'critical analysis'), as she insists on its reproduction/displacement. That is, a recent variant of this debate, 'modem gay and antihomophobic theory', is the 'appropriate place' (my emphasis) from which to elaborate both a theoretical and a historical critique. Her procedure here thus presupposes that it is only from (or at) the limits of dominant modes of thought that their own presuppositions can be properly discerned and contested. I will come back to this problem - that Sedgwick herself grapples with - of the undecidable localization of these floating limits, but it must be noted here that Sedgwick's presumption is in fact quadruple: i) that it is only at the limit, or from a position of liminal exteriority, that the truth of the centre can, however uncertainly, be told; ii) that what happens at the limit is itselfthe dissimulated truth of the centre (this conviction directly links her work to an abiding Romantic tradition of the American university system); iii) that the very revelation or becoming-apparent of this limit will eventually have come to re-pose and dis-place the hitherto determining relation between the centre and its limits; iv) the effects of this dis-placement will not, however, necessarily be of the order of the calculable or the desirable. 6 5 E. K. Sedgwick, Epistemology ofthe Closet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. I. All further pages references to this volume will be given in the text. 6 Furthermore, this presumption (or variants thereof) remains of extraordinary political significance for contemporary feminist theory: as Rosi Braidotti proclaims, in the course of an interview with Judith Butler, 'We should bank instead on the margin of

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2) That there is a historico-theoretical problem regarding the specific nature of the signs from which one is justified in 'reading-off' the emergence of an unprecedented cultural formation: again, Sedgwick does not fail to mention that 'many' of our analytic tools are not only 'structured', but 'fractured' by the crucial homo/heterosexual definition, which at once implies that this structuring principle is dissimulated or concealed - hence difficult to apprehend from within the very modes of thought it organizes- and which yet disables these modes of thought to the very extent that they (necessarily) fail to grasp their own architectonic principles. Furthermore, she therefore supposes that, insofar as such analyses fail to grasp their own principles, they are thereby blinded also to the truth of the ('material') histories over which they cast their dyspeptic gaze. And yet, for a well-placed critic - such as Sedgwick herself- this very blindness then itself comes to function as evidence of the very structures that it would ignore and conceal. Her argument, not coincidentally, ironically supplements its force in this passage by mobilizing a rhetoric of disease and contagion (that is, 'chronic', 'endemic', 'damaged'); Sedgwick thus implicitly figures her own position as that of a 'cultural physician', who can read the symptoms of congenital degeneracy spreading inexorably across both contemporary theory and the larger cultural formations of which the former are an expression. (The very conscious irony here is, of course, that - following Foucault- Sedgwick believes that it is precisely through the new status accorded the medical profession in the nineteenth century that the homo/heterosexual definition still dominant today was generated in the first place. I will speak more ofthis below.) 3) Given that Sedgwick's own project claims to develop itself from a position of what we might call 'relative exteriority', (that is, a marginalized discourse which, to the extent that it is marginalized, can apprehend its own and others' principles, and hence pronounce more truthfully or forcefully on the real), it is then incumbent upon her to elaborate the extent and limits of the cultural field that has been affected by the historical developments she is examining. For Sedgwick, the status accorded the homo/heterosexual definition since the late nineteenth century then comes to affect all of western 'culture' (and, presumably, given the extent of western imperialism at the time, much of the rest of the globe to boot), in a way that at once dissuades and provokes further analysis. 7 As I will argue, this third -very strong- claim is in fact required to legitimate Sedgwick's entire project, and thereby also functions as ground-clearing claim for an emergent disciplinary excentricity from the phallic system that women "enjoy" as part of the patriarchal sociosymbolic deal. It's that margin of non-belonging that serves as foundation for feminist politics', 'Feminism by any other name', differences VI: 2+3 (1994), pp. 39-40. 7 If Sedgwick herself remains relatively silent on this point, there is no doubt, given her own characteristic arguments, that she must extend the effects of this transformation in sexual definition to the rest of the world, even if these effects are obviously by no means simple or even, strictly speaking, legible outside the western dispensation.

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practice. As she herself goes on to say, 'I am trying to make the strongest possible introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole' (2). But there are a number of (analytically distinct if practically inseparable) difficulties that affiict this third claim. For Sedgwick herself finds it at once impossible and necessary to decide on its scope and status, as can be directly inferred from the oscillating ambiguities of her adverbs and adjectives: 'many of the major nodes', 'Western culture as a whole', 'virtually any aspect', 'not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance', 'relatively decentered', and so on. Hence provoking the question: how is it that Sedgwick, at the very moment that she is attempting 'to make the strongest possible introductory case' for her 'hypothesis', cannot help but draw back from, as she gestures towards, its wholehearted affirmation? This uncomfortable, indecisive shuttling between a globalizing discourse and a particularizing one stems from, I will argue, her attempt to respond to a number of incommensurable, historico-institutional injunctions simultaneously. We can offer both 'esoteric' and 'exoteric' explanations for this peculiar oscillation on Sedgwick's part. To follow, for the moment, the logic of her own argument, the problem can be said to be a function ofthe constitutive and irreducible contradiction of the homo/heterosexual definition itself. Furthermore, as she puts it, this contradiction is at least double: The first is the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what! refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeing same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter ofliminality or transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse of separatism- though by no means necessarily political separatism -within each gender (1-2).

Again, it is crucial to say that, as an analysis of the contradictions of twentieth century homo/heterosexual definition, this is impeccable, and I will myself have cause to rely on it below. However, as it is just as important to keep emphasizing, I am primarily interested here in how such statements jUnction in the elaboration of the argument itself. As I have already shown, Sedgwick's text begins with an intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about nomination; it proceeds to affirm the centrality of a 'nominally marginal' definitional binary, which, insofar as it genuinely appears to be marginal, provides a privileged point from which to view the centre; insofar as this marginality is only nominally so, it then becomes apparent that it covertly ventriloquizes the centre itself; finally, at this moment the argument reaches its own limits, and falls into indecision; this indecision, far from

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eroding the legitimacy of the argument, rather confirms it: the rhetorical oscillation is, as it turns out, an unavoidable consequence ofthe incoherencies and divisions that fissure the structuring principle itself. In other words: to the extent that Epistemology ofthe Closet is true, it remains unprovable. However- perhaps unavoidably- this conclusion also, as we shall see, runs dangerously close to its inversion: to the extent that the book's claims are unprovable, they must be true ....

From deconstruction to Kant This trajectory evidently bears more than a passing resemblance to so-called 'deconstructive' analyses. As Sedgwick herself admits: one main strand of argument in this book is deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as symmetrical binary oppositions- heterosexual/homosexual, in this case- actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but subordinated to term A; but, second, the onto logically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A (9-1 0). 8

However, Sedgwick is finally concerned to assert that the resemblances stop there. As she warns: To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous . . . To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these binarisms makes it possible to identifY them as sites that are peculiarly densely charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation ... Nor is a deconstructive analysis of such definitional knots, however necessary, at all sufficient to disable them. Quite the opposite: I would suggest that an understanding 8 It is probably worth mentioning here the under-remarked but indispensable role that deconstruction plays in Queer Theory more generally. Despite - for all the obvious political reasons- Foucault being the French philosopher most often explicitly invoked and cited in Queer Theory texts, it could be plausibly argued that Derrida has in fact had as great an influence on the work of Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Diana Fuss, Wayne Koestenbaum, Teresa de Lauretis, David Halperin, Annamarie Jagose, Liz Grosz, not to mention Sedgwick herself. What is strange about this influence is that Queer Theory often finds it extraordinarily difficult to acknowledge, if it doesn't try to deny it altogether: one minor but telling example would be Jagose's remark, in her Queer Theory, that Butler's Gender Trouble is an elaboration of' Foucault sargument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalized identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter', p. 83 (my emphasis). On the contrary, Butler's book is demonstrably indebted to Derrida from one end to another, in its procedure as in its results: that she does not herself explicitly declare this scholarly affiliation is therefore unsurprising.

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of their irresolvable instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discursive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces ofthis century (1 0).

This is undoubtedly an excellent synopsis of the characteristic techniques and failings of much American literary deconstruction; Sedgwick is, also, undoubtedly correct to have reservations about the 'undoing ofbinaries'; finally, she is certainly correct to distinguish her own practice from that of more traditional deconstructions. Her account, however, accomplishes this by refiguring the 'strategic inversions' of deconstruction as analyses that are at once correct with regard to their account of the convoluted contortions that underpin discursive foundations, but false, 'idealist', insofar as these self-same analyses mistake the demonstration oflogical incoherency as an effective blow against discursive power per se. Against this false political efficacy of (otherwise essentially correct) analytical demonstrations, Sedgwick will array a number of interconnected arguments. But her major response, as aforementioned, is to particularize and historicize. 'Deconstruction, founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, has both so fetishized the idea of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now look for help in thinking about particular difference' (23). 9 Her own particularization involves, of course, the historical assertion that homo/heterosexual definition 'has been a presiding master term of the past century' ( 11 ). Deconstruction, apparently, mistakes refined analysis for committed intervention, and necessarily falls into such a (vaporizing and fetishizing) subreption insofar as its idealist project fails to engage with the particularity of historical differences. However, this self-distancing from deconstruction leaves Sedgwick herself with a major problem, already flagged above: the provision of evidence that can support her hypothesis. This problem not only provides another opportunity for her lush rhetoric to waver once again in the cool breeze of indecision, but also sparks a confession with regard to the empirical traction ofher own central metaphors. For 'hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested; they must be deepened and broadened - not the work of one book - and used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples' (12). I have already noted Sedgwick's ironic deployment of medical metaphors; here it seems that she is deliberately twisting tropes drawn from the precise logical regime of mathematics ('hypotheses', 'axioms', 'theorems', and so on). But- contrary to their 'literal' mathematical significations - Sedgwick presents us with untestable and unprovable hypotheses, unstable axioms, and 9 Sedgwick then proceeds to suggest that not only are both 'postmodem' and 'psychoanalytic' theory tarred with the same brush, but, furthermore, that Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial projects - despite their admirable attempts to escape essentialist western universalizing- have also been elaborated at the cost of 'more ephemeral' or 'less global' differences, for example, homo/heterosexual definition. Yet another effort, theorists, if you would become Sedgwickian!

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unworkable theorems. There are no definite conditions, and often the evidence is literally unreadable, if not completely invisible. Which, of course, then makes it possible to discern such evidence everywhere, in a further Sedgwickian trumping of the hallucinatory ruses of those culturally dominant 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and 'paranoid knowledges' that supposedly continue to fracture and deform contemporary cultural production. 10 Furthermore, Sedgwick engages this manoeuvre only in order to renounce and pursue it simultaneously. And, once again, her indefiniteness and indecision is carefully refashioned and explicitly re-presented as a political weapon for and in the theory. Whereas Immanuel Kant's motto for Enlightenment was 'Sapere aude!' (Dare to Know!), Sedgwick's might be effectively summarized as: 'Dare not to know!' 11 Not only because knowledge and ignorance are not in any simple, mutually exclusive relationship with one another, nor simply because 'knowledge' (whether medical, scientific, philosophical, or whatever) has proved to be just another, exceptionally effective vehicle of modern power, but because 'in the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routine basis' (3)_12 Sedgwick accordingly desires that her own practice do what it says, and say what it does; hence, 'to be inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely non-algorithmic. A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable ... '(12). In other words, Sedgwick's project aims to present- as George Bush Snr might have put it - a kinder, gentler categorical imperative; liberal, non-exclusionary, not only more 'feeling' but infinitely more 'understanding' than the ascetic, rationalizing injunctions of the Enlightenment moral law. Epistemologies of the Closet (claims that it) does not wish to compel or demand assent, devotion, or respect (even if it has empirically given rise to such responses); on the contrary, its stated mission is merely to 'resonate' (that is, be affective) and be 'productive' (12). Of course, Sedgwick's conception of'production' has absolutely nothing to do with calculability, quantification, efficiency, or even productivity; ifshe adjectivally qualifies this concept 10 An interpretation echoed by Edelman inHomographesis, for example,' As soon as homosexuality is localized, and consequently can be read within the social landscape, it becomes subject to a metonymic dispersal that allows it to be read into almost anything', p. 4, and 'Though it can become, therefore, as dangerous to read as to fail to read homosexuality, homosexuality retains in either case its determining relationship to textuality and the legibility of signs', p. 5. 11 See Kant's famous essay 'An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' in Kant: Political Writings, ed. and intro. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 54. 12 Sedgwick will not hesitate to draw the anti-Enlightenment conclusion: 'The chief of these dangers is the scornful, fearful, or patheticizing reification of"ignorance"; it goes with the unexamined Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular force as "ignorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space on a never quite explicit ethical schema', Epistemology of the Closet, p. 7. See also her essay, 'Privilege of Unknowing: Diderot's The Nun', in Tendencies, pp. 23-51.

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at all, it is as wasteful production (13). Another masterful perversion of an old master trope: the pervasive nineteenth centwy anxieties about the dreadful horrors threatened by 'closeted reading' and the 'wasteful spending' of masturbation/homosexuality are thereby revivified and inverted by her expansive metaphorology. But there is another critical way in which Sedgwick's political imperative differs from the moral imperative of Kant. Whereas the latter's law resides in a supersensible realm accessible only to reason, and hence manifests itself in the world of the senses only as a void, purely formal principle, Sedgwick's capacious imperative does centre on a content- the divided principle of homo/heterosexual definition. This will prove to be quite an important displacement on Sedgwick's part. For Kant, of course, the only genuine subjective autonomy derives from freely acceding to the demands of the categorical imperative, for example, 'The moral law adds to the negative concept a positive definition, that of a reason which determines the will directly through the condition of a universal lawful form of the maxims of the will,' and 'Only a formal law, i.e., one which prescribes to reason nothing more than the form of its giving universal law as the supreme condition of maxims, can be a priori a determining ground ofpractical reason.' 13 Now Sedgwick believes neither in the a priori value, nor the universality of the rational law, but she nonetheless wants to retain the possibility of a subjective freedom that ought to be recognized in and by the universal. Her procedure here - entirely consonant with most post-Kantian Romanticisms- involves scrambling the polarities of the non-sensuous moral law versus the efficient causality of appearances by way of a radical injection of 'intuitive' and 'imaginative' elements. Which leads us inexorably back to the question of nomination. If one were to reassemble the insistent trajectory which I have already identified in Sedgwick's text, it would runs something like this: an argument that begins with an ambitious 'hypothesis'; which proceeds to take aim at a priori, predictive, supposedly precise knowledges (for example, mathematics, medicine, assorted sciences), a polemic which is doubled by the assertion of her own desire 'not to know'; this argument is intimately coupled with a beautiful, 'poetic' style which 'performs' its own stated indecisiveness; its characteristic technique is the elaboration of nuanced, suggestive descriptive interventions which enable and ensure a smooth modulation between otherwise astonishingly diverse topics (in a matter of pages she moves from deconstruction to Stonewall to her own previous book Between Men to homophobic violence to legal judgements to ... ). 14 13 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, third edition, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 49-50,67. 14 More on the implications ofRomantic style below. However, it is worth quoting here Guillory's analysis: 'discipleship is an effect of all teaching, and theory only magnifies this effect by objectifying the charisma of the master teacher as a methodology. While charisma may first appear in the seminar as a personal quality, it passes into the disciplinary field as a certain effect of style, an imitable effect', Cultural Capital: The Problem ofLiterary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 179.

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It is by way of such techniques that Sedgwick generates a strong authorial personality, the sense of a committed and effective practice that is fundamentally if subterraneanly linked to broader forms of political action, and which, crucially, then authorizes her to speak of anything in culture at large. To put this as bluntly as possible: once Sedgwick has proposed the general hypothesis that 'homo/ heterosexual definition has been a presiding master term of the past century', she can legitimately talk about any number of things under the sun insofar as they might possibly provide evidence for the viability of this claim. As always, however, possibility slips easily into necessity, a prospect itself covertly acknowledged when Sedgwick explicitly admits that her hypothesis is literally unprovable (anything might prove it/nothing will prove it/everything proves it). 15 However, given that her general hypothesis is then primarily an introductory regulative heuristic, it does permit her to move down towards the real world of historical events and actually existing individuals, a movement which then enables her to specify, broaden, and intensify the hypothesis - with the result that it is indeed not fixed identities that she discovers, but their constant reinvention and dissolution according to the open, mobile, material strategies of power/knowledge. Finally, she can then climb back up from history to her governing hypothesis, which is thereby revealed as necessarily in-consistent: it is precisely because identity inexorably dissolves and fractures that its claims are so binding. And if this double analytic movement -almost 'intuitive' in the Bergsonian sense- from generality to particularity and then back again to generality, demonstrates that particularity fissures the universal, this demonstration would have been impossible if one had not begun with the empty form ofhypothetical universality itself. 16 As I showed in the chapter on Deleuze and Guattari, this attribution of a residual Bergsonism to contemporary theory and philosophy is by no means as outlandish nor as irrelevant as it may initially seem; here again, it bears directly upon Sedgwick's practice and the plausibility ofher results in a number of crucial ways. Once again, it effectively localizes Sedgwick's project in a Romantic genealogy founded on an a priori suspicion of those knowledges it deems 'scientific' or 'logical', and which regulates her valorization of multiple, heterogeneous, preindividual differences, which re-bind the divisions inflicted on contemporary life by established power, and so on. Hence Sedgwick's limit-Romanticism not only conditions but determines her conclusions with regard to identity-formation, and this determination at once 15 It is impossible not to relate this strategy to that analysed by Freud under the heading of 'the damaged kettle', for example, 'I returned the kettle undamaged, it had those holes in it when you lent it to me, and I never borrowed a kettle from you anyway': seeS. Freud, Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton Library, 1963 ), p. 205. For a slightly different, more 'philosophical' account of this logic, see J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 15. 16 For a rigorous philosophical account of Bergson's method, which supplements my account of the previous chapter, see A. Badiou, Gilles Deleuze: 'La Clameur de l'etre' (Paris: Hachette, 1997), pp. 49-63.

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necessarily provokes and prevents an uncertain attention to the aestheticsability of the very identities that it simultaneously makes (almost) visible. Certainly, the profound relatedness of Sedgwick's own practice to Romanticism ought now to be clearly apparent: the only difference of major deviation from the tradition is presumably a specifically political one, and bears, as aforementioned, on a particular content (as opposed to their shared formal procedures, theoretical presuppositions, and so on). But, as we have also seen, Sedgwick's project paradoxically lapses into Romanticism in her very attempt to take her political distance from a supposedly apolitical or naive deconstruction. Into the bargain, it now seems that this apparently politically motivated discrimination is in fact ventriloquized by a subterranean aestheticizing impulse that, if it is explicitly rejected by Sedgwick, now returns with a vengeance, all the more insidious and forceful for having become invisible. Despite the stated objectives of Sedgwick's project, such a situation finally constitutes nothing less than an aestheticization of the category of identity in the guise of its very opposite; furthermore, such a judgment encrypts in itself a reflexive moment whereby it registers itself as an index of the morally good - and calls its practice politics. To put this in other words, there seems to be a necessity to aestheticize identity in general in order to politically affirm certain identities in particular. And ifl have specifically focused here on Sedgwick, I will show in the following chapter how such an aesthetico-political high Romantic philosophizing continues to traverse a great deal of Cultural Studies. Invariably, as in all such cases, a great deal of theoretical labour is expended in the pursuit, analysis, certification, and demolition of encrusted or sedimented identities. 17 It is also at such a moment that such theory often thinks of itself as becoming explicitly political. 18 That this may indeed be absolutely true (although it, equally, may not) does not in the 17 The emphasis on 'confessional narratives' in Cultural Studies (and elsewhere) is obviously of the greatest interest, and not only in this context. For differing accounts of the functions that such 'anecdotage' serves, or can serve, see D. Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule ofLiterature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); M. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', in P. Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 14-43, as well as Chapter Seven of this book. However, it is not simply through such 'anecdotage' alone that such rhetorical moves are authorized: much of the proselytizing for 'irreducible heterogeneity' and 'difference' also provides a crucial support, insofar as 'tactical considerations' can thenjustif.Y any lapse into even the most sweeping and apodictic statements. 18 To cite John Frow and Meaghan Morris, 'work in cultural studies accepts its partiality, in both senses of the term: it is openly incomplete, and it is partisan in its insistence on the political dimensions ofknowledge', Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993), p. xviii. It ought also to be flagged here that such confessions of 'partiality' are invariably linked to ambitious totalizing narratives of culture at large: it is the very assertion of partiality, in other words, which authorizes the critic's manifold transgressions, not only of disciplinary boundaries, but of all sorts of forbidden zones (for example, sexual, racial, national, and so on).

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least prevent further questions being asked as to the institutional and conceptual possibilities of its functioning as such. We are now in a position to turn to the problem of identity, and finally show how the apparent complexities of its constant renovation and unfounding are underwritten by the structural exigencies demanded by aesthetics in such a way that these themes seem most often ambiguously overlooked by those covertly aestheticizing analyses which are, paradoxically, in the best possible position to analyse its historical emergence and theoretical consequences. Identity politics, contemporary theory, nomination

That questions of identity remain the most pressing theoretico-political questions today, both inside and outside the academy, seems undeniable. And that particular identities can be affirmed as such by theory only by its making the category of identity itself pass through the eye of the aesthetic needle now seems equally undeniable. And that academic practices have consistently and covertly relied on such an aestheticization in order to found a not-entirely-justifiable-commonality with non-academic practices might also be just as certain. That such a selfdissimulating aestheticizing politics has undoubtedly had manifold positive effects is itself of great interest, but it then might also be argued, as has John Guillory, that 'the telegraphic invocation of race/class/gender is the symptom of just the failure to develop a systemic analysis that would integrate the distinctions and nuances of social theory into the practice of canonical revision'. 19 Again, I do not see that an adjudication between these competing claims is here either possible or necessary, but rather seek only to gesture towards the fact of their inextricable imbrication, and the consequences of this for an understanding of aesthetics. I will now examine this question in detail, and show how Sedgwick's elaboration and delimitation of aestheticization is intimately bound up with all of the issues I have already canvassed above, for example, the question of the theoretical links that can be drawn between nomination, evidence, aesthetics, and history. I have already argued that it is only on the basis of Sedgwick's implicit aestheticization of identity in general that she can effectively politicize and affirm one identity in particular. I now wish to show how this self-same aestheticization at once determines her recognition of aesthetics as a central instrument of social control, and yet - given her argument with regard to the dominance of homo/ heterosexual definition since the late nineteenth century - ultimately ensures that she is incapable of discerning its true extension. Here is Sedgwick's most forceful formulation of her hypothesis: The word 'homosexual' entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century- its popularization preceding, as it happens, 19

Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 11.

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even that of the word 'heterosexual'. It seems clear that the sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, denoted by the new term 'homosexual' and its contemporary variants already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other sexual behaviors and behavioral clusters. What was new from the turn ofthe century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition (2).

A number of points: 1) the word 'homosexual' itself has a history; 2) the history of the word is not reducible to the history ofthe identities and behaviours that it names; 3) nevertheless, the 'popularization' of the word is itselflinked to the rapid subordination and reorganization of the entirety of lived experience and culture at large through the medicalization of identities in the late nineteenth century; 4) the very evident, continuing mismatch between 'word' and 'practice' is an index of the success of this subordination. As Sedgwick writes, 'it is startling to realize that the aspect of 'homosexuality' that now seems in many ways most immutably to fix it - its dependence on a defining sameness between partners - is of so recent crystallization. That process is also, one might add, still radically incomplete. The potential for defamiliarization implicit in this historical perception is only beginning to be apparent' (158-9). 'Naming', on Sedgwick's account, has always an in-determinate force particular names, for whatever reasons, at particular moments come to determine unachievable ideals or pathologized others for those suffering under particular historical regimes, and yet do not essentially determine anything but those effective incoherences that are written on and in the bodies and practices ofits subjects. Yet, as Sedgwick's elusive invocation of the 'long, rich history' of 'homosexuality' shows, she, following Foucault, is not really engaged in producing a history of representations or behaviours, but rather 'the history of a word'. As Derrida has put it, 'this history of the uses of a word is neither nominalist nor essentialist. It concerns procedures and, more precisely, zones of'problematization'. It is a 'history of truth' as a history ofproblematizations.'20 20 J. Derrida, "To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis', Critical Inquiry XX: 2 (1994), p. 264. As Foucault himself puts it, his project 'was intended to be neither a history of sexual behaviors nor a history of representations, but a history of "sexuality" ... My aim was not to write a history of sexual behaviors and practices, tracing their successive forms, their evolution, and their dissemination; nor was it to analyze the scientific, religious, or philosophical ideas through which these behaviors have been represented. I wanted first to dwell on that quite recent and banal notion of"sexuality": to stand detached from it, bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated. The term itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor

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But such a 'history of problematizations' is, at least, in Sedgwick's case, ungroundable on her own terms. Though Sedgwick never uses or mentions the word 'nihilism'- despite a long discussion of Nietzsche in Epistemology of the Closet - her text constantly struggles against what it self-confessedly nominates as the 'unprovability' of its own central hypotheses (as I showed above). Her own practice of rereading and renomination of the occluded homo/heterosexual matrix, in Melville, Nietzsche, Willie Nelson, and so on- which itself thereby names and does not name in the same breath- is thus once again forced towards aesthetics in an attempt to bind together 'words and things'. This is, of course, not an aesthetics of form, but of its supposedly-once-degraded-or-marginalized others, 'sentimentality', 'homosexual panic', 'paranoia', and so on Sedgwick's procedure hence impels her towards the implicit telos of a possible (yet constitutively formless) political community based on aesthetic affect, and which is mobilized in a forceful rhetorical attempt to circumvent the established rhetorics of homophobic power. 21 Sedgwick's work is among the most persuasive and forceful of recent theoretical developments that investigate the ruses of naming and identity. In Queer Theory, for instance, the word 'queer' is thus arrayed against the pathologizing, normative nominations of established power, but in such a way as to pluralize and show the intimate and ineradicable disarray of not only this particular name, but of all names in particular. 22 The question again, becomes one of a renovated practice that is at once theoretical, aesthetic, and political- and which refuses to subscribe to settled identities or any fixed positions. Examples of this tendency are legion, and range overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which "sexuality" refers. The use of the word was established in connection with other phenomena: the development of diverse fields of knowledge ... the establishment of a set of rules and norms - in part traditional, in part new', The Use ofPleasure: The History ofSexuality Volume Two, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p. 3. 21 See, for further evidence of this, Sedgwick's brilliant discussion of'sentiment' and the 'ressentimental', in Epistemology ofthe Closet, pp. 141-50. For discussions of Kant that bear on precisely this question, see the various authorities cited in the second chapter of this book. 22 As Catherine Dale points out, in a review of articles by Biddy Martin, Judith Butler, and Elizabeth Grosz on the relationships between 'feminism' and 'queer': 'The central issue concerns the visibility and invisibility ofthe feminine and oflesbian desire. The issue of visibility, however, appears to be simultaneously one oflanguage, one of denominalization', C. Dale, 'A Debate Between Queer and Feminism', in Critical Inqueeries I: 3 (1997), p. 153. Jagose places this debate in its historical and philosophical context: to the extent that 'queer' names the unfoundedness and confounding of all identities, does it not, for instance 1) constitute an over-intellectualizing foreclosure of more practically oriented political orientations? 2) unproductively rehearse old debates? 3) reinstate or reinscribe the very identities it presumes to contest? See Queer Theory, esp. pp. 72-126. Again, any number of other names or movements might be cited in this context, not only those of queer theory (Halperin, Butler, Sedgwick, Grosz, de Lauretis, Edelman, Fuss), but Cultural Studies as well (Morris, Frow, Grossberg, and so on). The next chapter examines the latter formation in more detail.

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from the most blatant and unreflective assertions to the most subtle. Hence we find Annamarie Jagose writing, 'when "lesbian" is figured as one fluid point in a constellation of coincidental, coalitional and even contradictory identities, when the lesbian body is understood as inessential, a body in process, not a transculturally or transhistorically recognizable body, the political struggle for and in representation is not the desire for a "correct", "honest" or "true" depiction of the "real" lesbian body' .23 And Teresa de Lauretis would hope for 'a formally experimental, critical and lyrical, autobiographical and theoretically conscious, practice of writing-in-thefeminine that crosses gender boundaries (poetry and prose, verbal and visual modes, narrative and cultural criticism), and instates new correlations between signs and meanings, inciting other discursive mediations between the symbolic and the real, language and flesh' .24 Jonathan Dollimore, in much the same vein, writes: Within metaphysical constructions of the Other what is typically occluded is the significance ofthe proximate ... the proximate is often constructed as the other, and in a process that facilitates displacement. But the proximate is also what enables a tracking-back of the 'other' into the 'same'. I call this transgressive reinscription, which, also provisionally, may be regarded as the return of the repressed and/or the suppressed and/or the displaced via the proximate. Ifthe perverse dynamic generates internal instabilities within repressive norms, reinscription denotes an anti-essentialist, transgressive agency which might intensify those instabilities, turning them against the norms. It becomes a kind of transgression enabled rather than thwarted by the knowledge that there is no freedom outside history, no freedom within deluded notions of autonomous selthood. 25

These essentially Romantic declarations are, of course, not restricted to the (in any case) very diverse field of Queer Theory. And neither are they without argumentative or moral force. On the contrary, it is precisely because they are so compelling that I am analysing their characteristic ruses here, in order to ask: what are the conditions that contemporary theory must fulfil in order to acquire its force? These conditions, as I have tried to show throughout this book, are still those of Romanticism.

23

A. Jagose, Lesbian Utopics (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 162.

24 T. de Lauretis, 'Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation', inAbelove et

a!., Gay and Lesbian Studies, p. 148. 25 J. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde to Foucault (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1991), p. 33.

Chapter 7

Cultural Studies, Cultural Policy, and the Professed Anti-Romanticism of Ian Hunter X Goethe and Brentano Of course they had servants, dressed for dinner and though they themselves hardly washed their linen was spotless [ ...] It must have been hard really to be Romantic then, which I guess is why they were best, serious with the help of money, servants, limitless leisure a religious background and the knowledge they were the first. Today anyone can act the part, but could we manage any sex life, two litres of wine a day, and some great poems, all with a valet looking on? Andrew Taylor1

Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy

As the preceding chapters were aimed at making clear, aesthetics - when it is remarked upon at all- is held to function in ways that are, to mobilize an only too familiar Freudian concept, literally 'uncanny'. This chapter will be concerned to examine the most general ruses of this uncanniness, with especial respect to the recent work of Ian Hunter, who has attempted to find a way to account for - if not to neutralize - these ruses without falling into, say, a pure formalism on the one hand, or a naive historicism on the other. Indeed, as my citations of Hunter throughout the book should suggest, I have been relying on his arguments and historico-institutional studies for many of my own directions. Hunter's work tries not to presume that 'aesthetics' is either simply a literally immaterial by-product of analytic discursive modes, or simply something that constantly takes place within history itself. For, as we have seen, much of the interest of aesthetics is the challenge that it poses to such knowledge procedures, constantly tempting them to think it, and simultaneously eluding or frustrating them- thereby offering theories the opportunity to re-aestheticize, but under any other name. 1 A. Taylor, from 'Travelling to Gleis-Binario', in P. Mead and J. Tranter, eds, The Penguin Book ofModern Australian Poetry (Ringwood: Penguin, 1991 ), p. 251.

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My reading of Hunter is essentially reducible to a triple problematic of localization: how an academic discipline localizes and delimits the object of its study, and how it simultaneously attempts to localize its own practice or site of enunciation, all the while itself being governed and transformed, localized, by institutional forces (which, as its fundamental conditions, are often rendered invisible for precisely that reason). If these problems can often run the risk of appearing irrelevant or, at best, overly scholastic, I have already indicated above why they are of particular interest, and have a specific import, with respect to the problem of aesthetics. In other words, given aesthetics' seemingly irreducible errancy, its definitional subtraction from presentation, certain difficulties are immediately posed for any prospective analysis - whether this analysis thinks of itself as primarily theoretical, historical, economic, institutional, and so on. In other words, despite my own reliance on Hunter's work, I am still concerned to show how it remains Romantic, and particularly with respect to the problems posed by aesthetics. This situation is not, of course, unique. On the contrary, the currently (still) ascendant interdisciplinary discipline that now most often goes under the name of 'Cultural Studies' is in some senses a reaction against, and development out of, the perceived inability of more 'traditional' disciplines to account adequately for this infinite variety of the world. As Lawrence Grossberg et al. put it in their introduction to the gargantuan anthology, Cultural Studies, 'Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological and a more narrowly humanistic conception of culture. ' 2 The present book also unquestionably shares much with this relatively new discipline ofthe academic institution, that is, 'Cultural Studies'. The immediate problem is, of course, to know what Cultural Studies is in order to learn how to speak it, and given that Cultural Studies in fact tends to present itself as taking its definition from the impossibility of definition, this often proves something of a problem. Furthermore, it is also the case that there are presently (as C. P. Snow might have put it) two dominant cultures of culture, 'Cultural Studies' and 'Cultural Policy', which have for some time - at least in Australia - been engaged in internecine academic warfare (Hunter is, of course, the most influential ur-proponent of this 2 L. Grossberg eta!., 'Introduction' to L. Grossberg eta!., eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. If it is impossible to sketch satisfactorily the lineaments of Cultural Studies here, one might refer to any of the other (symptomatically) massive anthologies currently available, for example, S. During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993); J. Frow and M. Morris, eds, Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993); S. Franklin eta!., eds, Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991 ); K. Gelder and S. Thornton, eds, The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1997); G. Turner, ed., Nation Culture Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies (London: Routledge, 1993); D. Bennett, ed., Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University English Department, 1993).

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latter 'culture'). 3 Hence one of the central objectives of this chapter is to propose what amounts to a typological redescription of these two broad tendencies, and to suggest that they are thereby connected in ways that their proponents must explicitly reject. I am, for example, interested in how the question ofliterature, and Romantic literature in particular, still 'ghosts' and regulates in a well determined fashion these apparently antagonistic disciplinary relationships. It is important to note that Grossberg and his colleagues are concerned to situate their project as 'transdisciplinary', given that, as John Frow and Meaghan Morris point out in their introduction to Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, 'unlike much empirical work in positivist social science, Cultural Studies tends to incorporate in its object of study a critical account of its own motivating questions - and thus of the institutional frameworks and disciplinary rules by which its research imperatives are formed'. 4 I have already marked above my own investment in such a project, and its direct relevance to the topic of 'aesthetics'. Furthermore, as Frow and Morris continue, such work is interested 'to foreground the question of the relation between the description of textual/cultural networks and the position of enunciation from which that description is possible'. 5 Which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Cultural Studies - at least in its recent apparition in Anglophone Literature Departments - arrays itself against more traditional, 'elitist' conceptions of the scope and status ofliterature (and more particularly, lyric poetry); a reaction from which it draws much of its force. Against the discipline of literature, it is 'actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary' ,6 and demands an attention to objects that have hitherto supposedly been excluded from the purview of traditional literary studies. This is, furthermore, not merely a matter of a shift in content, but of form as well: Cultural Studies is seething with articles Other names associated, at one time or another, with the journal Culture and Policy include Stuart Cunningham, Tony Bennett, Jennifer Craik, Denise Meredyth, among others. For various accounts of Cultural Policy's declared objectives, see J. Craik, 'The Potential and Limits of Cultural Policy Strategies', Culture and Policy VII: I (1996), pp. 177-204, 'Mapping the Links Between Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy', Southern Review XXVIII: 2 (1995), pp. 190-207, 'Introduction: from Cultural Studies to Cultural Policy', and 'Cashing in on Cultural Studies: Future Fortunes', Culture and Policy VI: 2 (1994), pp. 1-4, 23-43; C. Greenfield, 'Introduction: Symposium The Politics of Culture', Southern Review XXVIII: 2 (1995), pp. 158-62, 'Politics, Culture, and the Odd Good Lesson', Southern Review XXVIII: 2 (1995), pp. 119-20; T. Miller, Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). The apotheosis ofAustralian Cultural Policy work only recently appeared, however, in the form ofT. Bennett eta!., Accounting/or Tastes: Australian Everyday Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 Frow and Morris, 'Introduction', to Australian Cultural Studies, p. xviii. 5 Ibid., p. xxii. 6 Grossberg eta!., 'Introduction', p. 2. Or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, 'Whatever [Cultural Studies] may be, it came into the world as the result of dissatisfaction with other disciplines, not merely their contents but also their very limits as such', F. Jameson, 'On "Cultural Studies"', Social Text XXXIV (1993), p. 18.

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that refuse to subscribe to supposedly traditional exigencies of good academic form. Following Walter Pater, one might even suggest that 'all Cultural Studies aspires to the condition ofbad rock journalism'. This shift is also of course connected- at least in contemporary critical theory and pedagogical practice- with the 'assault on the canon'; and, at the very least, compels a dissensus at the institutional site ofenunciation (there are no longer any texts which everyone must have read). This tendency could usefully be named 'universal reportage' (the phrase is Mallarme's). 7 But the dispersed and self-proclaimed anti-disciplinary aspects of Cultural Studies do not of course mean that it no longer exhibits certain regularities or commonplaces. On the contrary, if this dispersion is supposed to permit and respond to the disruption of forms, contents, and disciplinary boundaries, the effects of this disruption seem to be experienced in the terms of a Kantian categorical imperative. To the research problem of 'What should I do?', the Cultural Studies institution orders 'Do whatever! ' 8 What? Whatever- and with whatever tools available! But such an imperative, far from constituting a liberation (we are no longer constrained by oppressive disciplinary boundaries), would seem rather more unpleasant, like the ferocious and insatiable superego ofLacanian psychoanalysis which utters nothing but the unfulfillable command, 'Enjoy!' We will see below how Ian Hunter argues that Cultural Studies is indeed the evacuated memory of an unspeakable institutional trauma, which - at least on his terms - should never have been experienced as a trauma in the first place. In any case, Cultural Studies often explicitly, and almost always implicitly, thus has recourse to the technique ofbricolage; as Grossberg and his colleagues would have it, 'Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning, could best be seen as a bricolage. ' 9 Bricolage is of course a technique which has probably received its canonical theoretical elaboration in Claude Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind. As the anthropologist himself puts it: In its old sense the verb 'bricoler' applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting; shooting and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our own time the 'bricoleur' is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman ... Mythical thought is therefore a 7 Universal reportage, forMallarme, is a 'vulgar', as opposed to an 'essential' use of language: the latter is of course the realm of true literature, and especially poetry, which alone- and through an absolute foreclosure of the object-world- can conjure up the dream of the essence of the Idea. This dream, however, cannot and must not be fulfilled, for with its accomplishment all poetry would disappear. But, as reportage, language annuls itself in the very act of its appearance, and might as well be nothing other than an exchange of money, 'a coin passed silently from hand to hand'. SeeS. Mallarme, Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. with intro. B. Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956). 8 For a superb reading of this disciplinary injunction 'Do Whatever!' see T. de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), esp. chapter 6. 9 Grossberg et a!., 'Introduction', p. 2.

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INTERVENTIONS kind of intellectual 'bricolage'- which explains the relation which can be perceived between the two ... The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project ... the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set oftools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. 10

Accordingly, bricolage is consistently invoked to serve a number of connected functions: as an intellectual programme, it is directed against universalizing theories and the positions ofsingular master theorists, thereby flagging both traditional desires for purity and the necessary failure to achieve it; as a real process, it is presumed to involve fleeting, tactical responses to local questions of power, opposing itself to the global administration of truth; in its quasi-ontological registers, it constitutes an affirmation of the supposedly irreducible and heterogeneous multiplicity of cultural and subcultural practices themselves. To put all this another way: bricolage is not merely a technique, but a response and 'work of fidelity' to the impossible injunction, 'Do whatever!' Furthermore, Cultural Studies is obsessed with transgression (of limits of all kinds, not least political), which it characteristically figures in the spatial and physical terms of corporeal movement. But Cultural Studies not only loves to walk: it abhors and repudiates sedentary or immobile entities and cultivated sites. There are literally hundreds of examples; among the more familiar are de Certeau's stroller in the city, Benjamin'sftaneur, travelling theory, nomadology, peripatetic theory, and so on. These movements, which (at least implicitly) tend to figure themselves as a movement from immobility to movement itself, and which further overcode this movement towards movement as a movement from mind to body, masculine to feminine, high to low, most often oscillate undecidably between considering such 'movement' as a theoretico-political category (registering a dire situation of, say, migrant displacement) and enthusiastically affirming it as a utopian figure. Into the bargain, many such accounts unfold on the basis of a prior covert identification of organization with authority, and authority with oppression. Consonant with such a classically anarchistic a priori, this affirmation of vagabondage is usually tantamount to an abdication of mediation (hence, as I showed in Chapter Five, 'nomadology' functions for Deleuze and Guattari both as a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility, and a term that can be applied, with equal legitimacy and without further ado, to empirical trajectories and geographical redistributions). 11

° C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),

1

pp. 16--17.

11 I use the term 'vagabondage' here for a number of reasons; certainly, I aim at highlighting the politico-generational pretensions of this cultural studies tendency. As Kristin

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If the dominant Cultural Studies tendencies that I have identified so far tend towards, respectively, a contingent narrativization of indifferent events and objects, a work of fidelity to an impossible injunction, and an evaluative pedestrianism, Cultural Studies also evinces a noteworthy tendency towards what might be called 'anecdotage', which involves a motivated oscillation between global concerns and the intimately personal. 12 As David Simpson rather sourly characterizes this tendency (in a related academic context): it is often by way of a confession or advertised acceptance of one's limits that the storytelling genre is elected, only then to permit passage to unskeptical narrativization. Precisely because I can no longer confidently offer the grand theory, the master narrative, the outline of the social-historical totality, I resort to telling about myself as an individual, or as a representative of a small subculture, or as the maker of the history I transcribe. 13

With a view to a more generous characterization, one might add that anecdotage permits an expanded (if not necessarily conscious or well-articulated) account of the places in which institutional injunctions are experienced. For if anecdotage may seem to be rhetorically arrayed against the constrictive claims of institutional power, its evidence also suggests that such power actually regulates the very events of quotidian life that are invoked to contest it. To be a Cultural Studies academic is to be always anxiously at work: an irreducible aspect of the profession is its de facto demonstration that TV watching and dinner party conversation are already legitimate research and teaching resources. Anecdotage seems, in still other words, to serve a 'weak immobility function', as a self-confessedly inadequate attempt to specify and localize the subjective site of enunciation. But anecdotage is not simply the reproduction of riveting historical anecdotes (a IaNew Historicism), which would make it difficult to distinguish from Ross puts it, 'Between the years 1830 and 1896, convictions for vagrancy (vagabondage) increased sevenfold in France; in 1889, 600,000 children- one-eleventh of the educable population - had fled school. In most cases vagabondage corresponded to the ritualization of the entry into the work force at the end of school - that abrupt passage into a new age, itinerary, group of friends: with the onset of work came the moment of rupture. Particularly widespread was the phenomenon of youthful vagabondage: youths ... who fled rural life to come to the cities ... Vagabondage is a pure creation of penal law, a word of repression; it has no existence apart from a legally constituted infraction. A vagabond is a vagabond because he or she is arrested ... their "way of life" places them in a state that supposes the eventual violation of laws: vagabonds are always virtual, anticipatory', K. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, foreword by T. Eagleton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 56-7. 12 Meaghan Morris's work would be exemplary here. 13 D. Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule ofLiterature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 28-9. Simpson later adds, 'Anecdotes function in conversation as one of the yardsticks for distinguishing competence from incompetence ... when it is well deployed, the anecdote serves to bring to temporary closure or summation the otherwise infinite possible series of interpretations that come with participation in the culture of conversation', p. 53.

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the first tendency noted above. On the contrary, anecdotage must be distinguished as the attempt to present the construction of the subjectivity that presents within the presentation itself in order to - and despite appearances to the contrary - arrest the absolute dissemination and mobility ofform and content to which this subject seemingly assents and to which it is responding. These four 'ages'- reportage, bricolage, vagabondage, and anecdotage- are therefore able to provide a definition of Cultural Studies; these tendencies are not simply chronologically, but rather logically organized, according to the four functions of dissemination, injunction, errancy, and immobility. 14 They can, furthermore, be identified with the four aesthetic functions that I discerned as deriving from Kant's aesthetics, and which I have also identified as working through the texts of the other authorities I have examined, notably Lacan. In any case, they are recognisably Romantic. As Bill Readings has put it, the radical claims of Cultural Studies display rather more continuity than might be expected with the redemptive claim that underpinned the literary model of culture, however much they oppose its institutional forms ... the institutional success of Cultural Studies in the 1990s is owing to the fact that it preserves the structure of the literary argument, while recognizing that literature can no longer work- throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater, as it were. 15

Or, in John Guillory's words: 'It is not yet clear whether a "Cultural Studies" curriculum has been conceived which does not replicate the theoretical and hermeneutic paradigms of literary interpretation.' 16 It is thus no accident that, despite the barrel-rolling rhetoric and the enthusiasm with which Cultural Studies practitioners continue to declaim and prosecute their differences from already-established fields and major theorists, there is evidently a lingering anxiety about the true scope and status of these differences. As Morris elsewhere states, somewhat peculiarly (insofar as the very statement constitutes an exemplary performative contradiction), 'parasitic on philosophy as Cultural Studies has been, it is perhaps today the discipline most at odds with the historic, self-legitimating dream of philosophical autonomy ... Careless about its own epistemological grounding, its theoretical integrity, and its difference from "other" discourses, Cultural Studies has been more concerned (and, I think, rightly so) with analyzing and achieving political effects.' 17 One could add that the very obvious 14 I have indexed these 'functions' here to the work ofAlain Badiou. See A. Badiou, Conditions, intro. F. Wahl (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), especially the essays on love and Samuel Beckett. 15 B. Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 16-17. 16 J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 265. 17 M. Morris, 'Banality in Cultural Studies', in P. Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 40. See also Morris's recent book, Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington:

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'carelessness' ofCultural Studies, ofwhich Morris speaks here, is in fact nothing ofthe kind. On the contrary, it is much rather an anxious, deliberate, and central polemical trait, directed against the very 'others' from which it desires to differentiate itself, that is, philosophy, sociology, literary theory, and so on. As such, Cultural Studies' distaste for reflecting on its own discursive precursors is only ambiguously 'political' and more straightforwardly 'institutional'; furthermore, its politics (such as they are) tend towards an aesthetic grounding which it nonetheless refuses to admit. Indeed, it has been argued that much ofthe continuing force of Cultural Studies derives from the fact that it seems to be founded on a strange impasse (as implied in the quote from Frow and Morris on p. 172), between a more 'libertarian' project of emancipatory pedagogy, and a quasi-scientistic sociological critique. 18 Furthermore, as I have been arguing, I do not believe that either pole of this dichotomy can prove entirely satisfactory for a discussion ofaesthetics. I have been particularly concerned to highlight those problems that are often adduced as endemic to Cultural Studies - for example, that it does not demonstrate enough detailed knowledge of the practices or disciplines it analyses, that it itself is part of the very history it would desire to contest in ways that it is unable to recognize or acknowledge, that it does not devote sufficient attention to the (sexual, racial, national, class) differences it nevertheless affirms, and so on. 19 Keeping this in mind, my procedure in the second half of this book has been to proceed through a variety of theorists one by one, to attend to their specificity in order to ask what- if anything- they share.20 Indiana University Press, 1998), especially 'Introduction: History in Cultural Studies', pp. 1-28. As for the political claims of cultural studies, one might always quote dissenting voices. Slavoj Zizek: 'today's critical theory, in the guise of'cultural studies', is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible', The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 218. See also Zizek's Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Mis(use) ofa Notion (London: Verso, 2001 ), esp. Chapter 5, 'Are Cultural Studies Really Totalitarian?', pp. 190-229. 18 This could be put in a number of ways, for example, 'the fault line between textual analysis and sociological critique which has for so long disturbed the discipline's self-constitution', M. Shiach, ' "Cultural studies" and the work of Pierre Bourdieu', French Cultural Studies IV: 3 (1993), pp. 213-23. 19 For various positions on this question, see the references already cited in this chapter, as well as such articles as I. Hunter, 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', in Grossberg et al.; D. Meredyth, 'Changing Minds: Cultural Criticism and the Problem ofPrinciple', Meanjin LI: 3 (1992), pp. 491-504; F. Jameson, 'On 'Cultural Studies"; J. Craik, 'Cashing in on Cultural Studies: Future Fortunes', and 'The Potential and Limits of Cultural Policy Strategies', as well as the essay by T. Miller, 'Cultural Citizenship and Technologies of the Subject, or Where did you go, Paul DiMaggio?', Culture andPolicyVl: 4 (1994), pp. 141-56. 20 This was always, as De1euze has argued, Foucault's procedure: 'he has never had any problem concerning the links between science and literature, or the imaginary and the scientific, or the known and the lived, because the conception ofknowledge impregnated and mobilized every threshold by making each one into the variable of the stratum which stood as a historical formation', G. De leuze, Foucault, trans. S. Hand, intro. P. Bove (Minneapolis: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 52.

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It is thus to the work oflan Hunter that I now turn.

Ian Hunter, school janitor of Cultural Studies If I am correct about the dominant directions taken by contemporary Cultural Studies, certain consequences immediately follow. First of all, Cultural Studies would then by no means be as dispersed or as undefinable as it so often seems to want to be; second, and more problematically, none of these motifs- whether they appear singly or knotted together- are in themselves enough to distinguish Cultural Studies from any number of other disciplinary formations, Romantic philosophy and essayism, for instance. 21 So if Cultural Studies' supposed innovations are supposed to differentiate it from other disciplinary formations, they simultaneously recast it in such a way that it becomes indistinguishable from, or rather becomes nothing more than a late variant of, a more generalized Romanticism. Which is precisely what someone like Ian Hunter has suggested: to rephrase his critique here in a language to which he himself would not assent, 'Cultural Studies is a Romanticism grown so old that it no longer even remembers that it is a Romanticism, to the extent that when it considers itself in the bevelled mirror of its own glittering prose, it sees the rosy face of youth culture smiling back.' 22 And 21 Indeed, my four 'ages' not only refer back to my reading of Kant in Chapter Two, but also allude to a famous anti-Romantic diatribe by the Romantic poet/critic/novelist Thomas Love Peacock, entitled, precisely, The Four Ages ofPoetry, which inspired Shelley's rejoinder, A Defence ofPoetry. See T. L. Peacock and P. B. Shelley, The Four Ages ofPoetry/A Defence ofPoetry, ed. with intro. and notes. J. E. Jordan (Indianapolis: Hobbs-Merrill, 1965). 22 The texts of Hunter which I am relying upon for my account here include I. Hunter, 'Accounting for the Humanities', Mean} in XLVIII: 3 ( 1989), pp. 43 8-47; 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', in Grossberg eta!., pp. 347-72; 'The Critical Disposition: Some Historical Configurations of the Humanities', The UTS Review III: 1 (1997), pp. 26--55; 'The Emergence of Popular Education as an Apparatus of Moral Supervision: The Case of English', in B. Edwards, ed., Literature and National Cultures (Melbourne: Deakin University, 1988), pp. 5-20; Culture and Government: The Emergence ofLiterary Education (London: Macmillan, 1988); 'Four Anxieties About English', Southern Review XXIX: 1 (1996), pp. 4-18; 'The Humanities without Humanism', Meanjin, LI: 3 (1992), pp. 4 79-90; 'The Rarity of the School', Southern Review XXVIII: 2 (1995), pp. 163-71; Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1994); and I. Hunter eta!., On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law (London: Macmillan, 1993). Unfortunately, Rival Enlightenments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 ), Hunter's greatest work to date (in all senses of this word), only appeared when the present book was in press, and it is impossible to do justice to it here. However, it is possible to say that Hunter's effort to rehabilitate those 'rival enlightenments' (represented by such figures as Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomas ius) marginalized by philosophical liberalism is at once immensely valuable and persuasive- and yet seems to me to retain traces of the very difficulties I am criticizing here. Hunter's attempts to disentangle the LiebnizWolff-Kant strand of philosophical enlightenment from his preferred civil jurisprudential lineage fail to note I) their complicity: the 'two' 'lineages' are not simply unreconciled

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Hunter would further argue that this imaginary misrecognition has a more unsightly face, and is underwritten by another disavowed desire, 'infravisible' and unpleasant. For Cultural Studies's desire to be forever young is inextricably coupled with its desire to liquidate (institutional) archaisms, and at the very moment that it claims to be reactivating repressed memories andre-illuminating forgotten zones. The 'subtopian' nature of much Cultural Studies would then be indissociable from a subterranean institutional and intellectual generational war, which becomes one of the unrepresentable conditions for Cultural Studies itself. At least two things would then be forgotten: that Cultural Studies is a Romanticism that cannot recognize itself as such, and precisely because it is fighting for institutional space with a Romanticism that dares to speak its name. And for both formations, ultimately nothing but discrete torsions within the same discursive and institutional topography, what would remain utterly unspeakable would be the truth of what they really are: faceless State bureaucratic functionaries. For Hunter- who thus almost completely inverts the standard 'Ivory Tower' rhetoric - it's not that academics don't get out enough, it's that they should stay in more. A lot more. For when they do set off on their interminable theoretical perambulations back towards a generalized culture from which they have been so painfully tom, such intellectuals inevitably conclude by projecting onto the political, economic, and social spheres the formal aesthetic categories derived from their own ethical practices. According to Hunter, the logics of this selfdissimulating Romantic ethos can be comprehended under four major headings: 1) individuals learn to distance themselves from their own pleasures in order to rewrite this experience in the terms of the aesthetic categories of form and content, morality and the senses, desire and necessity; 2) this rewriting becomes a means by which individuals come to relate to themselves as yet-incomplete aesthetic wholes, on which oh so much more work always remains to be done, hence; 3) the renarrativization of the individual's aesthetic process of self-fashioning as a universalizing Bildung; and 4) the setting up of an aestheticized reconciliation of divergent zones as at once the most desirable telos of both self and culture, and the simultaneous recognition that this goal is a necessarily unachievable limit, for whatever reasons: 'the crooked timber of humanity', 'the reif)ring processes of capital', 'man is a useless passion', and so on. opponents, either in their institutional history, or in their theoretical presuppositions and propositions (for example, the structure ofKantian metaphysics is itself legislative); 2) the valuations of his own reconstruction: Hunter's persistent calls to evade, negate, destroy Kant cannot be separated from his tum to the past in the name of the future, and hence his emblematically Romantic work of polemical reconstruction; and 3) the question of truth: Hunter's work presumes that 'truth' is only ever at issue as a tactical politico-institutional instrument, with no more claim on the real than that (he is, symptomatically, silent on the fraught role that logic and mathematics play for the thinkers he examines, at the moment that, in a very ambivalent political register, he can unapologetically praise Carl Schmitt). This absolute restriction of truth to its institutional, biopolitical function is a central axiom of Hunter's thought. We will see the trouble this gets him into below.

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Not merely the founding project of German Romanticism, then, this ethos makes the transition from 'cult to culture' at the end of the nineteenth century through the emergent governmental techniques of popular education. And it is through this particular institutionalization of the Romantic project in the expanding school system that English as a discipline came to acquire its particular centrality in the Anglo-Saxon world. Crucially enough, 'the new education system was not itself an invention of the aesthetic personage ... Instead, its designers were administrative intellectuals acting as agents of the political and intellectual technologies of government. ' 23 And it is precisely this fact that is missed by the aestheticallydone-over intellectuals this system employed as teachers, and missed precisely to the extent that these individuals were themselves the well-wrought urns of which some of them would come to speak. Just as a poem should not mean but be, 'when the aesthetic personage eventually found a place in the school system it was not what he knew that permitted him to occupy a position in the new space of moral supervision, but what he was; that is, an ethically exemplary personality' .24 Given this rather unfortunate upbringing, it is no wonder that, when these exemplary ethical selves do try to broach the dividing walls of the institution, 'government is', as Hunter puts it, 'routinely found wanting for its failure to reconcile utility and desire, law and inclination, social norms and individual will, and so on' .25 There has been a great deal of criticism ofHunter's work, by a great many people, including Tom O'Regan, Meaghan Morris, John Frow, Fredric Jameson, Simon During, and David Bennett. 26 These criticisms include Hunter's manifest inability to understand and therefore account for post-structuralism, and, more disturbingly, feminism as well; his belief that literature and literariness can simply function without remainder as a tool of governmentality; his swerve away from Foucault at the very moment that he is proclaiming his Foucauldianism- for example, his 'top-down' rather than 'bottoms-up' approach, which manifests itself, say, in his implicit presumption that school students are the purely passive, inert material on which governmental procedures simply go to work; his return to statism at the very moment of technoscientific globalization; his desire to redomicile warring discourses in their proper, properly impermeable determining institutions; his desire to write both 'a truth-telling and a corrective account' which founders on Hunter, 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', p. 363. Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 For responses to Hunter's work, see D. Bennett, 'PC Panic, the Press, and the Academy', in D. Bennett, ed., Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory, pp. 197-212; S. During, The Cultural Studies Reader, and Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992); J. Frow, 'Rationalization and the Public Sphere', Memyin LI: 3 (1992), pp. 505-16; H. Grace, 'The Mundane Art oflmprovisational Governmentality', The UTS Review 1:1 (1995), pp. 163-8; F. Jameson, 'On "Cultural Studies"'; M. Morris, 'A Gadfly Bites Back', Mean} in LI: 3 (1992), pp. 545-51; T. O'Regan, 'Some Reflections on the "Policy Moment"', Mean} in LI: 3 (1992), pp. 517-32, and '(Mis)taking Policy: Notes on the Cultural Policy Debate', in Frow and Morris, Australian Cultural Studies, pp. 192-206. 23

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the contradiction of its own subtraction from the situations he describes; his overconfidence in the directorial force of architectural design and pastoral power; the fact that his avowed enemies seem rather phantasms from Hunter's own 'loony left' past than actually existing positions. However, if all of these critiques are indeed pertinent and some perhaps even crippling, they tend to remain somewhat piecemeal, and focus on various specific aspects ofHunter's practice without ever demonstrating the systematic solidarity of these errors with one another. Such piecemeal critiques finally remain on Hunter's own playground, and can easily be factored back into, without significantly disrupting, his explanatory system. For example, he could admit the determining role that undergraduate student preferences have begun to play in the Australian university system insofar as he could consistently hold - although he would again not put it like this - that 'Cultural Studies is economic rationalism at the level of theory', and that the real father of a Cultural Studies that, despite all its protestations to the contrary, is still looking for (non-threatening) fathers, is not Walter Benjamin or Raymond Williams, but John Dawkins. 27 What I want to do then is to attempt to demonstrate Hunter's 'solidarity of errors', which will finally come down to nothing more than orchestrating and reassigning a particular place in the system to all of the aforementioned critiques. Let us begin with Hunter's expulsion of politics from the sphere of ethics or, as he himself would want to put it, 'fewer principles, more ethics!' He, of course, derives this position from an analysis which considers traditional cultural criticism as 'absolutely groundless', and therefore useless for intervening in cultural policy. 28 The only effective intervention can apparently come from a modest attention to educational apparatuses, and an acceptance of the rigorously demarcated limits of such a practice. The problem here is basically Hunter's conviction that right interpretation determines right practice, and that his right interpretation in particular is going to give him the keys to the Kingdom, one absolutely forbidden the aesthetic critic. 29 And what Kingdom is this? The Kingdom of the Bureaucrat! And what is this Bureaucrat? It is something 'detached from personal ideals and enthusiasms', marked by an 'adherence to procedure', and a 'suppression of [personal] identity'. However, much like Georges Bataille's well-known fondness for acephalic gnostic deities, Hunter invokes a figure that was only ever the pathologically inflected fantasy of the Romanticism he professes to despise. (From 'expenditure without reserve', to 'careful with that, it's tax-payers's money'.) In other words, Hunter fails to distinguish the Bureaucrat (that obscure object of desire) from bureaucrats. Against Hunter then, it would be better to say, a Ia Lacan, that 'the Bureaucrat 27 John Dawkins was Labour minister for education in the Hawke and Keating governments. He presided over the vast reorganization and rationalization of the Australian tertiary sector from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. 28 See Hunter, Culture and Government. 29 I am indebted to Frances Ferguson for this formulation.

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does not exist', and it is for this very reason that the directives it seems to give are all the more disturbing and compelling. And if Hunter is usually extremely quick to search and destroy the conceptual nonsenses generated by those recurrent and unconscious - if historically well-determined - confusions of language-games, he can only discern such confusions at the price of himself continually conflating zones and practices that he is elsewhere so concerned to keep sharply distinguished. Here he is again, dramatically overstating his case: The problem with aesthetic critique- and with Cultural Studies to the degree that it is still caught in its slipstream- is that it presumes to comprehend and judge those other cultural regions from a single metropolitan point, typically the university arts faculty. To travel to these other regions though - to law offices, media institutions, government bureaus, corporations, advertising agencies - is to make a sobering discovery: They are already replete with their own intellectuals. And they just look up and say, 'Well, what exactly is it that you can do for us?' 30

In other words, Hunter will allow academics to leave school every now and then, but only as an education in their own abjection. Not only does this impassioned response - which Fredric Jameson accurately and sarcastically describes as 'Bureaucratic First Contact'- conflate the very different 'departments of existence' that Hunter invokes as a rebuke to Cultural Studies (for example, even the most massive distinctions, such as between 'public' and 'private' institutions), but it also presupposes the internal consistency ofthese departments themselves. As John Frow puts it, Hunter thereby 'posits an impossible purity of social structures'. 31 This is, however, a delicate point. Hunter's project is explicitly directed against every traditional form of critical theory -whether liberal, conservative, or Marxist - that mobilizes grand principles to criticize the actual conditions of schooling. In this broad group, Hunter would surely include most of the major instances of Cultural Studies I have already flagged above, including the work of Raymond Williams or the Birmingham School. 32 For Hunter, the modern school must be considered a contingent technology of governance, invented by administrative experts in the face of a scarcity of educational means and in response to specific Hunter, 'Aesthetics and Cultural Studies', p. 372. Frow, 'Rationalization and the Public Sphere', p. 514. 32 As Simon During puts it, 'Hunter's is a revisionist thesis: it is positioned against the cultural studies movement inaugurated by Raymond Williams', Foucault and Literature, p. 187. But it is, equally, positioned against the cultural studies work of, say, Richard Hoggart on 'literacy' or Stuart Hall on 'identity.' For a particularly pertinent recent example of the sort of studies in this tradition, see the Festschrift for Stuart Hall, published as P. Gilroy eta!., eds, Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London and New York: Verso, 2000), in which we find such statements as Rosaura Sanchez' 'For me, of course, cultural studies and Marxism go together', p. 61. For Hunter, such statements completely ignore the institutional constitution and constraints of the subjective site of enunciation - whereby all talk of 'gender', 'race', 'sexuality', 'ethnicity' condemns itself to immodest institutional blindness and vitiates its own purported morally committed activity. 30

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local problems: it is not the essentially repressive apparatus of a dominating state, nor simply one symptom or site of ongoing class struggle. On the contrary, the school's emergence is both a historical improbability and hybrid actuality- an ad hoc, singular combination of techniques of social administration and Christian pastoral care. There is nothing 'pure' about such an institution; neither does it have much in common with the other institutions (legal, administrative, media, and so on) that together purportedly comprise the unity of the 'modem state'. Yet Frow's point still stands, for reasons we shall return to below. After all, Hunter's position shares unexpected similarities with that of Louis Althusser, whose distinction between 'Repressive State Apparatuses' (RSAs) and 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISAs) is surely one ofthe targets ofHunter's own distinction between 'the state' and 'governance' .33 As the name suggests, RSAs are the explicitly repressive institutions of state power- the army, police, courts, prisons -that function primarily (but not exclusively) by the use of violence. On the other hand, the ISAs - comprising churches, family, educational, and communicational institutions - function primarily ideologically, that is, they form human beings into subjects by specific processes of 'interpellation' or hailing. Althusser 's central example of ideological interpellation is that of being hailed by a policeman, 'Hey, you!' The hailed individual, recognizing him- or herself in the call, turns in response -only to find 'by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he [or she] becomes a subject'. 34 The imposition of certain material practices by specific IS As thereafter generates the appropriate unconscious forms of response, and ideology works through just such material inculcation of internalized behaviours of unknowing- a position that is analogous to Hunter's in regard to the 'shepherdflock game' that the modem school adapts from Christian pastoral care. Althusser even invokes Pascal to explain the aetiology ofbelief: people think they believe in God and so kneel to pray, but in fact people kneel to pray and then retrospectively believe it's because they already believed. 35 Certainly, Hunter would openly disagree with Althusser 's Marxian 'principles', but cannot entirely evade a certain ambiguous recourse to principles himself. There is, for instance, a peculiar complicity betweenAlthusser's proposition that ISAs are concerned with 'the reproduction of the relations of production' and Hunter's belief that the objective of a specific governmental technology 'is typically the optimal development of its resources, especially its human resources'. 36 What Hunter calls 33 See L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: New Left Books, 1971). 34 Ibid., p. 174. It is not usually noted how, in this example, Althusser mixes elements of the RSAs (the cop) with elements of the IS As (the formation of subjects)- which suggests that the broad distinction between institutions founded on 'violence' and 'ideology' is itself more complicated than it is often taken to be. 35 SeeS. Zizek's superb rereading of Althusser on just this point, in The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989), esp. Chapter 1. 36 Hunter, Rethinking the School, p. xx.

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'the optimal development of resources' is a de facto principle, albeit a minimal one, and it is the point at which his positivistic account almost indiscemibly tips into what might be called a disavowed vitalism- after all, what's 'Life' (or, indeed, 'class struggle') in such philosophies but a name for a non-teleological, irreducibly heterogeneous, contingently articulated transformatory force essentially beyond good and evil, the organic and the inorganic? The committed deployment of a technocratic language of 'resource-optimization' is not enough to substantially alter the situation. Still, Hunter might array, in contradistinction to the critical theory he denounces, a Foucauldian version of Margaret Thatcher's notorious dictum that there is no society, that is, that all these institutions do not add up to a whole, nor function continuously with one another. But Althusser doesn't believe this either. After all, the concept of 'absent causality' (the social whole is lacking) and the theory of ideology (qua imaginary misrecognition founded on diverse material practices) are precisely gauged to respond to these issues. Whereas Althusser, however, insists on producing a meta-theory of ideology (ideology has no history because its structure is historically invariant), Hunter insists on a certain 'modesty' of approach, that is, he positively refuses to produce a meta-theory of how humans come to take to the new educational apparatuses at all. Presumably this is because, again following Foucault, there are for Hunter no trans-historical traits of humankind; and to this extent Hunter's is a rationally pursued anti-rationalist anti-humanism. On the one hand, this refusal is a clear refusal of Romantic speculation; on the other hand, Hunter thereby disables himself from acknowledging his affiliations with such speculations - and, indeed, is argumentatively constrained from doing so. This 'modesty' is further linked in Hunter to what others, notably Tom O'Regan, have referred to as his astonishing literalism, or even, we might say, his 'bureaucratylism'. This, again, derives from his expulsion of universal politics from bureaucratic ethics, which prohibits him from even acknowledging, say, the possible effectiveness of ambit claims. This failing is perhaps most legible in the account in On Pornography of the Dworkin/Mackinnon [Minneapolis and Indianapolis] Ordinance, where Hunter (and his collaborators, Saunders and Williamson) are reduced to accusing the project motivating the Ordinance as founded on a 'blurring of philosophical-aesthetic [bad!] and legal-governmental [good!] objectives', since it apparently at once wants to make feminist objectives a matter of law, and yet simultaneously condemn the same law 'in the name of universal history and its repressed feminine subject' .37 Leaving aside Hunter et al. 's quasi-covert attempts to make Dworkin and MacKinnon stand for feminism tout court (despite all their protestations to the contrary), they here fall into precisely the confusion of which they accuse others: politics and law, as they themselves constantly insist, are not language-games pertaining to the true and the just, but have rather more limited briefs. For example, to make things happen, and Hunter, here and elsewhere, finds 37

See Hunter eta!., On Pornography, p. 231.

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himself in the position of condemning people for doing what he himself would like to do (make things happen), while remaining perplexed at, and disgusted with, their constant tendencies to speak in the name of delusory universals. 38 In other words, Hunter cannot admit the possibility that one says what one doesn't mean in order to do what goes without saying. Furthermore, Hunter's quest (to travel to bureaucratic worlds unknown) is finally not geographical (as his metaphors would suggest), but rather a journey into the selfto find the condition of one's own truth. Which is, of course- to parody Heidegger here -that 'the question of the Bureaucrat has today been forgotten', and that, as humanities academics 'we are it, every one of us'. Or even, 'basically, all theory, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of the Bureaucrat, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task' .39 Indeed, Hunter's Romanticism is such that he continually invokes as ideals pre-lapsarian, and even self-confessedly pre-modern models of intellectual work - notably Erasmus, Lipsius, and Johannes von Justi - who apparently worked in an era before the lamentable aestheticizing 'dissociation of bureaucratic sensibility' set in: 'Unlike modern 'alienated' intellectuals, leading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists saw no principled contradiction between the recovery of classical learning and the bureaucratic requirements and objectives of the emerging Western European nation state. ' 40 But neither, it might be added, did Hegel, who, at least in a certain sense, would not have been at all unhappy with the proposition that 'Man, the individualized universal, came into 38 It should be noted here that those Australian Cultural Policy theorists who insisted on the necessity of 'talking to the IS As' (Hunter, Bennett, Cunningham, and so on) enjoyed their greatest success during the time that a centre-right Australian Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Paul Keating, was in power. This government was notable for the high priority it assigned to cultural issues, and its concomitant interest in supporting such issues. Following the defeat of this government by the far-right economists of the Liberal Party in 1996, the much-vaunted bureaucratic opportunities enjoyed by Cultural Policy work immediately dried up. This fact can only serve to highlight the precariousness of CP's ideological opportunism, and hence its own governmental irrelevance. See, however, Bennett eta!. for a CP-inflected account of this shift in Accounting for Tastes, pp. 226-48. As Alasdair Macintyre has put it, 'Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and future output to be predictable and measurable, and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are the enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics about all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision', Three Rival Versions: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), p. 234. What distinguishes Hunter's work in this regard from that of his erstwhile colleagues is its historical accuracy, force, and originality; finally, its refusal to succumb to the supposed 'necessity' of its own more programmatic dictates. 39 SeeM. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 40 Hunter, 'The Humanities without Humanism', p. 483.

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being under [civil service] recruiting inspection.' 41 And even if, as Morris has pointed out, the situation is such that Hunter needs to overstate his case in order that the true Other, the bureaucrat, is finally exposed and confronted, confronting bureaucrats with a snivelling 'we're really one of you', seems somewhat counterproductive, if not downright bizarre. As Bruce Robbins has noted, professions are in fact one source of ethical imperatives in the most literal sense: they compose, distribute, teach, and even to some extent enforce codes of 'professional ethics'. Of course, such codes often tend to specify obligations of individual members to the profession, not of the profession itself to those outside it. And yet the social impact of, say, legal and medical ethics and the controversies they enable are far from insignificant . . . There is no doubt that focussing on specific groups rather than universal values or objectives means resigning oneself at least provisionally to what must appear, after the Hegelian universality of other visions, a partial, fragmented politics. There is also no doubt that universalist discourse has not yet outlived its usefulness. 42

So if Hunter then remains a direct theoretical inheritor of the German Romanticism that he condemns as self-deluding, he also often sounds eminently Kantian, and (unsurprisingly) at the very moments that he presumes himself a virulent antiKantian. For not only does he present a restricted and even naive account of the Kantian system, not to mention its supposed influence upon subsequent academic (and non-academic) traditions, but the argumentative stunts he pulls - if they do indeed rebuke a certain over-principled universalism- are themselves straight out of Kantian metaphysics. Not that there aren't crucial differences: whereas Kant would insist on a rigorous delimitation of the faculties and sub-faculties of the individual subject in order to show how, on the one hand, errors arise when one faculty illicitly overflows its proper bounds and intrudes on domains where it is not qualified to judge, and, on the other, how such subreptions are inevitable given the nature of Reason itself, Hunter will attempt to apply a strictly homologous formal model to the field of the social itself. But, even ifHunter's a prioris are thus by no means transcendental, but empirical and historical, he is still faced with the problem of comprehending, not to mention explaining, how 'wrong interpretation and practice' (for example, Dworkin and 41 F. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer with C. Cullens, foreword by D. E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 61. Or, as Althusser remarks of the Hegelian philosopher, Eurocrat and possible Communist spy, Alexandre Kojeve: 'For him, everything centred on the life and death struggle and the End of History to which he ascribed a stupefyingly bureaucratic content. Though history as class struggle might end, history as such would continue, but only in terms of the routine administration ofthings (long live Saint Simon!). No doubt it enabled him to bring together his desires as a philosopher and his professional role as a high bureaucrat', The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, ed. 0. Corpet andY. M. Boutang, trans. R. Veasey (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 177. 42 B. Robbins, 'Deformed Professions, Empty Politics', Diacritics XVI: 3 (1986), p. 69.

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MacKinnon) can nevertheless have certain positive effects. And whereas Kant will try to solve this problem by recourse to the aesthetic category of the sublime, Hunter (and this is perhaps why he ends up being too Kantian by not being Kantian enough) has no other recourse than to moralistically denounce such subreptions as self-deluding-yet-programmed errors, as if such a denunciation was enough to suture the rifts that he himselfhas opened up by treating institutional conditions of possibility as if they were determining efficient causes; for example, he everywhere presumes that the limits of statements that can be made within the literary institution are determined by the historical limits of that institution, and the only way that someone formed in such an institution can have any social effect whatsoever is by speaking the language of an outside that has always already covertly been inside: that is, bureaucratese. His system is thus immediately subject to a de Manian critique, in at least two ways: I) the moralism of Hunter's own work derives not simply from the fact that he's a grumpy old man, but is a position forced upon him by the schisms internal to his own argument; 2) ethics is not simply a realm in which subjects elaborate their own heteronomous becomings according to historically well-determined if contingent procedures, but derives from the 'structural interference' of incommensurable but indissociable registers of existence with no consistency of their own (languages, practices, institutions). 43 As such, 'principles', 'politics', and 'aesthetics' cannot be considered absolutely foreign to governmental and administrative procedures (and vice versa), but neither, by the same token, can they be directly translated into bureaucratese. Finally, Hunter's problem would also be the problem he discerns in Cultural Studies at large: to the extent that Cultural Studies practitioners presume themselves to be adumbrating devastating historico-political critiques of aestheticizing thought, they find themselves all the more thoroughly its prisoners. And since both begin by attempting to repudiate the aesthetic, and both apparently fail, this might even suggest that a better way to deal with the problem posed by aesthetics would be not to begin by rejecting it. Indeed, it might be better to begin with the following paradoxical declaration: there is no truth of aesthetics. What this means, as a heuristic principle, or introductory regulative hypothesis, is that 1) all explanation, as Wittgenstein points out, must stop somewhere - for example, at aesthetics 'itself', without presuming that it must necessarily be referred to a supposedly more fundamental zone, and that; 2) no explanation, as Derrida points out, can stop anywhere - aesthetics cannot help but be referred to politics, but politics is itself incapable of providing such a ground. In other words, Cultural Studies (and Hunter to the extent that he tries to free himself from its aestheticizing backwash) gets itself going by shoving its head into the cleft stick of utterly historicized language-games, either immediately presuming their inconsistency and dispersion, or beginning by positing their singular and inviolable purity. Worse still, Cultural 43

1979).

See P. de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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Studies and Cultural Policy then imagine - and precisely insofar as they affirm such an empiricism and historicism - that this sorry predicament is universal. It is not: it is, as I argued at length in Chapter Three, founded on nothing other than that still uncircumventable academic discourse of cultural nihilism which imagines that the argument that there are no absolute grounds utterly compromises and renders nugatory every traditional intellectual-moral practice. Hunter's science of logic I now wish to summarize and reformulate the points I have already made with regard to the subjacent logic of Hunter's argumentation, in order to bring out even more clearly the debt that he owes Romanticism. First of all, it should be reiterated that Hunter's genealogy ofRomanticism is one offalse-ruptures and pseudo-events- for Hunter, the Romantics' fantasy that their work is essentially political is precisely how they continue to do, all the more unconsciously and effectively, the work of the modern Nation State. As Hegel once remarked of the Kantian antinomies, Hunter demonstrates 'the objectivity of the [Romantic] illusion' and 'necessity of the [Romantic] contradiction' .44 Hunter's demonstration takes the form of a materialist topology of educational institutions. It is important to note the specificities of Hunter's materialism, which he distinguishes carefully from the 'materialism' of Marxism, and its associated sociological offshoots. 'Material', for Hunter has at least four different, if intimately associated, aspects: 1) 'real' matter (like Dr Johnson's rock); 2) the organization of this matter (for example, playground and classroom design); 3) the behavioural interrelations between this organization and the exemplary figures that inhabit it (for example, teachers, bureaucrats, students); and 4) the organization of what is said about these interrelations (for example, narratives of Romantic self-overcoming, and so on). For Hunter, then, matter is a priori organized by and into sites and populated by figures; their situated organization has very well-defined limits, all capable of being exhaustively circumscribed and described - these limits are installed, reinforced, and occluded by the very behaviours of the subjects that they condition and determine. These sites have primarily to do with the pedagogical formation, canalization and administration ofhuman multiplicities. Most crucially, these limits are uncrossable: if one steps over a line, this for Hunter can mean one of two things. First, that the line was illusory and that the step-beyond it was simply a delusory step-within. Or, second, to the extent that one has succeeded in getting out, one is no longer participating in the same form of life, and to continue to maintain that one is, is to be subject to a confusion of language- and actiongames. For Hunter, then, what is called by Romantics 'politics' functions as the 44 See G. W. F. Hegel, Science ofLogic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), p. 56.

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im-possible and in-accessible -the fantasy of an outside that makes its adherents un-ethical, insofar as they think and say that they are doing one thing, but are in fact doing something else. Furthermore, this disjunction- rather than simply being an epistemological or logical failure - is in fact the place where modem power un-veils and expresses itself most forcefully. Hunter recognizes that the Romantic university turns the teacher into an unconfessed bureaucrat; or, in terms of my analysis in the first chapter of this book, Hunter's own distinction is not to recognize that there is any real distinction between these figures- if their specific techniques differ, their governmental principle is the same. For Hunter, what is misnamed by Romantic theorists as 'politics' is pedagogy is bureaucracy. What he cannot admit in his more polemical or programmatic registers - although his work everywhere presumes and demonstrates its functioning- is that the confusion he denounces in Romantics between 'politics' and 'ethics' (that is, the inability to put aside personal convictions for the good of the profession) is itself irreducible. In other words, one of the primary ways in which professional institutions continue to function is precisely by inflicting on their subjects a confusion between 'private conviction' and 'professional practice' which, in its intractability and irresolution, generates precisely that dialectic of conscience and bad faith which Hunter apparently cannot abide. In a bizarre irony, then, Hunter actually becomes a bad subject of the profession he purports to save. Insofar as he proposes to elude this dialectic, he eviscerates professionals of any reasons whatsoever for working and returns Reason to the State (albeit, as we have seen, a 'contingent' reason). For Hunter 'the State has its reasons, but you have none!' To the extent, then, that Hunter tries to expel the aesthetic subject from the humanities, he covertly reassigns the role of aesthetic subjectivity to the State itself. Against what Hunter sees as the fundamental Romantic investment in historical meta-narratives, he arrays what he calls 'contingency'. What does contingency mean for Hunter? Most importantly, that there is no sense to History; there are only diverse local sites and their associated idioms and ethical behaviours (this is the most Wittgensteinian aspect of his work). Events, at a global level at least, could always have been possible otherwise. Hunter's conviction in this regard has a polemic import, and is directed against what he sees as those Romantic 'principles' which still ultimately presume that 'everything has a reason'. For Hunter, on the contrary, contingency rather entails that 'everything will have had its local function'. This implicit axiom requires Hunter also to hold that the nature of a site determines its correct interpretation; the more 'contingency' governs global fluctuations, the more determined local sites actually are. These local sites, of course, bear the name of 'institutions'; they are the emblematic, central, and determining zones of Romantic modernity. But this axiomatic conviction then regulates a variety of interrelated confusions in Hunter's work; for example, between modalities ofbeing (possibility/necessity, conditions/determinations). Furthermore, although Hunter tries to rupture theory's suture to aesthetics by recourse to bureaucracy, this is still tantamount to treating

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the professional institution in exactly the same terms as the Romantics he criticizes: as an impossible and uninhabitable place, whose justification and grounding can only be located elsewhere. This also entails that Hunter's work must proceed on the basis of an inclusion ofthe exception. Indeed, this is often a (peculiarly motivated) principle guiding much sociological work, which comes down to demonstrating the complicity of the apparent exception with that which it is purportedly contesting, and according to social and material categories alone. Indeed, everything that looks or tries to be exceptional is immediately reduced by Hunter to a functional delusion: Romantic rhetoric is delusory insofar as it is based on a 'learned ignorance', a professional ethos; this learned ignorance then permits the activity to continue in the guise of its disavowal. But this then means that 'events' are unthinkable a priori for Hunter, and in a double sense: events are unthinkable (because they can't happen) and unthinkable (because Hunter has no way of registering them, and could have nothing to say about them). In Hunter's world, everything simply works - institutions are necessity for modem man. Yet, as I have argued, the very force ofHunter's work derives from- to cite Niilo Kauppi on Pierre Bourdieu- 'the status of the researcher as a Romantic hero, who liberates him/herself from the chains of preconceptions and illusions' and can thus 'demand larger legitimacy for his project' .45 Hunter's transgressions oflimits, his attempts at self-immolation, his illumination ofhitherto neglected historical details, his mobilization of intellectual procedures derived from philosophers as different as Foucault and Wittgenstein, all bind him to an aesthetic Romantic heritage as surely as the critics and fields he analyses. Aesthetics, nihilism, the institution - together again This is not at all to reduce the manifest differences between 'Cultural Policy' and 'Cultural Studies', but to suggest that these differences are themselves regulated by more fundamental 'antagonistic complicities' that derive from Romanticism. Hence I can summarize the arguments of this chapter by reiterating that 1) Cultural Studies and Policy are, and remain, late variants of European Romanticism; 2) to the extent that they are indeed Romantic they necessarily maintain - and despite all appearances or protestations to the contrary - an investment in the subject of Romanticism, and an unspoken or unspeakable a priori conviction that we live in the era of nihilism; 3) insofar as the disavowed shadow of this subject still roams about, possesses, the text of Cultural Studies, the latter also finds itself constantly compelled to return - whether consciously or not - to a regulated diversity of covertly aestheticized themes that integrally threaten and support this 45 N. Kauppi, French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic Transformations in the Post-Sartrian Era (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1996), p. 40.

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very subject; and 4) aesthetics then becomes the irreducibly divided resolution to the coupled problems of the subject and the unavailability of universally accepted grounds for action. Aesthetics, in other words, at once opens up a transient realm of freedom (subjectivity untouched by, or resistant to, State power) from necessity (the determinations of State power), and permits the un-veiling and return of any apparent such freedom or disinterest to necessity. Hence the debate between Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy -more than a bureaucrat/nothing more than a bureaucrat - is essentially irresolvable, and precisely insofar as both are still in fee to the Romantic aesthetic dilemma. Ifthere is a way to short-circuit or circumvent this interminable debate, it will evidently have to untie the Romantic discursive matrix that so cunningly knots the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism together. I now turn to the recent work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou, who has dealt with this problem in an unprecedented fashion.

Chapter 8

Alain Badiou, or; From the Sublime to the Infinite If number were an idea, then arithmetic would be psychology. Gottlob Frege 1 I think of recent mathematical research ... I can recognize that the limit has itself become a new dimension, that this ever-hidden thing which makes us fold our hands has begun to press down upon multitudes. W. B. Yeats 2

Europe, endless

In this, the final chapter, I turn to the work of Alain Badiou, which has played a crucial role in the formulation and exegesis of my own theses. Badiou is also the contemporary thinker who, more rigorously and originally than anyone else, has proselytized for the overcoming of Romantic philosophy. His arguments to this end are often very strong, and evade many of the Romantic difficulties that I have been outlining; indeed, much of the force ofBadiou's work depends on the distance that he takes from Romanticism. This chapter will therefore try to bring out the originality and strength ofBadiou's work- if, finally, I will suggest that he, too, cannot altogether evade the return of central Romantic motifs. Badiou has created an extraordinarily ambitious systematic ontology that draws on a range of developments in foundational mathematics, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, and the history of philosophy. He makes some striking claims: that philosophy is a specific kind of discourse, whose central interest is in the Truth (capitalized, singular); that there are, and have always been, four- and only four -necessary conditions for philosophy, which are science, poetry, love, and politics; that these conditions are 'generic' and produce truths (de-capitalized, plural) which, taken together, permit the construction of an idea ofhumanity that is non-humanistic; that these truths are heterogeneous forms of thought (mathematics, for example, is ontology, poetry is the regime of language come to presence); and so on. In doing so, Badiou suggests a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of philosophy in regard to the scansion of its disclosure of infinity. 3 G. Frege, The Foundations ofArithmetic: A Logico-mathematical Enquiry into the Concept ofNumber, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 37. 2 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier, 1966), p. 300. 3 See Badiou's magnum opus, L'etre et l'ew!nement (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), esp. p. 164.

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Unlike other major French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Franyois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, Badiou's work is still relatively unknown in English-speaking countries, and only recently have translations become available outside specialized academic circuits. 4 Moreover, existing English-language commentaries have generally neutralized, reduced, or altogether failed to present the most important and radical aspects of Badiou's work. This failure is, as Jean-Jacques LeCercle has pointed out, 'a scandal' - but it is also entirely unsurprising given the depth and diversity ofBadiou's interests, and the polemical character ofhis thought. 5 Given such under- and misrepresentation, I will spend some time outlining Badiou's general claims and approach. If, given the requirements of space, I can only sketch his position without always being able to provide detailed arguments for (or against) it, such a sketch can not only provide a basis for further inquiries into the issues that Badiou so productively explores, but -most importantly in the present context - present some of the ways in which Badiou attempts to rethink existing scholarly understandings of Romanticism.

Towards a new republic The problem of a contemporary 'Platonism' is key to Badiou's work, and Badiou has made it a central slogan in his polemic against contemporary philosophy. Indeed, the polemical force of a 'return to Plato' should be immediately apparent -given that it runs precisely counter to the dominant Romantic trajectory. Badiou's 'Plato', however, bears little resemblance to the pariah figure condemned by various influential contemporary accounts- such as Gilles Deleuze's- which, in the wake of Nietzsche, have called for 'an overturning of Platonism'. As Badiou puts it: 4 Recently, three ofBadiou 's books have appeared in English translation for the first time: Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. N. Madarasz (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1999); Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil, trans. P. Hallward (London: Verso, 2001 ); Deleuze: The Clamor ofBeing, trans. L. Burchill (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Other articles already in English include: 'Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque', in C. Boundas and A. Olkowski, eds, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater ofPhilosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 51--65; 'What is Love?', in R. Saleel, ed., Sexuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 263-81; 'On a Finally Objectless Subject', in E. Cadava et al., eds, Who Comes After the Subject? (New York; Routledge, 1991 ), pp. 24-32. Although the secondary literature on Badiou is growing rapidly, a good bibliography can be found in the English translation of Ethics, pp. 151--62. The only English monograph on Badiou available at the time of writing is J. Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002). Despite these various publications, I will be for the most part relying on my own translations. I would like to thank Geoff Boucher and Russell Grigg for their suggestions in the writing of this chapter. 5 See J.-J. LeCercle, 'Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, meme combat: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou', Radical Philosophy 93 (1999), pp. 6-13

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INTERVENTIONS it is not Platonism that must be overturned; this is the anti-Platonic evidence of the entire century. Plato ought to be restituted, and first of all by a deconstruction of 'Platonism' .... Platonism is the great fallacious construction of modernity, as of postmodernity. It provides a general negative support: it only exists to legitimate the 'new' under the sign of anti-Platonism.6

I wish to underline the polemical aspect of this declaration, which may initially give the impression that Badiou's call for 'a return to Plato' is only a rhetorical flourish, ultimately inessential to his project, or a simply negative position, motivated by wilfulness. Such an impression could be reinforced by Badiou's own confessions in regard to the status of this slogan. 7 However, it is crucial to note that the 'polemical' is itself an important philosophical element at the heart of Badiou 's own philosophy, and should not be treated simply as a stylistic ornament. On the contrary, as Badiou remarks about Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan, 'questions of organization and polemic were, in their eyes, constantly homogeneous to theoretical questions'. 8 In Badiou's case, the Platonic motif is integrally articulated with his attempt to delineate a mathematical ontology that can respond to the challenges of Romanticism. The reasons for this have to do with the exigencies of making Platonism contemporary; that is, adequate to our 'divergent world of modernity' in which there are no absolute foundations for thought (of which more below).9 Badiou's 'return to Plato' has at least a triple import. It calls for 1) a double rupture, first with the Romantic philosophy which calls for the 'overturning of Plato' and, second, with what currently passes as 'Platonism' (as we shall see, Plato needs to be saved more from his adherents than from his critics); 2) a concomitant re-interrogation ofPlatonic metaphysics, around the imbrication of philosophy and mathematics; and 3) an affirmation of'Plato' as the historico-foundational moment of philosophy itself. Indeed, for Badiou, philosophy's place has been fixed from its foundations, ever since Plato's 'speculative parricide' of Parmenides. 10 This also means that philosophy is one particular discourse among others, with its own proper conditions and limits; however, as we shall see, it is by no means a 'master discourse' that sets itself up as the highest tribunal of truth, justice, and being.

No more nihilism? Romanticism is obsessed with the problem of nihilism, which it often codes as 'Platonism'. The abiding force of this problem is such that its effects can be 6 Badiou, Deleuze: 'La Clameur de l'Etre', (Paris: Hachette, 1997), p. 149. 7 See, for example, Badiou's interview with Peter Hallward, 'Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou', Angelaki III: 3 (1998), p. 123. 8 A. Badiou, L'ethique: essai sur Ia conscience du Mal (Paris: Hatier, 1994), p. 9. 9 Badiou, 'Gilles Deleuze, The Fold', p. 55. 10 A. Badiou, Conditions, intro. F. Wahl (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), p. 277.

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discerned across an immense range of contemporary theory - and even in writers who may seem hostile or indifferent to nihilism's appeal. Furthermore, the problem of nihilism is irreducibly bound up with the problem of aesthetics. For Romantics, art is the non-place in which the historical distress of the world is best discerned and analysed, although by no means resolved. I have outlined some of the characteristic presuppositions and conclusions of such positions throughout this book. They include the sense of nihilism-as-destiny, the bond of art and nihilism, an emphasis on irreducible multiplicity and subjective finitude, the necessity to delineate the end of metaphysics, the rejection oftechnoscience, and so on. It is therefore no accident that Badiou spends some time in his 1989 text, Manifeste pour Ia philosophie, examining precisely the linked questions ofaesthetics and nihilism.U Noting that Heidegger is the last 'universally acknowledged' philosopher, Badiou suggests that the current, interconnected enthusiasms for the death of the subject, the widespread denunciation of metaphysics, and the repudiation of technology and techno-science are still essentially in fee to the Romantic dispensation ('Heidegger', for Badiou, serves as a synecdoche for late Romantic theory in general). As Badiou explicates the dominant theses he opposes: The world-wide reign of technics puts an end to philosophy ... The technical accomplishment of metaphysics, whose two principle 'necessary consequences' are modem science and the totalitarian State, can and must be determined by thought as nihilism; that is to say, precisely as the effectuation of non-thought. 12

To remain in this strand of Heideggerean thought is also to hold that poetry (or aesthetics) alone is able to provide the necessary leverage to contest the accomplished nihilism exemplified by the enframing logics of techno-science, and that this contestation will necessarily also entail a destruction of the Cartesian dualism that pits subject against object. For Badiou, this point of view remains reactionary- too enmeshed in archaic, sacralizing fantasies of gods and daemons, blood and soil, to be at all adequate to the contemporary situation. Indeed, Badiou believes that Heideggerean thought and its inheritors consistently misrecognize the ruptures effected by capitalism for the work of technology. That is, 'capitalism', 11 See A. Badiou, Manifeste pour Ia philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), esp. pp. 27-40. See also Badiou's L 'ethique, esp. chapter 3, 'L'ethique, figure du nihilisme', pp. 29-36. As already noted in Chapter Three, Stanley Rosen- another self-confessed Platonist- is one of the few other contemporary writers to substantially agree with Badiou on these points, for example, 'the great revolution of modem philosophy, carried out in the name of certitude against the mixture of superstition and empty speculation practiced by the ancients, ended paradoxically in a philosophy of radical historicity, of poetry rather than of mathematics', Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xvi. However Rosen's 'return to Plato' differs from Badiou's, insofar as the former insists on a return to classical ethics as a solution to the historicist dilemma. 12 Badiou, Manifeste, p. 28.

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'science', and 'technology' are all quite different; if their significant moments are undoubtedly imbricated historically, this is not the case at the level of their philosophical concept. For Badiou, rather: it is necessary to say: 'Yet another effort, technicians, if you really want the planetary reign of technique!' The true situation is that there is not enough technics; it is still very rough. The reign of capital curbs and simplifies technics, whose possibilities [virtualities] are infinite. 13

If Badiou - as a committed political activist himself - will also denounce the vicissitudes of Capital, he does allow that it has had one absolutely critical benefit for philosophy: it has permitted the revelation that 'being is essentially multiple, sacred Presence is a pure semblance, and truth, like all things, if it exists, is not a revelation, still less the proximity of that which withdraws itself' .14 To the extent that this situation is overlooked or misrecognized, one will remain convinced of the nihilism of the present age - a conviction still uneasily struggling with its inexpungible nostalgia for Presence, and which discerns in aesthetic fictions a privileged figure of hope for human finitude. 15 It is this insistence of the Romantic tradition on.finitude that will prove important for Badiou's tum to the mathematical infinite. As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Badiou believes that there are four discourses that together provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for philosophy. These are 'science', 'art', 'politics', and 'love'. Although these genres 'think' differently and, accordingly, produce heterogeneous 'truths', all such truths can only be ignored by philosophy at its own peril. Badiou understands 'knowledge', whose paradigm is mathematics, as 'necessity'. Yet, as we shall see, this 'necessity', if eternal, is not immutable: it is always susceptible to being re-founded. In a sense, Badiou has completely assimilated the cultural-historicist position that speaks of the world as constituted by discourses that go 'all the way down'- which, as I have been arguing throughout this book, is a Romantic form ofpost-Kantianism-without-transcendence. The usual consequences that are drawn from such a position include: there is no one or ultimate culture; there is no one discourse; there is no ultimate tribunal which can pronounce on differences without injustice (that is, without submitting one language or culture to the dominance of another, or translating both into a third language); we are thus committed to an incessant and irresolvable struggle between and within genres of language and Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 37-8. As Badiou scathingly remarks in L 'ethique, 'the modern name for necessity is, as we know, "economics" ', p. 29. 15 This does not mean that the diagnosis of 'nihilism' is entirely derisory; on the contrary, Badiou will maintain it (as a shorthand denomination) but only insofar as it can be detached from the developmental history it assumes in Romantic philosophy. Hence Badiou can write that 'each epoch- and not one finally goes better than any other- has its own nihilistic figure. The names change, but we always rediscover under these names ("ethics" for example), the articulation of a conservative propaganda and an obscure desire for catastrophe', L 'ethique, p. 36. 13

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culture, and so on. Badiou accepts aspects of this diagnosis but repudiates the supposed consequences. In order to do so, however, he must pass through the defile of analytic philosophy.

Analytic conundrums There is another major philosophical tradition that would consider itself as having no truck with Romanticism. That tradition is usually denominated 'analytic', and associated with the names ofFrege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine. In the words of one of its foremost contemporary exponents, 'The fundamental principle of analytical philosophy is the priority, in the order of explanation, oflanguage over thought: the only route to a philosophical account of thought is through an analysis of its expression in words or symbols, that is, a theory of linguistic meaning.' 16 It is primarily by means of a grammatical and logical analysis of propositions that analytic philosophy aims at isolating and identifying those rules that condition the difference between meaningful and non-meaningful utterances. 17 Analytic philosophy- unlike the Romantics whom I have examined in this book - tends to repudiate aesthetics in the name of logical and mathematical argument (to the extent that, within the analytic tradition, 'literary philosophy' today remains a euphemism for 'bad' or 'non-philosophy'). Indeed, as Badiou himself puts it, analytic philosophy (or what he calls 'Anglo-Saxon academic philosophy') was born of a 'suture' between philosophy and science, whereby philosophy often even considered itself ancillary to the sciences. 18 Certainly, the relationship of analytic philosophy to the sciences has undergone strenuous questioning from within its own borders, and the work of the 'later' Wittgenstein is often held as exemplary in this regard. Nonetheless, and despite the ongoing dissatisfaction within analytic philosophy as to its own relationship to the sciences, its attention to logico-mathematical issues remains unflagging. For mathematics and logic have always posed a particular problem for philosophy, in a very banal and immediate sense: how is it, say, that mathematical deduction seems to provide new knowledge, a knowledge with a force of necessity that seems different in kind from other forms oflanguage-use (poetry, for example)? Further: why do mathematics and logic seem to be the only 'universal' languages capable of supporting natural science, despite their non-empirical nature? And what 16

p. 17.

M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy ofMathematics (London: Duckworth, 1991),

17 As W. V. 0. Quine puts it in a famous essay, 'When a naturalistic philosopher addresses himself to the philosophy of mind, he is apt to talk of language', Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 26. 18 See Badiou, Manifeste, pp. 41-2. More on 'suture' below.

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are the relations between 'logic' and 'mathematics'? Can they even be considered 'languages'? For such reasons, analytic philosophy has also been centrally interested in issues around Platonism (for which Frege's project often stands as emblematic). This Platonism, however, is conceived and discussed in a very different way from that of the figures I have so far examined in this book; for it is a mathematical Platonism that is at stake here. 'Platonism' or 'realism' in mathematics is usually identified with the claim that mathematics provides the royal road to an abstract and eternal realm of nonempirical objects, which exist independently of our thought. As such, mathematical practice can fundamentally be considered a description of these objects; and the apparent necessity and objectivity of such descriptions (that is, that proofs are indisputable for all those who 'speak the language') derives from their being, precisely, descriptions of just such objects. 19 If, as has often been noted, working mathematicians are often 'spontaneous Platonists', it has proved a difficult position to maintain philosophically. As Crispin Wright points out: What sort of explanation are we going to be able to give of the necessity of pure mathematical truths, if it is merely a reflection of a feature of the domain which pure mathematics allegedly describes? And what account is going to be possible of the application of pure mathematics? In particular, how is it that truths concerning an alleged special abstract domain carry over into the physical world also?20

Wright proceeds to remark the 'crudeness' of such a picture, and to call for a less 'metaphorical' conception ofPlatonism (I believe that this is precisely what Badiou has accomplished, for reasons that will become apparent). For, as the usual picture stands, Platonism is not only tied to a spurious 'correspondence' theory of truth, but is constitutively incapable of specifYing the abyss that it itself opens up between truth and provability. For instance, questions still remain as to whether any mode of proof is itself truly adequate to the realm of mathematical objects that it supposedly shows as 'true' and true to us. In contemporary parlance, such a 'Platonism' is often distinguished from 'constructivism', that is, a position vis-a-vis mathematics that considers that any justifiable statement about the existence of a mathematical object necessitates the provision of finite, 'surveyable' proofs of the existence of such an object. 19 Dummett's own influential characterization of Platonism in mathematics is as follows: 'on the theory of meaning which underlies Platonism, an individual's grasp of the meaning of such a sentence consists in his knowledge of what the condition is which has to obtain for the sentence to be true, even though the condition is one which he cannot, in general, recognize as obtaining when it does obtain', Truth and Other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 224. In other words, the Platonist holds there is something in reality that makes every mathematical utterance determinately true or false, even if there is not any way that we can decide on the value of any particular utterance. 2 C. Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations ofMathematics (London: Duckworth, 1980), p. 3.

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Constructivism (of which 'intuitionism' is one of the major strands) thus subordinates any general claims about the truth of mathematical utterances to the specific routines of proof As Dummett puts it: Constructivist philosophies of mathematics insist that the meanings of all terms, including logical constants, appearing in mathematical statements must be given in relation to constructions which we are capable of effecting, and of our capacity to recognize such constructions as providing proofs of those statements; and, further, that the principles of reasoning which, in assessing the cogency of such proofs, we acknowledge as valid must be justifiable in terms of the meanings of the logical constants and of other expressions as so given. 21

In its most radical forms, conventionalism can edge towards a sociology of science, arguing that 'necessity' itself is grounded on social conventions, and that even the most fundamental truths of logical and mathematical practice are subtended by such conventions. The differences between and within these broad positions of 'Platonism' and 'constructivism' are, of course, far more obscure or complicated than this sketch can allow. Nonetheless, such a sketch does clarify the general lineaments of the dispute: the Platonist believes in mind-independent mathematical objects, the constructivist doubts the independence of such objects; the Platonist 'discovers' and 'describes' such objects, the constructivist 'determines', 'exhibits' or 'invents'; the Platonist talks of'objective truth', the constructivist of'construction'; the Platonist upholds the claims of undecidable propositions, the constructivist demands that a positive demonstration be provided in support of every theorem. Yet both positions also agree on certain fundamental points; for example, that 'it is perfectly legitimate to speak of mathematical objects and to make assertions, even hypothetically, about their properties and relations', and that classical logic holds for all decidable mathematical statements. 22 I therefore want to note a discord and an accord: the discord about the irifinite and the accord that there are mathematical objects. It is to a short account of the infinite that we must now turn.

Excursus: Cantor's infinite paradise

As we saw in Chapter Five, the Lacanian formulae of sexuation are affiliated with an intuitionist-type logic, insofar as they ignore the principle of excluded middle. This is one of the hallmarks of mathematical anti-Platonism: the rejection of this principle and, with it, the rejection of reasoning by absurdity. But there is another, equally crucial aspect to a broadly constructivist project: the rejection of unrestricted quantification over infinite sets. Precisely because it is at infinity that Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, p. 248. P. Frascolla, Wittgenstein :S Philosophy of Mathematics (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 34. 21

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undecidable mathematical propositions are generated, it is at infinity, so to speak, that the Platonist and the constructivist part company. The decision for the infinite is, in fact, universally considered to be Georg Cantor's fundamental innovation: 'It is to the undying credit of Georg Cantor ( 1845-1918) that, in the face of conflict, both internal and external against apparent paradoxes, popular prejudices, and philosophical dicta (infinitum actu non datur) and even in the face of doubts that had been raised by the very greatest mathematicians, he dared this step into the realm of the infinite. ' 23 By way of series of arguments, including the famous 'diagonal argument', Cantor instigated the development of a general theory of infinite or transfinite sets, now known as 'set theory' .24 Cantor showed not only that the completed infinity of natural numbers (that is, 1, 2, 3 .. .) is 'smaller than' the infinity of the so-called continuum or real numbers (that is, the numbers corresponding to the points of a line), but that it is possible to generate infinite sequences of infinitely larger infinities. Cantor designated the smallest transfinite number ~ 0 (Aleph-Zero) and identified a sequence~ 1, ~ 2 • ~ 3 ... , ~n ... , in which ~nlderlin, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, and Badiou, Manifeste, p. 41. There are a number of ways to recognize that a suture is in effect: one is the repetitive declaration that the era of systematic philosophy is over; another is the unjustifiable and unreflective contempt that such a sutured philosophy cannot help but evince for other forms of thought (think here of the recurrent analytic denunciations of 'literary philosophy'). 35 See Badiou, Manifeste, p. 51. But see also 'On a Finally Objectless Subject', in E. Cadava et al., eds, Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 24, where Badiou adds Hopkins to this list (without explanation), or his 'L'age des poetes', in J. Ranciere, ed., La Po/itique des poetes: pourquoi des poetes en temps de detresse? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), pp. 21-38, where Badiou subtracts Hopkins (again without explanation). 33 34

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Celan).35 These poets are not necessarily the 'greatest' of their era, but are the poets whose writings most matter for philosophy. Indeed, for Badiou, these particular poets of 'the age of poets' engaged in such properly philosophical projects as the destitution ofthe object as the fundamental form of presentation; the delineation of experiences that exceed the capacities of the reflexive subject; the disorientation of ideologies of progress, and so on. As Badiou writes in an open letter to Czeslaw Milosz: 'The true relation ofthe poem establishes itself between thought, which is not of a subject, and presence, which exceeds the object. ' 36 One can thus see how Badiou historicizes his criticisms ofHeidegger, without a pure and simple reduction to the historical. Heidegger's turn to the poets was, in fact, precisely the right move in a situation where the poets were doing philosophers' jobs for them, without the latter ever becoming aware of this fact. Heidegger's error, then, was at once anti-philosophical insofar as it misrecognized the stakes of the relation between philosophy and poetry and philosophical enough to orient itself towards the possibility of an unsutured philosophy, recognizing in the poets a genuinely philosophical practice of thought. But 'the age of poets' only finished with Celan and, in doing so, once again permitted the unleashing of philosophy from its deleterious sutures. Heidegger was at once too early and too late for philosophy; he is at the limit of the sequence of anti-philosophical sutures that founded Romantic modernity. Indeed, for Badiou, it is precisely this sequence ofsutures that determines what I have been calling the Romantic obsession with nihilism. As such, among the crucial acts accomplished by the poets of 'the age of poets' are two that particularly matter here: the destruction of the philosophical object and of the One as an absolute ground for thought. 37

A Platonism without object Given poetry's claims to have accomplished the destruction ofthe object, philosophy must take these claims seriously. Not to do so would be to perpetuate the Romantic sutures. And to take poetry seriously means to show how the consequences of its alleged destruction of the object irremediably affect or are consonant with operations in all other procedures of thought, no matter how apparently divorced they are from specifically poetic concerns. For Badiou, it then becomes necessary for contemporary philosophy to explore what an objectless politics, an objectless love, an objectless science might be. In other words, by taking poetry's operations A. Badiou, Petit Manuel D 'Inesthetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998), p. 52. To be convinced of such claims, one needs not only to read Badiou's detailed close readings of such poets as Holderlin, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Pessoa (cf. Conditions, esp. the essays in section 2, 'Philosophie et poesie', and Petit manuel, esp. chapter 4, L 'etre et 1'evenement, and so on), but also the work ofHeidegger, Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe et al., who have all tried to show how the philosophical object is dissolved in the acid bath of Romantic lyric verse. 36 37

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and ambitions absolutely literally, Badiou is able to affirm mathematical conceptions of the infinite without thereby also affirming their objectivity. What can a mathematics without objects mean- particularly given the emphasis in standard accounts of Platonism (both pro and contra) on the extra-empirical subsistence of mathematical objects?38 For Badiou, the answer can be simply put: mathematics is ontology. This may initially seem like a standard Platonism. But it isn't. For it means that mathematics does not deal with objects or entities but with Being itself. In Badiou's own opinion, this equation: evacuates the problem . . . of the nature of mathematical objects. Ideal objects (Platonism)? Objects drawn by abstraction from sensible substance (Aristotle)? Innate ideas (Descartes)? Objects constructed in pure intuition (Kant)? In finite operatory intuition (Brouwer)? Writing conventions (Formalism)? Constructions transitive to pure logic, tautologies (Logicism)? ... Mathematics presents, in the strict sense, nothing. 39 Precisely because mathematics presents nothing, it can be considered the pure form of presentation itself. That is, mathematics deals with what can be positively delineated according to the rigorous laws of pure thought, without recourse to objects or any abstraction from any particular set of objects. If logic constitutes a description of the laws of pure thought, one can immediately see the difficulties posed to a purely logicist programme by, say, the set-theoretical axiom of infinity, which appears to make existential affirmations about the world. For Badiou, it is not the axiom of infinity per se that constitutes the specific import of set theory in this regard, but rather the axiom of the empty set. This axiom, which presumes the existence of a set that has no members, enables the construction of infinite sets out ofthe empty set itself. If the empty set comprises, by definition, neither object nor element, it is nonetheless unique and included universally in every set. 40 Since such a mathematical presentation is voided of all objects, its apodicticity derives not from its objectivity, but from its absolute lack of objectivity - its presentation of the void, that is, Being insofar as it is. 41 Mathematics is therefore not one language game among others; indeed, it is not really a language at all. 38 Although I have already made this point above, it is worth rereading Dummett in this context, for example, 'Why, then, does there appear to be a compelling need for mathematical objects? The need arises from the concern of mathematics with infinity. It has to be concerned with infinity because of the generality of its applications: even if we were fully convinced that everything to which mathematics would ever be applied would be thoroughly finite, we cannot set an upper bound in advance on the number of its elements, or a lower bound on the ratio of its magnitudes. There cannot be infinitely many properties or functions unless there are infinitely many objects to start with; infinity must be injected at the lowest level', Frege, p. 304. My emphases. 39 Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement, p. 13. 40 Badiou's various translations of this axiom into philosophical terms are rhetorically interesting, for example, 'the void is the unpresentable point of Being of all presentation', L'etre et l'evenement, p. 92. 41 Badiou's doctrine is, in its details, more complicated than this. 'Being', being by definition global, the Being of beings, can nonetheless never present itself as such within any

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Badiou's equation thereby also offers a new possible solution to the problem of why the experimental sciences require mathematics: as sciences of beings, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, participate in Being without having to pass through any subjective defile. If pure mathematics says nothing about the existent world, as the place of the inscription of Being it provides the indispensable basis for all the other sciences. 42 The word 'inscription' is not an accidental one in this context. For 'being thought in mathematics always comes woven into and inseparable from being written. We are never presented with the pure idea of infinity as such ... Thinking in mathematics is always through, by means of, in relation to the manipulation of inscriptions'. 43 For Badiou, this literality of mathematics should be understood as the production of material marks that have nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary language: mathematical symbols are not signifiers, they are letters. 44 This is entirely in line with the doctrine that mathematics= ontology. Mathematics does not lay claim to any master signifier or particular sense (that is, object or object-realm), and its letters have nothing to do with transparency (one doesn't look through them) or presence (they present nothing). As sets of arbitrary letters, mathematics is 'integrally transmissible': it is ultimately irreducible to all cultural and political divisions. Mathematics is- for Badiou as for Plato- the paradigm of pure knowledge. {If competencies for mathematics are often empirically distributed according to geography, socio-economic status, and sexual difference, this is not an issue for mathematics, but for politics. I will come back to this point). situation, for that situation is structured in its very presentation- and such a structure prevents anything being said about Being 'itselr, other than in the necessarily restricted terms of that situation. 'Nothing' can therefore be the only word for the originary inconsistency ofBeing, the global breach that founds and un-founds presentation; it is a necessarily undecidable fact of retroactivity. If Nothing can manifest itself in a situation at all, it is as a void point, at the situation's 'edges'. This void point is the local irruption of the global Nothing, which verifies 'that the situation is sutured to Being'. 42 Incidentally, one might add that I) this suggests why philosophy can never be fully expunged from scientific questions (that is, to the extent that mathematics speaks Being, mathematicians will always be engaged, whether they know it or not, with philosophical problems); and 2) that science itself, in its ancient quest for a Grand Unified Theory will necessarily be unable to realize its dream (mathematics being able to prove its own completeness only at the cost of its inconsistency). 43 Rotman, Ad Infinitum, p. x. 44 This conception of Badiou's undoubtedly derives from the debate between Derrida and Lacan around the question of speech and writing, presence and the void. See, for instance, J. Lacan, 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" ', Yale French Studies 48 ( 1972), pp. 38-72; J. Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); B. Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric ofReading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 110-146. But it is also tied to an ongoing debate with J.-C. Milner over the status of mathematical writing. For Milner, mathematics is the science of beings and not the science of Being. See Milner's Introduction une science du language (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995), esp. p. 22.

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Precisely because Badiou does not hold that Being is mathematical, but rather that mathematics announces and circumscribes what can presently be said of Being, different dispensations of Being come to be inscribed differently in different historical periods without, for all that, being simply supplanted by new developments (one can hear in this a distorted echo of the Heideggerean doctrine of the sendings ofBeing). But such a situation has immediate and evident consequences for historicism: if mathematics is historical, its peculiar form of historicity places itself beyond the usual understandings of the oppositions temporaVatemporal, necessary/contingent, and true/false. After all, older forms of mathematics are not 'wrong'; if apodictic, there is nothing necessary about their appearance or the senses that they historically acquire; nor are they necessarily 'inconsistent'. But they are necessarily incomplete. There is, of course, a famous modem demonstration of the essential incompletion of mathematics, provided by Kurt Godel. GOdel's 'first incompleteness theorem' states that, given any acceptably complex axiomatized system, this system - if it is itselfconsistent- will produce a sentence that cannot be proven true within that system itself. That sentence will be undecidable within the system. It is certainly possible to take the new sentence as an axiom, which, however, would then entail that the rectified system generates yet another undecidable sentence. Godel 's 'second incompleteness theorem' states that the consistency of such a formal system also cannot be proven within that system- unless the system is itself inconsistent. 45 These theorems, moreover, afflict the projects of finite mathematics as much as those of the infinite. On the basis of these theorems, Badiou deploys a series of strong philosophical arguments. First, the fact that any consistent system will generate an undecidable proposition implies that a decision must be taken vis-a-vis this proposition. Given that there are no grounds for deciding one way or another, a decision must take place as a kind of gamble or, in the Pascalian terminology of which Badiou is fond, 'a wager'. If- still using mathematics as a model- one runs this argument for other forms of thought, we see how, in terms of philosophy too, a decision must be made in regard to undecidable philosophical propositions. To return to the vocabulary in which Badiou phrases his Platonism, such an ungrounded decision will be necessarily polemical - and such a polemical decision is integral to the practice of philosophy itself. One can thus decide to be a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a constructivist, and so on, and no consistent philosophical practice will ever be able to account consistently for its own decision in this regard. Badiou's own system cannot be both consistent and complete; neither can it prove its own consistency. Which doesn't mean that it cannot assemble arguments in support of its own position; on the contrary. But these arguments will not be of the order of proof They will 45 For a recent, accessible account of GOdel's theorems, see J. Hintikka, On Godel (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2000). This volume, however, is riddled with typographical errors.

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necessarily be narrative and polemical. Polemic, as I stated above, is therefore not to be dismissed simply as a merely stylistic tic or derisory irrationality- although there will necessarily be something extra-rational about it. Indeed, for Badiou, the necessity of polemic (extra-mathematical and logical narratives) is an ontological condition and evidence of the irreducible heterogeneity of Being. We are now in a position to see how Badiou understands the Platonist/ constructivist debate as a polemic around a proposition that is undecidable in just this sense: the irifinite exists. One must decide without criteria. Yet Badiou, in a particular sense, also circumvents the usual terms of this debate. An undecidable proposition is only undecidable with reference to a specific situation or to a specific system. For instance, the statement the irifinite exists only becomes an undecidable proposition for knowledge (as opposed to a speculative or metaphysical or theological supposition) in the wake of the development of set theory, itself a consequence of Cantor's own determination to attain to the infinite. Badiou's own fidelity to Cantor has him say that 'the question of the exact relation of mathematics to being is ... entirely concentrated- for the epoch which is ours- in the axiomatic decision which authorizes set theory' .46 As such, given the insistence of set theory on infinite infinities, Badiou will declare that Being is infinite- and that this infinity is the rigorous desacralized infinity made possible in mathematical script. 47 It is not the sublime infinity of Romantic thought. Although there is no space here to examine Badiou's use of set theory, his direct translation of its axioms, procedures, and theorems into a traditional philosophical vocabulary makes possible some striking reformulations of old problems. 48 Indeed, Badiou's reformulations also enable a redistribution of the oppositions by which I have been orienting my own account. For example, Badiou shares something with constructivism: 'necessity' is separated from 'truth' and identified with 'knowledge'. This knowledge is, as we have seen, not objective. But mathematical knowledge is also separated from any subject. There is a kind of'blind functioning' of mathematics, which subtracts it from every imposition of subjectivity. Stalin himself could not bring into being a difference between proletarian and bourgeois mathematics. The status ofmathematics is not psychological nor phenomenological nor intuitive; neither can mathematics be deduced from logic, with which it nonetheless shares a certain rigorous purity (in Badiou's own terms, logic is purely 'descriptive' ofthe laws ofthought, whereas mathematics is 'axiomatic', making fundamental claims about existence). Knowledge, as the place of the inscription of Being, cannot be understood as simply 'correspondence' or 'coherence'; neither is it Badiou,L'etreetl'evenement,p. 12. On the desacralizing function of the matheme, see Chapter Four. 48 For a more detailed account of Badiou's translation of set theoretical axioms into philosophical jargon, see my own 'Platonic Meditations: The Work of Alain Badiou', Pli 11 (2001), pp. 200--29. Badiou's own exegeses of mathematical concepts are the best -bar none- I have ever read. See, in particular, L'etre et l'evenement, and Le Nombre et les nombres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990). 46

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of the order ofHeidegger's 'unveiling ofBeing'. And yet a mathematical proof, for Badiou, can be considered an instrument of concept- and existence-determination without, for all that, being simply the product of an arbitrary language-game or convention. It is 'necessary', but in a very peculiar sense. Having expunged both subjects and objects from the realm of mathematics, Badiou is then left with a pressing question: 'Given pure mathematics is the science of being, how is a subject possible?' 49

Event-truth-subject-fidelity As the title ofBadiou's major work, L 'etre et I 'evenement (Being and Event), might suggest, he divides philosophy in two: on one side, the realm of'Being'; on the other, the realm of the 'event'. Now knowledge, as the place of inscription ofBeing, can be constantly refined and expanded without undergoing any fundamental mutations. For the most part, then, knowledge extends its dominion over human beings without those humans ever becoming 'subjects' in a philosophical sense. Yet, as we saw above in the discussion ofGodel's theorems, every system ofknowledge generates statements that are unprovable within that system. Badiou uses these incompleteness theorems to found his theory of truth. 50 When a human is confronted with an undecidable statement, that statement must be decided- but why, how, and by whom? This encounter with an undecidable is what Badiou calls an 'event'. For Badiou - as for most contemporary philosophers -the encounter itself is 'without why' (to parody Angelus Silesius). Indeed, from the point of view of ontology, the event is a non-sense, since no coherent matrix can be given for it. For Badiou, the necessary pre-condition for an event is that there be a 'historical' situation, that is, a situation which permits the irruption of radically unprecedented singularities. A 'natural' situation, by contrast, is one in which each 'singular' event is always already determined by 'global' laws (say, the situations examined by modern physics); similarly, in a 'neutral' situation ('neither natural nor historical'), there is no site for an event which might transform the existing laws and structure of that situation (for example, despite the incessant conflicts that traversed feudal Europe, a political event leading to total transformations in the socio-political relations of feudalism was impossible for much of its history). An historical situation is such because it contains what Badiou denominates an 'event-site', singular, local, finite, unstable. 51 Precisely because ofthis strange Badiou, L'etre et /'evenement, p. 12. This is not the end of the story: if Badiou mobilizes Godel's incompleteness theorems to speak of undecidability, he relies on the work of P. J. Cohen to track the becomings of the subject and the transformation ofBeing. Indeed, Badiou presents Cohen's mathematical formulation of the 'generic' or 'indiscernible' nature of truths as one of the central traits ofBadiou's system. 51 This difficult concept is explained in L'etre et /'evenement, pp. 193-212. 49

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abnormality, located 'at the edge ofthe void', there is the possibility for something to happen that the laws of the existing situation actually prohibit or render impossible. Such a something would be, precisely, an event. If events happen, it is as if they were acts of grace or miracles; strange evanescent irruptions into the fabric of what is taken for reality. In the set-theoretical terms that Badiou's theory rests upon, such an event can only be thought as a multiple-that-belongs-to-itself, that is, an entity that is forbidden by set theory and hence something that does not exist. Yet such things that do not exist have clearly had a central role to play in human history - an example being the 'event' that drives Cantor to explore mathematically the infinite. The only 'explanation'that can be given of the irruption of an 'event' is 'Chance'. By chance, an 'event' occurs that reveals the essential incompleteness, the 'void' of existing knowledge, by confronting a human being with an undecidable proposition; or, to use Badiou's own terminology, a paradoxical multiple. This multiple can be in one of four genres: as aforementioned, these are art, science, politics, and love. Why these four genres? Because, for Badiou, they are all specifically human endeavours, which each, in their own way, aim at the generic equality of humanity. For Badiou, love is the foundation of sexual difference, politics is the truth of collective situations, mathematics is ontology, and art reveals being come to presence at the limits of language. In an encounter, a human being constitutes itself as a subject by intervening with regards to the undecidable, in a fashion that is at once 'illegal' and 'disruptive' (there can be no 'rational' justification for its own decisions in this regard). Such an intervention decides whether a putative event has in fact taken place, that is, if it belongs to the situation at hand. If a subject decides affirmatively, the event is determined as an uncanalizable excess and indexed to a supplementary, arbitrary signifier (the 'name' of the event); ifthe answer is negative, the subject decides there was no event and that nothing has taken place. Either way, the event is necessarily annulled as event, but such subjective intervention nevertheless thereby holds out the possibility that there is a being of truth that is not truth itself, and that being and truth- if disjunct- are still compatible. 52 A truth, for Badiou, is thus a process that both rends holes in existing knowledge, and transforms it. This process is supported by subjects who, paradoxically, create themselves as elements of truth in their response to the event. Saint Paul, for instance, founds the universal Church in his militant 'work of fidelity' to the vanished event that was Christ. Hence the wager of a subject that an event-hastaken-place engages that subject in an attempt to 'force' its convictions into reality. Such a 'forcing', although the very work of truth itself, involves the transformation of an as-yet unverifiable conviction into knowledge, the transformation, if you like, of argument into proof A subject can, at best, 'force' a veridical knowledge of a truth, but the truth 'itself' -being an infinite and indiscernible process -will necessarily always elude it. 52

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All four genres of truth are 'free', that is, subtracted from necessity as it is defined by established know ledges- and are such precisely because they engage with the very propositions that are currently undecidable in those knowledges. Truths unfold in their own specific ways and under their own names. If these names can bear a similarity to one another or to philosophical names, this similarity is rather the index of irreducible heterogeneity (for example, the use of philosophical terminology in political activism has nothing to do with philosophy per se). For Badiou, the reference of a name can only be founded with respect to its particular situation; and this situation is circumscribed by the 'encyclopaedia' of 'knowledges' that constitutes the science and necessities governing that particular situation. What happens, however, in the wake of the event is the production of new names (or an absolute re-signification of existing names) through a committed 'intervention', that is, the decision of a subject who resolves the undecidable through such an inventive nomination. What prevents such names from simply being fantasmatic, that is, merely the indices of a nugatory delusion, is the labour of the militant subjects who polemicize for the truths that they hold these names to designate. Badiou's name for this committed labour is 'fidelity'. The reference of event-names still remains, strictly speaking, undecidable: from the point of view of established knowledge, such a name has no reference, that is, it is delusory; from the point ofview of the militant faithful to the event, the working hypothesis is that its truth will have been; from the philosopher's point of view, the name may have a void reference. For Badiou, one might suggest that 'no reference' differs entirely from a 'void reference'; the latter, in mathematical terms, bespeaking the empty set, the set of universal inclusion without specific belonging ('the proper name ofBeing'). 53 The worst of all responses to the event is what Badiou terms a 'disaster': the forcing of a name as if it had plenitude and presence (ecstasy); the forcing of a name as if its import dominated all other names without exception (sacrality); the forcing of a name into the real (terrorism). Truths are thus not imbricated with the possibility of error or falsity - but with ethics. If philosophy produces no truths of its own, it takes a philosophy to see this. For philosophy provides the only place where disparate truths (for example, those of politics and mathematics) can encounter each other- and it is this place that Badiou calls 'Truth'. Each generic procedure thinks in its own way, that is, there is a different relation of thought to its material situation in each case, yet every generic procedure involves the production of new possibilities of being for all humanity. In the field of physics, Einstein makes entirely new researches into the cosmos possible; the French Revolution transforms the limits of what can be done in the political realm; Holderlin opens new routes for poetry; love tears human beings from their usual routines of self-interest, despite their own desires, 53

Ibid., p. 204.

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and entails that their lives will never be the same again. Truths are forged by the difficult work of fidelity to the vanished event by the subjects that support them. 54 These truths are singular universals, insofar as they take place in a local situation with particular personnel and yet, equally, transgress the laws of that situation as if a truth was for all. A truth begins in the finite and becomes infinite. That is, each truth is ultimately bound to the universality of Being, insofar as the event-truth processes show that the situations they transform are founded at the edge of the void, necessarily incomplete and ill-founded. Despite their bond to universality, however, such truths are not total, nor totalitarian: science cannot speak for poetry; politics cannot determine science, and so on (any attempt to make such the case would be disastrous).

Coda On the basis of the above presentation, it should be possible to see how Badiou's procedure attempts to bind together historical, critical, constructive and polemic elements in an inseparable act ofthought. By taking the claims of philosophy's history, love, politics, mathematics, and poetry absolutely seriously, by showing none of the contempt, say, that philosophers often have for recondite lyric verse, Badiou is able to treat each as having something essential to contribute to philosophy itself- without, for all that, insisting that they all ultimately conform to a single rule of thought. Against the celebration of differences that divide much contemporary thought, Badiou forges a rigorous distinction between knowledge-necessity and truths which, infinite and indiscernible, evince the unstable activity of the universal void in the realm of necessity. Certainly, there have been many criticisms levelled at Badiou's position. He has been charged with reinstating a very old idea of philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari); with overly restricting philosophy's field of operations (Lacoue-Labarthe); with rephrasing the very positions he believes himself to be critiquing (Nancy); with succumbing to a Schmittian decisionism (Lyotard); with overstating the general consequences ofhis specific readings, themselves pushed too far (Ansell-Pearson); with perpetrating vagueness in the name of a mathematical rigour (Hallward); with turning mathematics, the science ofbeings, into the science ofBeing (Milner); with making theology the unacknowledged paradigm of the event-truth process (Zizek); with reproducing the operations of the State in the very gesture that he believes to be absolutely anti-Statist (Agamben); with the camouflaging of operations of power by a misleading vocabulary of truth (Critchley); with mistaking the scope and status of natural language (Wahl); with presupposing that human beings are the 54 Badiou's most accessible account of the subject and its fidelity can be found in Saint Paul: La fondation de l 'universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).

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only animals with the potential-for-truth although in themselves they are nothing but an 'animal abjection' (myself). 55 Many of the commentaries further suggest that Badiou's project depends on thinking in analogies drawn from mathematics, although his interpretation of mathematics is precisely mobilized to short-circuit analogical thinking. Even if one grants Badiou the validity of his claim, it raises another problem, also mentioned by a number of critics: although Badiou uses mathematics as a schema to think the being of the truth procedures (the generic conditions that are love, science, art, and politics), philosophy itself is not a truth procedure. Although not a truth procedure, can philosophy still think its own being by means of mathematics, in the same way as mathematics is deployed to think the being of truth procedures? If so, then the crucial distinction between 'Truth' (the unity of philosophy) and 'truths' (philosophy's four conditions) is unfounded; if not, then philosophy is able to think its own being without recourse to mathematics - and mathematics ontology. Or, again: philosophy is unable to think its own being. Whatever the case, Badiou's project is of extreme interest, not only for the analyses it provides ofRomanticism, but for contemporary thought more generally. Yet if Badiou explicitly declares himself against the philosophies of Romantic finitude, I cannot but think of the very poet with whom I opened this book, a poet who would never be granted entrance to Badiou's 'age of poets' and who had little of the obsessive interest in philosophy that dogged his own great confreres. Yet the tones of William Wordsworth can still be heard resonating in Badiou. Let me conclude with the famous paean to Imagination, from Book Six of the 1805 Prelude:

*

Imagination! - lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my song Like an unfathered vapour, here that power, In all the might of its endowments, came 55 See, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 76, and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 24-5, 90; KeithAnsell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition ofDeleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 131-2; J. Clemens, 'Platonic Meditations: The Work ofAlain Badiou'; S. Critchley, 'On Alain Badiou', Theory and Event III: 4 (2000); G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu 'est-ce que Ia philosophie? (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992), p. 145; J.-L. Nancy, The Muses, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 110, n. 47 and The Sense ofthe World, trans. and with intro. J.S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 186, n. 73; P. Hallward, 'Generic Sovereignty: the Philosophy of Alain Badiou', Angelaki III: 3 (1998), pp. 87-111; P. Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Poesie, philosophie, politique', La Politique des Poetes, pp. 39-63; LeCercle, 'Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett', pp. 6-13; F. Wahl, 'Le soustractif, Conditions, pp. 9-54; S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre ofPolitical Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), esp. chapters 3 and 4, as well as 'Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou', The South Atlantic Quarterly 97: 2 (1998), pp. 235-61.

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Athwart me. I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now, recovering, to my soul I say 'I recognise thy glory'. In such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our nature, and our home, Is with infinitude - and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. 56

Here we encounter the paradox ofan unfounded and sudden event that simultaneously disables and produces the subject in the glory of its abyss; the interruption and usurpation of sense by the dark flashes of the invisible; the presentation of the infinity of Being; the conviction that this is the domain of all humanity, beyond the greatest Romantic division of them all - that of 'child' and 'adult'. And we also encounter the trace in the world of an immortal truth. Not simply the kingdom of ends, nor the subreption effected by thought in its attempt to think beyond the bounds of possible experience, nor the divine as such, humanity's infinite destiny is both actual and, for Wordsworth, capable of delineation in Imagination by such diverse practices as mathematics and poetry. Perhaps it is here, in the canonically central poem ofWordsworth's oeuvre, that we discover, once again - and despite the most rigorous and inventive theoretical efforts of two centuries- that Romanticism is still evermore about to be.

56 W. Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 216. The very same book of The Prelude, moreover, recapitulates the movement of institution-aesthetics-nihilism that I have been analysing throughout- 'Cambridge and the Alps'! Even more pointedly, Book Six opens with Wordsworth's praise of geometry: 'Yet must I not entirely overlook the pleasure gathered from the elements/Of geometric science ... Yet from this source more frequently I drew/A pleasure calm and deeper, a still sense/Of permanent and universal sway', p. 192. I would like to acknowledge Peter King and Philip Hunter for reminding me of this passage.

Index Abrams, M.H. xvi, 3, 15 Adorno, T. 62-3 aesthetics viii, xiii-xv, 17, 22, 37-8, 40-72,74,77,79-81,89,96-8,106, 108-9, 132-4, 139, 141, 145, 147, 152-3, 155-6, 165-6, 168, 170-71, 177, 179-80, 184, 187, 189-91, 195, 197; see also Kant Agamben, G. xiv, 88, 93, 101, 213 Allen, W. 71 Althusser, L. 51-2, 183-4, 194 Anderson, L. 91 anecdotage 175-6 angels 97, 100-104 Ansell-Pearson, K. 82, 90, 138, 203 Arac, J. 3-4, 154 Aristotle 206 Augustine 103-4 Badiou, A. viii, ix, xv, 37, 97, 121-2, 143, 148-9, 151, 191-215 Bann, S. 4, 14 Bataille, G. 181 Baudrillard, J. xv Baumgarten, A.G. 42 beauty, the beautiful 53-8, 65 Beckett, S. 62 Benjamin, W. xii, 174, 181 Bennett, D. 180 Bennett, T. 185 Bergson, H. 134, 138-47, 152, 164 Bloom, H. xvi, 87, 127, 129 Body without Organs (BwO) 136-8, 150, 152 Bogue, R. 135 Bolla, P. de 11, 43 Borch-Jacobsen, M. 106 Borges, J.L. 113 Bourdieu, P. xvi, 21-2,24,36,63-4, 190, 193 Bowie, A. 17, 22 Brandom, R. 52 Breazeale, D. 75-6 Bricmont, J.-P. 121 bricolage 173-4, 176 Brouwer, L.E.J. 122, 206 Brower, D. 78 Bulgakov, M. 99 Bush, G. 162 Butler, J. xv, 115, 130, 132

Butler, M. 9 Cacciari, M. 103 Callicles 85 Cantor, G. 200-201, 209, 211 Carnap, R. 197, 202 Carr, K. 74, 90 Carroll, D. 67 Cascardi, A.J. 4, Caygill, H. 48-9, Certeau, M. de 174 Chernyshevsky, N. 79 Christianity 80,82-3,85, 95, 107, 183 Cioran, E.M. 40 Clement, C. 117-18 Cohen, P.J. 210 Coleridge, S.T. 18 Conflict of the Faculties, The (Kant) 27-31 Copjec, J. 124-6, 129, 138-9 Copley, S. 19 Critchley, S. 4, 18, 43, 74-5, 82, 213 Critique ofJudgment (Kant) 52-7 Critique ofPractical Reason (Kant) 50-51 Critique ofPure Reason (Kant) 12-13, 27, 44-53 Cultural Policy 170-72, 178-91 Cultural Studies 114, 156, 165, 170-91 daemons 97-106, 109, 195 Dawkins, J. 181 Deleuze, G. xv, xvi, 49, 51, 54, 57, 83, 96, 130-31, 133-53, 155, 164, 174, 193, 213 Derrida, J. xv, 30-31, 53, 58, 66-7, 167, 187, 193 Descartes, R. 142, 202, 206 Dionysius 105 Docherty, T. 16 Dollimore, J. 169 Dor, J. 121 Dostoevseky, F. 79, 99, 106 Drew, E. 91 Duchamp, M. 118 Dummett, M. 34-5, 198-9 During, S. 180 Dworkin/Mackinnon Ordinance 184, 186-7 Eagleton, T. 40, 51, 65 Einstein, A. 212

INDEX Encore(Lacan) 114,120,124 Epistemology ofthe Closet (Sedgwick) 156--68 Erasmus 185 Feik, C. 77-8 Ferguson, F. xiii, 44, 67-8 Ferry, L. 21-2 Fichte, J.G. 31, 75-7 Forbes, J. 3, 71, 106, 154 formulas ofsexuation 114, 121, 124-6, 128-9 Foster, H. 40-41 Foucault, M. xv, 14-17, 19-20,24,31,34, 75, 108-9, 167, 180, 184, 190, 193-4 Frege,G. 192,197-8,203 Frow,J. 172,177,180 Fynsk, C. 88 Gallop, J. 119 Gasche, R. 51 Gillespie, M. 73-4, 78-9, 98-9 Godel, K. 208, 21 o Goudsblom, J. 74, 77, 80, 107 Grossberg, L. 171-3 Grosz, E. 116, 119 Guattari, F. xv, xvi, 130-31, 133-53, 155, 164, 174, 213 Guillory, J. 23-4,36, 123, 166, 176 Habermas, J. 65 Hall, S. 182 Hallward, P. 213 Hartman, G. xiv, 87-8 Hegel, G.W.F. 26-7, 30-31,42-3, 52, 74, 128, 143, 151, 185, 188 Heidegger, M. 31,41-2,47, 66, 72, 74, 80,82,84,87, 140,185,195,202-3, 205,210 Hobbes, T. 202 Holderlin, F. 212 Howey, R.L. 82 Humpty-Dumpty 118 Hunter, I. xv, 20-22, 24,29-30, 77, 107, 170-91 identity 16, 51, 54, 59, 81, 142, 155, 164-9 imagination xi-xv, 18,45-7, 52, 68, 143-4, 163, 214-15; see also aesthetics infinity, the infinite 121-2, 192, 199-201, 203,206-9,211,213,215

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institution(s) viii, xiii-xv, 19-40, 72, 74, 76-80,84-5,92,97-8,106-9,113-14, 132, 139, 171-3, 175-7, 179-83, 188-91 intuitionism 121-2, 199 Inwood, M. 42 Irigaray, L. 102 Jacobi, H. 75, 77, 82 Jagose, A. 169 Jameson,F.24, 180,182 Jardine, A. 124 Jenisch, F. 74 Johnson, S. 188 judgment 45, 48-9, 53-61, 65-8 Jiinger, E. 87 Justi, J. von 185 Kant, I. ix, xiv, 12-13,27-31,40-68, 75, 97, 109, 125-6, 128-9, 140-44, 162-3, 173,176,186-7,202,206 Kauppi, N. 36, 190 Keating, P. 185 Kelley, R. 62 Kittler, F. 21, 63 Krell, D.F. 103 Lacan, J. ix, xv, 51-2, 69, 102, 113-32, 155, 173, 194, 199 Lacoue-Labarthe, P. xvi, xvii, 12-13, 32-3, 37, 213 Lauretis, T. de 169 LeCercle, J.-J. 193 Lee, B. 147 Leibniz, G.W. 143, 149, 202 Levi-Strauss, C. 173-4 Lipsius 185 Locke, J. 143 logic 16-17, 66, 81, 114, 117, 124-6, 129, 132,151,164,197-9,202-3,206,209 Lovejoy, A.O. xiii, 5-7, 9, 133-4, 152 Lowith, K. 76 Lyotard, J.-F. xv, xvi, 52-6, 58, 63, 68, 76, 193,203 Machiavelli, N. 85 Macintyre, A. 33-4, 185 Maffesoli, M. 99 Mallarme,S.64, 173 Man, P. de xvi, 3, 11, 14, 16, 24, 36, 52-3, 56,65-6,80-81,187

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INDEX

Marcus, G. 91,94 Marx, K. 31, 101 Massumi, B. 147 matheme 114-15, 120-23, 130, 203 mathematics 121-2, 161, 163, 192, 194, 196--204,206--15 metaphysics 26--7, 29-31, 37, 66, 105, 140, 145--6, 195 Miller, J. Hillis xiv, 87 Millot, C. 124 Milner, J.-C. 213 Milosz, C. 205 Milton, J. 104-5 Mirror Stage 114, 116--20, 126, 128 misrecognition 52, 116--20, 126--32, 179, 184 Morris, M. 172, 176--7, 180, 186 multiplicity 133-8, 143, 145-50, 195 Musil, R. viii Nancy, J.-L. xvi, xvii, 12-13, 58, 88, 193, 201,203 Neumann, K. 89-90 Nietzsche, F. ix, 31, 47, 50, 72-4, 80-96, 106, 108, 168, 193 nihilism viii, xiii-xv, 38, 44, 70-109, 139, 152-3, 155, 168, 188, 190-91, 194--6, 201,205 and history 80, 82-4, 89-90, 93, 96, 107-9, 132 Russian xiv, 77-80, 106, 108 Obereit, J.H. 74 O'Regan, T. 180, 184 Pandaemonium 104--6 Parmenides 61, 194 Pascal, B. 85, 183 Pater, W. 173 St Paul211 Peckham, M. xiii, 7 Pepper, T. 33 Pesron, J.-P. 21-2 Pfa~ T. 7-8, 13-14 phallomatrix 129 phallus 119-20, 124-5, 127-8 Plato 53, 66, 80, 85, 193-4,203,207 Platonism 84-5,95, 134-7, 153, 193-4, 198-201,203-4,206,208-9 Poe, E.A. 128 Poggioli, R. 3

Posy, C.J. 68 Pound,E.94 Praz, M. 8, 12 Priest, G. 201 Protevi, J. 137 Queer Theory 114, 154--69 Quine, W.V.O. 197 Quintilian 127 Rajan, T. 17, Readings, B. 25, 31,35--6, 176 Redfield, M. 12, Reid, I. 21 Renaut, A. 21-2 reportage 173, 176 Rilke, R.M. 101 Robbins, B. 186 Romantic(ism) viii-x, xiii-vii, 3-39, 144-5, 152-3, 156--7, 163-5, 169, 176, 184--6,188-91,192-7,201-5,209, 214-15 and culture 20-21, 86--8, 90, 171-2, 178-80 definition ofviii-ix, xiii-xvii, 3-26, 38-9 and history 3-9, 11-12, 14-17, 38, 71-3, 77,96,107-8,154-5 and literature 22-3, 172 and subjectivity 17, 43-4, 49-59, 132, 191 and theory viii, xiii-xvi, 22--6, 31, 59--60, 87, 108-9, 154-5; see also aesthetics, institution, nihilism Rorty, R. xv Rosen, C. 10-11, 83-4, 93, 195 Rosen, S. 17-18 Rotman, B. 200-201 Roudinesco, E. 114, 151 Russell, B. 197, 200, 203 Sartre, J.-P. 118 Saunders, D. 184 Schelling, F.W.J. 31, 59 Schlegel, F. 74 Schopenhauer, A. 31 Sedgwick, E.K. xv, 154--69 settheory 121-2, 148-9, 199-201,206, 209, 211; see also mathematics sexuation 115-17, 120, 123, 130; see also Lacan, Mirror Stage, formulas of sexuation

INDEX Shepardson, C. 124 Silesius, Angelus 210 Simpson, D. xiii, 23-4, 175 Singer, A. 40, Siskin, C. 12, 17, 21 Sloterdijk, P. 84, 93 Sluga, H. 37 Smart, B. 88 Snow, C.P. 171 Sokal,A. 121 Spinoza, B. 202 Spivak, G. 55 Stalin, J. 209 Sturm, J. 30 sublime, the 56--8, 68-9, 117, 123, 125--6, 128-9,187,192,209 Taylor, A. 170 Thatcher, M. 184 university, the viii, 21-39, 76--97, 106--9, 114-15, 122, 142, 152, 154, 157; see also institution

vagabondage 174, 176 Vattimo, G. xiv, 89-90, 93, 96 Wahl, F. 151, 213 Waite, G. 86--7 Weber, S. 127 Wellek, R. xiii, 5-7 Whale, J. 19 Wheeler, K. 4 Williams, R. 181-2 Williamson, D. 184 Winchester, J. 81 Wittgenstein, L. 84, 187, 190, 197, 203 Wordsworth, W. ix-xiii, 214-15 Wright, C. 198 Yeats, W.B. 192 Zerner, H. 10-11 Ziolkowski, T. 21 Zizek, s. 9-10, 51, 132, 213 Zoller, G. 75

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