Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser 9780823225873, 0823225879

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Labors of Imagination

Labors of Imagination Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser

Jan Mieszkowski

fordham university press new york 2006

Copyright 䉷 2006 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mieszkowski, Jan. Labors of imagination : aesthetics and political economy from Kant to Althusser / Jan Mieszkowski.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2587-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics. 2. Economics. 3. Political science— Philosophy. 4. Philosophy. I. Title. BH39.M48 2006 111⬘.85—dc22 2006004264 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

To my family

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Introduction: Production, History

1

1.

The Art of Interest

13

2.

Breaking the Laws of Language

47

3.

On the Poetics and Politics of Voice

75

4.

Economics Beyond Interest

111

5.

Ideology, Obviously

147

Conclusion

174

Notes

177

Bibliography

211

Index

223

acknowledgments

This book grew out of work I began as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University. I am especially grateful to my advisors, Werner Hamacher and Rainer Na¨gele. Peter Fenves, Neil Hertz, and David Wellbery all offered valuable advice at important stages. Completion of the project was aided by the Dean’s Office at Reed College and by a Mellon PostDoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where Simon Richter, Wendy Steiner, and Liliane Weissberg helped create a lively, collegial atmosphere. Many friends, teachers, and colleagues have been involved in this research in ways that they may recognize far better than I. Special thanks go ¨ lker Go¨kberk, Patrick Greaney, Kate Jento Roger Blood, David Ferris, U ckes, and Thomas Pepper. Sarah Roff, always my standard of intellectual creativity, will hopefully find something of herself on every page. Finally, I want to express my appreciation for Helen Tartar and the entire staff at Fordham University Press for their excellent editing and design work. The final section of chapter 1 appeared in Modern Language Notes 116, no. 5. A much earlier version of chapter 2 was published in Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 1, and part of chapter 5 was in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 2. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint this material in its revised form.

ix

preface

The last twenty-five years have seen increasing scholarly interest in the relationship between aesthetics and economics.1 Particular attention has been paid to the way in which classical political economy and the eighteenthcentury discourse on taste emerge concurrently from earlier moral and social thought, only to diverge in the course of the nineteenth century as the work of art comes to be regarded as the antithesis of the commodity form.2 Although such historical analyses raise important questions about the rise of bourgeois subjectivity, the formation of the modern conception of value, and the relationship between equality and individuality in liberalism, they also tend to overlook the degree to which the thinkers they are addressing offer their own far-reaching theories of history, theories that may be incompatible with the methodologies being employed to understand them. In this respect, to evaluate the liberal tradition by situating the work of its principal contributors in a genealogy of ideas, discourses, or institutions is to risk foreclosing on some of its most important contributions. Labors of Imagination takes this complication as its starting point. Its broadest thesis is that Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations inaugurate parallel discourses in which productive agency comes to be understood in terms of the creative and destructive powers of language. For the writers who follow, an emphasis on the transformative dimensions of language does not, as is frequently assumed, culminate in the claim that something called ‘‘discourse’’ directs human activity and molds empirical reality. To the contrary, nineteenthcentury analyses of discursive positing or performance invariably question the status of language as a stable paradigm of thought, action, or construction. xi

xii

Preface

Much of the recent research on aesthetics and political economy has sought to explain the shift from the ‘‘absolutism’’ of a philosopher such as Kant, for whom every judgment of taste asserts its own universal validity, to today’s pluralistic, even relativistic, climate in which the unique worth of artistic products has ceased to be self-evident. The effort to unsettle the authority of aesthetic value belongs to a larger project of demystifying aesthetics by purging it of its claim to constitute an autonomous domain ‘‘outside’’ of social or political dynamics, impossible to evaluate in terms of the price its goods can command on the open market and untouched by issues of class, ethnicity, or gender.3 In this vein, the literary and philosophical tradition Kant helped to shape has come to be viewed as suspect for having accorded a uniquely privileged status to aesthetic productivity as the only human act that can escape determination by any standard or model not entirely of its own devising. In his later essays, Paul de Man maintained that for Kant the aesthetic is concerned with the articulation of pure with practical reason and is thus a category of the utmost social and political significance.4 This argument has proven extremely influential, providing a defense of the Kantian legacy for an entire generation of critics. The success of the effort to understand aesthetics as a critique rather than as a perpetuation of ideology has, however, allowed other fundamental misconceptions about Kant to remain unexamined. In the decades following its appearance, the Critique of Judgment was considered provocative less for its affirmation of the power of universal concepts or pure disinterestedness than for its account of how the singularity of taste disrupts rationalist paradigms of judgment, calling into question the coherence of the very subjective-objective opposition on which attempts to relativize the idea of value rely. In this regard, contemporary efforts to characterize the relations between aesthetics and politics or aesthetics and economics—even efforts entirely sympathetic to Kant—unwittingly treat an earlier set of problems as if they had already been resolved: Is aesthetics a discourse about the relationship between experience and knowledge or about the impossibility of arriving at knowledge through experience? To what extent is an aesthetic model of productivity necessarily at odds with the understandings of human agency found in moral philosophy? In what respects do different forms of art resist assimilation into a broader theory of representation, and what does this resistance mean for a political model

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xiii

dedicated to a fundamental correspondence between creative and utilitarian practices? Labors of Imagination poses these questions anew because they are fundamental to any comprehensive analysis of the relationship between aesthetics and classical political economy and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. To this end, my focus is less on the phenomenon of Romanticism than on how the considerations of literary language by particular authors are motivated by their reading of Kant’s third Critique and by their subsequent efforts to understand the precarious standing of discursive media within aesthetic models. The privileged connection between literature and the imagination in nineteenth-century European thought constitutes a profound challenge to the sovereignty of the human mind as much as it confirms its generative capacities. Beyond any simple dichotomy between fiction and reality, the political power of the poetic word is rooted not in its capacity to document the forces that shape the world or even its ability to generate visions of alternative realities, but in the way it reshapes our most basic ideas about social and material determinations. The first three chapters of this book explore the conception of ethical and historical experience that emerges when literature is treated as the medium most independent of formal or material constraints. Chapter 1 considers Friedrich Schlegel’s reading of the third Critique as the first sustained attempt to grapple with a theory of art not governed by the category of interest. Schlegel sets forth a notion of cultural development that contrasts starkly with the ideal of aesthetic education that comes to predominate by the mid-nineteenth century. In inviting us to reassess our reliance on value as an artistic category, he confronts us with the uncertain relationship between ethical and aesthetic models of freedom. Chapter 2 examines Kleist’s interrogation of the Kantian will, showing that the autonomy of human agency depends on a discourse that is at once spontaneous and self-legislating. The pronouncement of an ethical law and the violation of that law become one and the same act, unsettling the assumption that linguistic performance can be comprehended according to a codified set of principles and requiring us to rethink our view of language as a tool of social or political praxis. Chapter 3 discusses Friedrich Ho¨lderlin’s theoretical writings and his late lyrics as efforts to evaluate Kant’s claim that genuinely free expression is incompatible with the dictates of artistic method. For Ho¨lderlin, the authority of the poetic word is only legible at the site of conflicts between

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divergent models of memory. Ultimately, the status of art as a historical force turns out to be at odds with its capacity to represent human knowledge or experience. With its focus on the concept of interest and the languages that evade its rule, post-Kantian literature demonstrates a concern with the linguistic dimensions of historical praxis that also preoccupies a wide range of political and economic thinkers. In Adam Smith’s theory of contracts, Jeremy Bentham’s ‘‘interesting fictions,’’ or Karl Marx’s commodity speech, the work of the word names not a retreat from the material to the immaterial but a new understanding of the economic act as an act of language. In contrast to liberal interpretations of The Wealth of Nations, chapter 4 identifies a series of moments at which Smith calls into question the status of self-love and persuasion as the defining forces of human experience. This overlooked dimension of Smith’s thought proves crucial for Marx’s efforts to envision an alternative to the equivalence logic of capitalist commodity speech, culminating in the argument that every theory of material productivity is also a theory of linguistic productivity. These intersecting traditions of literary and economic thought remain equally decisive for twentieth-century accounts of language and politics. Chapter 5 offers readings of Theodor W. Adorno, Roland Barthes, and Louis Althusser, proposing that efforts to explain the ideological power of ideas must invariably be grounded in an account of the work that a discourse can or cannot do. It is only by attending to these dynamics, I conclude, that the critical analysis of aesthetics can establish itself as a real alternative to the reigning historicist and pragmatist paradigms.

introduction

Production, History Less terrorized by the specter of ‘‘formalism,’’ historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and history. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from history, but that a lot brings one back to it. — r o l a n d b a r t h e s , Mythologies

Contemporary literary criticism is guided by the belief that a human act is best understood by considering the space and time in which it emerges. This idea is powerful in its simplicity, appealing to the notion that more background information is always better. It is less clear whether the assumption of a fundamental connection, if not an outright identity, between origin and purpose is sound for all social or aesthetic phenomena. Can and must the study of texts proceed by situating them in their cultural and historical contexts? If we want to read a nineteenth-century novel, we may take it for granted that knowing something about its author will assist us in making sense of its plot or its ideological dynamics. Yet are the models used to explain what literature means in terms of its creation compatible with the models used to explain what it means in terms of the understanding it facilitates or the representations it effects? What if literary language is distinguished precisely by its resistance to being determined as a product—be it the product of a social or cultural system, a historical period, or an individual writer? 1

2

Introduction

To get a better sense of what is at stake, it will be helpful to look at the case made by Stanley Fish for the explanatory power of context in a nonliterary setting. At issue is a nineteenth-century Supreme Court decision upholding the railroads’ right to provide ‘‘separate but equal’’ compartments for blacks and whites. Faced with the plaintiffs’ claim that this act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Fish observes: ‘‘The Supreme Court ruled that there was no such violation and chided the plaintiffs for assuming ‘that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority’: ‘If this be so it is not by reason of anything found in the act but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.’ ’’1 For Fish, the nature of the Court’s error is easy to describe: ‘‘In the act means ‘in the act itself,’ i.e., the act as it is, apart from the history that gave rise to it or the intentions of those who performed it. Abstracted from this background information, ‘the act’ is indeed without the significance imputed to it by the plaintiffs; it is without any significance at all.’’2 The example is well chosen, for there is likely to be little disagreement as to whether ‘‘separate but equal’’ was a reprehensible policy. Clearly, the Court was unjust in its decision. Nonetheless, there is much to be learned about Fish’s conception of history from the casual manner in which he affirms that it is always possible to abstract an act from its historical context. Independent of its site of emergence, the act is, in Fish’s terms, ‘‘without any significance at all,’’ but it is evidently still recognizable as an act, which means that whatever makes an act identifiable as such, it cannot be its ‘‘context.’’ If, moreover, the historical dimension of the Supreme Court decision has to do with the unique circumstances that surrounded the policy of the railroads—in other words, if the specificity of the Court’s decision concerns the singularity of a situation that could never be reproduced in exactly the same way—then the act itself, detachable and iterable in one context after another, has nothing whatsoever to do with the historical character of these events. Although context is historical, it would appear that the acts that take place in this context (and that may be abstracted from it) are not. Fish’s history is a history without acts, or rather, it is a history in which historical acts are by definition generic phenomena, easily replaced with other, equally generic, acts. The way in which Fish privileges genealogy—‘‘Where did it come from?’’—over analysis—‘‘What is its essence?’’—is designed to combat the notion that there is such a thing as a ‘‘neutral’’ principle of

Introduction

3

social and political life. The problem is that this opposition between detachable act and the context of history, between essence and genealogy, is itself an instance of the abstract ‘‘neutral’’ principles against which he inveighs. As Fish writes, ‘‘when this or any other ‘act’ is detached from the history that renders it intelligible it becomes unreadable, or (it is the same thing) it becomes readable in any direction you like. But if you reinsert it into the historical context of its production, implications are easily and nonarbitrarily readable. . . .’’3 Fish’s characterization of the ‘‘act’’ as something to be read puts him at the center of the debates about the historical nature of texts and the textual nature of history that have dominated literary criticism since the 1980s. Yet it is precisely the standard for what is ‘‘readable’’— presumably the first question for any literary analysis—that Fish takes for granted. For him, systems of relation, determination, and cause and effect are in the end simply different models for a state of affairs in which it will always be evident to the discerning gaze of the patient observer why things are the way they are and why they happen in the way they do. Fish’s ultimate target is not social or moral relativism, but any argument that would suggest that there might be something in history that remains ambiguous, arbitrary, or even unreadable. He offers a vision of a finite world that will always submit to a praxis of reading because it will always be possible to circumscribe a context or set of contexts in order to explicate a text whose boundaries will be similarly clear and distinct. What Fish never asks is whether the relationship between a text and a context—a relationship that itself may or may not be a text or a context—will in turn have to be ‘‘read,’’ or, more significantly, whether it will be readable at all. In declaring that the production of meaning is the product of an interpretive community, Fish tries to guarantee that the borders between texts and their contexts, between an act and the circumstances surrounding the act, are historical facts rather than formal abstractions.4 In this respect, Fish’s work shares a great deal with the approach to the concept of culture encapsulated in Stephen Greenblatt’s pronouncement that ‘‘the work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or a class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society.’’5 The effort to turn literary studies into an anthropological account of cultural practices has by and large succeeded in displacing questions about the specificity of linguistic problematics. What would once have been the basic question of literary-critical

4

Introduction

analysis—What and how does a given instance of language propose or represent?—is simply avoided. What would it mean for Fish or Greenblatt— indeed, for an entire generation of critics dependent on the site of a text’s production as their principal explanatory paradigm—if literature were precisely language that confounds any explanation of itself in terms of a model of producer and product or cause and effect? As a paradigm of textuality, production is enlisted to help demystify the ‘‘autonomy’’ of the artwork, especially when it comes to claims for the volition or even the creative authority of language. In examining the texts of German aesthetics from which these ostensibly suspect models are presumed to emerge, however, we find a tradition in which art in general and the verbal arts in particular constitute anything but a flight from social and political concerns. The starting point for such a discussion is necessarily Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the most famous attempt to formulate a doctrine of genius with which to overthrow the normative poetics that predominated in eighteenth-century Germany. For Kant, art is ‘‘production [Hervorbringung] through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice [Willku¨r] that bases its acts on reason.’’6 With this definition, the venerable understanding of art as a function or skilled task—Kunst as artifice or techne¯—is replaced by a paradigm of noninstrumental activity, an innovation frequently regarded as the first clear formulation of what in the nineteenth century will come to be known as the doctrine of art for art’s sake.7 Kant’s argument appears to be the logical extension of a philosophical oeuvre that from its earliest inception considers the autonomy of the mind in terms of acts of construction. He initially describes art as something done (getan); it is a deed (Tat), not a product or a fashioned object.8 He also sharply distinguishes between Kunst and craft, for art is ‘‘play, in other words, an occupation that is agreeable on its own account,’’ whereas ‘‘craft’’ or ‘‘mercenary art’’ is ‘‘labor,’’ which is to say, ‘‘an occupation that on its own account is disagreeable (burdensome) and that attracts us only through its effect (e.g., pay).’’9 Kant’s convictions about the nature of artistic experience are complemented by his equally adamant assertion of a stark divide between knowledge about the production of art and knowledge about the art product: ‘‘Only if something [is such that] even the most thorough acquaintance with it does not immediately provide us with the skill to make it, then to that extent it belongs to art.’’10 Studying art can never reveal how art came to

Introduction

5

be, so knowing something about existing artworks is not the same thing as understanding how they are produced. In disrupting the basic tenet of genealogical analysis, Kant directly attacks the authority of Alexander Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry (1735), which claimed that ‘‘philosophy and the knowledge of how to construct a poem, which are often held to be entirely antithetical, are [actually] linked together in the most amiable union.’’11 Against his predecessor, Kant maintains that there is no ‘‘science [Wissenschaft] of the beautiful,’’ for it would be fundamentally incompatible with the singularity of genius and the productive powers of the imagination.12 With art, we can speak of a modus, but not of a methodus.13 The moment Kant begins to expound on the character of artistic genius, he turns away from an emphasis on art as an act and begins to talk about something we would today recognize as an instance of the literary or plastic arts. Ultimately, genius, the capacity to produce art, is defined in terms of its products. These products, explains Kant, are made possible by spirit (Geist), which is ‘‘the ability to present aesthetic ideas; and by an aesthetic idea I mean a representation of the imagination which prompts much thinking, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.’’14 The indeterminacy characteristic of the idea of freedom, for which there is no intuition or representation of the imagination, is paralleled by a thinking that never coalesces into a thought. Such a thinking can never be exhausted by expression—indeed, it frees itself from the demand that every thought must be expressible. As the basis of artistic activity, the imagination is distinguished not by its ability to create fantastic visions of alternate realities, but by the way in which it prevents thinking from being reduced to a set of forms or propositions. Hardly the mechanical application of rules, codes, and regulations, that is, the reproduction of pregiven schemas, the imagination is the faculty that allows thinking to be an activity that forms and deforms, and hence, to be something truly productive (and destructive). The question is whether the figure of genius and the corresponding notion of art as the subjective expression of a will are compatible with this account of production as the epitome of a free act of creation. Does the productivity of the imagination outstrip Kant’s own model of human agency? In the Critique of Pure Reason, the imagination is charged with coordinating the spontaneity of the understanding with the receptivity of the senses

6

Introduction

in such a way that the self can recognize itself as a thinking entity.15 In J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, this paradigm is extended. Mindful of the unique status Kant accords to the artist’s mental faculties when he describes genius as ‘‘the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers,’’16 these later authors ascribe enormous significance to the act of constructing art. At the same time, although Fichte and Schelling follow Kant in designating the imagination (Einbildungskraft) as the power of (re)presentation (Darstellung or Vorstellung) and as the very possibility for a coordination of the sensible and intelligible realms, they also stress the disruptive potential of imagination. In their philosophy, imaginative praxis, like Kant’s prompting of a thinking to which no thought can be adequate, is never a fait accompli, never something upon which the self could reflect and confirm its creative power. As Schelling writes in his System of Transcendental Idealism, ‘‘through willing there straightaway arises an opposition, in that by means of it I am aware on the one hand of freedom, and thus also of infinity, while on the other I am constantly dragged back into finitude by the compulsion to represent. Hence, in virtue of this contradiction, an activity must arise which hovers [schwebt] in the middle between finitude and infinity. For the time being we shall call this activity imagination. . . .’’17 Marking the imagination as an essentially conflicted faculty that is both the power to represent and the clash between a compulsion to represent and the awareness of something that does not permit of representation, this image of Schweben is one of the most enigmatic figures of post-Kantian thought. While Schelling leaves no doubt that the imagination produces ideas, he also emphasizes that its products escape determination as either finite or infinite, ‘‘hovering,’’ as he says, between the two. This is why the imagination is invariably characterized as both spontaneous and receptive, transcendental and empirical, original and derivative. The imagination generates the forms that make such oppositions coherent, but it never settles within given borders as a discrete object of thought. As Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason, the imagination is ‘‘a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only very rarely.’’18 Schelling is closely following Fichte, who maintains that the imagination suspends the self between acts of positing and reflection at the same time as it produces ‘‘something which is composed of both [impulses].’’19 Fichte argues that the imagination achieves the basic syntheses that ground the

Introduction

7

human mental condition yet ‘‘has no fixed standpoint of its own,’’ ‘‘hovering in the middle between determination and non-determination, between finite and infinite.’’20 The imagination is both the possibility of a synthesis that reason alone cannot effect, and a force of indeterminacy or a-determinacy that reason must overcome if there are to be acts of determination and reflection in the first place. It is from this perspective that Fichte writes that ‘‘all we have [with the imagination] is determinability, the hereby unattainable idea of determination, but not determination itself.’’21 Sheer capacity rather than the realization of specific concepts or intuitions, the imagination is equally the condition of possibility and impossibility of any act of the mind, preventing as much as facilitating the emergence of thoughts and perceptions. Far from naming the power of a self to create itself or a world, the imagination threatens to derail or even to paralyze conceptuality, undermining the absolute primacy of ideas that ostensibly defines Idealism. Impossible to assess in terms of what it makes or does, the imagination eludes straightforward definition as a law of understanding and confounds the distinction between constitutive and regulative concepts on which Kantian thought relies. At issue is not whether we create our world or are created by it, but whether the imagination, putatively the power to form, must ultimately be said to cripple the construction of all forms. The literary and philosophical tradition that arises at the site of these difficulties will thus consider the human being not as a self-sovereign, autogenerative agent, but as an entity haunted by the radicality of its own synthetic powers. Nowhere is the challenge clearer than with Kant’s claim that poetry (Dichtkunst), preeminent among the arts, literally ‘‘sets the imagination free [die Einbildungskraft in Freiheit setzt].’’22 Poetry, explains Kant, ‘‘offers us . . . that form which links the presentation of the concept with a wealth of thought to which no linguistic expression is completely adequate, and so poetry rises aesthetically to ideas’’ (196). As an art that cannot be defined as a discourse of expression, poetry will be understood by Kant’s inheritors as language that resists appropriation by any exogenous law or paradigm.23 In setting the imagination free, however, poetry is liberated not simply from limitations of subject matter or experience, but from the very polarities of determinacy and indeterminacy or position and negation. Well aware of the potentially radical implications of his argument, Kant is quick to note that ‘‘if the imagination is left in lawless freedom, all its riches [in ideas] produce nothing but nonsense. . . .’’ (188).24 Accordingly, he says that in ‘‘all the free

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Introduction

arts there is as yet a need for something in the order of a constraint, or, as it is called, a mechanism. (In poetry, for example, it is correctness and richness of language, as well as prosody and meter)’’ (171). Kant does not specify whether this ‘‘need’’ for constraint has something to do with the nature of art, of language, or of ideas in general. He is adamant that if poetry literally transcends the expressive powers of language, art must nonetheless be regarded as a discourse of ‘‘expression’’—not the expression of specific ideas or representations, but of a state of mind: ‘‘Hence genius actually consists in the happy relation . . . allowing us, first, to discover ideas for a given concept, and, second, to hit upon a way of expressing these ideas that enables us to communicate to others, as accompanying a concept, the mental attunement that those ideas produce’’ (186). Properly speaking, what genius communicates is not an aesthetic idea—which can never be cognized and can only be shared negatively, through our mutual inability to grasp it—but the coordination of faculties that accompanies the production of such an idea. Whereas Kant identifies this attunement as a harmony, Fichte and Schelling deem it an interruption as well. It thus remains to be seen whether the Kantian doctrine of genius confirms the power or the weakness of Kant’s understanding of poetic freedom. Similar tensions plague Kant’s distinction between poetry and oratory, which he designates as the two discursive arts. Initially heralded as the pinnacle of expressive freedom, poetry is in this context presented as a discourse of understatement rather than overstatement, a language of humility rather than excess: ‘‘The poet . . . promises little and announces a mere play with ideas; but he accomplishes something worthy of [being called] a task, for in playing he provides food for the understanding and gives life to its concepts by means of his imagination’’ (191). Kant insists that poetry’s announcement of ‘‘mere play’’ is misleading and that poetry always does more than it says, but he is perhaps even more adamant that poetry is not deliberately misleading, noting that poetry ‘‘plays with illusion . . . without using illusion to deceive us’’ and that it is ‘‘honest and sincere’’ and ‘‘does not seek to sneak up on the understanding and ensnare it by a sensible presentation’’ (197–98). Poetry’s indirect brand of honesty is contrasted with the unabashed dishonesty of the orator, who, says Kant, ‘‘provides something that he does not promise, namely, an entertaining play of the imagination, yet he also takes something away from what he promises and what is after all his announced task, namely, that of occupying the understanding purposively’’

Introduction

9

(191). For Kant, ars oratoria is typified by and denigrated for its status as a doubly misfired promise. Because it neither gives what it promises nor promises what it gives, Kant considers it deceptive and insidious. Yet why should poetry escape any charge of dishonesty since it also fails to do what it proposes, although the crime of the poet is solely that of understatement rather than the under- and overstatement of the orator? If poetry announces itself as a play it never achieves, it is easy to see how one could push this negative self-relation further and ask whether poetry’s declarations and its ultimate achievements (providing ‘‘food for the understanding and giving life to concepts’’) are really parts of the same discursive order. Among the first generation of Kant’s readers, it was Friedrich Schlegel who most thoroughly explored the complexities of poetry as the peculiarly non-self-coincident praxis of the imagination. Romantic poetry, writes Schlegel in the most famous of his Athenaeum Fragments, ‘‘recognizes as its first law that the will [Willku¨r] of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.’’25 The distinctive autonomy of this discourse is not simply a freedom from external demands. Nor is it just an affirmation of Romantic poetry’s ability to follow only the rules of its own devising. To recognize itself as its own law would be tantamount to submitting itself to itself as to something ‘‘above itself.’’ To distinguish itself as unable to endure any law, Romantic poetry must reject all legislative authority, including that of Romantic poetry. Such thoroughgoing intolerance cannot take the form of a straightforward negation of lawfulness, for to oppose a set of rules or principles is still to remain under its sway. In this regard, Schlegel maintains that Romantic poetry must be capable of abandoning itself at any and every point, and it must be capable of doing so not to demonstrate its spontaneity (or spitefulness), but ‘‘completely arbitrarily’’: ‘‘Even a friendly conversation which cannot be freely broken off at any moment, completely arbitrarily [aus unbedingter Willku¨r], has something constrained about it.’’26 To exhibit a capacity for resisting laws is still to submit oneself to a law of resistance, which means that Romantic poetry can confirm its absolute autonomy only by surrendering itself to a whim (Willku¨r) it cannot even call its own. In this way, the ‘‘will [Willku¨r] of the poet’’ becomes free not by negating itself, but by sacrificing itself to a capriciousness (Willku¨r) over which it has no claim, a capriciousness that may destroy it, or that may not change it at all. In a contemporaneous essay, Schlegel writes that ‘‘every individual work of art is in no way chained to the law of actuality but is definitely limited by

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Introduction

the laws of inner possibility. It may not contradict itself; it must be in complete agreement with itself.’’27 The most challenging aspect of his theory of poetry is arguably its demand that poetry’s intolerance-to-everything (including itself ) constitute utter self-accord. If this is the discourse of the imagination, it is because it exists as a dynamic of possibilities that is never compromised by a determination about actuality, even where the actuality of its own possibilities is concerned.28 In perhaps his best-known formulation, Schlegel says that ‘‘progressive universal poetry’’ is essentially ‘‘in the state of becoming’’ and ‘‘never perfected.’’29 As a language permanently exposed to the possibility that it does not yet exist and may never be able to exist, such a poetry is never more or less than on the way to becoming language, as much an affirmation of language’s impossibility as its possibility. This poetry of im-possibility was a central concern for Theodor W. Adorno, the twentieth-century Marxist least inclined to dismiss abstruse art as self-evidently mystified or counterrevolutionary. As Adorno describes the work of Stefan George, the ear of George, German student of Mallarme´, hears his own language as though it were a foreign tongue. He overcomes its alienation of use, by intensifying it until it becomes the alienation of a language no longer actually spoken, even an imaginary language, and in the imaginary language he perceives what would be possible, but never took place, in its composition. [It is] a quotation . . . from something language has failed to achieve.30

Any citation announces both the finitude of the language it invokes, that is, its status as irrevocably past, and its rebirth in and as an enunciation that points toward the inexhaustibly repeatable quality of the original. In this passage, however, language is said to proclaim both the death of a discourse that never was and the return of what never could have been. For Adorno, George’s poetry is a citation of a possibility that was never actualized as a possibility; it is a citation of the possibility of language itself, prior to the determination of any given discourse as conceivable or inconceivable. What Adorno calls an ‘‘imaginary [imagina¨r]’’ language is anything but a fantasy. It is poetry that achieves self-accord in its freedom from the restrictions, or as Schlegel might say, the laws, of its own use. It is language set free from the authority of any pronouncements about what it can or cannot be or do. This is not to say that poetry is radical because it helps us to envision alternatives to the status quo, as if fiction’s provocation were merely the

Introduction

11

glimpse it provided into other possible worlds. By remaining inconceivably open to what are, strictly speaking, impossibilities, poetry challenges the standing of existing languages—in particular, the legitimacy of any discourse that claims to express what is, what must be, and what can or cannot be. In late-Romantic aesthetics, this imperative takes an overtly political form. No stranger to the controversies surrounding the autonomy of the artwork, Bertolt Brecht writes: The interest in epic theater, then, is an eminently practical one. Human conduct is presented as changeable, the human being as dependent on specific politicoeconomic relations and at the same time as capable of changing them. To give an example [from Man is Man]: a scene in which three men are hired by a fourth man for a specific illegal end must be depicted so that one can also imagine the expressed conduct of the four men to be otherwise. . . .31

In classical Marxist fashion, Brecht would be the first to grant that forces that transcend the individual determine, indeed overdetermine, all human practices. At the same time, he is committed to confirming the possibility of change. This might sound like old-fashioned left-wing humanism: ‘‘Everywhere man is in chains, but only man can set himself free.’’ Brecht, however, seeks a theatrical praxis that depicts not so much what is, but what could also be, as well, which is to say, the picture such a drama presents of what is is also a picture of what need not be the case. In this sense, epic theater is to be a theater of what could (also) be, of what is (also) possible. If any particular set of politico-economic relations is contingent rather than necessary, if things could always be, as Brecht says, ‘‘otherwise,’’ then what is shown in epic theater is presented in virtue of its status not as what is or could be, but as what is possibly other.32 A play such as Man is Man illustrates less a version of human behavior than the impossibility of any individual scenario constituting an illustration of a necessary human experience. No matter how complex its constitutive dynamics, a given social or political reality can never be more than one option among others. Moreover, since what is possible is possible contingently, any given possibility is equally likely to turn out not to be possible.33 In this respect, it is only by exposing the potentially impossible character of the status quo that we can confirm an opportunity for change—not simply a change in present circumstances, but an alteration of the very way in which what can occur is fated to emerge under these conditions of ‘‘otherwise.’’ Anything less would

12

Introduction

amount to nothing more than the reorganization of existing forms and principles and would definitely not qualify as revolutionary. Of course, if what epic theater first and foremost depicts is contingency, this is not merely the contingency of the situations it represents, but the contingency of its own modality of signification, as well. For Brecht, a politically progressive discourse must be permanently open to the possibility that its means of representation are occasioned by particular circumstances and are not an inevitable consequence of the laws of language or politics. No text of epic theater will ever demonstrate that it is the proper medium for its subject matter. Brecht’s dramas thus become radical by revealing their inability to confirm their own thematic or formal individuality, ‘‘a quotation,’’ we might say, ‘‘from something language has failed to achieve.’’ In the Kantian aesthetic tradition, literature distinguishes itself by unsettling the models of determination that should ostensibly clarify the relations between artworks and the circumstances of their production and consumption. Despite the numerous differences between their projects, both Adorno and Brecht proceed from the insight that an inquiry into linguistic spontaneity is not a distraction from the study of historical experience or material existence, but a necessary reevaluation of the dynamics on the basis of which human praxis can lay claim to being productive or autonomous. Their work demonstrates that however poorly the negativity at the heart of the Kantian doctrine of imagination may sit with the reigning paradigms of artistic production, its exposition remains crucial if the discipline of literary criticism is to fulfill its promise as a progressive political program. They also suggest that any theory of culture that cannot account for the specificity of literary language is fated to celebrate the values of the status quo.

one

The Art of Interest One may say that Kant’s Critique of Judgment . . . has been influential up to now only on the basis of misunderstandings, a happenstance of no little significance for the history of philosophy. — m a r t i n h e i d e g g e r , Nietzsche Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art. — t h e o d o r w . a d o r n o , Aesthetic Theory

Throughout his oeuvre, Kant focuses on the uncertain relations between universal principles and singular events that threaten to confound the elaboration of a comprehensive model of the mind. One of the central concepts in his account of the (dis)equilibrium of the self is interest, a term that appears at crucial moments in the three Critiques, but whose very ubiquity has tended to divert attention from its importance. ‘‘All my reason’s interest (speculative as well as practical),’’ explains Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘‘is united in the following three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’’1 This might sound like an assertion that the basic interest of an inquiring consciousness is self-interest.2 As many of Kant’s interpreters have noted, however, his analyses describe a reason bent on its own demise. What interests reason is its inability to extract itself from the difficulties into which its interests lead it. Even when reason finds itself beset by seemingly intractable antinomies and is ‘‘quite disconcerted in a throng of arguments and counterarguments,’’ Kant insists that ‘‘neither 13

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withdrawing from the quarrel nor watching it indifferently as a mere mock combat is feasible, and even less feasible is simply commanding peace; for the object of the dispute is of great interest.’’3 Reason is interested less in its own self-interest than in the fact that self-interest always carries it beyond its intended goals, which is to say, reason’s interests are never just in its own interests. A philosophical interest in oneself inevitably encounters problems that are more interesting than one’s own powers or aims, compromising the very structure of self-understanding, if not leaving it behind altogether. At the outset of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant succinctly presents this basic predicament at the heart of his thought when he writes that reason ‘‘is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they surpass human reason’s every ability.’’4 Can philosophy explore its interest in interest without reducing the object of its inquiry to a paradigm of mere self-interest? Versions of this question can be found throughout Kant’s work. In the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says: ‘‘The subjective impossibility of explaining the freedom of the will is the same as the impossibility of discovering and explaining an interest which man can take in moral laws. Nevertheless, he does actually take an interest in them and the foundation of this interest in us we will call the moral feeling.’’5 If interest is a name for our engagement with the universality of the moral law, it is ‘‘impossible,’’ Kant insists, for us to explain how and why such a law interests us. In these terms, interest refers to the fact that we have a relationship with this law—interest is this relationship—but it also suggests that the relationship can never be an object of knowledge. In other words, interest expresses both the conjunction and disjunction of pure and practical reason. This is why Kant calls interest a ‘‘cause determining the will,’’ but makes it clear that its determinations are essentially incomplete and provisional.6 Suspended between act and pathos, between a relation to self and an attentiveness to something that exceeds the self, interest drives reason on its most far-reaching investigations of the world and the mind, but interest can never be formalized as a stable process of cognition, a fixed group of relations, or even a coherent set of questions. If there is a resolution to the problem of interest in Kant’s oeuvre, it may lie in the Critique of Judgment, a text that moves beyond the insistent interests of reason and focuses on the disinterest of aesthetic judgment and on artistic creation’s freedom from the interests that drive craft or labor. For

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his contemporaries, Kant’s theory of beauty was at the center of a host of debates about the singularity of taste, the affective and cognitive dimensions of art, and the social quality of individual experience. Two hundred years later, Kant’s influence shows no sign of abating. His notions of purposiveness without a purpose, genius, and the sensus communis underlying the doctrine of taste continue to be widely discussed. Although one can dispute the originality of some of his positions, they have become the emblems of the tradition. At the same time, there is no consensus among contemporary scholars as to whether our studies of these problems would do best to embrace Kant’s ideas or reject them, and the Critique of Judgment is invoked as a hurdle to be overcome as often as it is heralded as a guide for theorists or artists. There is also disagreement about precisely what arguments Kant bequeathed us. Does judging beauty ‘‘without interest’’ correspond in some way to current views on aesthetic merit? If not, how are we to understand our advance beyond (or retreat from) Kant’s stance? What, moreover, are the implications of the third Critique for the study of literature, a topic that Kant himself apparently treats as little more than a side issue? Working toward an answer to this second question, we will begin this chapter by describing the peculiar demand structure that informs Kant’s aesthetic judgment, then consider the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Kafka as two attempts to respond to the unique imperatives of Kantian doctrine. It is often noted that our use of the word aesthetics as a synonym for art or to designate a set of preferences—what one likes in theater, music, or fashion—was not the term’s original meaning, much less its primary significance for Kant. It has proven difficult, however, to provide a convincing account of precisely how and why the concept changed over time. In his Aesthetica (1750), Alexander Baumgarten differentiates the science of sensuous knowledge, whose aim is beauty, from the science of rational knowledge whose aim is truth. Baumgarten’s decision to call the former discipline ‘‘aesthetics’’ is routinely cited as the moment at which a preoccupation of philosophers throughout the Western tradition was first referred to by the name that has since become ubiquitous.7 The root of aesthetics is the Greek aisthesis. In the pre-Platonic texts of the physikoi, discussions of the physical processes that facilitate the recognition of an object turn on a distinction between sensation and perception, or better, between a sense perception and a perception that is not wholly dependent on the senses (phronesis as noesis rather than as a kind of aisthesis).8 The challenge of the aesthetic is to

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conceptualize the relationship between the sensible and the supersensible, between organon and psyche. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant notes that ‘‘the Germans are the only people who currently make use of the word ‘aesthetic’ in order to signify what others call the critique of taste,’’ adding that Baumgarten failed to bring the evaluation of beauty under rational principles because of his focus on empirical criteria of taste rather than on the faculty of judgment as such.9 Forty years later in his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel makes a point of distinguishing between ‘‘aesthetics’’ and ‘‘the discourse on art,’’ then bows to the popular usage for the title of his course.10 The legacy of the terminology Kant disparaged and the emergence of modern aesthetics as an independent branch of philosophy have been complicated by uncertainty about precisely how important art is for the Critique of Judgment. On the one hand, Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment is not primarily concerned with man-made beauty; indeed, in a number of passages, he explicitly privileges natural beauty over its artificial counterpart. On the other hand, what Kant actually says about art in the third Critique constitutes a major break with the normative poetics of eighteenth-century German letters, inaugurating a conception of art as the product of genius that flourishes to this day. The situation is made more confusing by the fact that Schelling reverses Kant’s privileging of natural over artistic beauty in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and his Philosophy of Art (1802–3), an attack on Kantian doctrine that is later canonized by Hegel in his Aesthetics.11 Most subsequent aestheticians will follow the lead of Schelling and Hegel and concentrate on objects of beauty fashioned by human hands. To gain perspective on these issues, it is crucial to consider whether Kant’s statements about reflective judgments of nature are compatible with his ideas about the creation of art. In some instances, Kant appears to unite his doctrines of artistic activity and taste, insisting that the capacity for genius is nothing other than the ability to realize the harmony of the faculties that is constitutive of an aesthetic judgment. At other moments, Kant makes it clear that ‘‘taste is merely an ability to judge, not to produce [ein Beurteilungs—nicht ein produktives Vermo¨gen]’’ and claims that even with the production of artworks the correct relationship between the faculties has priority over the originality of imaginative genius: ‘‘In order [for a work] to be beautiful, it is not strictly necessary that [it] be rich and original in ideas, but it is necessary that the imagination in its freedom be commensurate

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with the lawfulness of the understanding.’’12 In these terms, the power of the imagination is measured not by its capacity to create or construct, but by its ability to co-exist harmoniously with the understanding. Subordinated to a dynamic that may very well be its own condition of possibility, the imagination—presented in the Critique of Pure Reason as the coordination of spontaneity and reception or of synthesis and analysis—is here distinguished as neither a producer nor a mediator. Kant’s attempts to clarify this harmony of the faculties have radical implications for many of the basic concepts of the first and second Critiques. At moments, it appears as if the idea of law will be the principal casualty: ‘‘Only a lawfulness without a law, and a subjective harmony of the imagination with the understanding without an objective harmony—where the representation is referred to a determinate concept of an object—is compatible with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which has also been called purposiveness without a purpose) and with the peculiarity of a judgment of taste’’ (92). In an aesthetic judgment, the notions of law and purpose are contemplated solely with reference to the form of their possibility. More precisely, the reflective power of this judgment lies in its consideration of the conceptual structure of lawfulness and purposiveness prior to the cognition of any given law or purpose—prior even to the establishment of a logic or system through which a specific law or purpose could emerge. Emptied of anything we might call ‘‘content,’’ our enjoyment of an aesthetic judgment is pleasure in the ‘‘mere apprehension [apprehensio] of the form of an object’’ (29). What we experience, however, does not amount to a reflection on the nature of objectivity as such. Rather, it is ‘‘the quickening of the two powers (imagination and understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate, but, as a result of the prompting of the given representation, nonetheless accordant; the activity required for cognition in general’’ (63). Prefiguring Fichte’s description of the power (and threat) of the imagination, an aesthetic judgment is the experience of determinability prior to any individual determination. Kant says that the ‘‘basis for the pleasure’’ that distinguishes this experience ‘‘is posited merely in the form of the object for reflection in general, and hence not in a sensation of the object, nor with a reference to any concept that might involve some intention or other. . . .’’ (30). An aesthetic judgment is not an act of reflection in which the subject confirms its own capacity to judge, implicitly subordinating the activity of reflection to the

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introspective self. It is tempting to say that for once reflection is truly reflection on reflection, that is, reflection on the very grounds of reflection rather than on the one who reflects or on an object that prompts reflection. Even to call an aesthetic judgment a ‘‘reflection on reflection,’’ however, amounts to treating reflexivity as a distinct content, in which case we are no longer dealing with a judgment of taste but with an act of cognition. Guided by no conceptual interest or external stimulus—whether in itself or in anything else—an aesthetic judgment is the pure exercise of the power of judgment (Urteilskraft). It engages solely with the ‘‘quickening’’ of the mental faculties that produces the ‘‘harmony’’ or ‘‘accord’’ by virtue of which the form of lawfulness or purposiveness becomes possible. All other judgments take this form for granted. At this juncture, it may sound as if Kantian aesthetics is primarily concerned with solipsistic events internal to the human state of mind and has nothing to do whatsoever with evaluating roses or paintings. Kant insists, however, that an aesthetic judgment is always the judgment of a ‘‘singular empirical representation’’ or ‘‘perception’’ and, furthermore, that ‘‘this harmony of the object with the powers of the subject is accidental [zufa¨llig]’’ (154, 152, 30).13 The notion that an accidental harmony between a subject and an object it confronts can be systematically differentiated from the determined harmony of mental faculties that ‘‘just happens’’ to be occasioned by said confrontation has raised suspicions that fairly conventional assumptions about rationality inform or even guide the Critique of Judgment, blunting its more radical features.14 If the judgment relates to its object only contingently, then why is Kant certain that taste is an experience of the possibility of purpose rather than of purposelessness? If the judgment reflects on the forms of law and purpose by virtue of which cause and determination are first distinguished from chance and happenstance, then how can it be conceived of as a singular event? To get a sense of the difficulties involved, we must consider Kant’s overarching claim that an aesthetic judgment is the only act of the human mind truly beyond the reach of interest. In one of the best-known sentences of Western aesthetics, Kant writes: ‘‘The liking [Wohlgefallen: ‘‘pleasure’’] that determines a judgment of taste is devoid of all interest [ohne alles Interesse]’’ (45). Interest,’’ he elaborates helpfully, ‘‘is what we call the liking we connect with the representation [Vorstellung] of an object’s existence [Dasein]’’ (45). In the case of an aesthetic judgment, we are ‘‘indifferent’’ to ‘‘the exis-

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tence of the object of this representation . . . since we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason’’ (46, 52). If this summary dismissal of interest leaves us with virtually no connection to the objects of our judgments of taste, it is crucial to see that we are not indifferent to the status of our judgments as universal or particular. An aesthetic judgment, writes Kant, ‘‘does not connect the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object, considered in its entire logical sphere, yet it extends that predicate over the entire sphere of judging persons’’ (59). Although singular in modality, a judgment of taste asserts its own universal validity. Such a judgment is not simply a propositional statement expressing that something is the case (‘‘The rose is beautiful’’). It is also a demand that everyone offer the identical judgment: ‘‘In making a judgment of taste (about the beautiful) we require [ansinnen] everyone to like the object’’ (57). Since each judgment is based on ‘‘the subjective relation suitable for cognition in general,’’ it must hold true for all people of similar cognitive faculties (62). The universality of the singular empirical judgment, then, lies not in the pleasure involved in making it, but in the ‘‘universal validity of the pleasure . . . that we present a priori as [a] universal rule for the power of judgment, valid for everyone’’ (154). In the simplest terms, a judgment of taste is a demand for its own universality, or better, it is a demand for a voice, a language, in and through which such a judgment could be articulated: We can see, at this point, that nothing is postulated [postuliert] in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a pleasure unmediated by concepts. Hence all that is postulated is the possibility of a judgment that is aesthetic and yet can be considered valid for everyone. The judgment of taste itself does not postulate everyone’s agreement . . . it merely requires this agreement from everyone [es sinnet nur jedermann]. . . . (60)

The aesthetic judgment ‘‘postulates’’—ever the scholastic, Kant relies on the Latin postulare: ‘‘to demand, to request’’—‘‘not that everyone will agree with my judgment, but that he ought to [zusammenstimmen solle]’’ (89). In this idiom of universalizability without universals, a judgment postulates the possibility of what it demands itself to be. At the same time, the language of beauty is not perfectly autogenerative and remains finite and fallible. Given the subjective vicissitudes of an individual’s faculties, it is conceivable, Kant concedes, that someone could designate an object as ‘‘beautiful’’ without the judgment conforming to the

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postulate of a universal discourse. On its own, the word beautiful has no magic; it is a singular instance of expression rather than a divine performance of speech. The demand for a universal voice that can pronounce something beautiful never becomes an imperative, much less a categorical imperative. Kant’s presentation of beauty as the symbol of the morally good notwithstanding, his aesthetics remains distinct from his ethics. Taste produces nothing—no law, justice, or desire—and is directed toward nothing. Nevertheless, Kant is adamant that this demand for a universal voice, a voice of universalizability without universal concepts, is the demand by virtue of which thought and language are to be coordinated—if somewhat less than harmoniously. In a crucial passage, he explains that what the judgment of taste actually postulates is ‘‘subjective universal communicability [Mitteilbarkeit], [which] can be nothing but the mental state in which we are when imagination and understanding are in free play (insofar as they harmonize with each other as required for cognition in general)’’ (62).15 A judgment of taste is the demand for the possibility of communication, which in turn is said to be the ground of cognition. In this respect, an instance of cognition can confirm its status as a cognitive act only by communicating that communication is possible. It thus becomes extremely important to decide whether the postulates that constitute the language of aesthetic judgment can themselves be regarded as communicative. As a demand for communicability, a judgment of taste never confirms its ability to transmit concepts or intuitions. It is not a constative statement. On the other hand, a judgment of taste does not demonstrate that communication is possible simply by demanding its possibility; that is, it is not a performative utterance, either. It may very well be that all communication depends on the articulation of this aesthetic demand, but the demand itself never confirms its own status as a communique´ of any sort. One of the first to recognize the potentially confounding implications of this argument was Friedrich Schlegel. In the opening pages of his essay ‘‘On Incomprehensibility,’’ Schlegel proposes that one of the most difficult tasks facing the study of language is the need to ask whether or not communication is possible without unwittingly presupposing that it is in the course of articulating the question.16 If the only thing we cannot communicate is the idea that communication might be impossible, this raises the concern that we are incapable of explaining what, if anything, does make communication possible, which may be to say that the one thing we can never communicate

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about is communication. The very notion of a discourse about discourse is suddenly at risk of being exposed as empty, or at least as deluded about what its subject matter actually is. Schlegel explores these quandaries at greater length in On the Study of Greek Poetry (hereafter the Study), one of the most remarkable early interpretations of the Critique of Judgment. Schlegel’s text would have greatly altered the reception of Kant’s understanding of beauty and sublimity had it achieved anything like the notoriety of Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education or Hegel’s Aesthetics. Whereas the third Critique offers genius as a counter to the normative poetics of the eighteenth century, Schlegel’s Study presents a new doctrine that continues to exert its influence on German criticism today: the historical-philosophical conception of literature (die geschichts-philosophische Erfassung der Dichtkunst). At first glance, the conceptual schema appears quite familiar. Weighing in on the longstanding ‘‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns,’’ Schlegel diagnoses a crisis in modern poetry, which lacks the ‘‘objectivity’’ of ancient verse and has ‘‘only individual beauties, without harmony or completion.’’17 At times, the discussion sounds like a straightforward rehearsal of the central tenets of Kant’s third Critique: ‘‘Beauty (the concept of which I put forth as problematic, and leave its actual validity and applicability for now as undecided) is the universally valid object of an uninterested pleasure, which, independent of the constraint of needs and laws, is at the same time independent, free, and necessary, entirely purposeless and yet unconditionally purposeful.’’18 Scholars have gone further in underscoring Schlegel’s lack of originality by arguing that his text also owes a huge debt to Schiller’s On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. At issue is whether the distinction Schlegel discusses between the beautiful, the ideal of ancient verse, and the interesting, the ideal of modern poetry, is simply a reworking of Schiller’s distinction between the naive and the sentimental. From a logistical standpoint, the dispute has been settled insofar as Schlegel is believed to have sent the bulk of his manuscript to his publisher before he would have had a chance to read Schiller’s piece.19 The resolution of this point, however, has only fueled speculation about the relationship between the main body of Schlegel’s essay, written in 1795, and its preface, written two years later, in which he explicitly addresses Schiller’s conception of naive and sentimental poetry at length. Some have questioned whether the preface makes arguments that are not present in the 1795 document. It has also been noted that the earlier

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text may be internally inconsistent since Schlegel’s opening points there about the reigns of the beautiful and the interesting as aesthetic ideals are not necessarily compatible with his closing claims about the rebirth of poetry out of its contemporary crisis. In this context, it is worth keeping in mind that although Schlegel’s oeuvre is today commonly read as a systematic engagement with some of the most difficult challenges of philosophical poetics, nineteenth-century critics had a far more cynical view of his writings. His detractors were quick to claim, for example, that he had revised his Study and added the preface merely in order to avoid offending Schiller and jeopardizing his chances of being published in Schiller’s journal Die Horen.20 Schlegel provides his own commentary on his text’s problems when he writes in a fragment from 1797 (the year he added the preface to the Study): ‘‘My essay on the study of Greek poetry is a mannered prose hymn to the objective quality in poetry. The worst thing about it, it seems to me, is the complete lack of necessary irony, and the best, the confident assumption that poetry is infinitely valuable—as if that were a settled thing.’’21 If the central concern of Schlegel’s Study is the notion of poetic value, then his analysis arguably takes its cue from Schiller’s discussion of Gottfried Bu¨rger’s poetry in 1791: ‘‘All that the poet can give us is his individuality. . . . The highest value of his poem can be nothing other than the fact that it is the pure perfect print of an interesting state of mind of an interesting, perfect spirit.’’22 The individuality Schiller describes is an idealization; abstracting from local detail, the poet gives us a single exemplar to serve as the representative of a noble humanity. These claims may strike us as unremarkable, and one could show that they are not typical of Schiller’s later poetological writings. It is nonetheless important to recognize that Schiller directly connects the question of poetic value to the concept that Schlegel’s Study will identify as the essential problem of Kantian aesthetics: the interesting. ‘‘In the entire realm of the science of aesthetics,’’ proclaims Schlegel, ‘‘the deduction of the interesting is perhaps the most difficult and complicated task.’’23 Today when we call something ‘‘interesting,’’ we mean that we take an interest in it, that it arouses our curiosity, or that it is worthy of our attention. Given the casual, nonconfrontational quality of the term, we tend to overlook our profound reliance on it. Scarcely any academic exchange, for example, proceeds for long without someone explicitly affirming that at

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least some feature of the matters under consideration is interesting. One way of explaining the ubiquity of this pronouncement is that it offers us a means of avoiding the accusation that we are aestheticizing our subject matter, which is to say, we call a poem or play ‘‘interesting’’ when we want to confirm that it is worth discussing without opening ourselves to the charge that we are making a value judgment about it. In contrast to statements that something is beautiful or evil, ‘‘That’s interesting!’’ lacks the quality of a final pronouncement, serving more as an introductory remark or as an invitation for others to elaborate further—unless, of course, it is uttered sarcastically, in which case ‘‘How interesting!’’ means ‘‘How boring!’’ To say that something is interesting, then, is noncommittal. It leaves us safely in the middle, somewhere between confessing a real investment and declaring our complete indifference. To the extent that saying something is interesting does not unduly expose the person who says it, it also suggests that the thing deemed interesting is expendable. In the first lecture of What Is Called Thinking? Martin Heidegger observes that something interesting ‘‘is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment, and be displaced by something else, which then concerns us just as little as what went before. Many people today take the view that they are doing great honor to something by finding it interesting. The truth is that such an opinion has already relegated the interesting thing to the ranks of what is indifferent and soon boring.’’24 This characterization of the negativity at work in the concept of the interesting is compelling, but we will probably be inclined to protest: ‘‘Some things really are interesting!’’ Can we hope to describe our experiences of novels or films (or even political causes) without some reference to this idea? If the interesting functions as an inherently provisional declaration, it would appear that our reliance on it is anything but transitory. This state of affairs would come as no surprise to Schlegel, who argues that modern poetry errs in taking the interesting rather than the beautiful as its ideal. Of course, modern poetry has an extremely unusual relationship to this ideal: ‘‘It is obvious that modern poetry either has not yet attained the goal towards which it is striving, or that its striving has no established goal, its development [Bildung] no specific direction, the sum of its history no regular continuity, the whole no unity.’’25 Modern poetry strives after a goal that has not been reached, but to say this is already to say too much, for modern poetry does not even know whether it has a goal to pursue, much less

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whether said goal exists as a viable end. The last discourse that could master the implications of these alternatives is, of course, modern poetry, for if it does not know what, if any, goal it can call its own, it certainly does not know if it has already reached its goal. Although the notion that the human condition is defined by insatiable striving is one of the most familiar cliche´s about Romanticism, in Schlegel’s modern poetry, we find a striving that challenges its own coherence and value. We cannot say that the striving that is modern poetry exists only as a striving for the sake of striving, because it is a striving that at every step questions whether or not it has anything whatsoever after which to strive, including striving for its own sake. In the simplest terms, modern poetry may or may not be striving to strive or not to strive. The essential obscurity of this situation is what Schlegel regards as the ‘‘modern’’ predicament, and it can certainly be asked whether we ‘‘postmoderns’’ have made any progress beyond it. German philosophy after G. W. Leibniz is preoccupied with the paradoxes that plague efforts to coordinate a teleological process, for example, Bildung, with the infinite approximation of an ideal that can only be asymptotically approached. Schlegel’s concept of cultural development is heavily influenced by Fichte’s considerations of these dynamics. In Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (1794), Fichte claims to deduce a version of Kant’s categorical imperative from the phrase ‘‘I am’’: Thus it is not man’s vocation to reach this goal [harmony, self-identity, and selfunity]. But he can and he should draw nearer to it, and his true vocation qua man, that is, insofar as he is a rational but finite, a sensuous but free being, lies in endless approximation toward this goal. Now if, as we surely can, we call this total harmony with oneself ‘‘perfection,’’ in the highest sense of the word, then perfection is man’s highest and unattainable goal. His vocation, however, is to perfect himself without end. 26

The status of this highest goal as utterly unattainable may irremediably compromise its very character as a goal, that is, to aim to perfect oneself without end may be an essentially imperfect project, or one that aims at anything but perfection. In this respect, both Schlegel and Fichte echo a seminal moment in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality when, fearing that his description of the human being as a free agent has not adequately explained the difference between people and animals, Rousseau introduces the spe-

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cifically human faculty of ‘‘perfectibility’’ (perfectibilite´).27 Although in French and English alike the word seems to imply progress toward a state of perfection, Rousseau notes that human beings are unique among earth’s creatures in their tendency to become imbeciles, stressing that perfectibility, the ‘‘power of change,’’ is as much a possibility for regression as for development. This tension between endless progress toward a goal and the realization that this goal may be as much a failure as a triumph is legible throughout Schlegel’s Study. At times, it seems that culture and poetry have lost almost all direction, positive or negative, and Schlegel goes so far as to characterize the present crisis in verse as the ‘‘anarchy’’ of theory and praxis.28 Nonetheless, there is some clarity to be garnered by exploring the present age’s ‘‘orientation’’ toward the dynamics of the interesting (21). In the first pages of the 1797 preface, Schlegel observes in passing that the interesting is ‘‘subjective aesthetic vitality [Kraft]’’ (96). In the 1795 text, he offers a longer explanation of the concept: The general orientation of poetry—indeed, the whole aesthetic development [Bildung] of modernity—toward the interesting can be explained by this lack of universality, this rule of the mannered, characteristic, and individual. Every original individual [Individuum] that contains a greater quantity of intellectual content or aesthetic energy is interesting. I said deliberately: greater. Greater, namely, than the receptive individual already possesses, for the interesting demands an individual receptiveness, indeed, often a momentarily individual mood. Since all magnitudes can be multiplied into infinity, it is clear why a complete satisfaction can never be attained in this way, why there can be no highest interesting [warum es kein ho¨chstes Interessantes gibt]. (35—translation modified)

Elaborating on the impossibility of a ‘‘highest interesting,’’ Schlegel adds: ‘‘Certainly, even that which is most interesting could be more interesting. . . . All quanta are infinitely progressive. . . . (72). As abstract as these claims may appear, they have eminently practical consequences for the interpretation of literature. For Schlegel, the epitome of modern poetry is William Shakespeare, an author more typically glorified than criticized in late-eighteenth-century Germany. Although Shakespeare produces individual elements of beauty, Schlegel argues that beauty as a principle never determines the structure of Shakespeare’s work. Instead, Shakespeare strives to realize particular interests: ‘‘His representation is not purely objective; rather, it

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assumes an entirely individual stamp and peculiar local color; it is entirely taken up in a specific style’’ (116). In this fashion, modern poetry distinguishes itself by dealing not with the form of form or the interest of interest, but with the transmission of given representational contents. In the terms of the Critique of Judgment, reflection on communicability as such has been replaced by the unquestioned assumption that literature can and does communicate information and values. The point of all of this is not to challenge Shakespeare’s uniqueness. Schlegel readily grants that his predecessor is inimitable and that Shakespeare’s style is ‘‘the greatest, and his individuality the most interesting that we know of as yet’’ (35). The real concern is rather with the significance of the interesting as an aesthetic ideal. In the longer passage cited above, Schlegel casts the problem in terms of a comparative dynamic: anything that possesses more intellectual content or aesthetic energy than an individual does demands that individual’s receptiveness. To the extent we are dealing with discrete, finite units, the interesting can always be surpassed by something more interesting, which is to say, there can be no ‘‘complete satisfaction.’’ It is in this sense that each encounter in which an individual (Individuum) confronts a greater quantum of content or energy demands ‘‘an individual receptiveness, indeed, often a momentarily individual mood.’’ The experience of individuality is the experience of the interesting, the experience of confronting something ‘‘greater’’ than oneself, an abiding engagement with ‘‘more.’’ Only through its openness to this ‘‘more’’ can the individual get in the ‘‘individual mood’’ and truly confirm itself as distinctive. The question, then, is not so much whether the ‘‘interesting’’ is an objective trait found in the ‘‘real’’ world or something subjective ‘‘in’’ us, but whether it is only by encountering something interesting, that is, something more interesting than ourselves, that we become individuals. Such a formation of individuality is essentially adrift, isolated from any universal concept that would stabilize the interacting units. In the process of confronting the ever more interesting, the individual draws no conclusions from the engagement. An endless encounter with greater and greater energies, the individual’s aesthetic experience never becomes a discrete event culminating in the pronouncement, ‘‘That’s interesting!’’ Still less does it lead to a pronouncement such as ‘‘That’s beautiful!’’ Schlegel’s recourse to a comparative dynamic of individuality reveals that where the interesting is concerned no judgment can actually take place. To be an

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individual is to maintain a ‘‘receptiveness’’ to an open-ended process of comparisons whose function as either the synthesis or analysis of varying quanta of content remains completely uncertain.29 In the end, the experience of the interesting is the experience of the deferral of experience. Schlegel never simply dismisses the interesting as a roadblock on the way to a true philosophical appreciation of objective beauty. Indeed, he insists that its reign is an essential step in cultural progress and that modern poetry can be said to have a goal after all: ‘‘The predominance of the individual leads of its own accord to the objective; the interesting is the propaedeutic for the beautiful, and the ultimate goal of modern poetry can be nothing else than the ne plus ultra of beauty [das ho¨chste Scho¨ne], a maximum of objective aesthetic perfection’’ (35). Given the complexities that surround modern poetry’s relation to its (hypothetical) goal, these remarks are not entirely clarifying. Almost immediately, Schlegel adds that ‘‘the predominance of the interesting is simply a mere passing crisis of taste: for it must finally annihilate itself,’’ either degenerating into piquancy, or veering in a more philosophical direction and moving ‘‘on to attempts at objectivity’’ (36). In the latter case, we may be able to proceed methodically, trying diligently to obtain ‘‘objectivity and beauty according to the laws of an objective theory and the example of classical poetry’’ (99). Once again, however, the ‘‘modern’’ predicament imposes itself: Can we even know if we are engaged in such an enterprise? And how will we know if we are (or have already been) successful with it? In a key passage, Schlegel indicates why one cannot simply differentiate ancient and modern poetry on the basis of a realized and a not-yet-realized goal: That which is unconditionally the ne plus ultra [das unbedingt Ho¨chste], however, can never be entirely attained. The utmost that the striving force can attain is more and more to approximate this unattainable goal. And even this endless approximation does not seem to be without inner contradictions—which makes its possibility doubtful. The return from decadent art to genuine art, from corrupted taste to genuine taste, appears to be achievable only through a salto mortale— which in turn does not allow itself to be combined with the constant progression by means of which every skill tends to develop. That which is objective is immutable and enduring: should art and taste ever attain objectivity, aesthetic development would have to be fixed. An absolute cessation of Bildung is inconceivable. Accordingly, modern poetry will always change. But can it not just as well move

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Even more explicitly than in earlier passages, these remarks unsettle the very figure of striving—as if the course set out by a series of endless approximations could ever weather the ‘‘inner contradictions’’ of its tendentious relation to both its methods and its goals. However systematic our progress may be, we cannot be sure that our program of culture is approaching anything, whether asymptotically or otherwise. Far from being controlled by a goal or technique of Bildung, the inexorable change of modern poetry will realize ‘‘genuine art’’ not through some ‘‘science of knowledge’’ (Wissenschaft), but through a leap—a leap that is as much a product of chance as anything else. Without such a salto mortale, a movement utterly discontinuous with the ‘‘constant progression’’ of ‘‘skill’’ and the technologies of craft, there is no way to differentiate between progress and regress, between gradually proceeding in the right direction and gradually going in reverse. Nor is there any way to achieve a fixed development. If Bildung is always in flux, we have to imagine a leap outside of Bildung to a different order and a different pattern, a leap beyond striving itself. Clearly, modern poetry and its Bildung must fundamentally change. But what guarantees that the product of such a change will still be poetry, much less a poetry that could be identified with what we currently call by this name? If we are to envision progress as something beyond movement forward or backward, then we must confront culture as somehow grounded in its very inability to have a goal. Remembering the ‘‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns,’’ we must also recognize that the very ideal of objective beauty ostensibly realized by the Greeks will never offer a model to be imitated and may only ‘‘by chance’’ be our point of reference. According to Schlegel, we cannot begin to think ‘‘historically’’ until the comparative individuality of the ‘‘always-more-interesting’’ has been radicalized to the point that the identities of the terms of the comparison are at risk of being lost. The ultimate form of this ‘‘comparison’’—if it is one—is an imperative. Schlegel claims that the moral or intellectual content of the interesting is never moral value, for value implies a relationship with universality that

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the individual can never achieve. He writes: ‘‘The interesting has indeed necessarily also intellectual or moral content: yet I doubt whether it also has value. The good, the true, should be enacted, known, not presented and perceived. I do not put much store by human knowledge that is supposedly created out of Shakespeare, or a virtue created out of He´loı¨se—despite the praises heaped upon them by those who want to amass testimonials for poetry’’ (100). Interesting poetry presents itself as solely a medium of representation. It is language on holiday, passively transmitting rather than performing, positing, or negating. Once again, however, Schlegel insists that the interesting is ‘‘the necessary propaedeutic for the endless perfectibility of the aesthetic disposition—[and] is aesthetically admissible. For the aesthetic imperative is absolute, and since it can never be fulfilled perfectly, it must at least be brought ever closer to being attained through the endless appropriation of artistic development [Bildung]’’ (99–100—translation modified). Repeatedly challenged in other passages of the essay, the figure of endless striving here returns as an imperative that appears to be a demand for the impossibly ‘‘highest’’ interest. Somewhat obliquely, Schlegel adds: ‘‘Yet the interesting in poetry has always only a provisional validity, much as a despotic government’’ (100). The reference is to Schlegel’s own ‘‘Essay on the Concept of Republicanism’’ (1796), in which he takes up Fichte’s reworking of Kant’s categorical imperative into a statement about the absolute ‘‘I’’ and tries to link it to the Kantian idea of community by connecting Fichte’s highest practical principle—‘‘the I should be [das Ich soll sein]’’—with the notion of communicability: By means of the theoretical datum that the human being, apart from the capacity it possesses as a pure isolated individual as such, has the capacity of communication [das Vermo¨gen der Mitteilung] in relation to other individuals of its species . . . the pure practical imperative receives a new specific modification, which is the foundation and object of a new science. The proposition ‘‘the I should be’’ means in this specific case ‘‘the community of humanity should be’’ or ‘‘the I should be communicated [das Ich soll mitgeteilt werden].’’30

Although in his Study Schlegel proposes that ‘‘beauty should be,’’ which according to the Critique of Judgment must mean, ‘‘Beauty should be communicated,’’ he does not simply trust that a mode of command or exhortation is the key to the language of objective beauty.31 If there is to be poetry by virtue of which beauty could be communicated, it will have to be poetry

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that can pose the questions that the third Critique does not. It will have to ask whether the statement that communicability should be communicated is a purely aesthetic—and not an ethical or epistemological—claim, and whether the lexical or grammatical force of such an injunction is itself communicable. Rather than achieving objectivity through representational perfection or by formulating a law to which all human behavior would correspond, such poetry would have to effect a complete break with the modality of authority (‘‘should,’’ ‘‘must,’’ ‘‘ought’’), abandoning itself to the power of chance that for Schlegel—the protests of modern poetry notwithstanding—governs the development of culture. Of course, as was made clear in Schlegel’s first remarks about modern poetry, there is no way of determining whether such a discourse has already been realized, much less what it would mean to say that it ‘‘should’’ be. Aesthetic striving knows itself neither as definitively striving nor as definitively beyond striving. Unable to control the distinction between its content and its value, it cannot account for its status as theoretical or practical, as descriptive or prescriptive. If it works against the imperative to articulate purely teleological or causal determinations, it offers no counterideals of its own. In showing that models of aesthetic merit cannot explain what it means to call something ‘‘interesting,’’ Schlegel suggests that even though it can be viewed as the product of a given system of ideas or beliefs, poetry may inexorably reveal any such system to be no more than a concatenation of chance effects. To this day, our reluctance to confront the implications of this argument for the study of the arts is evident in the vigorous energy with which humanists of all stripes continue to aver that the problems they investigate are ‘‘interesting.’’ Having convinced ourselves that we long ago dispensed with beauty as a standard by which to evaluate interpretive arguments, we are nonetheless reluctant to renounce our reliance on the discourse of interest, an abiding vestige of the paradigm we mistakenly fancy ourselves to have superseded. At the same time, we may suspect that the extreme vision of aesthetic striving presented by Schlegel is not radical enough precisely because it remains governed by the paradigm of beauty—however complex, if not impossible, the realization of objective beauty is said to be. In more positive terms, it may be that for Schlegel beauty names a complication inherent to the act of using language to speak about language, whether we call this act ‘‘poetry’’ or ‘‘literary criticism.’’ What would it mean where beauty is

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concerned to respond to Schlegel’s pithy claim that ‘‘in order to write well about something, one shouldn’t be interested in it any longer’’?32 In Kantian terms, such a discourse would constitute the pinnacle of beautiful art by virtue of being language ‘‘beyond’’ interest. Of course, the question of whether the conception of beauty articulated in the Critique of Judgment has actually survived, much less prospered, is notoriously vexed. Writers, artists, and critics alike have struggled between accepting Kant’s arguments as unavoidable and rejecting them as dated or as simply too idiosyncratic to be of continued relevance. In the twentieth century, perhaps no author went as far in exploring these problems as Franz Kafka. Throughout his oeuvre, Kafka searches for an activity that might unite Kant’s concept of taste with the activity of genius in a discourse that would be both free and productive. Perhaps unexpectedly, the result is a sustained meditation on the concept of performance.33 Following Schlegel, whose reading of the third Critique helps us challenge the idea that a judgment of taste can be termed constative or performative, Kafka investigates the linguistic act through which language would present itself as a material praxis. In one of his final stories, he does this through an analysis of art’s pretensions to happen. Written in 1924, ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ was one of four short pieces collected in a volume by the same title, the proofs for which Kafka corrected on his deathbed. Exploring the dilemmas of the artist and the artist’s craft through the figures of a singing mouse that cannot sing, a trapeze artist who will not come down from his perch, and a man whose specialty is fasting before an audience, these stories are typical of a broader interest in performance experiments prevalent among the Czech avant-garde at the time. The Prague of the early 1920s has been called the ‘‘Dada fair of Central Europe,’’ and although there is no direct reference to Dada in Kafka’s writings, we can assume that he was well acquainted with the Dada-permeated cafe´ culture, cabaret, and variety theater of the Czech capital.34 The overtly performative dimension of the three characters’ activities raises questions about the nature of their ‘‘art,’’ particularly in the case of the deathly thin individual who sits on display in a cage, not eating for forty days at a stretch. Is this man to be regarded as a victim of anorexia, a skilled entertainer comparable to a trapeze acrobat or a stripper, or a creator in some more existential sense? When this ‘‘artist’’ speaks of ‘‘the honor of his art,’’ is he asking for the respect the patrons of high culture might accord a

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painter, sculptor, or pianist, or is he inviting the good-natured indulgence they would grant a juggler, stage magician, or palm reader? May it even be misleading to speak of art and artists in this case? There is certainly no consensus about Kafka’s oeuvre with which to resolve the issue. For every claim that ‘‘the question of the artist and the function of art underlies nearly all of Kafka’s work,’’ there is an equally adamant rejoinder that ‘‘Kafka never concerned himself with the artist and his relation to society.’’35 From the outset of the story, a concern with managing the show— whatever kind of art or performance it may be—is paramount: ‘‘During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now.’’36 The narrator’s declaration that interest in hunger art has waned hangs over the entire story, lending it the improbable fairy-tale quality of something that transpired in an age we can no longer comprehend. Curiously enough, there is no explanation as to why the change took place. Did tastes shift? Did people become less macabre in their voyeurism or more imaginative in their leisure pursuits? Later, the narrator again emphasizes the change, without even a guess as to why it happened: A few years later when the witnesses of such scenes called them to mind, they often failed to understand themselves at all. For meanwhile the aforementioned change in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that; at any rate the pampered hunger artist suddenly found himself deserted one fine day by the amusement-seekers, who went streaming past him to other morefavored attractions. (273)

In a narrative that dwells on one set after another of relations between audience and performer, these remarks provide notably little information about why the performance is or is not successful. Stressing the altered circumstances, the narrator hints at a variety of causes, but he pointedly declines to identify them, instead proclaiming that the change in the audience’s interest is itself not interesting. ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ thus unfolds as a story in flight from the fact that the event that sets it in motion is anything but gripping material. As if addressing someone about to embark on a career as a sideshow promoter, the narrator warns in the first lines that producing such events is

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no longer profitable. But this need not make us feel insecure about our investments, for the narrator never speaks of ‘‘we’’ in a way that would suggest we are reading about our own ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now.’’ Nonetheless, Kafka’s interpreters have felt the need to supplement the story with historical detail, as if to demonstrate that ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ can be situated in relation to the modern era and is not simply a fairy tale.37 In other words, confronted with the continuity the story proposes between spectatorial interests and the interests of business, critics have responded by recasting the issue of falling interest in terms of an economy of self-interest. In effect, ‘‘we’’ seize on a decline in the hunger artist’s interest value as a means of learning something about ourselves and our interests, a gesture that may suggest that we do not find ourselves interesting enough. Although always dependent on principles and principals it does not fully determine, interest is also by nature double; it always spawns an interest in interest, and one relates to interest (or the lack thereof ) only with and through still another interest.38 At the same time, interest fails to establish itself as the overarching principle of the narrative. When the faster is relegated to a side cage in a circus near the end of the story, the narrator’s description of the people pushing by to see other shows characterizes their nonencounter with the artist as entirely independent of their reaction to (much less interest in) him. Indeed, once the explanatory status of interest is replaced by another paradigm for understanding the story, it is as if it had been forgotten entirely. As the initial account of the artist’s career continues, the complications surrounding the dynamics of the performance take center stage. ‘‘At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day’’ (268). The enthusiastic spectators who come to view a caged man who does not eat are complemented by overseers who are on watch to ensure that the hunger artist does not (ch)eat. On the one hand, the narrator stresses that the guards are merely a ‘‘formality,’’ for those familiar with the artist know that he never eats during his fasts since the ‘‘honor of his art’’ forbids it. On the other hand, the longer the artist’s performance goes on, the more it is assumed that he must be cheating. By definition, nothing is seen in this performance, but the more nothing is seen, the greater the suspicion that something is masquerading as nothing—that some eating must be going on, even if nobody catches the artist in flagrante.

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The overseers respond to this dilemma by shirking their duties in order to give the artist a chance to eat. This confirms, as we have been told, that they are a ‘‘mere formality,’’ although for precisely the opposite reason suggested, that is, because it is supposed that the artist must cheat rather than because it is obvious he will not. Attempting to counter their lackadaisical behavior, the artist sings and tries to draw his overseers into conversation, doing as much as he can to make it clear that his mouth is not busy with mastication. This elicits further wonderment from the guards, although not the kind for which the artist had hoped: ‘‘But that was of little use; they only wondered at his cleverness in being able to fill his mouth even while singing’’ (269). A performance that cannot confirm that it has taken place supplements itself with other performances, each one only furthering the conviction that the original performance is not happening. Hunger art invites protest; it begs for proof that it is what it claims to be, but ironically, the power to provide such proof remains radically external to the art. Although the artist sits in a cage on display and is viewed daily by most of the townspeople, no observation can be thorough enough to ensure that he has performed hunger. Ultimately, it is suggested that only the artist can know what he is ‘‘really’’ doing: ‘‘Only the artist himself could know that; he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast’’ (270). The performance of hunger art is defined by its permanent exposure to the possibility that it is not a performance at all. In this respect, it could be argued that Kafka’s story is both a companion to and a critique of the avant-garde art movements that for the last century have striven to realize a live art. Like a number of his contemporaries who lived at a time of great change in artistic practices without generating material suitable for stage audiences, Kafka has tended to be neglected in the standard genealogies of performance innovation, particular when it comes to the debates surrounding what over the last thirty years has come to be called ‘‘performance art’’—an endlessly polymorphous series of challenges to the authority of the aesthetic object and the supremacy of the plastic arts. The theory and praxis of actions, installations, and happenings are organized around a historical narrative that privileges the innovations of futurism, Dada, and surrealism in attacking nineteenth-century aestheticism. Of equal importance in understanding the critical potential of today’s performance research, however, are writers such as Kafka who did not overtly undermine the genre conventions of their time.

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What status, then, would the performance presented in Kafka’s story have in contemporary debates about performance art? In a widely cited analysis, RoseLee Goldberg writes, ‘‘By its very nature, performance [art] defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists.’’39 This ‘‘new’’ meaning of live—which since the sixteenth century has meant the opposite of dead—appears with the advent of radio and film, that is, with the technological reproduction of sounds and moving images. Noting that the word live was first used in this sense in the 1930s, the Oxford English Dictionary offers: ‘‘Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc. Also quasi-adv.’’ The air of simplicity that surrounds this concept becomes more clouded as soon as we realize that it rests on an implicit conflation of different models of immediacy. This is apparent in casual conversation, where ‘‘live’’ is used to refer either to a temporal correspondence between a performance and the presentation of the performance— ‘‘Broadcast while actually performed; not taped, filmed or recorded’’—or to a shared site of performance and reception, a spatial coincidence: ‘‘Involving performers and spectators who are physically present,’’ as the American Heritage Dictionary has it.40 Indeed, once a minimal degree of mediation intervenes, the term quickly loses any grounding in the singularity of a one-time presentation, which is why it is not an oxymoron to speak about a ‘‘live’’ recording. Far from confirming its status as an original, ‘‘the live’’ reveals itself to be a systematization of reproduction—a complication central to debates in contemporary cinema, media, and performance studies. Performance is celebrated for conjoining the clarity of individual expression with the indirection of simulation or parody, the spontaneity of an original with the derived character of a citation, and all without simply collapsing these oppositions into a more general field in which the old dichotomies ‘‘no longer apply.’’ In short, performance is both uncompromisingly radical and reassuringly flexible. It leaves nothing untouched, yet scars nothing permanently. Theorists of the live try to distinguish the absence of mediation for which performance art strives from an attempt to establish a pure presence unmarked by repetition and difference. From this perspective, performance art takes as its target precisely the idea—some would say the ‘‘fiction’’—of a controlled mediation, aiming instead to realize a medium no longer defined by the distinctions between essence and appearance or rule and example on which most modern aesthetic doctrines rely. There

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is, however, another tradition of performance art that strives to realize less an immediacy of presentation than a live event, one whose specificity is based not on the proximity of an audience or the coincidence of production and reception, but on its resistance to being defined by spatial or temporal parameters. Beginning with Dada, the attempt to articulate such artistic ‘‘occurrences’’ has been organized around an effort to submit art to the power of chance. Hans Richter presents a foundational anecdote: Dissatisfied with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Hans Arp finally tore it up, and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio on the Zeltweg. Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve. How meaningful! How telling! Chance movements of his hand and of the fluttering scraps of paper had achieved what all his efforts had failed to achieve, namely expression.41

The point of this parable is not that Dada seeks to establish itself as a discourse of meaninglessness or to lay claim to some sort of supernatural rapport with fate. Instead, it attempts to embrace the event of a contradiction by which ‘‘random’’ movement becomes the medium through which ‘‘something of the mind and personality of the author’’ is expressed.42 Dada ‘‘happens’’ by disrupting the coordination of act and intention, imagination and articulation, by virtue of which something would customarily said to be made or be performed. Art thus becomes something that befalls us, something that we believe to occur precisely and only because it is unclear whether it is the product of premeditation or spontaneity. As Walter Benjamin writes, ‘‘the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer [es stieß dem Betrachter zu]. . . .’’43 This ‘‘art’’ forces us to conceive of it as an event that is neither natural nor man-made, neither the product of an act nor the effect of a cause. ‘‘I don’t consider [Dada] an art form,’’ says Eric Andersen, a participant in the Dada revivals of the 1960s. ‘‘It just takes place.’’44 The tradition of performance art as an art of events rather than of physical immediacy develops further in the Happenings and Fluxus movements of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the work of Allan Kaprow, who sought to ‘‘facilitate’’ random occurrences. The activities carried out by participants in the first ‘‘happenings’’—which included, among other things, turning on and off light bulbs, finding assigned seats at a dinner table, and

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touring a neighborhood—were often scripted. Having insisted that these be the most banal and everyday of tasks, Kaprow went further and sought a participatory mode that could not be prearranged. Accordingly, people were instructed to undertake actions that would involve unpredictable variables and require a degree of improvisation, such as attempting to walk down a crowded sidewalk in a straight line. The contours of the happenings grew more and more nebulous, often amounting to no more than brief sightings of random passers-by. As Kaprow himself was quick to concede, it became increasingly difficult to decide if one had or had not taken place. ‘‘Relying solely on chance operations,’’ he writes, ‘‘a completely unforeseen schedule of events could result, not merely in the operation but in the actual performance; or a simultaneously performed single moment; or none at all.’’45 Like hunger art, the work of Dada and its inheritors paradoxically happens as a challenge to the very schemas of determination and consequence that make it possible to say that something has or has not taken place.46 However seriously one takes this tradition, it would appear to develop as a stark alternative to the performance art with which we are more familiar today, the body art of the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized the artist’s ‘‘live’’ exploration of his or her corporeality in front of an audience. On the other hand, it has been argued that body art calls its own performance into question by suggesting that the performative agent is indexical rather than iconic, a sign rather than a (re)presentation of itself or of its corporeal concreteness. In a well-known study, Peggy Phelan writes: ‘‘Performance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se. . . . Performance marks the body itself as loss. . . .’’47 Posed in these terms, body art sounds like the obvious inheritor of Kafka. At the same time, it remains unclear whether the body thus conceived is or is not subordinate to the injunction that art happen. The performance artist Martha Wilson offers an explanation routinely provided by practitioners of the genre: ‘‘Performance artists remind their audiences: There is no artifice here, this is happening now. . . .’’48 Far from straightforwardly invoking the live as the immediate presentation of a living body, Wilson’s remarks underscore the fact that the ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ of performance are not confirmed by the presence of the living artist. The need for a supplemental reminder that the ‘‘here’’ is here and the ‘‘now’’ is now is a need for

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an abstract reference to the fact that something is ‘‘happening.’’ Without confirmation that ‘‘this’’ is happening—however diverse or extreme ‘‘this’’ may appear—here and now are never enough to confirm that ‘‘this’’ is this. The living artist supplements the occurrence of the happening, rather than the other way around. In the process, the activity of the performance artist actually calls into question the flexibility and critical acumen for which performance art is so prized, condemned as the performer is to reminding us that ‘‘this’’ is ‘‘this’’ and not something else. It is a bizarre art indeed that subordinates life itself to the imperative that something take place, something that may be neither art nor life. Precisely which elements of later performance art, then, does Kafka’s story prefigure? The nebulousness of the hunger artist’s activity and the uncertainty about whether he is doing anything at all seem to hint at the presence of a tangible physical danger, as if his corporeal existence were the main point after all. The ostensibly peaceful, if bizarre, atmosphere of the narrative is forever on the verge of tipping over into something more violent, as when the narrator observes, in a disarmingly casual tone, that the people watching over the artist are ‘‘usually butchers, strangely enough.’’49 The macabre side to this tale about a skeleton behind bars is heightened by the sense that the artist may at any moment be about to become a sacrificial lamb, a victim of cannibalism, or even a meal for a circus animal.50 In short, the challenge of hunger art is both abstract (Does it exist? What does it mean for such an art to exist?) and concrete (Does this art not ‘‘occur’’ precisely by putting the physical body of its artist in jeopardy ‘‘on stage’’?). At this juncture, it is important to note that the story never proposes that the audience’s doubts about the artist and what he is doing are the source of his popularity problems. Having monitored the artist’s activities for some time, the town’s impresario has discovered that after about forty days the public begins to lose interest in the spectacle. The change is not, however, attributed to any growing assumption on their part that the hunger artist must be cheating. The logic of the artist’s performance and his public’s reactions to it follow no common pattern and are at times perplexingly indifferent to one another, a tension that is clearest when the impresario halts the hunger art after its fortieth day. In the story’s most descriptive scene, a passage distinguished by an elaborate blend of biblical, maternal, and sexual imagery, the townspeople, captivated by a combination of fear and amazement, help the half-starved figure out of his cage and watch as he takes his

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first bites of food. Only when it ceases does hunger art allow for a truly successful spectacle that raises no questions about what is ‘‘really’’ happening, bringing the town together as a group. On the other hand, this semblance of social unity is produced by ignoring the hunger artist, who is incensed that he must stop performing.51 If anything, his objections are open to greater misinterpretation than was his hunger performance since the townspeople assume that he is unhappy because he is hungry rather than because he has been forced to stop fasting. At this point, the impresario intervenes, deciding that it is the faster’s unruly behavior rather than some violation of his art that warrants an apology: ‘‘Yet the impresario had a way of punishing these outbreaks which he rather enjoyed putting into operation. He would apologize publicly for the artist’s behavior, which was only to be excused, he admitted, because of the irritability caused by fasting; a condition hardly to be understood by well-fed people.’’52 As if this were not enough, the impresario goes even further and refutes the artist’s claims that he feels well by producing photographs of him that purportedly make it clear that he is on his last legs. The story does not explain why these still images are more persuasive evidence of his exhaustion than the living body itself, but it is stressed that their appearance immediately makes the artist stop protesting. Margot Norris has argued that these ‘‘frozen’’ images are an extension of the artist’s performance itself. As he fasts on and on, she writes, ‘‘he becomes a frozen tableau vivant, a human being who never eats and therefore virtually never moves.’’53 In these terms, hunger art becomes a kind of bodily expression only by facilitating supplemental, noncorporeal representations. As we will shortly see, the problem with this interpretation is that the artist may present us with supplements to his performance that are not first and foremost representational. In any case, at this point in the narrative a logic of displacement is in evidence. Rather than trying to understand the hunger artist’s activity as a meaningful process in its own terms, readings of the story have tended to follow the impresario’s cue and search for a way of understanding the fasting as a labor in the service of higher ends, depriving it of any independent significance. Kafka’s tale thus becomes a narrative about asceticism or religious devotion, a Romantic striving for an unrealizable absolute, or a parable about a misunderstood creator confounded by the ignorance of the society in which he lives. In these terms, hunger art is not an interest in its

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own right, and it enters only imperfectly into an economy in which an audience could take an interest in its interests. In a similar vein, the artist’s hunger is deemed a source of hardship and misery because he is assumed to be physically (and probably mentally) ill. As they align themselves with the impresario, readers of Kafka’s story also align themselves with the townspeople, who assume that the hunger artist is simply being modest when he informs them that fasting is actually the ‘‘easiest thing in the world.’’ To be sure, the artist’s determination and dedication, particularly his refusal to give up his craft long after it has ceased to be popular, prompt the narrator to inform us that he is ‘‘fanatical,’’ but this does not explain why it should be ‘‘the easiest thing in the world’’ to disregard the performer’s claims about his activity. Why are we so loath to allow hunger art to be treated as the art of hungering? There might be no pressing need to describe what an affirmation of a hunger logic might be were it not for the closing paragraphs of the story, which include the artist’s first and only comments the narrator sees fit to quote directly. Following the decline of the town’s interest in hunger art and several failed attempts to convert the performance into a traveling show, the artist is relegated to a circus where he is left alone in his cage, gradually all but forgotten, and allowed to fast unchecked. If his performance was previously invisible, now no one even tries to see what cannot be seen: ‘‘He might fast as much as he could [konnte], and he did so; but nothing could [konnte] save him now, people passed him by.’’54 Reuniting Kunst with its etymological root in German, ko¨nnen, hunger art appears to be freed from the dictates of interest and open to an unlimited horizon of possibilities, although even this cannot save the artist from ignominy, or worse, anonymity. Eventually, some circus attendants discover the artist in his cage, wasted away to the point of near invisibility: ‘‘ ‘Are you still fasting?’ asked the overseer, ‘When on earth do you mean to stop?’ ’’55 The narrator has described the artist’s storytelling and singing, as well as his claims about the ease of his art, as failed attempts at communication and self-expression. Nobody believed him when he said fasting was easy, and nobody took his singing or his chatter as proof that he was not eating. Beyond these unsuccessful speech acts, the artist has proven even more inarticulate at every critical juncture, for example, when the impresario angers him by interrupting his performances, at which point he bellows with rage like an animal.

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Only when the vigilant faster has become no more than a bodiless whisper does hunger art find its voice and confront the possibility that it may be neither art nor something that can be performed: ‘‘Forgive me, everybody [Verzeiht mir alle],’’ whispered the hunger artist. ‘‘Of course,’’ said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, ‘‘we forgive you.’’ ‘‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting,’’ said the hunger artist. ‘‘We do admire it,’’ said the overseer, affably. ‘‘But you shouldn’t admire it,’’ said the hunger artist. ‘‘Well then we don’t admire it,’’ said the overseer, ‘‘but why shouldn’t we admire it?’’ ‘‘Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,’’ said the hunger artist. ‘‘What a fellow you are,’’ said the overseer, ‘‘and why can’t you help it?’’ ‘‘Because . . . because I couldn’t find the food I liked [die Speise, die mir schmeckt]. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’’56

Although the artist’s confession suggests that his art was not worthy of admiration because it was not the product of an autonomous choice, the force of the imperative to fast is quickly parodied by the explanation that the problem has arisen because it is impossible for the artist to find anything tasty to eat—a dilemma more whimsical than words such as ‘‘will’’ or ‘‘necessity’’ imply. The predicament is clear: Should one follow the circus attendant’s lead and interpret these remarks as evidence of mental instability (or at least of a confusion induced by starvation), or is the artist actually saying something essential about his vocation that may fundamentally change our conception of it? If we take the hunger artist at his word, Kafka’s story can be accused of reducing asceticism to a lack of interest. Alternatively, it can be argued that the artist’s final ‘‘admission’’ is an indication that he ‘‘makes some spiritual progress, in that, at his dying moment, he is no longer proud of his achievement.’’57 In fact, neither interpretation does justice to the shock value of these final remarks. Far from simply invoking a distinction between spiritual nourishment and material food and drink, they imply that hunger was neither a means nor an end, but a side effect of the fact that the artist could find no food to his taste—meaning that his art was grounded not in skill, genius, or even persistence, but in an illusion born of a lack produced by the quirks of a picky eater.58 Only by chance, it would appear, does hunger art prove to have had anything to do with art or hunger. Having introduced this potentially shocking information and seemingly transformed everything we had to this point assumed about our performer,

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the narrator brings the story to a speedy conclusion. As the artist expires, his eyes reveal ‘‘that he continued to fast.’’ No tears are shed, and the cage is immediately turned over to a panther, for which the cramped circumstances evidently do not serve as a hindrance: ‘‘He seemed not even to miss his freedom.’’59 The panther’s feline body appears to carry its freedom with it, and most importantly, it immediately gets the food it likes. While the contrast between the panther and the artist is obvious, this very clarity obscures the fact that the precise nature of their differences is far from self-evident. The panther’s freedom is a freedom of the mouth and jaw—‘‘Somewhere in his jaws [freedom] seemed to lurk and the joy of life streamed with . . . ardent passion from his throat’’60 —but the good luck by which the panther finds something to its taste (‘‘die Nahrung, die ihm schmeckte’’) suggests that it is anything but discriminating. Physical autonomy underwrites no higher sensibility. The animal’s freedom remains only the freedom of instinct, that is, the freedom of having no taste at all.61 In contrast, the artist has been given the ‘‘freedom’’ to pursue his art to its logical conclusion, but he has not had the opportunity (whether due to luck, fate, or personal failings) to exercise his taste. However extreme the artist’s behavior may appear, there is always the possibility that he only looks like a self-sacrificing ascetic and has merely been hampered by strange circumstances. Of course, to pursue the implications of these details may already amount to falling into the trap of taking the artist’s final utterances too seriously and forgetting that it is entirely unclear who in this scene is to be taken at his word. In this regard, we need to ask whether the artist’s closing statements should be understood as mere commentary on his art—for example, as an explanation of its conditions of (im)possibility—or rather as a part, perhaps even an essential part, of his performance proper. The key lies in what the artist says when he exercises his own ‘‘freedom of the jaw’’ and, unlike the panther, speaks: ‘‘Forgive me everybody [Verzeiht mir alle].’’ Following the impresario’s lead, the artist has taken it upon himself to make his performance verzeihlich, although at first glance, the ensuing exchange is as unsuccessful as his previous attempts to communicate with others. The attendant answers the artist’s initial request and subsequent clarifications mechanically, gesturing to his associates that they are dealing with someone who is mentally impaired. Yet what interest—self-interest, spectatorial interest, performance interest—is served by playing along and responding ritualistically ‘‘We forgive you’’ before there is any indication as to why the

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artist is asking for forgiveness? Why is it vital for the attendant that the artist’s remarks—again, the first ones cited by the narrator—be summarily dismissed? Verzeiht mir alle. The first and last whisper of hunger art is a far more complex performance than it may initially appear.62 To be a sincere and worthy plea, a request for forgiveness must be presented with conviction, like a demand. ‘‘Forgive me’’ must mean, ‘‘Forgive me because I should be forgiven’’—any less adamant an entreaty would seem undeserving. On the other hand, forgiveness is only forgiveness if it does not have to be given: a request for forgiveness remains one only insofar as it has no power to prefigure or presuppose the reply it seeks. A request for forgiveness must make a demand, although by definition, what it demands can be the object of no demand. Suspended between these restrictions, a performance that begins by asking ‘‘Forgive me’’ necessarily remains incomplete until it has been answered with ‘‘We forgive you.’’ In this respect, the circus attendant’s reply to the artist is not necessarily evidence of his control over the situation; it may indicate that he does not understand the solicitation with which he is confronted or that, according to the ritual’s logic, he has no choice but to answer, even if his answer sounds routine or insincere. If ‘‘Forgive me’’ is a request that cannot determine the response it receives, what law—religious, ethical, or aesthetic—dictates that there will always be a response, even if it is ‘‘only’’ a formal quip, or mere silence?63 The attendant’s need to stress the formality of his reply with a gesture to his associates to indicate that the artist is insane suggests that the attendant is aware that the answer ‘‘You are forgiven’’ is by no means an unambiguous—much less a voluntary, or even sane—act and cannot be relied on to bring the conversation to a close. The more the attendant strives to speak as though he does not take what the artist says seriously, the more implausible it becomes for him to have spoken to the artist in the first place. In other words, the longer the exchange continues, the more the attendant becomes a foil: a pretext for the request for forgiveness or a dutiful participant in a ceremony chanting ‘‘We forgive you’’ on command. If to speak to the hunger speaker is to find oneself subordinated to the logic of hunger speak, then from the artist’s perspective, ‘‘Forgive me’’ may be a completely sane reply to the query, ‘‘When will you stop fasting?’’ If the only response to ‘‘Forgive me’’ is another speech act, this might mean that forgiveness—whatever it may look or sound like—is nothing

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more or less than the utterance ‘‘We forgive you.’’ Presumably, the circus attendant would be quite surprised to learn that uttering ‘‘We forgive you’’ indicates that he has understood the artist’s request, much less actually meant anything in reply. In this sense, ‘‘Forgive me’’ asks, ‘‘Forgive me for asking you to decipher what ‘Forgive me’ means,’’ which suggests that ‘‘Forgive me’’ is a self-defeating exclamation that undermines itself by generating a further need for forgiveness in the very act of asking for it. If we are inclined to assume that we ask for forgiveness for something we say or do, the reverse may be equally true, that is, a request for forgiveness may be the prerequisite of any and every speech act, the act’s anticipation of its own inevitable misfiring.64 ‘‘Forgive me’’ would thus constitute not the artist’s commentary on his art, but an intensification of the fasting itself, the opening of his performance onto the hunger of a language for which his various spectators will have no phrase or expression that can serve as a nourishing remedy. In these terms, Ver-zeihen—a de-reference or de-signification65—is the act, or better, the sideshow or side act, that traverses any and every articulation, at once celebrating and lamenting the fact that language presents itself as both the paradigm of performance and the ultimate obstacle to such a paradigm.66 Verzeihung seeks Verzeihung for Verzeihung, for the very possibility that there can be an utterance—‘‘Forgive me’’—that demands a response it cannot acknowledge for a hunger over which it has no control. One may object that our analysis relies on the assumption that linguistic performance has a paradigmatic status for performance as such. After all, if those critics who are interested in characterizing all human praxis as performance have applauded the idea that language is inherently performative, the identification of language with praxis has been a source of considerable unease. The proposal that there may be no such thing as a nonverbal act has frequently been attacked because it is thought to accord language an idealized power to shape the world. This anxiety is misplaced. Discourses for which the notion of a nonverbal act is of little or no interest invariably prove to be expose´s of the essential unreliability of language on both an epistemological and a practical level.67 Conceived of as the model of performance, language is the most thoroughgoing challenge to its own ability to assert knowledge or perform acts. From this perspective, the lesson of hunger art is that all performances take place as the confirmation of and attempted escape from a hunger for

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Verzeihung, a hunger that paradoxically both precedes and follows the performance, and which both relies on and seeks to free itself from the possibility that language is the model for and impediment to any concept of performance. At the height of his powers, forgotten in a cage where he has wasted away to the point that he barely remains a corporeal being, Kafka’s hunger artist becomes a performance artist by requesting forgiveness for his art. His request is ‘‘live’’ not because it is delivered by a living speaker or happens in front of a present audience, but because it treats its own performance as the ultimate guarantor of and challenge to the capacity of any and every art to perform. His hunger art challenges the models by virtue of which it is to be understood, but not simply by revealing that the artist fasted for contingent reasons rather than out of religious conviction or because of a personal desire for unparalleled accomplishment. The request for forgiveness opens the performance of hunger up to a hunger of language that the performance can neither recognize as a guide or model nor dismiss as some external ‘‘other.’’ Hunger art happens when the performance of hunger is suspended by the paraperformance of linguistic fasting that no artist, spectator, or impresario can call his or her own. In these terms, Kafka’s story allows us to formulate some general conclusions about the challenges that confront the contemporary social sciences and humanities in their attempt to establish performance as the paradigm of aesthetic or political praxis. To perform is both to invoke and to supersede a pre-text, pre-tense, or preliminary form—what we will call a ‘‘pre-performance.’’68 In order to become more than the mere repetition of a pattern or model, a performance must overstep the determinations, capacities, or intentions of its pre-performance, i.e., it must effectively demonstrate that the pre-performance is simply a formality or a pale imitation of what is to follow. In this respect, a performance may even reveal that the pre-performance—what was to be per-formed, ‘‘carried through in due form’’ (OED)—is first constituted by the performance itself. To ‘‘carry out in due form’’ is thus both to form and to deform, which is to say that every performance is the transformation of a pre-performance into something both pre- and postperformative. At the same time, a performance never entirely dispenses with the mold, model, or intention that shapes or incites it. Indeed, if it does not constantly refer to what it per-forms, a performance is only a form or the instance of a form, a model or the example of a model. Defined by the way it overtakes,

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overreaches, or overcomes the form it per-forms, a performance must falter in transcending this form or become one itself. As a pretense to action, a performance never completes the modulation from form to act, which is to say, the pre-performance never becomes fully postperformative. In short, a performance is the completion of an act, but considered as an act of completion, it can never present itself as complete. Often praised for its capacity to ironize, performance is ironically the praxis least able to mark the difference between a real and a feigned act, or between a genuine agent and a pretender to action. At the very moment it solidifies its claim to dynamism, flexibility, and critique, performance is necessarily open to the charge of being toothless or solipsistic, a parody of nothing more than itself. Far from simply celebrating performance as a tool in the fight against identity politics and the bourgeois subject, Kafka’s story suggests that our accounts of the relationship between aesthetics and politics are woefully inadequate to decide whether the freedom of this faster in a cage is a paradigm of liberty or slavery, much less how this freedom’s status changes if we call it ‘‘art’’ or maintain that it is ‘‘just’’ a performance. For contemporary performance studies and its critique of the representational structure of events, Kafka’s work offers an urgent warning about the pitfalls of assuming that we know what it means to say that ‘‘art happens.’’ From the perspective of Kant’s theory of communicability and Schlegel’s concept of Bildung, Kafka provides an example of an imperative—Forgive me!—that both calls for a language that is not yet possible, a language that would need no forgiveness, and challenges the authority of language to become art. If our reply to the hunger artist is ‘‘That’s interesting,’’ then we must concede that the demands of Kant’s aesthetic judgment and Schlegel’s insights into the instability of individuality have failed to interrupt the sovereignty of interest in a lasting way. On the other hand, if we can read Kafka’s story as a call to conceive of literature not as a discourse defined by specific styles and themes but as a revolution in language itself, then we are much closer to engaging the full import of the Kantian legacy.

two

Breaking the Laws of Language Our concern is with actions of which perhaps the world has never had an example. . . . — i m m a n u e l k a n t , Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

The doctrine of productive imagination that informs Kant’s theory of art would appear to complement his discourse on freedom, the cornerstone of the three Critiques. It is far from obvious, however, whether Kant’s efforts to develop a model of practical human autonomy are in any sense ‘‘clarified’’ by his statement that poetry ‘‘sets the imagination free.’’ A great deal of scholarship on Romanticism has relied, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption of a substantive connection between creativity and liberty—if not their outright identity—but this position is rarely evaluated by trying to use it as a vantage point from which to reread Kant’s texts on ethics or epistemology. If it has become routine, for instance, to disparage Friedrich Schiller for the ideological dangers of his reductive interpretation of Kantian aesthetics, it is more difficult to show how the theory of imaginative spontaneity can support progressive political impulses. Of course, even to pose the problem in these terms may seem old-fashioned. For contemporary theorists in the social sciences and humanities, the 47

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concept of freedom is often viewed as an outdated topic, of little significance for the ideological challenges of the twenty-first century. In this regard, we tend to take our cue from John Stuart Mill, who averred in his famous essay On Liberty that though we do well to be concerned with political liberties— with an individual’s sovereignty vis-a`-vis restrictions imposed by the community or the state—speculations about the autonomy of a metaphysical spirit are likely to be misleading.1 Similarly, we trust that in discussions of ‘‘free’’ speech or the ‘‘freedom’’ of the press we are referring to something eminently concrete concerning the checks particular groups place on people’s behavior, not to acts of will ‘‘based on reason’’—whatever that might mean. Whether one celebrates or disparages this state of affairs as evidence of the triumph of pragmatic liberal ideology, it remains an open question whether our stance ‘‘on liberty’’ is as down to earth as we imagine. When we discuss, for example, whether economic forces are essentially amoral or apolitical, we unwittingly rehearse an eighteenth-century debate about the feasibility of grounding empirical social systems in metaphysical concepts. When we ask if cultural identity and civic responsibility rest on mutually exclusive prescriptions, we tend to rely on the same arguments about individual and group history that nineteenth-century Hegelians would have made. Despite the fact that the Anglo-American philosophical tradition continues to define itself against the perceived excesses of ‘‘Continental’’ thought, the two discourses are hardly strangers to each other. Among those determined to keep Mill’s legacy free of speculative dialectics, Kant’s ethics is a source of considerable anxiety.2 For the Kantian practical subject, self-determination is self-legislation, the act of laying down a law for oneself—a law that paradoxically proves to be universal rather than particular. The abstract quality of this model has left even the most faithful Kantians unwilling or unable to defend it as a guide for human behavior. Kant himself is quite explicit about the complexities of his doctrine, although his concerns are not necessarily those of his detractors. The basic question driving his moral philosophy is whether it is possible for human beings to recognize themselves as responsible for their own actions, that is, whether the capacity for self-determination is necessarily at odds with the powers of self-knowledge. In the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant offers the well-known formula of the categorical imperative: ‘‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can

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at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’’3 Superficially, this may be the most reassuring feature of Kant’s ethics, since it appears both to provide a concrete criterion for action and to permit of exemplification. A moral will, argues Kant, can have no external object as its ground of determination, for in that case it would be guided by specific feelings of pleasure or displeasure that could never be universal for all people. For the subjective principle or ‘‘maxim’’ of an action to become an objective principle of reason, the will must abstract itself from every particular interest or desire in order that it may act on the basis of a maxim that will conflict with no other. If a maxim does not successfully pass this strict test of universalizability, there is always the danger that it is a subjective impulse, hence a hope, aim, or whim that may clash with someone else’s hopes, aims, or whims. In this respect, it is often said that Kantian ethics is based on the principle of noncontradiction. The question is what such a free act of will actually wills. Kant’s notorious answer is that ‘‘if there is a categorical imperative (a law for the will of every rational being), it can command only that everything be done from the maxim of its will as one which could have as its object only itself considered as giving universal law.’’4 As Kant repeats in the second Critique, all that such a will ‘‘wills,’’ properly speaking, is ‘‘the mere form of giving universal law.’’5 Since this law-giving has nothing to do with empirical conditions of justice or injustice or with the relation of specific mental representations to feelings of pleasure or displeasure, it has no purpose outside itself; it is neither a sacrifice nor an act to be weighed and bartered in a moral calculus. In this sense, the act of willing does not follow any preexisting model, pattern, or rule of behavior. It depends neither on an anterior set of circumstances that prompts it nor on an anticipated outcome. Its ‘‘content’’—its status as free—is simply the spontaneity of its law-giving. Kant emphasizes that the object of the will is a ‘‘giving’’ of form rather than a ‘‘given’’ proposition or statute, for if the will is subject to an existing law, even one it spontaneously provides for itself, then it is potentially linked to this law by particular rather than universal interests. What, then, is this curious ‘‘form’’? Kant’s answer, of course, is that the law is articulated as an imperative with the modal auxiliary sollen (‘‘should/shall,’’ ‘‘ought,’’ ‘‘to be supposed to’’). The expression of the will’s command to itself, should is the condition of possibility of the ultimate speech act of reason, the utterance by virtue of which we realize that we conceive of ideas as objective

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forces. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is quite explicit about the issues at work: ‘‘Now, that this reason has causality, or that we at least conceive such a causality in it, is evident from the imperatives, which, in all that is practical, we impose as rules on the performative powers. ‘Should’ [das Sollen] expresses [dru¨ckt . . . aus] a kind of necessity and connection with grounds that does not otherwise occur [sonst nicht vorkommt] in all of nature.’’6 It is not enough to say—as Kant in fact will—that should expresses an intelligible action, an act of reason based on objective necessity as opposed to the events of nature based in appearances. As the expression of the difference between what is and what ought to be, should has an evidentiary function of a near-empirical quality. It expresses something that ‘‘does not otherwise occur in all of nature,’’ which means that it does intrude ‘‘in’’ nature and thereby potentially becomes an object of cognition. On the other hand, should is not in any sense natural, and it clearly expresses something beyond the realm of appearances. ‘‘Indeed,’’ Kant writes, ‘‘should, if one has merely the course of nature before one’s eyes, has no meaning whatsoever.’’7 In all of these descriptions, should reveals the power of language to articulate independently of any intention, cause, or meaning that may or may not be expressed. In a truly rational discourse, all words first and foremost say ‘‘should,’’ that is, they declare that language ‘‘should’’ have the power to express, and that this power ‘‘should’’ hold sway prior to anything else language may be said to do. In this context, Kant goes to some lengths to underscore the intrinsic finitude of the human will, arguing that imperatives exist only for beings who, unlike gods, do not ‘‘always do something simply because the thing is presented . . . as good to do.’’8 In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel objects to Kant’s reliance on this dimension of should: ‘‘Yet what may be called the laziness of thought, when dealing with the supreme Idea, finds a too easy mode of evasion in the ‘should be [Sollen]’; instead of the actual realization of the ultimate end, it clings hard to the disjunction of the concept from reality.’’9 Remarks such as these have done a great deal to promote the interpretation of Kant as a dualistic thinker unwilling to accept the idealistic implications of his theories. Kant, however, was less confident than Hegel that should is defined by a disjunction between subjective concepts of purpose and objective reality. If the existence of imperatives betray the status of the human will as less than divine, imperatives betrays the status of language as finite. For Kant, should—the expression of language’s power to

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express—can never express that it is truly a categorical rather than a hypothetical imperative that presents ‘‘the practical necessity of a possible action as a means to achieving something one desires.’’10 On this point, Kant is unambiguous: ‘‘But it must not be overlooked that it cannot be shown by any example that there is such an imperative. Rather, it is to be suspected that all imperatives which appear to be categorical are tacitly hypothetical.’’11 Reducible neither to the subjective impulses of an individual nor to the objective reality of an imperative in which essence and appearance would coincide, should unsettles the duality with which Hegel seeks to condemn it. In this regard, it is important to emphasize that Kant’s should is not a speech act. It says ‘‘ought,’’ not ‘‘is’’ or ‘‘will be.’’ The expression of language’s power to express, should nonetheless reminds us that language does not craft reality in its own image. Even though should commands that language should be able to do more than say ‘‘should,’’ it cannot guarantee that this demand can or will be met. Should says that there should be language that could express itself as both possible and actual, hence, that there should be a language that would transcend should; but—and here is the disjunction that concerns Kant—no empirical instance of language can confirm or deny its capacities on this score. The language of imperatives is the purest expression of reason’s ability to be practical as well as theoretical, but such articulations are always open to the charge of idling in indeterminacy rather than effecting genuine deeds. The categorical imperative is the foundation of Kant’s ethical system, his central account of how autonomous action and the knowledge of such action might be possible. The more we examine this doctrine, however, the more important, and the more potentially problematic, its underlying model of expression appears. Why, we might ask, is the discourse of an ethical agent that proves its autonomy through self-legislation not itself self-legislating? Is not the form-giving of the will primarily an act of presupposing the existence of language, suggesting that should is the word with which language crowns itself as linguistic? If autonomy is, as Kant writes, ‘‘the property of the will to be law to itself,’’ then to what extent must we speak of language itself as autonomous, i.e., as governed by rules that are entirely its own?12 Over the last fifty years, literary criticism has benefited greatly from a willingness to follow the lead of linguistics and approach language as some-

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thing that can be scientifically studied as a system with identifiable rules and procedures. One possible drawback of such research, however, is that it risks bypassing the more fundamental question of whether language is an inherently rule-bound phenomenon, not to mention Kant’s concern about precisely whose rules these might be. Indeed, the most far-reaching deconstructive challenges to the referential or signifying capacities of discourse can unwittingly take the lawful nature of their object of inquiry for granted. Even when language is said invariably to misfire, it is held to function according to parameters that can be delineated and codified, and we are still operating with a norm of communication from which linguistic acts are believed to deviate. What would it mean if language distinguished itself from other systems by its inevitable transgressions of its own laws? What, in other words, if the norms of language were precisely what language unavoidably shatters? Whether they are believed to reflect cultural mores or to shape them, debates about the ‘‘rules’’ of language have always had a significant place in social and political discourse. Where the Imperial Romans modeled their legislative self-understanding on rhetorical doctrines, today we model the resolution of everything from jurisprudential disputes to controversies about war and the media on speech-act theory. One venue in which the ideological implications of different linguistic paradigms are explored with particular rigor is the drama, a genre that has historically been seen to confirm literature’s claim to play a central role in the construction of communities on both a local and a national level. In linking rules about the world with rules about how words work to the point they become virtually inseparable, dramas tends to raise certain kinds of questions about the lawful and unlawful nature of language that are rarely posed elsewhere. In the generation that followed Kant, perhaps no author explored these issues with the uncompromising vigilance of Heinrich von Kleist. His oeuvre has always been heralded as unique, although there is little agreement about precisely what makes it so distinctive. Almost two centuries after Kleist’s death, plays such as Penthesilea and Amphitryon continue to delight with their dark and playful—not to mention uncannily prescient—insights into many of our own most pressing concerns about religion, politics, and gender. At the same time, the tone of Kleist’s dramas and his short stories is notoriously difficult to pin down, both in individual scenes and from the

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perspective of a given work’s overarching themes. What at one moment appears almost threateningly ironic is sanguinely straightforward the next. This curious style is nowhere more in evidence than in Prince Friedrich of Homburg, a profoundly ambiguous text that has confounded generations of directors, actors, and audiences with its dreamy pace and mysteriously anticlimactic ‘‘resolution.’’ In anecdotal terms, Prince Friedrich constitutes a failed attempt to mobilize a moment in Brandenburg history in order to honor the Prussian aristocracy. Dedicated to ‘‘Her Royal Highness the Princess Amalie Marie Anne,’’ ostensibly in hopes of securing the position of court poet for its author, the play is ominously remembered as the last production of Kleist’s short career, if not as the work whose disastrous reception drove him to suicide. The drama was never performed in Kleist’s lifetime on account of Princess Wilhelmina’s conviction that the honor of her family (the Hessen-Homburg line) was injured by its depiction of a Prussian soldier dreading death. Further criticism from military and court circles derailed negotiations for the work’s publication in 1811. When opening night finally did take place in Vienna in October of 1821, audience reactions ranged from dismay to disgust. Similar problems plagued performances later that year in Berlin, and King Friedrich Wilhelm III banned the play after its third performance. Prince Friedrich finally had some success about two decades later, but, as was typical of almost all of its performances in the nineteenth century, this followed substantial editing: the names of the characters were changed, and most of the Prince’s speeches were modified or eliminated altogether. Kleist—who purportedly went so far as to alter the drama’s first scene and insert the last scene in an effort to appease his critics—gives no indication in his private papers that he worried that his play would follow anything but the normal routes of public reception.13 Uncertainties about precisely why it did not live up to expectations reflect the broader confusions that confront any attempt to understand what the play means. Does it praise and glorify the Prussian state, or does it mock it? Is the Prince an insightful hero or a buffoon? Is his father figure, the Elector, a noble statesman, a careless ruler, or a tyrant? In few texts is the general tonal orientation so obviously indefinite. Were it not for the fact that the Prince begins and ends the play in some sort of ‘‘dream’’ or ‘‘stupor,’’ it might be possible to say that Prince Friedrich rehearses a clash between the state and the individual. As the curtain rises, the Elector and his entourage discover the Prince sitting in the palace garden, half-awake, half-

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asleep, weaving a laurel wreath. The intruders quickly assume the role of mischievous players, snatching the wreath from him before he can crown himself with it and withdrawing as he slowly comes to his senses. Five acts later, this scene is repeated in a ritualistic fashion, except that this time the dreaming Prince is actually crowned with the wreath and, his death sentence evidently forgotten, given a hero’s salute just before everyone rushes off to resume warring with the enemies of Brandenburg. Although the play opens and closes with a play within a play, there is a play in between, as well. During the central battle scene, the Prince disobeys the Elector’s orders and commands his unit to attack prematurely. For this act, he is sentenced to death, at which point several characters intervene on his behalf in an effort to have the sentence rescinded. Initially disinclined to take his predicament seriously, the Prince becomes distraught upon seeing the grave being dug for him. In a bizarre twist, the Elector, who has learned of his soldier’s pathetic pleas for mercy, calls upon the Prince to decide for himself whether his sentence is just, whereupon the young soldier undergoes a transformation and announces that he is ready to acknowledge his misdeeds and die. The potentially tragic clash between the state and one of its subjects appears to be a source of genuine consternation, and the resolution of the drama seems to turn on its protagonist’s struggles to constitute himself as a lawful rational agent. The brief remarks Kleist made about the crisis he experienced on reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason have prompted a great deal of discussion about the epistemology underlying his oeuvre. It is far from obvious, however, whether reading Kant and Kleist ‘‘together’’ is a productive exegetical endeavor or a sophisticated strategy for avoiding the very different challenges the two thinkers present.14 If one does wish to pursue the Kant connection with Prince Friedrich, it is tempting to think about the play as a literary exploration of the confounding relationship between knowledge and action at the heart of Kant’s doctrine of moral autonomy or, perhaps even more ambitiously, as a search for an ethico-political language that would respect both the authority of the state and the impulses of its subjects.15 The character of Prince Friedrich would thus be an example of an agent who gives himself the power to prescribe the law. That the Prince often appears to be far from decisive or even conscious need not upset this account. Suspending him between subjective confusion and the objective exigencies of war, Friedrich’s autonomy could be said to render him incom-

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prehensible to himself and to others; the message of Kleist’s play would thus be the pronouncement with which Kant closes the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, namely, that we can only aspire to be moral agents insofar as we comprehend the incomprehensibility of our own freedom. Such a conclusion certainly seems to be borne out by the other figures in the play, who learn that the more one makes assumptions about the Prince’s character or inferences about why he does what he does, the less intelligible his behavior becomes. Unfortunately, it is only somewhat clarifying to view the Prince as a Kantian subject who acts such that the maxim of his action should become a universal law. In its final act, the play dissolves into a quasi-comedy. As the day of execution approaches, the Elector’s forbidding tone softens into cheerfulness, and he behaves more and more like a playful, all-knowing god who has staged the entire event as a lesson for his pupil and is not sure why everyone else has been taking it all so seriously. This shift in tone prompts a retrospective reassessment of the entire drama, and it becomes evident that abrupt swings between tragic and comic moments, often within the space of a few lines, are the norm throughout. Although certain scenes are undeniably ridden with pathos—for example, the characters’ grief at inaccurate reports of the Elector’s death, the Prince’s display of fear, or Natalie’s impassioned pleas to the Elector—the Prince’s decision to attack too early is made only after an aide has surveyed the field and ascertained that victory is theirs. More important, this error manifests itself with mechanical predictability. If the play turns on the attribution of responsibility, intention, or motivation(s) for a (mis)deed in battle, the inevitability of this errant behavior is prefigured to an almost absurd extent. Virtually all of the dramatic action prior to the Prince’s decision to attack before receiving the proper command makes it clear that the Elector’s orders will not be followed. Indeed, the ‘‘preparations’’ for the Prince’s disobedience are so precise that if he were to carry out his instructions correctly, most of the notable scenes of act 1 would become meaningless. To detail the forces that contribute to a decision being made is inexorably to elide its status as a decision; that is, such an explanation dispels the spontaneity and autonomy ostensibly characteristic of a decision by showing that it was actually the product of a set of determinants logically or temporally prior to it. Although this point has become something of a truism in contemporary theoretical discussions, in Prince Friedrich, the dialectic of spon-

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taneity and determination takes an odd turn. The Prince’s ‘‘decision’’ to attack prematurely is foreshadowed to such a degree that it almost does stand outside of the chain of events, not as an instance of his autonomous freedom, but as an instance of his irrelevance. Even if the rest of the action up until the last scene of act 5 is viewed as an elaborate series of attempts by the Prince (and everyone else) to deal with the ramifications of his unusual behavior in the opening scene in the garden, the play’s conclusion does not constitute closure on this score or mark the culmination of a process of intellectual or moral development. To the contrary, the conclusion divides the beginning and the end of the play from the rest of the drama.16 The Prince is crowned with a wreath he wove himself. In between is another play about an error in battle and the efforts to come to terms with that error. So we are back where we started: What does the play mean? Should the audience be moved to laughter or tears? Does the misfiring of a tragic plot suggest a collapse into comedy, or should it have been clear from the opening scene that it is a mistake to speak of tragedy at all?17 The opening scene of Prince Friedrich is an exercise in evaluating the state of the Prince, although the insights garnered here will be forgotten almost immediately by everybody who participates. Unlike the bard of the play’s dedication who aspires to be crowned by somebody else—‘‘She holds the prize that falls to him in hand, and if she crowns him, they all crown him’’—the Prince is discovered in the palace garden, half-awake, halfasleep, weaving a wreath for himself.18 Or so Hohenzollern, in what will prove to be a very influential account of the situation, says: Like a sleepwalker—look, on the bench— Where, asleep, as you would never have believed, Enticed by the moon, he is occupied; Adream in himself, like his own posterity He is weaving his own splendid wreath of fame. Als ein Nachtwandeler, schau, auf jener Bank, Wohin, im Schlaf, wie du nie glauben wolltest, Der Mondschein ihn gelockt, bescha¨ftiget, Sich tra¨umend, seiner eignen Nachwelt gleich, Den pra¨chtgen Kranz des Ruhmes einzuwinden. (22–26)

It is by no means clear when or where the logic of Hohenzollern’s description leaves the dreamer. In a dedication of the self to the self, the Prince is

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said to be ‘‘like his own posterity [seiner eignen Nachwelt gleich]’’ in creating a wreath, an emblem of his future fame. With these remarks, Hohenzollern casts the opening events as a search for a mode of interpretation that will facilitate an understanding of the Prince in terms of his attempts to dedicate himself—his fame, his future, his posterity—to himself. By understanding the weaving of a laurel crown as a proleptic act of self-affirmation, Hohenzollern suspends the Prince between a future of glorious deeds that may take place (perhaps as early as the next day on the battlefield), a future posterity in which the Prince will no longer exist, and a present that exists only as a dream and that retrospectively will never have existed. In this schema, the Prince wins fame for his deeds by relating to them as though they were past achievements of a past subject, which is to say, even in the dream of fame, a dream of a relation between doer and deed, fame is still not something that you dream of winning for yourself, a point that the Elector makes quite aptly: ‘‘One does not win such things in dreams!’’ (76). The dream of fame is a dream of a fame won improperly, a fame that is won before it ever exists and that ceases to exist the moment it is won. This dream logic is further complicated by the Prince’s own account of his dream, in which he makes it clear that although he remembers nearly being crowned, he is not aware that it was he who wove the wreath. The dream is not one of self-creation, but of passivity: the Prince’s visible activity, the weaving, is something of which he has no experience, either awake or in his dream. The act of weaving is neither the anticipation of future renown nor the product of an intention that produced it, which is why the Prince never achieves a perspective on the strange mental ‘‘state’’ in which he begins the play. As the grounds for conclusions about the Prince’s intentions with respect to his actions (dreamlike as these ‘‘intentions’’ may be), the weaving can only take place in a time in which the Prince could never be. Intent is divided from the temporal schema that would coordinate it with an act, and being and being famous threaten to become mutually exclusive—a complication to which the Prince ironically gestures by writing his own epitaph during his lament about an impending death (and afterlife) without fame: ‘‘And a stone says of him: He was!’’ (992). Self-creation occurs as an act that shatters the production of the self as a historical entity at the very moment the self dedicates itself to a future that can never be its own—hence, we have a play about a condemned man who never dies, or at least who is never executed.

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The dedication to the Prussian princess that precedes the opening act of the play suggests that the act of weaving should be understood as the representation of artistic productivity itself and that ‘‘whoever holds the prize in hand can crown one and all.’’ The act of weaving should therefore be the grounds for the Prince’s relation to himself; it should facilitate the dedication of the Prince from himself to himself, from a warrior to a warrior, from a poet to a poet. The Prince, however, weaves this wreath only in the midst of a dream in which the prize is taken out of his hands, trapping him, not between reality and hallucination or waking and sleeping, but between a dream in which he is rewarded for deeds he will never be able to perform and an act of weaving he can never know as his own. The ensuing drama unfolds as a response to this predicament, presenting a series of attempts to reject any aporia at the heart of the praxis of self-construction and any paradox that would undermine the coherent attribution of actions to an ‘‘agent.’’19 This recuperation is by no means necessarily doomed to failure. If these complications point to a difference between winning fame and weaving the crown of one’s own fame rather than a conflation of them, the ostensible epistemological predicament may only concern the existence of a distinction between how fame is achieved and how fame manifests itself as an achievement. The Prince dreams of being famous, and he dreams of being crowned with the wreath he is weaving. What could be simpler? Why could he not hope for both? Moreover, Hohenzollern’s account of the weaving, particularly his comment that the Prince is copying pictures of heroes he has seen in Berlin, suggests that the Prince’s relation to his posterity (Nachwelt) is mimetic (48). In these terms, the act of weaving need not be understood with reference to the dedication of the play as an act of selfcreation, but can simply be read as an act of self-representation grounded in imitation. Yet can the mimesis of poiesis avoid all pretensions to being poietic? The decisive scenario in this regard, the test case, if you like, of the relation between weaving fame and being famous, would be the act of the Prince crowning himself with the wreath he has woven (an act which, in the terms of our previous discussion, would be the impossible act par excellence, the self-creative act of self-erasure). It is precisely this scenario that is never probed in the opening garden scene. The moment the Prince finishes weaving the wreath, the Elector takes it from him, winds a chain around it, and gives it to Natalie, who then withdraws. The Prince never gets a chance to

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mimic the self-elevating act of Napoleon, who created quite a stir at his coronation when at the last moment he took the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowned himself.20 The Elector will subsequently be accused of having erred in playing what from scene 2 on will be referred to as a joke (Scherz) on the Prince (although the Elector will aver that what he terms the ‘‘ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit]’’ of his actions was not unacceptable).21 But what is the joke? And who is it on? The Elector’s remarks at the moment he takes the wreath from the Prince seem illogical in this context: ‘‘I must see how far he’ll take this!’’ (64). Precisely what the Elector does not do is see how far the Prince will take things, that is, whether he will crown himself. In the face of the difficulties presented by the, as Hohenzollern calls him, ‘‘sick’’ Prince, order is restored by cutting him off from that of which he is supposed to be making himself a part, by cutting him off from his comic dream action, his relation to his production of himself, his production of a future self he will never be or have been. The characters must play with the Prince in this opening play within a play, they must play the Prince off against the Prince because they must be able to understand his dreamlike state as the difference between two distinct Princes, one ‘‘half-awake, half-asleep,’’ one alert and self-aware. The problem is that in interrupting the Prince’s play, they appear to lose the ability to interrupt their own.22 From the moment the wreath is taken from the Prince’s hands, it is never clear if he can wake up, or if the other characters can stop playing their play within a play. Acting here means playacting, and it is far from witty. Precisely what the players in this play within a play are unable to do is to pass from the comedy of the joke (Scherz) to the incisiveness of wit (Witz). As Carol Jacobs has noted, the Prince’s place in the battle—the place that he is all too capable of leaving early—is none other than the Hackelwitz, as if the entire play develops as the impossibility of being witzig enough.23 For all its reverberations, the Elector’s joke may never be strong enough to free the sick Prince from the healthy Prince. Of course, the joke in the opening scene may be on the players, for the Prince’s self-crowning is interrupted by putting the crown in Natalie’s hands, thereby substituting one reflexive structure for another, as this scene is aligned with the play’s dedication: now ‘‘she,’’ Natalie, ‘‘holds the prize in hand.’’ In this way, the play, like its own dedication, shelters the dramatic present against the doubly destroyed present of the Prince’s dream, but it does so only by reinscribing that present into a structure of dedication to

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which the play’s dramatic action may relate only as a joke. The divisiveness of the potentially impossible act of self-crowning is so disruptive that interrupting it, however wittily, only underscores the impossibility of relating to it (much less interrupting it) at all. In other words, interrupting the impossible act of self-crowning is either impossible, in which case the play unfolds as the repetition of a suspended disjunction of two impossible events, or possible, in which case the players’ interruption has no relation to the paradoxical essence of self-crowning in the first place and reveals nothing about it. Either way, the interruption of the self-crowning in act 1 is by no means itself necessarily interrupted when the Prince is crowned in the last scene of act 5. The final scene is not simply the repetition, much less an exposition, of the opening one, for it ‘‘completes’’ it only by doing what in scene 1 is impossible, namely, crowning the Prince. The opening scene of Prince Friedrich, a search for a mode of interpretation that will facilitate an understanding of the historical dimension of heroic agency, founders on the weaving scenario: the attempt at a dedication of the self to the self proves only to confound the possibility of knowing the self. The effort to explain what the Prince is doing establishes a relation between the Prince and his posterity that jeopardizes the possibility of relating to the Prince, whereas asking why he is doing what he is doing seems to be a superfluous line of inquiry that offers no insight into his state of mind.24 The act of self-weaving gains significance within the broader logic of the play, however, precisely because the other characters intervene in it. From the start, then, the Prince’s problem is not primarily his relation to himself, but his relation to something or someone other than himself (which initially means the other characters who interrupt him and attempt to evaluate his dreaming). One could argue that this dynamic is paradigmatic not only for the relationship between the Prince and the other characters, but for all interpersonal relations in the play, a point that becomes clearer in the contrast between the various interpretations of the Prince’s behavior in the opening scene in the garden and the accounts of his behavior during the battle. Although the other characters debate the Prince’s decision to attack too early with respect to his intentions or state of mind (In what sense did he know what he was doing? Did he know what he was supposed to be doing?) and with respect to the military consequences of the decision (Would the battle have had a different outcome if he had followed orders?), there is never any

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doubt about the identification of the act with the agent. The Prince committed the crime. This much is not in question. The opening scene in the garden, however, presents a different problem. The claim that the Prince does not know what he is doing—he is asleep, he is dreaming—cannot be discussed independently of the consequences of ‘‘his’’ act, but these consequences must in turn be considered with reference to the act’s interruption by the other characters. In the battle, the identity of act and agent is irrelevant for the meaning of the event, whereas in the opening scene, it is impossible to be sure what the act is, much less whether it matters who committed it. In both instances, subjective agency manifests itself only negatively, as the withdrawal of the attribution of intent from the character or characters. Intention, we might say, is the death of the subject.25 This question is whether these details constitute an insight into the nature of the self (who does or does not act), or into the structure of actions (considered as objective events rather than as the predicates of a subject). To the extent these examples suggest that asking why things were done will not be useful in explaining what they mean (a qualification that greatly complicates the interpretation of the plot in terms of schemas of cause and effect), the effort to explain a relation between a given character and a given action of that character (the effort, that is, to explain an incident as though it were a relation between a subject and predicate) is put in jeopardy. The basic tenet of dramatic theory since Aristotle, the viability of characterizing one who acts in terms of how he or she acts, is suddenly a questionable assumption. The action of Prince Friedrich breaks in upon itself as it becomes a challenge to action as the dramatic paradigm. This is why the characters in Kleist’s play are simultaneously too mechanical and too unpredictable, too generic and too inscrutable, too obvious and too enigmatic. Once the relationship between plot and character cannot be understood as a coherent synthesis of subjects and predicates, of doers and deeds, situating different elements of the plot within a broader explanatory summary becomes impossible. By what standards, for example, are we to decide how ‘‘serious’’ the threatened mutiny by the troops is, not to mention why the Elector puts the Prince’s gross gesture of disobedience aside with scarcely a comment. It is equally difficult to assess any given character’s account of another character’s behavior (for instance, the Prince’s claim that Natalie is the cause of the Elector’s hostile behavior toward him), or to understand how certain characters seem to anticipate others’ actions so ac-

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curately (for example, Natalie’s awareness the moment the Prince receives his letter from the Elector that he will not be willing to claim that he has been treated unjustly). The characters appear to have subjective motives only if they are subsumed by a larger model of unity and telos, that is, only if they are subsumed by an abstraction called the plot; but this abstraction can in turn be understood to have a conceptual content (‘‘the [im]possibility of decision’’) only if its status as determining with respect to the action is negated by the particularity of the characters. The more we focus on the events of the play per se, the more we try to rescue our interpretation by just explaining what happened, the more a strange logic of suspicion permeates the events and dissolves our connections. In other words, the more we try to explain what happened, the less it seems that anything has happened at all. Literary history has tended to argue that a radical dramatic inactivity or stasis is first explored in the works of Anton Chekhov or Luigi Pirandello, or even as late as Samuel Beckett. Here, nearly a century earlier, we find a drama that questions the viability of dramatic agency as such, a drama in which it may be impossible to act in a way that can be recognized as action. Insofar as the dynamic interrelations of character and plot do not unfold as a productive synthesis of subjective activity and objective occurrence, Prince Friedrich constitutes a substantial challenge to any account of the relationship between drama and history couched in terms of the representation of past events. Still, this paradigm of action and the lack thereof, telling as it is for the development of the play as we have pursued it to this point, is incomplete. In laying out its consequences at such length, we risk eliding the role, albeit a somewhat abstract role, of the law. The Prince, we should not forget, breaks the law. From a slightly different perspective, we must now consider the play as a series of efforts to develop a language of decision, a language of intentions, and most importantly, a language of the law, a language by virtue of which the Prince can be put before the law and justice can run its course. At first, it appears as though this language will be constituted in an Adamic scene of naming. At the beginning of the play in the garden, nobody chooses to follow Hohenzollern’s advice—‘‘Call [the Prince] by name and he’ll fall down’’ (31)—but the strategy proves to be very effective in the fourth scene when it is finally deployed: ‘‘Hohenzollern: ‘Arthur!’ Stage direction: The Prince falls down’’ (87). There are strong suggestions that this fall in the garden (of Eden) is the Prince’s fall away from the power of

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naming. In his trance, the Prince, the princely Adam, bestows the other characters (to their collective confusion) with names: ‘‘My bride!’’ ‘‘My father!’’ ‘‘My mother!’’ (65, 67, 68). Once he wakes in a fall at the sound of his name, however, he finds himself unable to remember Natalie’s name, exclaiming: ‘‘No matter, no matter / Since I awoke, the name escapes me / And means little to us here [Gleichviel! Gleichviel! / Der Name ist mir, seit ich erwacht, entfallen, / Und gilt zu dem Versta¨ndnis hier gleichviel]’’ (155–56). The ‘‘Fall’’—a fall from names, a fall from grace, a fall into consciousness—that marks the Prince’s failure to be like his own posterity and that may constitute his inability to name himself is expressed not in terms of equality (Gleichheit) or inequality, but as an exclamation of indifference (Gleichgu¨ltigkeit): Gleichviel!26 This exclamation subsequently multiplies to the extent that it becomes the central word in the play.27 In act 2, when the Prince is confronted with the news of the Elector’s ‘‘displeasure’’ at his actions during the battle and retorts that they did after all defeat the Swedes, Hohenzollern answers: ‘‘It doesn’t matter: The order is to be obeyed [Gleichviel!—Der Satzung soll Gehorsam sein]’’ (775). Surprised that his friend is not bringing him his weapon and setting him free, the Prince responds in kind: Prince: I thought you, you were bringing me my dagger—No matter! Hohenzollern: I don’t know anything. Prince: It’s irrelevant, you hear, irrelevant! Prinz: Ich glaubte, du, du bringst [den Degen] mir—Gleichviel! Hohenzollern: Ich weiß von nichts. Prinz: Gleichviel, du ho¨rst; gleichviel! (796–98) This curious ‘‘indifference’’ takes a final turn when Hohenzollern tells the Prince that the Elector was given the death sentence from the military court and, rather than pardoning the Prince as the judgment allowed, ordered that it be brought for his signature. By now, the Prince’s response should be obvious: ‘‘So what. You hear [Gleichviel. Du ho¨rst]’’ (883–84). For once, however, Hohenzollern answers in kind: ‘‘So what? [Gleichviel?]’’ (885). His gleichviel countered with gleichviel, the Prince is suddenly convinced of the seriousness of his situation and proclaims that it is impossible that the Elector could be sentencing him to death. The question is whether Hohenzollern negates the Prince’s indifference with indifference, or whether gleichviel

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is ‘‘like’’ gleichviel (gleichviel gleich) in such a way that it can articulate a relation to the death sentence that is something other than like or unlike, gleich or ungleich. Whereas in act 1 gleichviel is associated with the loss of the Prince’s power to name names, here it hints at a broader problem that will become more and more evident as the play continues: the inability of the law and its judgments to name the differences between identity (Gleichheit), similarity, and indifference (Gleichgu¨ltigkeit). Indeed, with the specter of the French Revolution’s guillotine lurking in the background, equality may in the last instance be nothing other than the opportunity for everyone to have an equal shot at losing one’s head, the head on which one might be crowned with a laurel wreath. If gleichviel is a somewhat improbable name for the lawfulness of the law, subsequent efforts in the drama to compare and contrast various other terms (‘‘fate,’’ ‘‘the Fatherland,’’ ‘‘luck,’’ and ‘‘war’’) make it seem less and less likely that any confrontation between the Prince and the law will ever take place. Following the battle and his return from the dead, the Elector announces that whoever has led the cavalry in its premature charge is to be put before the military court and sentenced to death. Informed (incorrectly) that it was not the Prince who was at fault, the Elector adds that even if the victory had been ten times greater that day, ‘‘That’s no excuse / For him, through whom chance [Zufall] sent me the victory. / I have more battles to fight than just these, / And I want the law to be obeyed.’’ (731–34). Later in an argument with Kottwitz (who has noted that they did not, after all, lose the battle), the Elector makes the point even more graphically: I do not like victory which, a child of chance, Falls to me; I want to uphold the law, The mother of my crown, which Spawns me a race of victories. Den Sieg nicht mag ich, der, ein Kind des Zufalls, Mir von der Bank fa¨llt; das Gesetz will ich, Die Mutter meiner Krone, aufrecht halten, Die ein Geschlecht von Siegen mir erzeugt! (1566–69)

The progeny of the law is to be distinguished from that which merely falls to one by chance (‘‘ein Kind des Zufalls, / Mir von der Bank fa¨llt’’). The law is to be maintained upright (aufrecht gehalten), and its products are not to fall at all. The Elector, the representative of the law, assumes that the

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law is responsible for demonstrating the difference between the case (Fall) of victory through chance (Zufall) and the case (Fall) of victory through the law (der Beweis des Unterschieds fa¨llt dem Gesetz zu). Nevertheless, once Zufall is put into a relation with the law, once there is a case, ein Fall, of the law, even if it is a Fall of radical contrast, the other of the law, Zufall, becomes a law in its own right. The lawfulness of the law falls to chance (Die Gesetzlichkeit des Gesetzes fa¨llt dem Zufall zu). Since any victory will collide with chance (mit Zufall in Konflikt kommen oder gegen den Zufall verstoßen), chance becomes the (anti)law of the law. If it is to be truly absolute, the law cannot determine the principles of its own lawfulness without thereby becoming one law among others, one more Fall of law. Accordingly, the law of laws is powerless to prevent its regression, its Fall, back into a multiplicity of competing statutes. The highest law cannot account for its relation to that in the name of which it is the law, because the very attribution of names—far from stabilizing the relation between subject and predicate or between actor and act—reveals itself in the case of the law (im Fall des Gesetzes) to be already fallen. As with Schlegel’s theory of Romantic poetry, the law is absolute only insofar as it tolerates no other law. In other words, there can be no lawful self-presentation of the law as law. In its uniqueness, the law must appear as thoroughly broken. Only in its total collapse, its utter fallen-ness, can the law distinguish itself from everything that would be a Fall or a Zu-fall des Gesetzes.28 The problem is not that the law is arbitrary (willku¨rlich), a point the Elector will make over and over. Nor is the problem that the letter of the law fails to provide access to the spirit of the law, or that the intent of the law is difficult to interpret. By contrasting the law with Zufall, the Elector transforms the law of victory into a law of incidents (Zufa¨lle or Vorfa¨lle), battles that must occur (vorfallen) if the law is to be a law. At the same time, this law of Vorfallen—this effort to be before the law, vor dem Gesetz, as vor dem Fall—is in turn nothing but an attempt to understand the law as a law of some thing, in which case the law is just something that falls to one (‘‘Mir von der Bank fa¨llt’’). This is not to say that it is unclear which events (Vorfa¨lle) are children of the law and which are accidents (Zufa¨lle), but it does suggest that the law can only manifest itself as a competition between laws that, before the law, appear to be accidental (zufa¨llig). The law falls, from law to law.29 This is why all debates about the law degenerate into disputes

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over which law is the highest. The most extreme instance of this line of argument is expressed by Kottwitz in his debate with the Elector in act 5: Sir, the law, the highest, the mightiest, The law that you should feel in your general’s breast, It is not the letter of your will; It is the Fatherland, it is the crown, It is you yourself, whose head wears the crown. Herr, das Gesetz, das ho¨chste, oberste, Das Gesetz, das wirken soll, in deiner Feldherrn Brust, Das ist der Buchstab deines Willens nicht; Das ist das Vaterland, das ist die Krone Das bist du selber, dessen Haupt sie tra¨gt. (1570–74)

In this model, the Elector does not represent the law in its difference from that which is not the law (Zufall); he simply is the law.30 What Kottwitz describes is nothing less than the fall of the law back into instances (Vorfa¨lle) of subjective decision making, hence, in his argument, the law becomes the Elector’s option to decide to rescind the death sentence. Kottwitz has misunderstood the law31—and provided, as the Elector says accusingly, nothing other than ‘‘the fool’s conception of freedom’’ (1619)—because he has reduced the law to a rule or regulation. He has transformed it into something that no longer rejects the pretensions of any individual incident to be a case of the law, the pretensions of any Vorfall to be a Fall unter dem Gesetz. Kottwitz’s law is a mere statute that fails to achieve the autonomy of utter collapse; it does not singularize in a total breakdown that would finalize an absolutely antithetical relationship with its own representatives. In short, his law fails to be so fallen that it would not even constitute a case (Fall) of itself.32 The war in and over the name of the law ends when the head that wears the crown is the crown, which is to say, when the distinctions that would make a crowning possible have been elided, and the Elector simply is the law. Unfortunately, as the Elector knows all too well, when one is truly before the law one can never isolate a single Fall with whose consequences one can then contend. There are always more battles to be fought, more Zu- or Vor-Fa¨lle to face, before the law, which means that one must always reckon with one more modulation in the name of the law, one more failure to articulate the law of the law. In act 1, calling out the name of the Prince

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proved to be enough to make him fall over and wake up, but here, there is no way for a logic of consequence to fall into line. The law falls by failing to fall in a way that one could speak of a time after its fall; it falls by failing to be fallen. So is the Prince brought before the law? For the Elector, the posture to be adopted in the face of these difficulties is termed obedience. To some extent, the Prince’s failure to obey the law may stem from his appeal to the Roman goddess of fate, Fortuna, in his search for a power of fortune (Glu¨ck) that cannot be reduced to Zufall (358–65). This move contrasts with the Elector’s implicit conflation of Glu¨ck and Zufall in his argument with Kottwitz about the reasons for their victory in battle.33 Nonetheless, the Prince’s ability to apostrophize Glu¨ck does not suffice to explain why he is crowned rather than executed at the end of the play. To speak to the goddess of fate is not necessarily to speak in her name, in the name of ‘‘that which has been spoken’’ (fatum). There is no question that the Prince’s oratorical talents grow markedly during the course of the play, virtually from speech to speech. Despite his ever increasing eloquence, however, it is clear that he speaks as one who can never be sure if he is addressing fate, good or bad fortune, or blind luck. The Prince can never speak as the one who has spoken, and his apostrophe to Fortuna, like all his speeches, may turn out to be just something that befell him, not a dramatic address that could found a certain future. Whatever the true name of the law may be, the Elector breaks with the due process of the military tribunal and gives the Prince an opportunity to decide for himself if he has been treated unjustly and, if so, to rescind his own death sentence. The unlawful decision to attack prematurely is thus met with the offer of an opportunity for a second decision. The question is whether the Elector, the representative of the law, makes this happen by acting lawfully, by abrogating his duty, or by occupying a state of exception in which the lawful and unlawful are indistinguishable. In offering the Prince a chance to annul his death sentence, the sovereign calls his own position before the law into question, forcing us to decide whether the rule of the state and the ethical agency of the individual characters are parts of the same dynamic, or whether the political authority of the Elector comes into conflict with his status as an ethical being. The remarkable offer of a self-pardon emerges out of Natalie’s plea for mercy for the condemned in the opening scene of act 4. Natalie begins her

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speech to the Elector by acknowledging that the law of war must prevail, and then adds that feelings should also play a role and that the best gesture in this case would be to rip up the death order arbitrarily (willku¨rlich). Alone, these claims are not disruptive of the law. In its absolute systematicity, in being entirely nonarbitrary (unwillku¨rlich), delimited by nothing but itself and devoid of any reference to another code or paradigm, the law is utterly autocratic (selbstherrlich, eigenma¨chtig), hence, willku¨rlich. In legal terms, a blatant disregard of the military tribunal’s verdict would be equally arbitrary or nonarbitrary; the distinction is simply not relevant. Rather than confronting the law with an ‘‘other’’ that turns out to be itself, Natalie’s remarks make it necessary to ask whether any account of the law’s relation to something other than the law, in particular, any account of the law’s impact on something other than itself, is, by definition, willku¨rlich. Willku¨r does not thereby become another name of the law, like the (non)law of Zufall. The point is rather that it makes no more sense to say that the law is willku¨rlich than it does to say that it is unwillku¨rlich because the law is nothing other than a relentless attempt to differentiate itself from everything else. This does not mean that it is impossible to distinguish the lawful from the unlawful, as if they were hopelessly mixed together or their boundaries blurred, but it does mean that ‘‘before the law’’ the negation that would facilitate such an opposition cannot be formulated. Natalie’s call to the Elector to rip up the death order is only one part of her larger argument that the Fatherland will have no trouble surviving the Prince’s mishap (and a concomitant gesture of forgiveness on the Elector’s part). To her mind, the future of the fatherland is assured by ‘‘history,’’ irrespective of the lawful or unlawful rule of law. The danger inherent to this claim is that it may irrevocably divide history from the law, a consequence to which the Elector speaks when he responds, ‘‘Does [the Prince] think it doesn’t matter [gelt es gleich] to the Fatherland / Whether it is whim [Willku¨r] or the edict that prevails?’’ (1144–45). Still, the fact that the Elector’s first response is a question about the Prince’s view points toward what is compelling about Natalie’s distinction, namely, that by opposing historical existence and the law, she holds out a possibility for reconstituting the Prince—a subject whose efforts to relate to the future have pitted his ability to know against his ability to act—as an ethical agent with self-insight. Unfortunately, Natalie’s subsequent remarks on this point are not reassuring. Far from having an opinion about the status of the legal decision

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and its implications for the Fatherland, the condemned Prince is trapped in a state of misery without precedent and thinks only of rescue: ‘‘I believe,’’ Natalie tells the Elector, ‘‘that nobody history has heralded as a hero / Ever sank / To such misery’’ (1167–68). As if this were not enough, Natalie adds that the Fatherland could meet its demise (an event which, in the terms of her previous remarks, would be the counterfactual event par excellence), and the Prince would not even notice: ‘‘The entire realm could disappear / Under thunder and lightning, / And he would never ask: ‘What’s happening?’ ’’ (1152–54). The Prince of act 3 is entirely outside of the history of heroic glory of which he dreamed in act 1 because his behavior has no historical precedent (Pra¨zedenzfall); that is, there is no prior fall, biblical or otherwise, to which one could refer in order to explain it. The Prince’s heroic future has become impossible—unimaginable even in a dream—and in one poignant lament, he envisions his glimmer of hope to lie in his destiny not as a soldier but as a farmer. No hero in history has ever fallen so far outside of the ethico-political order and become such a poor model of agency. As Natalie puts it, no hero, whether crowned or guillotined, has ever so completely lost his head.34 In this sense, the Prince presents us with a vision of history that is neither prospective nor progressive. In his abject state, he permits of no possibilities or projections. Comprehensible as neither a universal nor a particular, he lies beyond any anticipation of a future. ‘‘Where can I / Set myself against such a soldier’s view?’’ the Elector asks Natalie (1181–82). The Prince’s radical misery demands extraordinary attention from the law because it is unclear whether his Fall (case/fall) is, legally speaking, gleichgu¨ltig (irrelevant), or whether he is too much like the law in his indifference to what has happened and what is to come, standing outside of any chronological narrative that could map him onto the past or the future. If the law cannot deal with a Fall in which gleichviel means Gleichgu¨ltigkeit (indifference), then the Prince has become the dramatic agent of a negative poetics in which literary and political representation are both impossible. Of course, the Prince is still a hero, and it is Natalie’s description of this hero’s abject state that successfully persuades the Elector that action must be taken. Thus the infamous offer: ‘‘If he can deem the sentence unjust, / Then I annul it: He is free!’’ (1185–86). Informed by Natalie of this novel opportunity, the Prince exclaims, ‘‘It’s not possible! No! It’s a dream!’’ (1305). The Prince’s own interrogation of his dream state has come full

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circle. In act 2, he wondered if he must be dreaming (or worse) as they took his dagger away: ‘‘Am I dreaming? Am I awake? Am I alive? Am I in possession of my senses?’’ (765). Now, he assumes that he is dreaming precisely because he is being offered his dagger back. By repeatedly referring his difficulties to his somnambulistic behavior in the play’s opening scene, the Prince could be said to be turning his relation to the law back into a question of self-relation, but it is never clear that he completely rouses himself from his dream state of the first act, much less awakes into a deeper ‘‘sleep’’ in which he knows that dreaming disrupts the opposition between waking and sleeping.35 Closer examination of the Elector’s offer of a self-pardon confirms that we must be cautious before drawing any conclusions. Even if the Prince has been given an extraordinary opportunity to treat the law as his own, there is no guarantee that he is free to do so. The Prince reads the letter from his sovereign aloud: ‘‘If you think you’ve been done an injustice, / I say, tell me so in two words, / And I’ll send you your dagger back at once’’ (1311–13).36 Silly as it sounds, it is by no means obvious what these ‘‘two words’’ would be. Natalie pales, realizing immediately that her cousin will not be able to provide them, while the Prince mulls over the letter: ‘‘He says, if I am of the opinion . . .’’ he muses, at which point Natalie interrupts: ‘‘Certainly! [Freilich!]’’ (1322–23). Freilich, however, never modulates into ‘‘a freedom [Freiheit] of composition’’ or into the signature ‘‘Friedrich.’’ The Prince finds it impossible to compose himself (sich fassen); he is unable, he says, to write ‘‘the composition [Fassung] of a Prince’’ (1334). Gleichviel, the exclamation he has been able to utter with such ease up to this point in the play, is only one word, and it would certainly condemn him. Her frustration increasing, Natalie stresses that the request for a response ‘‘is a formality; / An empty gesture is all that is required. / As soon as he has two words in hand, / The entire matter is over’’ (1346–49). Although the play’s dedication speaks of she who ‘‘holds the prize in hand,’’ nobody in this scene has the means ready to hand with which to get a grip on the two words required. No self-evident principle of similitude (Gleichheit) governs the passage from gleichviel to zwei, two. Moreover, zwei is consistently associated with various characters’ doubts (Zweifeln) about the future, as well as with the aforementioned ambiguity (Zwei-deutigkeit) of the Elector’s joke.37 This is a play about two people named Friedrich, and it is

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a play about an assault in battle that took place, as the Prince says, two seconds early. It would be difficult to take two too seriously. In any case, the Prince continues to insist that he is unable to comprehend the Elector’s letter until he finally exclaims: ‘‘Look there! . . . He calls on me to make the decision myself [Sieh da! . . . Mich selber ruft er zur Entscheidung auf!]’’ (1340–44). Once the Prince has specifically reformulated the Elector’s offer as a call to decision, there is suddenly no doubt in his mind that he will not be able to say that he has been treated unjustly. Despite the confusion caused by his dreamlike activities, the Prince is far more problematic for the other characters when he is ostensibly awake and can hold the law together (zusammenfassen) by virtue of being able simultaneously to understand (fassen) the Elector’s offer, compose himself (sich fassen), and compose (fassen) an answer. Although the Prince is no longer an irresponsible sleepwalker and finally seems to have taken the law (if not the crown) into his own hands, in contradistinction to the opening scene of act 1, where the characters were able to take the wreath away from him, it is not obvious to what extent his new mode of autonomy permits of outside intervention. Assured by Natalie that the Elector will certainly have him killed, the Prince answers as only he can: ‘‘So what! [Gleichviel!]’’ (1374). ‘‘The monster,’’ as Natalie dubs him, has reached the limits of humanity because, contrary to the dedication under whose aegis the entire drama unfolds, he is no longer striving after the crown. The joke of the opening scene suddenly becomes serious when the Prince stops playing along, when he stops trying to live by attempting to craft his future. The Elector’s offer apparently makes it possible for the death sentence, which cannot be said to belong to anyone, to be transformed into a judgment the Prince could call his own. In this case, however, the joke is on the Elector. The Prince knows all too well that the call to decision cannot (as Natalie unsuccessfully tries to persuade him) be treated as a hollow pretense. Before the law, two words are never at hand, ready for use like a joke. The Prince refuses to allow the law to be recast as a dialogical process; he refuses to treat the call to decision as a question that anticipates either the answer of ‘‘Yes’’ (‘‘I have been treated unjustly’’), or ‘‘No’’ (‘‘I have not been treated unjustly’’). This does not mean, as is often assumed, that the Prince is holding the Elector to the letter of the law. If he is to do something truly lawful, the Prince must do more than just claim to take responsibility for his mistakes. To say that before the law ‘‘two words is enough’’ is to say that

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the only acceptable answer is ‘‘Yes and no’’ or ‘‘Neither yes nor no.’’ Less obvious is whether such an answer is to consist of one word or two. It is tempting to describe this transformation of the Prince as an example of the act whereby a Kantian self lays down a law for itself in a dynamic that is intra- rather than intersubjective. Several scenes later, the Elector calls on the Prince for help with a petition from the troops demanding the prisoner’s freedom; and the Prince answers, ‘‘I want to suffer the death to which I am sentenced. . . . It is my unbendable will; through a free death, / I want to honor the holy law of war / Which, in the view of the army, I injured’’ (1745, 1749–52).38 The Prince fancies that he can elevate his individuality to the universality of the law through death. In the terms of act 1, this ‘‘free death’’ would be the impossible coincidence of knowledge and action, the epitome of a self-crowning in which the subject, by dying in accordance with the law, would affirm the law’s status as utterly indifferent to the impulses (the wishes, dreams, or wreath weavings) of any individual. In such a ‘‘free death,’’ the judgment of the law and the decision of the self would coincide, and the self would give itself a universal law that would not be restricted to the particularity of a self. The will to die freely, however, does not make the Prince free. Although death divides freedom from being—the free subject no longer exists—this does not mean that by sacrificing his life the Prince can win immortality. In one of his most memorable speeches, the Prince apostrophizes immortality as his own, but he can do so, in the larger logic of the play, only one scene after the Elector has ripped up the death sentence, which is to say, only after the law no longer holds death over him as the only crown he will ever have. Far from returning him to the ranks of obedient soldiers, the Prince’s wish for a just death is starkly at odds with the culture of war in which he lives. The battles the characters in this play wage are not, first and foremost, struggles to kill or be killed; they are campaigns to prevent what the Prince calls ‘‘the journey of life’’ from stalling in an endless reflection on what exists, a ‘‘freedom’’ in which the self would simply be enslaved to a world about which it spoke—presumably, as in the Prince’s later monologues, with great eloquence. Waged through apostrophes to that which should be rather than to that which is, two-word calls to the next skirmish and the next triumph (‘‘To battle! To victory!’’), the war against the enemies of Brandenburg is never a reflective experience through which a lawful subject understands what it is, what it will be, or what it will have been. In embrac-

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ing militarism, the characters struggle rather to discover a language by virtue of which a fighting self could declare its bellicose operations to be free.39 Of course, there is still the Elector’s ‘‘joke.’’ The joke of the joke of the opening scene of act 1 is that the other characters rely on it as the only means of relating to the Prince. Before they can rush him back into battle in an effort to revitalize his obedient posture toward the law, they must first attempt to play out his impossible relation to his posterity and reinvigorate his dream of fame by acting out the death sentence. In the last scene of the play, the players blindfold the Prince, and then, rather than executing him, they crown him with the wreath he wove in the first scene. The joke of the joke—a joke ostensibly designed to end the reverberations of the play within a play with which Prince Friedrich began—fails, however, to produce the intended effect. Like a dream, the joke cannot be negated in its own terms. At the point when he is finally crowned, the Prince faints. Trapped between the law of the dream and the law of war, between the Garden of Eden and the field of battle, he is roused by the others’ noisy tributes (‘‘Hail! Hail! Hail!’’); but, far from waking into a reinvigorated life of fame and glory, he manages only a question—‘‘Is it a dream?’’—to which the sole answer is Kottwitz’s peculiar version of gleichviel: ‘‘A dream? What else?’’ (1856–57).40 This confused heroic consciousness is the manifestation of something— neither joke nor dream, neither life nor death—that interrupts the lawful self-composition that could underwrite them all. This something—in the name of which the effort to make two words one and one word two is suspended; in the name of which words can no longer relate to a posterity as zwei or gleich—is what the play calls ‘‘history.’’ History, which begins in an interrupted dream of self-creation and self-glorification, in a garden where nobody yet has a name, is the breaking of a law, the law of language. The Prince can never be, as the Elector requires, ‘‘obedient to the law,’’ because he can never accept that a rational language is defined by its demand that it constitute itself as a free discourse (731). In the simplest terms, the Prince can never confirm his obedience to language. Pursuing the logic of Kantian ethics to its necessary conclusion, Kleist reveals that the ethical subject is truly autonomous and spontaneous only in the act of breaking the law it lays down for itself, only, that is, in the act of complementing its power to give form with a power to destroy it. Correspondingly, it is only when it is transgressed that a law can be characterized as universal, that is,

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as genuinely without any ground other than the object of its own formgiving. Prince Friedrich of Homburg gestures toward a dramatic address in which the Prince could speak freely and still be himself, an address to a future posterity that could name the difference between fate and fortune with more than one word, or at least with a word other than gleichviel. Such a naming would be the autonomous act par excellence, the spontaneous linguistic designation of freedom as freedom, a dramatic language of wars and jokes by virtue of which there could be a politics based on a form that would be both ‘‘categorical’’ and ‘‘imperative.’’ This would be a language productive of and sacrificed to the interruptions, the accidents, or most simply, the falls of language. Such a dramatic speech would designate itself as the power under which all linguistic acts could be subsumed at the same time as it would permanently expose itself to the possibility that the dramatic word is as unproductive as it is productive, as apoietic as it is poietic. In suggesting that reason’s sovereignty is confirmed only in the transgression of reason, Prince Friedrich challenges the capacity of the ethical subject to know its agency as rational because it demonstrates that no performative speech can establish itself as the law of its own performance.41 The gesture toward a free address thus fails to coordinate the moral injunctions that organize the Prince’s agency with the executive systems that judge his acts. If this play is therefore emancipatory, it is not because its characters’ words are potentially arbitrary, or because it takes the liberty of representing whatever it desires, but because it challenges the assumption that ethics and politics rely on the same theory of action. In this regard, Prince Friedrich may not ask that we give up on our efforts to explain the relations between literature and social reality, but it shatters the uneasy alliance between science and aesthetics by virtue of which we submit human behavior to the laws of language—and language to laws of our own design.

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On the Poetics and Politics of Voice Only by virtue of a differentiation taken so far that it can no longer bear its own difference, can no longer bear anything but the universal, freed from the humiliation of isolation, in the particular does lyrical language represent language’s intrinsic being as opposed to its service in the realm of ends. — t h e o d o r w . a d o r n o , ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’’ And so I say to all of you here, let us resolve to reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people. — w i l l i a m j e f f e r s o n c l i n t o n , 1993 Inaugural Address

The vision of the self that emerges from Kleist’s reading of Kantian ethics differs sharply from the figure of specular self-determination generally associated with Idealist thought. In forcing us to reconsider the assumption that language can be a medium of rational activity, Kleist seems to part company from those inheritors of Kant who accord ultimate primacy to the authority of reason. At the same time, one could argue that Kleist shares with both Kant and the Idealists a sense of the volatile power of literary language and a more general concern with the historical dimensions of artistic creation. It is precisely these problems that come to the forefront in the work of Friedrich Ho¨lderlin. Like Kleist, Ho¨lderlin is routinely celebrated for the innovative character of his writings, a judgment usually accompanied by the label of ‘‘difficult’’ or ‘‘obscure.’’ Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Ho¨lderlin’s oeuvre is its unique account of the relationship between literature and history. Exploring the role that the experience of the past must play in any paradigm of agency, Ho¨lderlin’s poetry proves to be historical 75

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not because it offers a record of what has happened or constitutes a process by which an ideal subject produces and destroys itself, but because it articulates singular events of linguistic violence. In the last decade, scholarship on British and German literature has broadened our picture of the social, religious, and political environment of the early nineteenth century. In trying to understand the writers of this period and their ideas through references to regime changes, technological innovations, or shifting economic forces, we must remember, however, that their works suggest that an historical event is as much something that happens in language as in the streets. Friedrich Schlegel’s announcement that ‘‘the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s [Wilhelm] Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age’’ is the most familiar expression of the belief that the advent of a new book is no less an occasion than a war or an election.1 Schlegel goes on to state, ‘‘Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition [Zusammenstellung], whoever cannot take any revolution seriously that is not noisy and materialistic, has not yet achieved a lofty, broad perspective on the history of mankind.’’2 To grasp the full implications of this argument is no small undertaking. For Schlegel, to achieve a broad ‘‘perspective’’ on revolution is to achieve a perspective on juxtaposition (Zusammenstellung) or syntax, which is derived from the Greek syntassein: ‘‘to bring together, to arrange, or to construct.’’ At issue is not merely the notion that the overthrow of a government might be comparable to the overthrow of a philosophical or literary system—be it French literary convention or Cartesian rationalism—but also the idea that anything that is truly revolutionary must constitute a transformation in what it means to have things in order, whether neatly in a sequence or conveniently under one’s thumb. Revolution is not just a change in the status quo, however conceived, but a shattering of the principles by which the event of revolution itself could be put into some kind of perspective. Although it may be that any change worthy of being considered revolutionary should ‘‘also’’ be a revolution in syntax, to speak in terms of a revolutionary syntax may be to miss the point. As one of the oldest metatropes of classical rhetoric, syntax implies that words or things can be put in their proper places. As such, its reign may commence after a revolution, when those who thought they had changed the world turn out to have become the same reactionary bureaucrats against whom they had once struggled. In a more literary context, it is not enough to champion the radicality of

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idiosyncratic innovations in syntax, as if writing well were merely a question of deviating from the templates one is taught in school. If syntax means anything, it is that the offbeat or the atypical soon becomes the norm. This means that if the revolution has a syntax, it must be a syntax in ‘‘permanent revolution,’’ to use Leon Trotsky’s famous phrase. Such a syntax must be an ordering, arranging, or juxtaposing that does not allow itself to become a fixed order, arrangement, or juxtaposition; it must be an event that can never be reduced to a form that could be followed as a guide or rejected in favor of an alternative model. Whether for medieval grammarians, Port Royal logicians, or twentiethcentury analytic philosophers, the problem of syntax has suggested that language cannot be understood as a purely semantic medium or as simply a system of words, be they treated as icons, tokens, or signifiers. Schlegel and his contemporaries developed their theory of language on the basis of their interpretation of Fichte’s theory of positing (Setzung). In the collection of texts loosely referred to as the ‘‘Science of Knowledge [Wissenschaftslehre],’’ Fichte articulates his famous doctrine: ‘‘The I’s own positing of itself is . . . its own pure activity. The I posits itself, and by virtue of this mere selfassertion it exists; and conversely, the I exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing.’’3 This account of the self as both an act and an entity, both the force of positing and something posited, addresses one of the basic dilemmas in Kantian thought: Does one have knowledge of oneself as an extant being? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes that the ‘‘I think’’ that accompanies all mental representations is neither a concept nor a sensible intuition but an ‘‘act of spontaneity.’’4 If the self cannot recognize itself as an object of cognition, the idea of self-knowledge is clearly in jeopardy. One consideration is whether simply conceiving of the possibility of this original apperception as the grounds of self-consciousness is tantamount to confirming the self’s status as an actual being in the world. Characterizing Kant’s ‘‘act of spontaneity,’’ Fichte says that the I ‘‘is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action [Handlung] and deed [Tat] are one and the same, and hence the ‘I am’ expresses an Act [Tathandlung], and the only one possible. . . .’’5 A host of nineteenth-century theories of subjectivity as a process of autogenesis, a product of the imagination, or an agency that makes its own history can be viewed as efforts to describe the identity of this simultaneously ‘‘self-positing’’ and ‘‘existing’’ I and explain the sense in which act and deed

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can be one and the same.6 On the one hand, Fichte does not want to reduce the self to an effect of a cause—whether the cause is nature or God. In this case, the subject’s mode of existence would be indistinguishable from other phenomena we cognize in space and time through the coordination of concepts and intuitions. Kant insisted that the categories of possibility, actuality, and necessity are generated entirely by thought and owe nothing to experience, so one could readily envision an account of positing (Setzung) in which it would be the act or pre-act by virtue of which different modes of being first emerge. The problem is that Fichte follows Kant in maintaining that the spontaneous act that founds self-unity is both transcendental and empirical. Positing has a product that cannot be reduced to an idea or a schema of the understanding. Considered as the only activity that corresponds to nothing that preexists it, positing can no more be said to belong to the mind than it does to nature. It is from this perspective that contemporary literary criticism has analyzed positing as a doctrine of speech acts, approaching the absolute identification between the action and the fait accompli, the positing and the posited, in terms of the relationship between performative and constative utterances. Insofar as language is thereby implicated as both the giver and the given, it has been argued that the activity and the product can never completely coincide.7 As a nonmimetic, nonpredicative gesture, the areferential, athetic quality of positing constitutes a challenge not only to consciousness as the ground of the self, but to predication as a model of semantics and trope as a model of language.8 Can we nonetheless speak of a syntax of positings and positions? Fichte’s effort to articulate the fundamental principles, Grundsa¨tze, of the science of knowledge begins with a rejection of two notions: the idea that a positing establishes a ground for something that could be called its consequence, and the idea that positing can be schematized as a proposition. In this respect, the foundations of Fichte’s philosophy, his Grund-Sa¨tze, dismiss both concepts, Grund and Satz. At the same time, Fichte is clear that one of the great challenges facing his analysis is to understand how his first two principles—the absolute positing of the I and the absolute opposing of a not-I to the I—relate to one another. How, that is, can there be an arrangement, a syntax, of different positings? Ho¨lderlin approaches this very question in his longest poetological text, ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit.’’ The essay, composed about five

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years after the Wissenschaftslehre, undertakes a meditation on the poetic modus operandi and its importance for the analysis of poetic subjectivity.9 Writing in the wake of Kant’s attempt to break with the rationalist poetics of Baumgarten and the notion that there can be a method of art, Ho¨lderlin asks whether to speak of a poetic procedure (Verfahren) is already to corrupt the freedom of the poetic act, reducing it to the mere rehearsal of preexisting guidelines (eine Verfahrungs-weise). If poetry is to be distinguished from other discourses by its autonomy with respect to form, content, and design, what sort of language can reveal itself as genuinely amethodological?10 Although Ho¨lderlin makes no direct reference to Fichte, his essay is of great interest as an interpretation of Fichte’s reading of Kant because it is organized around a consideration of the relationship between the first Grundsatz of the Wissenschaftslehre (‘‘The I begins by an absolute positing of its own existence’’) and the second fundamental principle (‘‘So surely is a not-I opposed [entgegengesetzt] absolutely to the I’’).11 Fichte calls this second event the ‘‘act of Entgegensetzung’’ (subsequently translated as both ‘‘oppositioning’’ and ‘‘counterpositing’’).12 If we follow his explicit pronouncements, there is no question that this act of counterpositing is subordinate to the original act of positing. ‘‘Opposition,’’ writes Fichte, ‘‘is possible only on the assumption of a unity of consciousness between the I that posits and the I that opposes. . . . It is only in relation to a positing that it becomes a counterpositing.’’13 Countering is not an activity in its own right; it expresses only a relationship or, better, a position between positings. Predicated on an underlying original unity called ‘‘the self,’’ this hypotaxis of the absolute acts of the I is unambiguous. But is it a taxis of acts or a taxonomy of things? Does not the very need to affirm the priority of the first over the second fundamental principle confirm that, to appear as an individual act, any positing must be submitted to the logic of Entgegen? This seems like a necessary inference if we are to speak, as Fichte does, of relations between different acts of positing rather than of relations between the products of those acts. In other words, it may be that positing is conceivable only on the basis of a counterpositioning that precedes any identity of action and deed. If an act of positing is to avoid being reduced to what is posited, establishing itself as pure positioning rather than as a purely given position, this act must always-already be a counterpositing, a counter to the very givenness of its own productivity and to the fixity of position as such.

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Ho¨lderlin considers these problems in a discussion of the poet’s need to control the ‘‘free movement, the harmonious alternation and progressive striving,’’ of the poetic spirit.14 Initially, he describes the contradictory task of controlling something free with reference to a unity that inexorably transcends itself, confirming its autonomy by reproducing itself in such a way as to surpass itself with each new instantiation. Ho¨lderlin does not make his presentation any less abstract when he recharacterizes this process in terms of a dual conflict between spiritual content and spiritual form on the one hand, and material content and material form on the other. At first glance, the organizing principle would seem to be rhythm rather than conflict— albeit a rhythmic modulation of self-unity and self-division.15 With each step in his analysis, however, Ho¨lderlin’s insistence on the internal oppositioning that is constitutive of poetic language becomes more acute, culminating in the claim that a poem confirms its significance only if ‘‘it can be considered as capable of a different condition, and not of another harmoniously opposed one, to be sure, but of a directly opposed [condition] [eines geradentgegengesezten], a most extreme [one] [ein A¨ußersten].’’16 The freedom of poetic operation is the freedom of a poem that confirms its capacity to oppose itself absolutely. This oppositioning, which Ho¨lderlin also calls ‘‘striving,’’ is the ‘‘foundation and significance’’ of a poem, a foundation that is, in the simplest terms, conflict: ‘‘The pure comprised in every particular mode conflicts with the organ by which it is comprised, conflicts with the pure of the other organ, conflicts with the [very] alternation [between them].’’17 The poetic spirit emerges by coming into conflict with itself, its other, and the very difference between them. It realizes itself in and as an untiring drive for pure oppositioning. For Ho¨lderlin, every bit as militaristic as Napoleon, poetry is a language of war. It will not suffice to think about this discord in terms of a struggle between two empirical entities. Nor should we picture it as a definitional or logical contradiction, which is to say, as the abstract identity of difference generated by the observations that form conflicts with content (and therefore that form and content are different) and that spirit clashes with matter (and therefore that they, too, are not the same). This is a collision between the individual and the universal, between self and other, but it is also a struggle against the absolute authority of opposition. The strife of free poetic language puts even the very possibility of conflict in jeopardy. As such, the poetic spirit is ‘‘never the mere opposition of what is unified, nor [is it]

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ever the mere relation [or] unification of the opposing and changing; what is opposed and unified is inseparable within it.’’18 Poetry is language of and at the most extreme (‘‘das A¨ußersten’’), and it cannot be relativized by comparing it with other forms of expression, excess, or violence. Ho¨lderlin’s vocabulary of striving will recall Friedrich Schlegel’s nearly contemporaneous claim that romantic poetry ‘‘should forever be becoming and never be perfected.’’19 These two authors obviously share a concern with Kant’s understanding of freedom as a transcendental idea and its implications for the theory of language. Accordingly, it is tempting to suggest that Ho¨lderlin’s treatment of striving as oppositioning never realizes a pure alternative position, remaining apositional, or at least permanently on the way to becoming ‘‘alter-positional.’’ This claim, however, may not go far enough. While such a figure of striving would appear to challenge the authority of positing, it leaves the authority of ‘‘counter’’ (entgegen) untouched. It is similarly inconsequential merely to reverse the hierarchy of Fichte’s principles so that the self-positing of the I becomes the second Grundsatz and the opposing of the not-I to the I becomes the first. A counterpositing redefined as the ‘‘primary principle’’ amounts to nothing more than a positing. For this reason, Ho¨lderlin stresses that the poetic spirit must not allow its exposure to its most extreme opposition to become a regular mode of oppositioning, a systematic procedure through which the spirit would maintain and control itself. Such a spirit would lose its identity in an empty alternation of opposites, or it would disintegrate into a series of isolated moments with no relation to one another—positive and negative, positive and negative. In contrast, what Ho¨lderlin terms the ‘‘hyperbole of hyperbole,’’ the ultimate act of the poetic spirit, is an act so radical that it is not clear whether the spirit can even confirm its ability to undertake it. This ‘‘hyperbole of hyperbole’’ names the striving for a counterpositing that opposes or ‘‘oppositions’’ both entgegen and Setzung. It clashes not only with its own form and content, but also with the very status of its own mode as positional or oppositional. This highest achievement of the poetic spirit, this event of counterpositing, Entgegensetzung, is a movement without position and cannot be understood in terms of a semantic model in which a word becomes meaningful by finding its proper place in a syntax. Ho¨lderlin’s effort to conceive of the poetic spirit outside a philosophy of the subject culminates in a language in which counterpositing can be an act in its own right rather than an abstract category of logic or a secondary

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inference that follows from a pregiven position. Such a poetic spirit does not inhabit a dead letter that preexists it or find a home in a preposited form. Rather, it strives to realize a syntax organized not around the grammatical elements of a proposition, but around an oppositioning by virtue of which the poetic spirit can be said to have both a system (Verfahren) and a method (Weise) and yet still remain free. In this way, counterpositing is the interruption of expressive positings by a hyperactive syntax that genuinely taxes language. For Ho¨lderlin, this is the only discourse worthy of the name of ‘‘poetry.’’ Ho¨lderlin calls this poetic act of acts a ‘‘hyperbolic comparison.’’ Such a comparison is radical because it challenges the identity of the terms it juxtaposes, the very possibility of comparing them, and the difference between the comparable and the incomparable as such. What, then, guarantees that the poetic spirit’s acts are related to one another at all? Do we actually know how to think about a procedure without a method or about a process without a script? It is precisely these concerns that lead Ho¨lderlin to formulate a vision of the ‘‘infinite perspective’’ that the spirit must achieve over its own oppositioning. This is a ‘‘final act’’ in which the spirit ‘‘cannot and must not be understood through itself, nor become its own object if, instead of an infinite, unified and living unity there shall not exist a dead and deadly unity, something that has become infinitely positive.’’20 Ho¨lderlin’s spirit cannot relate to itself as something given or as something it produces and then discovers to be itself. As an object of reflection, it ‘‘cannot appear at all or only in the character of a positive nothing, an infinite standstill [unendlichen Stillstands].’’21 As self-originating, it would be infinitely positive and absolutely peaceful; rather than linking opposition and unity, it would reduce opposition to unity. In dividing the operations of the spirit from both the authority of self-reflection and the figure of a self grounded in its own unity, Ho¨lderlin parts ways with Kant and Fichte.22 The poetic procedure is poetic, that is, free, precisely because it can break with the form of its own emergence at any moment. If Ho¨lderlin does still conceive of the poetic spirit in terms of a dynamic of individuality, it is an individuality menaced at every step by a break or interruption that it can never determine as a stage in its own development. ‘‘It is the hyperbole of all hyperboles,’’ Ho¨lderlin writes, ‘‘the boldest and ultimate attempt of the poetic spirit—if it ever undertakes it in its operation—to assess [aufzufassen] the original poetic individuality, the poetic ‘I,’

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an attempt through which it would supersede [aufho¨be] this individuality and its pure object, the unified and live, harmonious, mutually effective life, and yet it needs to make it . . . [I]t shall and must be everything that its operations involve with freedom. . . .’’23 In order not to remain trapped within its own subjective determinations, the ‘‘I’’ must ‘‘freely choose an object from which, if it wants, it can abstract without canceling itself in order to be adequately determined by it and determine it.’’24 The object of this free choice is quite different from the Kantian object, which acquires its unity from the unity of the subjective manifold of apperception. Although a determination of subject and object does take place, Ho¨lderlin’s poetic I participates in this dynamic by confirming its ability to withdraw from the very process that should allow it to become what it is without thereby sacrificing itself. In selecting an object as its own, the poetic I lends that object nothing; it confers neither form nor content upon it, not even the minimal degree of difference by virtue of which the object and the I might be compared and contrasted. The I appears through its determination of this object, but it never establishes itself as the object’s syntax. Only in being constituted by a relation that paradoxically is not constitutive with respect to its relating terms, then, can the poetic I become free. The result is not the freedom of an ideal subject that spontaneously selflegislates or self-generates, but a radical speculation on the basis of which the existence of the poetic spirit is nothing more than the imperative that it risk everything for the sake of an I that can confer upon it neither material nor spiritual identity. Poetic oppositioning never becomes a deposition, that is, a position by virtue of which the spirit could garner the insights of selfaffirmation or self-negation. Ho¨lderlin’s hyperbole of hyperbole is thus a confirmation of the poetic spirit’s capacity to break off not just from its own procedure, but also from its reliance on procedure in general. Even this, however, is not hyperbolic enough, as Ho¨lderlin’s qualification—‘‘if [the spirit] ever undertakes it in its operation’’—makes clear. The hyperbole of hyperboles, the ultimate achievement of the spirit in which it grasps and interprets the poetic I, may not be a responsibility that the spirit can assume—much less attempt and fail and so be brought to a standstill. The demand that the act be enacted is already too much. In the most hyperbolic of hyperbolic acts, the poetic spirit constitutes itself as free not by outstripping the relations in terms of which it is articulated, but by revealing that it may never have taken place at all.

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Much of the difficulty in assessing the argument of ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit’’ has to do with uncertainties about what it would mean to put such a doctrine into practice. In this regard, it may be helpful to consider one of the oldest figures for the relationship between language and human beings who claim to ‘‘use’’ or ‘‘speak’’ it, namely, the voice of the poet—pneuma, the breath and spirit of the muse. In English and German, ‘‘voice’’ denotes audible sound, the right to speak, or the content of an utterance. It knits together intention and expression, suggesting a thought, the ability to utter a thought, or the physical process whereby the thought is made manifest to the senses. It can be argued that to speak of language as ‘‘having a voice’’ constitutes an overt anthropomorphism. On the other hand, the possibility of ‘‘giving voice’’ to something may depend entirely on figures of address that are essentially linguistic and have nothing to do with possessing a tongue or a palate. In ‘‘Autobiography as De-Facement,’’ an essay on Wordsworth, Paul de Man considers whether voice is a name for language’s—potentially misleading—self-representation. His subject is prosopopeia, a rhetorical term for the way language gives voice by literally giving a face (a mask) to something, or as de Man defines it, ‘‘the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech.’’25 There is a latent threat in this operation, de Man observes, since ‘‘by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death.’’26 In Wordsworth’s poem, the individual who encounters a tombstone that addresses him—‘‘Pause, Traveler!’’—is said to have ‘‘given his voice’’ to the tombstone and thus may find himself as mute as the stone he confronts. It is by no means obvious, however, why this ‘‘trope,’’ as de Man calls it, should be symmetrical, or more generally, why giving voice to something should, in a finite economy, be tantamount to giving it away. One could argue that any metaphor necessarily cuts both ways, as it were, but as the classical rhetoricians knew, putting words in the mouths of others is a figure, not a trope.27 ‘‘Pause, Traveler!’’ is not metaphorical; each word means what it says. Speaking in the name of someone or something else may not be the ‘‘normal’’ way of speaking, but it is a change in the form of discourse rather than in the meanings of individual nouns or verbs. At the very least, this suggests that we need to think more about the logic of exchange at work in the kinds of semantic dynamics de Man is considering.

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Both de Man and Wordsworth maintain that prosopopeia designates the act whereby language generates a fiction, namely, the fiction that a dead or absent person is speaking to us. For at least one of Wordsworth’s contemporaries, this fiction had explicitly political implications. In his 1796 study of Kant’s ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ essay, Friedrich Schlegel asks, in overtly Rousseauist terms: But how is republicanism possible? The general will is its necessary condition; but the absolute general will does not occur in the realm of experience and exists only in the world of pure thought. The individual and universal are therefore separated from one another by an infinite gulf, over which one can jump only by salto mortale. There is no solution here other than, by means of a fiction, to regard an empirical will as the surrogate of the a priori absolute general will. . . . The only valid political fiction is that based on the law of equality: the will of the majority should be the surrogate of the general will.28

For Schlegel, the majority acquires a voice through a fiction that connects two irremediably divided orders: the realm of thought and the realm of experience. Surrogation, or as Schlegel calls it, ‘‘representation’’ (the very act of something standing in for something else), is fiction—or as he writes in Latin, a fictio: ‘‘a forming,’’ ‘‘a feigning,’’ or ‘‘an assumption.’’ This assumption is not the byproduct of an excessive imagination since the majority literally cannot express itself without it. As such, the fiction is less a creation than a creative force in its own right, for it gives form to a voice that is otherwise absent. On the other hand, Schlegel stresses that this fiction is never a ‘‘pure’’ resolution of the problem of political delegation. His model of representation provides the form by virtue of which the majority can have a voice, but it also marks this form as a hypothesis (fictio), a gesture toward an unrealized state of affairs rather than an empirically verifiable fact. In this regard, political ‘‘voice’’ is based not on a physical model of expression—the oral articulation of sounds with the lips and tongue, or even the counting of paper ballots—but on a postulate that takes us outside the parameters within which one thing can neatly stand for another. This is a leap based as much on faith as on reason or on the desire to do what is right or good. In giving voice to the ‘‘will of the majority,’’ this fiction may appear to underwrite an essentially democratic order, but in relying on a logic of pretense and assumption, the majority necessarily forgoes the quantifiable cer-

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tainty of its empirical status as the majority, surrendering it not for the universality of a metaphysical concept, but for something ‘‘in the middle,’’ what Schlegel also calls ‘‘an approximation.’’29 In other words, the majority becomes the voice of the people by giving up its empirical solidity without receiving an ideal foundation in exchange. The trope—if it is one—is hardly symmetrical. In this sense, this fiction does not bring to light a view or sentiment—individual or collective—that would otherwise remain unsaid. Schlegel’s fiction is political not because it expresses feelings or ideas that people ‘‘really’’ have, but because it transforms the concept of representation from a static relation (or set of relations) into an act by virtue of which an empirical and an absolute order are connected by being revealed to be utterly divided. Surrogation does not guarantee a bridge from one realm to the other, as if we could pass back and forth between pure thought and experience without difficulty. In the very act of linking the two registers, the fiction reveals that each leap across the divide between them is a singular event that cannot confirm that either a complete passage or a return is possible. Schlegel’s study of the fiction of voice finds a counterpart in Ho¨lderlin’s lyrics. At least since the Middle Ages, lyric poetry has been charged with coordinating the positional power of the first-person pronoun with the representational power of words. The problem is that it is far from certain whether it is ‘‘we’’ who represent lyric language as the presentation of an individual voice, or whether language represents itself through the figure of voice, a determination we retrospectively take as our own. To read lyric, then, one must think about grammatical ‘‘voice,’’ about whether words submit passively to interpretation, or whether what we call ‘‘interpretation’’ and ‘‘exegesis’’ are things words do irrespective of our interventions. Rather than depending on a naive notion that language can conjure up the sensory experience of hearing or seeing a person speak, lyric may be the discourse in which the figure of voice and its formal and epistemological coherence receive their most thoroughgoing test. Lyric asks whether it makes sense to think of anyone or anything as possessing a voice, and if so, what this means for the ways in which language can be said to perform in a social context. Contemporaneous with Schlegel’s ‘‘Concept of Republicanism,’’ Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Voice of the People’’ (‘‘Stimme des Volks’’) examines how the lyric challenge to the figure of voice alters our understanding of political expression and the status of speech as a political act. Originally two stanzas long,

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the ode was repeatedly rewritten and expanded into an eighteen-strophe version between 1798 and 1800. This was a highly productive period in Ho¨lderlin’s life during which he was also composing better-known texts such as ‘‘As on a Holiday’’ and ‘‘Bread and Wine.’’ Given the title of ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ it is tempting to read it as a commentary on the French Revolution, perhaps even as a celebration of Germany’s politically liberated neighbor. At the same time, it is widely assumed that by 1798 Ho¨lderlin had long been disillusioned with events in France, and none of the booklength treatments of his youthful participation in radical Girondist sects or his sympathies with the Jacobins give even a cursory treatment of the poem.30 In fact, the political dimension of this text emerges less in its references to empirical political sympathies—Ho¨lderlin’s or anybody else’s—than in its exploration of the sacrifice of voice. The poem begins with a complex announcement: ‘‘You are the voice of God: I believed it once, / In my sacred youth—yes and I say it still (again)! [Du seiest Gottes Stimme, so glaubt’ ich sonst / In heil’ger Jugend; ja, und ich sag’ es noch!].’’31 From the start, it is clear that it is the poet or lyric I, not the people, who will have the first and the last word, and the first word is about voice. The boldness of the opening lines is mitigated by the rest of the sentence, which makes explicit what the subjunctive verb form (‘‘Du seiest’’) already indicates, namely, the address to the voice of the people is indirect discourse, that is, the poet is quoting himself about what he once ‘‘believed’’ and what he still ‘‘says.’’ In this regard, the implicit political claim, the identification of popular and divine will, is arguably secondary both to the poet’s insistence on relating to himself as an historical entity with a present and a past and to his avowal of a connection between what he says and what he holds to be true. The poem starts as much with an address to its own title as to any ‘‘people.’’ The autoaffective experience of always being in the process of speaking to oneself (if to no one else) appears to confer considerable authority on the first-person pronoun I as it calls to the voice of the people, invoking it in and as its own retrospective autocitation. On the other hand, the poet’s voice is not permanently or perfectly present to itself. In referring to its own ideas and utterances—‘‘I believed it before and I say it again’’—the lyric confirms that what it has in common with both God and the people is a voice, but in doing so, it foregrounds the transient, almost punctilious quality of its pronouncement. The moment the poem gives voice to the

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voice of God or the people, it seems to forgo any conviction that its own act of voicing is permanent, or even entirely convincing. The poetic reflection on the existence of poetic voice has to be conceived of as a continual process in which the power to give voice is rediscovered and lost, again and again. The poem thereby identifies a predicament that may in fact be defining of lyric, a discourse that is always on the verge of having and not having a voice it can call its own. In this respect, the opening lines of ‘‘Voice of the People’’ emerge in an air of uncertainty, as if each attempt at coming once more to voice were beset by the possibility that on this occasion the procedure will not work. The act of the I citing itself is thus best characterized as a figure for the act by which it gives itself and renounces voice in one and the same instant. What must the poetic voice sacrifice in order to be able to talk about (or ‘‘give voice to’’) these other voices? Does giving voice to the voice of the people or the voice of God involve speaking on their behalf? These questions are two versions of a classic dilemma: How does the lyric confirm that the poet is not just talking to him- or herself, hence that the poet’s poem is more than an instance of ‘‘ego-logical mono-logos’’? If the lyric is to become a truly social text, it needs to escape its own voice so that something more than the expression of a singular individual is articulated. In ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ the give and take of voices assumes the form of a double citation, for in citing himself in these opening lines, the poet is also indirectly invoking a familiar proverb: Vox populi vox dei. To the contemporary ear, this Latin slogan sounds oddly familiar, yet thoroughly antiquated, a relic from an era before the separation of church and state. Whatever contemporary political theory does or does not do, surely it does not understand the people in terms of divine power. At the same time, there is something oddly reassuring for the modern audience about the grandiosity of vox populi vox dei, as if only an entity as worthy of admiration as the people could be the subject of such a declaration. On this ostensibly progressive score, the proverb has a dubious pedigree. The first extant textual reference to it appears in a letter to Charlemagne from the cleric and early humanist Alcuin, who stresses that vox populi vox dei is a proposition to be dismissed: ‘‘Nor are those to be listened to who are accustomed to say, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ For the clamor of the crowd is very close to madness.’’32 Similar skepticism continues throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with the state-

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ment, far from functioning as a call for popular sovereignty, serving at most as a reminder to the king that he should listen to the people in case God is trying to tell him something through them. It certainly does not imply that he should respect their will, or even that they have one. In late-eighteenthcentury America, vox populi vox dei was recast as a revolutionary slogan and was consequently denounced by more conservative figures such as Alexander Hamilton, who proclaimed that ‘‘however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true.’’33 Hamilton’s formulation echoes Alcuin’s account of the slogan as something ‘‘said’’ by anonymous others. Arising not from an authoritative treatise but from the people’s voices themselves, vox populi vox dei is invariably characterized as something that has been overheard, surviving each refutation of its content unscathed, like gossip that will never die. It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the earliest identifications of the vox populi as vox dei comes in Hesiod’s discussion of rumor: ‘‘Remember how destructive people’s gossip is. . . . What is said of you does not vanish, / If many say it; such talk is a kind of god.’’34 For Hesiod, the voice of the people alive with gossip is not the voice of a god; it is a god. In this fashion, the voice of the people reveals the divine essence of language as that which survives and thrives precisely in its detachment from any individual who would lay claim to sovereignty over its articulation or meaning. Anonymity is divine. The idea that language’s divinity is constituted by its independence from its speaker finds parallels in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Since Boileau, it has been argued that the sublime authority of ‘‘Let there be light’’ in Genesis comes from its status not as the original speech act, but as the original citation of a verbal act: ‘‘And God said: ‘Let there be light!’ ’’ What is divine about this speech is that it appears, like vox populi vox dei, as something already said. In the broadest terms, ‘‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’’ identifies the status of all voice as secondhand. Voice is always double; that is, it is always the presentation of one voice via another surrogate voice. In calling this dynamic a ‘‘fiction,’’ Schlegel suggests not that voice is a fantasy, but rather that any expression of individual control on the part of one voice is necessarily supplemented by a second one whose very existence undoes the first claim to representational supremacy. Far from mediating between intention and expression or thought and its physical manifestation as sound, voice threatens to suspend exchange between the two, forever

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deferring their coordination. Voice does not thereby vanish. To the contrary, it multiplies, but it is no longer clear what it actually achieves. If history is any guide, it would appear that the problem with vox populi vox dei is that once it is there, it is hard to make it go away—even when it is only referred to elliptically, as at the start of Ho¨lderlin’s poem. Claims for a voice of the people appear ineradicable because, as Hesiod or Hamilton might have put it, the people never stop talking about them. In this respect, Ho¨lderlin’s revival of Alcuin’s Latin should be situated in the line of political performances that runs from Louis XIV’s avowal of divine right rule—‘‘L’e´tat, c’est moi’’—to Napoleon’s identification of himself as the subject of history—‘‘I am the revolution’’—to Nietzsche’s blasphemy of blasphemies: ‘‘God is dead.’’ The last of these maxims is particularly useful in illustrating the curious relationship between hyperbole, transgression, and repetition that characterizes all such utterances since, in Zarathustra’s terms, the memorable claim is always part of a report that one may or may not yet be privy to: ‘‘Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!’’35 The inherently secondhand quality of this declaration is underscored by one of Zarathustra’s forerunners, Moses, who comes down from the mountain to bring the vox populi together with the vox dei: ‘‘And Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the ordnances: and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do’’ (Exodus 24:3). As with the ever repeatable vox populi vox dei, these utterances assume a unique power not because they are hyperbolic or actualize the thing they aver in the course of uttering it, but because they demand to be heard as something that only a god could say, that is, they demand to be heard as citations of the divine that acquire authority on that very basis. At the same time, as Nietzsche’s famous line makes explicit, they also demand to be heard as the utterance that God would or could never say. This bind distinguishes the fictive character of voice as at once divine and sacrilegious. In ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ the poet’s ability to cite himself is necessarily both an effort to speak as God and a gesture that underscores his difference from God, who never needs to quote Himself. Perverting the classical relationship between the lyric and its muse, Ho¨lderlin’s poem attempts to speak about two voices—God’s and the people’s—without speaking in their name. In other words, the poem seeks to report voice (or the rumor of voice) without thereby speaking in the voice of rumor. In this

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curious quest for its own voice, the text underscores an uncertainty about the ability of language to control the difference between what is and what ought to be. The urgency with which the poet revisits his previous beliefs about the ‘‘voice of the people’’ in order to reassert them has to be understood as an acknowledgement that the voice of the people may not be the voice of God, in which case the opening example of indirect discourse (‘‘Du seiest Gottes Stimme’’) will have to be read as an imperative—Be the voice of God! (‘‘Sei Gottes Stimme!’’). These difficulties become clearer if we compare Ho¨lderlin’s poetry with that of a contemporary author who grappled with the same issues. Although most of his best-known texts were written decades before the French Revolution, the poet Friedrich Klopstock, whose experimentation with the syntactic and metrical possibilities of the German language was extremely influential for the young Ho¨lderlin, was still quite productive at the end of the eighteenth century. Having been made an honorary citizen of France by the National Assembly, he spent his time writing praise of his adopted nation. For him, the problem of talking about God is bound up with the question of whether the authority of an ode rests on its relationship to a speaking God, or whether even to refer to a speaking God is already an egregious anthropomorphism. These issues are explored by Klopstock in a poem contemporaneous with ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ ‘‘Thirst for Knowledge’’ (‘‘Wißbegierde’’), a text that asks whether God, like mortals, ‘‘speaks’’ through deeds that take place in the world (‘‘Spricht durch tat auch, / Welche die Sterblichen tun, die Gottheit?’’). If the answer is yes, then any historical act may be an act of God rather than a human act, and the French armies marching across Europe can be greeted as agents of the Lord. The first strophe reads: God, too, speaks. With the language of eternity, The eye catches sight of more than the ear Hears; and His voice is faint When the grapes and the flowers refresh us. Auch Gott spricht. Von der Sprache des Ewigen Erblickt das Auge mehr, wie das Ohr von ihr Ho¨rt; und nur leis’ ist seine Stimme, Wenn uns die Traub’, und die Blume labet.36

On a didactic level, the poem is interesting because it never resolves the question of whether God speaks through deeds. It is its deceptively straight-

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forward first sentence, however, that is truly provocative: ‘‘God, too, speaks [Auch Gott spricht].’’ On the one hand, these three words state the obvious, indeed, they state the condition by virtue of which anything can be ‘‘obvious.’’ Only because God speaks (‘‘Let there be light!’’) can there be a world in which language can reveal something to be true. From this absolute presupposition that no mortal could claim to have presupposed, the poem quickly gains a more pious footing, going on to characterize the worldly forms taken by the divine voice and to ponder epistemological questions about God’s actions. In this way, ‘‘God, too, speaks’’ becomes ‘‘God speaks, as well,’’ with the emphasis now falling on speech as one of God’s activities rather than on God as one orator among others. Still, the first word of the poem—auch—lingers uneasily. As with ‘‘You are the voice of the people,’’ the claim that God, among others, speaks necessarily comes under suspicion of denigrating God rather than praising Him. But precisely what does ‘‘denigrate’’ mean here? Like Klopstock’s betterknown poem ‘‘The Messiah,’’ ‘‘Thirst for Knowledge’’ begins by talking about God in the third person rather than with God as the object of the poet’s address, but unlike the earlier text, this poem does not ask an eternal muse to sing about God. If anything, the poem presents us not with a language that tries to speak about God in more than purely rationalist terms, but with a language that breaks with the authority of divine speech in which all identity is modeled on the self-assertion of Exodus 3:14: ‘‘I am who I am.’’37 In other words, Klopstock writes as if Moses had descended from the mount to announce to the Israelites: ‘‘Auch Gott spricht.’’ The first three words of his poem hazard a stab at a poetry that speaks about God without asking for God’s permission to do so. At the same time, it is only in this gamble, only in running the risk of blasphemy, that it is possible to treat God’s voice as more than just one voice among others. Only in this way can we present the divine voice as the also, the auch, of all voices (Es spricht; auch Gott spricht). Of course, the costs may be enormous. The poem closes by confronting not simply the fear that we cannot know which worldly events are acts of God and which are not, but also the anxiety that to announce ‘‘Auch Gott spricht’’ is to say that God Himself is eternally silent on the question of whether or not He can in fact speak. The poetry that strives to confirm its own power to speak is potentially the poetry farthest from Him, and when in the final strophe the poet commands, ‘‘Be

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silent! [Schweigt jetzt!],’’ it is not clear whether he is addressing those who would deny God or the various worldly manifestations of God Himself.38 For Klopstock, the basic mission of the ode as a form of praise is threatened by the possibility that the language that will allow for a poetic relation to God obeys a logic that is anything but divine. In Ho¨lderlin’s poem, it is the people’s voice that seems to be lost, or rather, to be realized only through its loss. Although the opening few lines of ‘‘Voice of the People’’ clearly dominated its original two-strophe version, it is arguable that Ho¨lderlin’s repeated expansion of the text replaces any straightforward meditation on divine voice with a far more complex discussion. Rivers plunging from ledge to ledge are aligned with mortals who, forgetful of themselves even as their eyes remain wide open, seize the shortest path into the cosmos. The presentation of force is decidedly violent, and one could well imagine that the people are constantly on the verge of becoming a mob, their voice always a syllable away from babble. At the same time, even the most tumultuous images of the poem betray systematic design: the running waters are ‘‘abandoned, helmless,’’ yet they clearly assume great might from their organization and direction, just as the inexorable progress toward the end of human life is described as orderly, predictable, and marked by a willingness to comply. What actually moves the heart is the poet’s intimation of a ‘‘surer’’ route, not a brush with chaos. Although most interpretations of Ho¨lderlin’s first five or six strophes speak of a tension between hope for future liberty and a fear of uncontrollable forces (a people turned unruly), it is hard to see exactly what sort of freedom is at stake here. In the only section of ‘‘Voice of the People’’ other than the opening stanza that explicitly mentions voices, a strophe Ho¨lderlin rewrote several times before ultimately allowing it to vanish in the final revisions, the vox populi is described as peaceful and pious, if potentially restless. The full complexity of this figure of expression only becomes evident in the final nine strophes as the text shifts to an identifiably epic tone and recounts the tale of Xanthus, an ancient city where the populace, besieged by foes, set themselves aflame rather than allow themselves to be conquered. Incredibly, the people do this not once, but twice: first, when faced by Persian invaders; then, five hundred years later, when confronted by the Greeks. The emphasis on the repetition of the event, and indeed, on the pre-figuration of the one disaster by the earlier one centuries before, parallels the opening lines of the poem in which the poet stresses his return

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to the activity of youth and his proclamation, ‘‘You are the voice of God.’’ The inaugural gesture of identification and praise in which the poem ostensibly gives itself a voice by determining its subject matter as the divine voice of voices is thus aligned with its closing description of the double suicide of an entire city. ‘‘Voice of the People’’ refers to this self-destruction as a sacrifice. When it mentions an artist who destroys his work to honor higher powers, it seems to suggest that this event honors the gods. Finally, it would appear, the people speak to the divine rather than on its behalf, although they do so by dying, twice. In these terms, the vox populi can be regarded as a sort of supervoice, the expressive event by virtue of which all political identities are meted out. The last strophe completes this monumentalization and memorialization of the voice of the people by reflecting on the sagalike status of the story that has been told: So their children heard, and no doubt Such legends are good, as a memory Of the Highest; yet there is also need of One to interpret the holy legends. So hatten es die Kinder geho¨rt, und wohl Sind gut die Sagen, denn ein Geda¨chtnis sind Dem Ho¨chsten sie, doch auch bedarf es Eines, die heiligen auszulegen.39

In the poem’s closing lines, the lyric seems to finalize its transformation into epic, describing the repeated recounting of the memory of a people who survive in the sagas, always there to die again, twice. It is this last detail that should disturb us, because the improbable privilege or horror of dying two times is not the same as the privilege (or horror) of dying again and again with each retelling of the saga. In this instance, twice is much less than an idealized once that can be repeated over and over. When Ho¨lderlin adds that one is needed who will interpret the stories, the interpretation for which he calls can only be an interpretation that treats the story of Xanthus as an expression of extreme mortality and finitude, not as an emblem of resistance made permanent by poetry. ‘‘Voice of the People’’ gives voice to the voice of the people as something more than just one voice among others by revealing that each gesture to ensure the legacy of this city, each gesture to assimilate it to a historical saga that will guarantee it is never forgotten,

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serves to underscore the city’s status as irremediably lost. The poem is a lyric, an instance of ‘‘poetic voice,’’ because it can relate to its addressee, the people’s voice, only as something forever vanishing, forever on the way to being just a story. The fiction by virtue of which any voice can be a voice at all is thereby ‘‘given voice’’ in being exposed as potentially nothing more than a tall tale. Through this double sacrifice, the voice of the people becomes the voice of God by demonstrating that both the people and God may be nothing more than rumors. The attempt to theorize the voice of the people, the attempt to ensure its survival as a monument of history, only confirms that this voice is absolutely limited and mortal. What lingers is not an ideal memory of praise through sacrifice, but death. In retelling after retelling of the story, the people of Xanthus die, twice, because as finite, mortal, and lost—i.e., as irremediably other than the idealized first-person construct that is the ‘‘voice’’ of Ho¨lderlin’s poem—their lyric story is never a monument to what once was and still is, but a sign of something that can never be repeated. The poet does not preserve the stories by relating them. Nor would it be accurate to say that each recounting of the story is the repetition of a sacrifice whereby the polis becomes political by burning itself to the ground, one more time. In striving to treat the voice of the people as more than just the ‘‘other’’ of its own voice, this poem not only describes the disruption or destruction of the voice it praises; it also exposes itself to the possibility that its own expression, robbed of all individuality or interiority, will become merely one more figure in an epic saga, rather than the medium for an event that could happen over and over. Only by taking this risk of utter loss, by potentially forgoing the very authority of poetry as a medium of record or commemoration, does ‘‘Voice of the People’’ have a chance to be the poetry of the vox populi. Interpretation, Aus-legung, the laying out of the sagas, occurs here as language’s challenge to its own power to found a history of the past—even when that founding occurs as a sacrifice and subsequent transcendence of loss. Far from demonstrating that the language of lyric is in the service of a teleological project designed to memorialize the story of a people, the force of lyric praise—praise for God, praise for the people, praise for poetry—lies in the fact that in asking, ‘‘Who are the people?’’ the poem does not prefigure the answer as something that will unfold in the image of its own voice—be that voice individual or collective, mortal or divine. ‘‘Voice of the

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People’’ is a political text because it envisions a hyperbolic sacrifice in which language acknowledges its own failure to give voice to the products of its expression without thereby winning a new voice in exchange for its confession. What we call ‘‘lyric’’ is nothing other than this permanent interruption of language’s power to be the giver and taker of voice. The idea of lyric as an expression of individual and group experience, if not a medium of collective memory, has received a great deal of attention in contemporary critical theory. As both a social and an antisocial discourse, lyric may offer unique perspectives into the ways in which literature functions as a site on which values are articulated and contested.40 In ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ Theodor Adorno proposes that lyric is the expression of social antagonism because it is the discourse in which the spontaneity of subjective expression coincides with the domination of that expression by a language that is universal and objective. Adorno does not argue that individual self-expression becomes objective with the help of linguistic forms and is thereby able to confront society as an equal. Nor does he claim that in lyric, language speaks through a subject that is little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy. Rather, he maintains that the lyric identification of an individual with a universal discourse allows for the expression of a singular alienation so extreme that it can no longer be assimilated into the social fabric as one expression among others. In this respect, lyric distinguishes itself by not being put to work in the service of any program external to it. Only at the point at which poetry avoids doing anyone else’s bidding can it break with the ideological paradigms of the status quo. If ‘‘Voice of the People’’ offers us the poetry of a city whose double loss never becomes a transcendent event, it is by no means clear that this text realizes Ho¨lderlin’s hyperbole of hyperboles, much less the progressive potential characterized by Adorno. In Ho¨lderlin’s later poems, the historical (and potentially revolutionary) nature of poetic language is explored through the figures of remembrance and memory. Memory appears by name in a number of his texts, but in its most important manifestation, it goes under a divine name, ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ the title of Ho¨lderlin’s last ‘‘complete’’ hymn, written at least four years after ‘‘Voice of the People.’’41 Familiar from Hesiod’s Theogony and present in Orphic hymns where she is celebrated as the possibility of a continuous mediation between nous and psyche, Mnemosyne, the personification of memory, daughter of heaven (Uranos) and earth (Gaia), is also (by Zeus) the mother of the nine Muses.42

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The hope for a reconciliation between the Titanic and Olympian orders, this goddess is the ground of poetic inspiration, as we learn when Hesiod’s bard goes to great lengths to thank her daughters for their gifts of song and knowledge of the past. Written in and to the name of memory, ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ is thus a poem about the nature of poetry as a language that constitutes itself through its power to remember and to be remembered. A text about the very possibility of historical recollection, it asks whether every ‘‘memorable’’ language must first and foremost be a tribute to memory’s divine name. The editorial history of ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ is rife with controversy. Efforts to produce a transcription of the handwritten original have become a test case for the vexing problem of how Ho¨lderlin’s manuscripts should be fashioned into printed pieces and whether it is even possible in some cases to speak of him as having composed a single poem.43 Even a brief examination of the critical apparatuses mobilized to the address the task suggests a situation in which it is all but impossible to determine the extent to which philological, hermeneutic, and poetological expertise are working at cross purposes or in tandem. Alone, D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurter Ausgabe presents a number of provocative challenges to our assumptions about what a reliable edition can or should look like. Attempting to convey all extant information about the empirical generation of Ho¨lderlin’s texts through a palimpsestlike presentation of his revisions, this enormous project constitutes a substantial argument about the relationship between the production and the meaning of a poem.44 Whether the edition is therefore a major contribution to the conceptualization of textuality is less certain.45 As our examination of his poetics has shown, Ho¨lderlin is quick to stress that the alternation that allows the material identity of a work to appear is made possible by a permanent clash between form and content. The concept of a text can be articulated only insofar as the distinction between principles of grammar and principles of semantic change can be sustained. Ultimately, this may have nothing to do with the integrity of one document over and against a later set of revisions.46 As a poem concerned with the conflicts between generative laws and transcendental principles of signification, ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ is not atypical of the texts grouped by Friedrich Beißner, the editor of the Ho¨lderlin Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, under the heading ‘‘Die vaterla¨ndischen Gesa¨nge’’:

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In two Gesa¨nge composed roughly contemporaneously with ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ ‘‘The One’’ and ‘‘Patmos,’’ the relations between mortals and deities are explored in terms of Christ’s status as either the opponent of the Hellenic pantheon or its completion.48 Relying on the appearance of a cross in the second strophe of ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ the ‘‘One’’ of the above strophe is often taken to be the Son of God, and the poem is read as a clash between Christian and ancient Greek figures and their corresponding models of history.49 Given the complexities surrounding theological conceptions of identity, the consequences of such a decoding of ‘‘One’’ are difficult to determine. Although it will not be our focus, it would be possible to explore these relationships in terms of the ‘‘deformation’’ (‘‘furchtbar gehet / Es Ungestalt’’) described in the first layer of the handwritten manuscript.50 Here, an excessive engagement with ‘‘One’’ (‘‘uns / Zu gierig genommen’’) leads not to the completion of humanity through its union with the godhead, but to the disfiguration of identity itself, the setting adrift of self-coincidence into an

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impersonal oscillation between sameness and difference that the second layer of the text also describes as a ‘‘strife in the heavens above men.’’51 This differential force leaves its traces across the entire poem in all its versions such that the intimate interactions between human and divine realms will be expressed as divisions internal to one order or the other rather than as a direct clash between gods and humans.52 Whether or not the poem ultimately presents a system governed by an ancient Greek or a Christian pantheon, it is clear that in the final version of the strophe cited above, ‘‘our’’ self-relation is crucial: ‘‘A sign we are, without meaning [deutungslos] / Without pain we are and have nearly / Lost our language in foreign lands.’’ As a sign, we cannot be understood to point to a particular referent. Unable to master our semiotic meaningfulness, we never allow for the establishment of a relation to a content by virtue of which signing could be said to take place. A sign that does not sign, we cannot be interpreted, and our self-relation cannot be understood as the product of an act of self-understanding. How, then, can memory facilitate a meaningful connection between a present and a past or between a Hellenic and a Judeo-Christian universe if we are almost entirely lost to ourselves and to the language we are in the very act of affirming a relationship between ourselves and this ‘‘foreign land’’? How can a sign lose its meaning and its language and still retain its status as our identity? Can any other sign refer to this event? It would be possible to pursue these questions by focusing on one of the poem’s most enigmatic lines, the close of the first strophe: ‘‘Though the time / Be long, The true / Will come to pass [Lang ist / Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre].’’53 The challenge is to explain what it means for something to happen (sich ereignen), and whether such an event can be grasped as an event of language. The advent of ‘‘the true’’ would seem to have something to do with memory as that which both confirms our existence as a sign and threatens us in our sign nature with the loss of our status as possessors of language. To remember would thus be to sacrifice the linguistic quality that is our most intimate belonging. The threat of sacrifice is very much in the background of the final strophe of ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ which presents a relation with a past in which the speaker identifies with the fate of the Greek heroes in such a way that he is drawn into their fate and may die:

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By the figtree My Achilles died to me, And Ajax lies By the grottoes of the sea, By streams, with Skamandros as neighbor. In the persisting tradition of Salamis, Great Ajax died Of the roar in his temples And on foreign soil, unlike Patroklos, dead in king’s armor. And many Others also died. On Kithairon Lay Eleutherai, city of Mnemosyne. And when God cast off his cloak, the darkness came to cut Her lock of hair. For the gods grow Indignant if a man Not gather himself to save His soul, yet he has no choice; likeWise, mourning is in error. Am Feigenbaum ist mein Achilles mir gestorben, Und Ajax liegt An den Grotten der See, An Ba¨chen, benachbart dem Skamandros. An Schla¨fen Sausen ist, nach Der unbewegten Salamis steter Gewohnheit, in der Fremd’ ist groß Ajax gestorben. Patroklos aber in des Ko¨niges Harnisch. Und es starben Noch andere viel. Am Kitha¨ron aber lag Elevthera¨, der Mnemosyne Stadt. Der auch, also Ablegte den Mantel Gott, das abendliche nachher lo¨ste Die Loken. Himmlische nemlich sind Unwillig, wenn einer nicht Die Seele schonend sich Zusammengenommen, aber er muß doch; dem Gleich fehlet die Trauer.54

If ‘‘we’’ are a sign, it is imperative to understand in what respects, if any, we are different from the other mythological and historical names in the poem,

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and whether the vision of history that unfolds is more than a collection, or clash, of allegorical figures. The characterization of a relation to heroes of the past appears to take the form of a complex act of possession: ‘‘By the figtree / My Achilles died to me [Am Feigenbaum ist mein / Achilles mir gestorben].’’ Beißner has described this line as the ‘‘kernel of the poem.’’55 Although other critics have suggested that this is probably to overstate the verse’s significance, its structure remains confounding. The proposed conjunction of an appropriation of the hero and an appropriation of the hero’s act (‘‘mein Achilles ist mir gestorben’’) seems to assert the possibility of a distinction between the identification with the hero (and the determination of him as one’s own) and the memory of him (as lost).56 The temporal specificity of dying ‘‘to me’’ is far from obvious, particularly insofar as it might be said to constitute the grounds for a relationship between a poetic ‘‘present’’ and a Hellenic ‘‘past.’’ For Ho¨lderlin, Greece is never simply a phenomenal place or period that could be delineated by its coordinates in a given map or timeline. Nor is Greece just an ideal—whether of something eternally present or utterly lost. As interpretations of Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Letter to Bo¨hlendorff’’ have argued, he views the ancient Greeks as a people who can refer to themselves only as irremediably inaccessible to self. To understand our modernity in relation to their past—to seek to confirm our similarity or difference from them—is thus doubly complicated: it effectively requires that we try to establish our historical position vis-a`-vis the Greeks by repeating their impossible relation-to-self, that is, by entering into a comparison and contrast of one infeasible construction of identity with another.57 Attempting to solidify our self-relation—as a sign that is almost lost to itself—we seek a connection with an Other with whom we ironically share only the impossibility of a stable self-relation. At the same time, this past of heroic deaths does not manifest itself in the poem as a dead time, a pure anteriority to which we could never relate. The ancient Greek heroes appear as something yet to be killed in a past that confirms its status as prior to us only in the course of becoming a dying past, or perhaps a deadly one. Never quite gone, the past continues to expire; indeed, this is how it becomes our past. Far from trying to assimilate the Greek Other and thereby ensure its survival, transforming the assertion of its finitude into an affirmation of its immortality, ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ like the closing strophes of ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ envisions memory as an act of language that would confirm the mortality of this Other, that is, its inevita-

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ble death. All that truly survives here is loss, so the invocation of Achilles must paradoxically mark the collapse of any relation we might have with him, as well as the breakdown of any form of a present in which we could remember him. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the most famous lines of this final strophe have been read as a scene of sacrifice: And many Others also died. On Kithairon Lay Eleutherai, the city of Mnemosyne. And when God cast off his cloak, the darkness came to cut Her lock of hair. Und es starben Noch andere viel. Am Kitha¨ron aber lag Elevthera¨, der Mnemosyne Stadt. Der / Die auch als Ablegte den Mantel Gott, das abendliche nachher lo¨ste Die Loken.58

Initially, most interpretations of this scene followed Beißner’s lead and understood the cutting of the lock of hair as the preparation for the sacrifice of the goddess of memory.59 Recently, however, objections to this observation have been raised. Pointing out that Beißner’s own notes to the poem align the ‘‘lock’’ image with Schiller’s Dido (in which the cutting of hair has an overtly amorous connotation), it has been argued that this is actually a scene of the sexual union of Zeus and Mnemosyne (‘‘his’’ cloak, ‘‘her’’ hair, etc.). This would be a representation of the conception of the nine Muses, and thus of poetry itself. In this reading, the ‘‘aber’’ of ‘‘Am Kitha¨ron aber lag’’ is glossed as adversative, a contrast with the ‘‘starben’’ of the previous line.60 From the standpoint of our discussion of Achilles, any true loss of memory will have to be more complicated than the simple sacrifice of its allegorical representative. As a poem that unfolds as a hymn in and to the name of the mother of the muses, ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ asks whether all poetry can and must take place in the name of this deity; that is, whether all poetry must, de facto or de jure, be an ode to her. In the third line of the final strophe, the poem identifies Eleutherai as the goddess’s city. It is tempting to call this a personification in which an idea is represented as a person. Because, however, the word Mnemosyne already refers to a complex conjunction of a

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concept and an individual, we might just as well say that the city is thereby figured as an abstraction (for instance, as an idea of memory), rather than being concretely embodied in someone. Nor can we simply reverse the relationship and maintain that the abstraction of memory is being concretized in a physical place, for Eleutherai is a classical emblem of ruin and is just as much the embodiment of memory’s absence as of its presence.61 In this vein, we might be inclined to suggest that the linking of Mnemosyne and Eleutherai is a fitting emblem for the fall of Greece. The problem is that Eleutherai is also a Greek word for ‘‘freedom,’’ and once the different chains of associations are set into play, it is by no means obvious how the various dimensions of denomination and personification reinforce or undermine one another, much less when they come to an end. Is this a city ‘‘in name alone’’ or ‘‘in memory alone’’? Is memory the grounds of freedom or the site on which the dynamic of recollection and liberty falters? Various glosses on the interactions of these terms are conceivable, but none of them stands out as authoritative, and as is often the case with Ho¨lderlin’s poetry, we will begin to sense that we are interpreting the scholarly apparatuses rather than the texts themselves. Above all, this overdetermination of symbols, names, and places highlights the fact that memory, however it takes place, does not occur as a series of referential determinations in which singular locations and times are concretely illustrated. Focusing again on the line in question, what we first and foremost encounter is a setting side by side of names: ‘‘Eleutherai, the Mnemosyne city.’’ At issue is not which figure represents which idea, but the authority of names itself. In its confoundingly brief conjunction of these two terms, the poem gestures toward the inability of any name to name the difference between a singular place or entity, an allegorical personification, and an idea. No dynamic of denomination can reveal which titles are abstract and which are concrete, which are universal and which particular. If the poem ‘‘remembers’’ the city by naming it for the goddess of memory, it does so only in a gesture that risks transforming the name of memory into a figure of yet another idea (ruin or freedom), which is to say, the gesture of naming removes the very grounds for analogy and substitution on the basis of which a name can be recognized as part of a trope or a figure. In revealing that no name can govern the relations between names, the setting side by side of Eleutherai and Mnemosyne risks paralyzing the

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interactions of words and concepts by virtue of which the lines of the poem might be explained as meaningful. If the relationship (assuming there is one) between a name and a personification cannot be controlled by a single term, particularly when that term is memory, then no hierarchy of form and content or observer and perspective can dictate how the passage through the appositive—Eleutherai, the Mnemosyne city—is to be understood. In naming the city for the goddess of memory, we ruin (or free ourselves from) the assumption that it is through names that poems memorialize. The name of the city is ruined, set free, or both in becoming a figure, a person, an image, a motif—in short, in becoming something more or less than ‘‘just’’ a name. The link between the conceptualization of memory and the name of memory is a ruined figure, a figure that is neither a concept nor a name. Memory thus arises at the site of the sacrifice of the freedom to conceptualize through names, a sacrifice in which the name ‘‘freedom’’ appears only as the destruction of that which was already ruined. In ruining the name of freedom, the language of Mnemosyne ruins naming.62 Every memory is fated to remember that no memory can govern the relationship between something and its name, and all language is at risk of becoming a name for language’s own failure to remember itself as something named ‘‘language.’’ If ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ is a historical discourse, it is not because it helps us remember what has happened or because it shows us that the poetic subject can produce and destroy itself in various acts of self-creation and selfdestruction. ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ reveals rather that what we call ‘‘history’’ is precisely the failure of the relations between the past, the present, and the future to submit to a logic of referential denomination. Although all names are potentially historical figures, in the terms of Ho¨lderlin’s poetry, this means that they are signs that have nearly lost their language. Memory, a memory that can truly remember the past as something finite and singular rather than ideal and universal, thus takes place as the decimation of the very forms of historical experience that would coordinate our connection with the ancient Greeks. The irony of names, then, is that to use one is always to risk forgetting that remembering is precisely what a name can never facilitate. To put this slightly differently, because one cannot sing a hymn to the mother of the Muses and hope to remember what one is doing, one can never be sure whether one is in the midst of such a dedicatory gesture or not. In a poem

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where names of the dead and the death of names run amok, the danger is not that the poet’s identification with the heroes will falter on his mortality, but that it will falter on his name. In these terms, poetry addressed to Mnemosyne confirms not the absolute self-determination of an ‘‘I’’ (or a ‘‘not-I’’), but the loss of language as the grounds of personal memory and the loss of the ‘‘I’’ as the minimal personification of language. The close of the poem’s final strophe further complicates the structure of any identification with the past: For the gods grow Indignant if a man Not gather himself to save His soul, yet he must; likeWise, mourning is in error. Himmlische nemlich sind Unwillig, wenn einer nicht die Seele schonend sich Zusammengenommen, aber er muß doch; dem Gleich fehlet die Trauer.63

The dominant interpretation of the final line treats it as an augmentation of the previous claims: mourning is errant, like the error of a man who has not gathered himself (sich zusammengenommen).64 The ‘‘he’’ of ‘‘he must’’ is thus both the hero (Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus), who must die, and the poet, who must identify with the hero through mourning, a gloss reinforced by a sentence that preceded the ‘‘For the gods . . .’’ line in an earlier layer of the text: ‘‘And many others / also died. By their own hand / Many mournful [traurige], courageous hearts, yet / Divinely compelled in the end.’’ At the same time, ‘‘he must’’ also restates the need to pull oneself together in this predicament in which neither heroes nor poets escape the gods’ demand that one save oneself.65 In fact, the poet never completes his identification with the heroes by coming to stand in a field of divine compulsion. As a mode of identifying with the dead heroes who must die, mourning errs because a historical consciousness founded on an insight into memory’s role in the destruction of the authority of names has no language with which to truly contemplate its own demise. The poet errs in his identification with the ‘‘others’’ precisely insofar as he cannot err in the way that they can. In this sense, mourning fails to facilitate a connection between the poet and his heroic object that

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could then be internalized as a division within the lyric self: ‘‘Mourning is soon missing [dem / Gleich fehlet die Trauer],’’ not because it has become a spiritual or psychological lack, but because there is no longer any obvious correspondence between the temporal dynamics of the subject and the historical schema of past, present, and future.66 In articulating a complex relationship between an entity that would know itself as an irreducibly temporal being and a language of memory in which historical events occur as singular breakdowns in syntax (‘‘Eleutherai, the city of Mnemosyne’’), what ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ ultimately reveals is that historical time is never a time we can call our own. The very models of recollection on which we rely to establish a substantive link with the past are antithetical to the figures of self-relation that are supposed to confirm our existence as unified entities (‘‘For the gods grow / Indignant if a man / Not gather himself to save / His soul’’). A similar set of problems plagues ‘‘Remembrance’’ (‘‘Andenken’’), another of Ho¨lderlin’s later poems that is often read as a counterpart to ‘‘Mnemosyne.’’ At first glance, there is much about ‘‘Remembrance’’ that holds out hope for a simplification, or at least a stabilization, of the relations between memory and recollection.67 Nothing in it resembles the near loss of language with which ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ opens, overt meditations on death are nowhere to be found, and the agency of the gods, at least in comparison to contemporaneous works such as ‘‘Patmos’’ or ‘‘The Ister,’’ is muted. In further contrast to ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ ‘‘Remembrance’’ also appears to provide a direct account of a personal act of relating to the past, a description that is particularly unusual because it contains precise biographical details drawn from Ho¨lderlin’s experiences on his travels to France.68 On the other hand, large sections of ‘‘Remembrance’’ exhibit a gnomic complexity stemming not from the obscurity of private information, but from the presence of some of the most abstract motifs in Ho¨lderlin’s corpus. The lapidary power of the poem’s final line—‘‘But poets establish what remains [Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter]’’—invokes an activity at a considerable remove from heroic self-sacrifice, but it is arguably one of the most far-reaching statements about language in the entire oeuvre, and it is certainly not reducible to (or necessarily rendered any more incomprehensible by) ‘‘personal’’ factors.69 What kind of experience, then, does ‘‘Remembrance’’ illustrate? The poem opens with a classical figure of inspiration, the power of pneuma: ‘‘The

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northeasterly blows in / My favorite among winds [Der Nordost wehet, / Der liebste unter den Winden].’’70 The description of this wind’s movement from the northeast to the southwest and on to France does not merely serve to illustrate the geographical situation of the speaking voice, for the encounter immediately takes the form of an imperative, as much a command from wind to speaker as from speaker to wind: ‘‘But go now and greet / The lovely Garonne / And the gardens of Bordeaux [Geh aber nun und gru¨ße / Die scho¨ne Garonne, / Und die Ga¨rten von Bourdeaux].’’71 Remembrance, Andenken, takes place not as the act of preparing a path on which to travel to a greeting, but as a demand to greet the present of the past (the France where the poet was) and the past of the present (the France where the poet no longer is).72 In this respect, Ho¨lderlin appears to rely on the Middle High German andenken in treating remembrance as a verb, that is, as something an individual does or experiences, rather than as a noun that refers to experiences facilitated by other acts such as Erinnern (recollection). The nature of this demand is somewhat clarified as we move from the descriptions of Bordeaux in the first strophe to the second, where Ho¨lderlin writes: ‘‘All this still comes to mind and how / The broad tops of elms . . . [Noch denket das mir wohl und wie / Die breiten Gipfel neiget . . .].’’73 With this impersonal ‘‘Noch denket das mir wohl,’’ the sole instance of this Schwabian construction in his work, Ho¨lderlin shifts the act of remembrance away from an active recollection—in which case it would be very close to a synonym for ‘‘thinking of or about something’’ (denken an etwas)— toward a more passive activity, a me´moire involontaire. In this regard, Andenken may be the activity of the poet that deactivates him, a reflection on the temporality of language that leads not to a synthesis, but to a posture that Adorno, employing a phrase from Benjamin, calls ‘‘a complete passivity.’’74 Does ‘‘Remembrance’’ thereby constitute an overcoming of the predicament we analyzed in ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ or is ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ the demystification of its counterpart, and indeed, of all claims on the part of recollection to facilitate self-insight? It would be possible to explore this question in terms of some of the individual motifs of ‘‘Remembrance,’’ or through an analysis of the chiastic logic that is decisive in virtually every strophe.75 In the context of our discussion of ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit,’’ however, it will prove most illuminating to focus on the (in)famous concluding lines:

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But memory Is taken and given by the ocean, And the eyes of love do not waver in their gaze, But poets establish what remains. Es nehmet aber Und giebt Geda¨chtniß die See, Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleißig die Augen, Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.76

Opening the German language to a burst of Greek, Ho¨lderlin’s later poems frequently use aber, nemlich, and several other similar words in an attempt to render the Attic particles gar, men, and de. Functioning uncertainly in an adversative, explanatory, connecting, or even merely rhythmic capacity, these conjunctions confound efforts to align the syntactic patterns of the poems with a propositional summary of their narratives. In ‘‘Andenken,’’ the word aber occupies such a prominent position in every strophe that one is tempted to treat it as the core of the text.77 Still, the final lines appear less than confounding insofar as their two instances of aber seem to have to be read as adversative, with the latter, somewhat more forceful one setting off ‘‘that which remains’’ (das, was bleibt) not only from the giving and taking of memory—from ‘‘that which remains in memory’’ (das, was im Geda¨chtnis bleibt)—but from all the preceding movements of the poem.78 What, however, can remain? In fact, what remains, and all that can remain, is ‘‘aber,’’ for everything else falls outside the poet’s domain as soon as it becomes part of the rhythm of past, present, and future, a rhythm in which activity cannot remain but can only become (or wither away). What remains, remains aber, which is now an ad-verb. Poets found (das) Aberbleiben. Such poetry takes place not by challenging the status of its propositions as originally posited or derivative, but by becoming indifferent to its own ability to form or deform, shifting from the power of language as verb to the power of ad-verb or aber-verb. What ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit’’ calls a ‘‘harmonious oppositioning’’ is precisely this break in the ocean’s give and take of memory, not as an interruption—of parallels between, for example, subjective and historical schemas—but as a remaining-aber. Aber counterposes or counterposits itself to this give and take as a remainder of opposition that memory can never ground. The language of Mnemosyne, we might say, is both founded by and doomed to

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founder on aber. It is the product of a movement that can neither produce this remainder as its own nor remember it as the remainder of an ‘‘Other’’—be it ancient Greece, France, or simply the past. The closing lines of ‘‘Andenken’’ are frequently parodied, as if their idiosyncratic cadence and syntax were simply too successful to be wasted on just one set of nouns and verbs, but to parody aber is in effect to attempt to stabilize rather than to unsettle its semantic function.79 No poetic language can affirm its ability to articulate the difference between a tragic aber and a comic aber, between a sincere aber and an ironic one. Having gone this far, we now have to reinterpret the first aber in the final stanza, in which case ‘‘Es nehmet aber / Und giebt Geda¨chtniß die See’’ is no longer, ‘‘But memory is taken and given by the ocean,’’ but, ‘‘The ocean takes Aber [now a noun] and gives memory.’’ As with the ‘‘oppositioning of the poetic spirit,’’ aber inevitably becomes part of the rhythm to which it would counterpose itself, an alternative to memory rather than something that would transcend it. The imperative to remembrance (‘‘Geh aber nun und gru¨ße’’) is an imperative to remember aber (adverbially) even as it marks the inexorable fall of aber into an additive and adversative rhythm in which nothing, not even aber, ‘‘bleibt.’’ Aber— the word for which there is no other word, the last word that could have a name or be a name, much less the name of memory—is thus the Andenken, the keepsake, of lyric, a language that creates only through its incessant disruption of the relations between what can be represented, what can be established, and what can remain. Of course, to organize a reading of ‘‘Andenken’’ around an interpretation of its final aber may be to do precisely what cannot be done with any instance of this word, namely, to differentiate between its additive and adversative functions. To say that ‘‘language founds what remains aber (now both a noun and an adverb)’’ means that poetry fashions itself as something that can never exist as a fixed determination of reinforcement or contrast. Such a language is what makes it possible for a discourse to be more than a series of predicative positions and counterpositions, and it is what makes it possible for there to be a memory of a past that can be grasped as something other than an ideal present. At the same time, this poetry of remembrance or Mnemosyne is what makes it impossible for language to be confirmed as an authoritative voice that grounds the unity of a subject or confers singularity upon an event. With Ho¨lderlin’s aber,

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lyric takes leave from the ‘‘give and take’’ of names by virtue of which the significance of words would rest on their power to refer to an other— another place, time, or person—as their own. In this respect, his poetry gestures toward a revolution in syntax whereby poetry truly becomes a historical force.

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Economics Beyond Interest Interest will not lie. —Seventeenth-century maxim But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labor. Capital is dead labor which, vampirelike, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. — k a r l m a r x , Capital

The last fifteen years have seen an explosion of interest in Adam Smith. In addition to the fact that the success of capitalism is often celebrated in his name, his oeuvre is increasingly heralded as the key to understanding the relations between politics, aesthetics, and economics in the eighteenth century. As research on Smith has moved beyond The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments to include his writings on jurisprudence, belles lettres, and even astronomy, it is often suggested that his work is a unique example of an interdisciplinary thought attentive to the demands of both metaphysics and the social sciences. More generally, it is now widely recognized that the discourse of classical political economy allows certain questions to be asked about human material agency and the organization of society that would otherwise remain unposed. Less attention has been paid to the role that the conceptualization of language plays in both Anglo-American and Continental political philosophy. Despite their many differences, Smith, Bentham, and Marx are curi111

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ously united behind a demand that we approach economic activity both in terms of a rational drive for the maximization of utility and with reference to a system that is material precisely because it is linguistic. As with Kleist and Ho¨lderlin, the analyses of political economists prove to have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of historical experience and human praxis and force us to rethink the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the empirical analysis of society. At the center of classical political economy and nineteenth-century political philosophy is a sustained reflection on the problem that concerned Kant in his ethical and aesthetic theory: the figure of the self-interested agent and the corresponding ideology of interest. Modern English, German, and the Romance languages all have some derived form of the Latin interesse.1 Indeed, there are few words in English we employ with such ease, whether in casual conversation or in academic debate, as the word interest. We ask what a person’s ‘‘real interests’’ are or whose interests should have priority; we consider whether human beings are essentially ‘‘self-interested’’; we question whether people, groups, or governments are capable of acting in or pursuing ‘‘their own interests’’ or the ‘‘interests of others’’; and we wonder whether it will always be beneficial, or ethical, to do so. In each case, we rarely reflect on the difficulty of defining precisely what ‘‘interests’’ are. On the one hand, ‘‘interests’’ name that which is most proper to a person or group; they are ostensibly the motivations or predilections that define an agent’s particularity. On the other hand, ‘‘interests’’ designate a dynamic that takes the self beyond itself, grabbing its attention and turning its gaze outward. This ambiguity is heightened by the extent to which the connotations of interest seem to run the gamut from a drive or long-term investment to a mere whim or passing fancy. The one constant here is the self—the one who is ‘‘interested’’—so it is easy to see how it could be argued that ‘‘interest’’ is always a question of ‘‘self-interest,’’ that is, one is first and foremost interested in one’s own ability to be interested. In this respect, one’s interest in ‘‘interest’’ is and ultimately can only be oneself. The guiding maxim of liberal capitalism, not to mention the single most famous statement about the concept of interest, is Adam Smith’s canonical claim in The Wealth of Nations: ‘‘By pursuing his own interest [the individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’’2 While neoclassical economics has drastically revised most of Smith’s positions, this idea, the clearest and most poignant

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proclamation of the value of a free-market system, continues to enjoy seemingly unassailable authority. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a dictum that has had more profound consequences for how we live our lives. The belief that the social whole is best served when individuals are allowed to pursue their own interests organizes modern Western communities on virtually every level. Yet what precisely is interest? Can it be an object of systematic scientific investigation? Can it be quantified? For social scientists, interests are empirical phenomena to be studied—their emergence questioned, their status as the feelings of individuals or the products of superstructures probed, their interactions assessed. The model of individual volition can be made as complex as we like: we can complement the pleasure principle with a reality principle or a death drive, link selfishness with sympathy or altruism, or integrate (the myth of ) individual autonomy into a paradigm of social determinism. In each case, however, interest—of a self, group, or world— remains the basic organizing term. One could suggest that the concept of interest functions as a compromise formation, a sort of nonpsychological psychological category designed to protect the empirical analysis of individuals and societies from having to rely on the metaphysical will of philosophy or the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Situated somewhere between desire and the indisputable dictates of logic, such a dynamic is at once an articulation of affect and entirely affect neutral. The self-interested self is guided by reason but does not overindulge in rationality; it exhibits no unbridled passions but is never purely mechanical.3 The complexity of interest may lie in its twofold status as a figure of appropriation and a figure of delay. On the one hand, to take an interest in something is to mobilize it for some ulterior motive. On the other hand, interest ‘‘makes a difference,’’ as the Latin root would have it, since it always points toward something not yet realized: a wish, an objective, an endpoint with which no particular interest can coincide. The concept of interest is thus ridden with ambiguity, sometimes treated as a means to an end, other times spoken of as though it were a goal in its own right. The fact that this ambiguity is never paralyzing, however, suggests that interest—inter-esse, between-being—grounds a discourse in which resolution is not the primary concern. Suspended between the power and the obscurity of interest, the subject of liberal capitalism discovers that he or she will reap the benefits of

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a commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—tomorrow. The self-interested agent lives a life of eternal deferral. Interest, then, is never a sure thing; it always involves a risk, and the return on one’s investment is anything but guaranteed. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains: There is much that is obscure in the history of this word [interest], first as to the adoption of Latin interest as a subject, and secondly as to the history of the Old French sense [of ] ‘‘damage, loss.’’ No other sense is recorded in French until the sixteenth century. As this was not the fifteenth-century sense of English interess(e), it is curious that the form of the French should have affected the English. The relations between the sense-development in French and English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are also far from clear.

The Old French word to which the editors refer meant both ‘‘injury’’ and ‘‘compensation for injury,’’ what we would today call ‘‘damages.’’ Even in a nonfiduciary sense, to regard oneself as interested in something is to say that it may turn out to be less (or more) than one expects, but—and this is the key issue—the state of being interested is always the state of not yet knowing what one will get. The point is not simply that one can be selfinterested and still not do right by oneself. More fundamentally, the experience of interest is an experience of the possibility of difference. It is an experience with what is different, with what makes a difference, and with what could make oneself or a given state of affairs different. In this sense, interest is always bound up with the possibility of things being other than what they are now. As self-interest, interest is always interest in the otherthan-self, which is to say, the self-interested self is by definition ‘‘otherinterested.’’ In Kant, we saw that the very ubiquity of the term ‘‘interest’’ dissimulates its complexity. A glance at some major political theorists who rely on the concept reveals a similar situation in which interest is routinely invoked as though its meaning were self-evident. In A Theory of Justice, for example, John Rawls feels no need to clarify his terms when he describes society as being ‘‘marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests,’’ or even when he speaks of people’s ‘‘inclination towards self-interest.’’4 The omission is all the more notable if one considers Rawls’s characterization of the cornerstone of his theory, the hypothetical ‘‘original position’’ in which rational agents are pictured as selecting those principles of social relations

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under which they would fare best.5 A crucial parameter of this thought experiment is the stipulation that the self-interested entities at work must be presumed to be mutually disinterested. While Rawls’s philosophy of justice begins with several assumptions about what interests are, what the absence of interests might look like, and how interests relate, he never asks why a dynamic of interest is almost always in contact, if not in tension, with a dynamic of disinterest. Nor does he reflect on what it means that in his model interest is to be both irreducibly singular—each person has his or her own private interests—and yet thoroughly generic—interests are supposed to facilitate precise comparisons and contrasts between individuals or groups. One forerunner of Rawls with an unusually good sense for the difficulties presented by the concept of interest was Jeremy Bentham, whose An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation situates a notion of interest at the heart of his utilitarian calculus. As any action is to be evaluated based on whether or not it augments the total happiness of the community, there must be some way of quantifying this happiness, and it seems that the unit will be interest: ‘‘The interest of the community then is what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.’’6 At this point, one might expect Bentham to turn to an arithmetic of interests and provide some clarification of the standards for comparing them and for how they might be summed. When it comes to counting utility, however, he instead relies on pleasures and pains as his quanta. Although it expresses the fact that an individual’s wants, desires, and plans can be combined with one another, interest is not a measure in its own right. The real significance of interest may have to do with its role in the definition of utility itself. Something’s utility, Bentham maintains, depends on its capacity ‘‘to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.’’7 Is interest therefore simply a synonym for ‘‘wellbeing’’? Aware that there may be some unsettled questions here, Bentham adds: ‘‘A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains.’’8 This definition of interest seems to be a statement about what promotes or is for someone’s interest, that is, Bentham highlights the prepositions one may employ with ‘‘interest’’ without explaining what it actually means. One

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might be tempted to resolve the matter by saying that ‘‘interest’’ names one’s relationship with one’s own pleasures and pains. For Bentham, however, pleasures and pains are real precisely because of their palpable immediacy, so it is unclear what this mediating ‘‘relationship’’ would add. For his part, Bentham is entirely forthcoming about the inadequacy of his remarks. ‘‘Interest,’’ he writes, ‘‘is one of those words, which not having any superior genus, cannot in the ordinary way be defined.’’9 To pseudodefine a word by using it in a series of prepositional phrases is a tactic Bentham elsewhere calls ‘‘paraphrasis,’’ an explanation in which ‘‘the term . . . is made parcel of a phrase.’’10 Recourse to paraphrasis, he maintains, is often necessary when dealing with ‘‘fictitious’’ entities: ‘‘Where the word is the name of a fictitious entity, frequently it has no superior genus. And then, that mode of exposition [per genus et differentiam] is inapplicable.’’11 Bentham defines a ‘‘fictitious entity’’ as ‘‘an entity to which, though by the grammatical form of the discourse employed in speaking of it, existence be ascribed, yet in truth and reality existence is not meant to be ascribed. Every noun-substantive which is not the name of a real entity, perceptible or inferential, is the name of a fictitious entity.’’12 In this curious ontology, the difference between reality and fiction relies on a term, ‘‘existence,’’ that is itself a fiction. For Bentham, fictions (which include concepts such as obligations, rights, and property) are a necessary evil; without them, there can be no discourse about the human mind. At the same time, he does not think that fictions should be allowed to masquerade as ‘‘real’’ entities like, for instance, pleasure and pain. Such fictions, which Bentham also calls ‘‘immaterial entities,’’ do have material roots, and the idea attached to the name of a fictitious entity can be explained by pointing out the relation the ‘‘import of that word bears to the import of one or more names of real entities.’’13 In this manner, the fictive term can be translated ‘‘into a correspondent proposition having for its subject the name of some real entity.’’14 In the introduction to his ‘‘Table of the Springs of Action,’’ Bentham observes that desires, wants, hopes and fears, motives and interests—all fictions—have their roots in pleasures and pains.15 He also repeats the qualification he makes in Principles of Morals, noting that, in contradistinction to other fictions such as desire or motive, ‘‘for the word interest, no synonyms have been found.’’16 On the basis of this claim, we may infer that interests are not desires, wants, hopes, fears, or motives. Indeed, insofar as we cannot say what they are, it is far from clear

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why we need them. In the list of actions and their foundations Bentham provides, he appears to situate interests as mediating terms between fictions (motives) and realities (pleasures and pains). Sexual interest, for example, corresponds to lust and lechery (as motives) and to sexual appetite (the realities of pleasure and pain); pecuniary interest with avarice or miserliness (motives) and with affluence or poverty (pleasures and pains); and so on. Interest functions to confirm that fictions are fictions and real entities real entities, but it is not obviously part of either realm. The matter is further complicated when Bentham informs us in Principles of Morals that pleasures and pains—the ultimate standard of real entities— are ‘‘interesting perceptions.’’17 In other words, it is only by being ‘‘interesting,’’ by partaking in this mysterious term that is neither simply material nor immaterial, that pleasure and pain can confirm their status as the reality of the real, the ground of everything that can demonstrate its status as other than fictive. Far from naming a real connection between the self and its perceptions, then, ‘‘interest’’ designates a fictitious relation, or rather, underscores the fact that the very notion of a relation—especially the relation between a fiction and its roots in reality—is a fiction. Intended to designate the minimal link between perception and thought or between reality and the necessity of a fictitious discourse about reality, ‘‘interest’’ reminds us that what is real about fictions is that we speak about them as real. Bentham explains: ‘‘To language, then—to language alone—it is, that fictitious entities owe their existence—their impossible, yet indispensable, existence’’; language is ‘‘that instrument without which, though of itself it be nothing, nothing can be said, and scarcely can anything be done.’’18 Like his notion of language, Bentham’s conception of interest is ‘‘of itself’’ nothing, neither real nor fictitious, yet without it there are no feelings or intentions. In this sense, interest and language are arguably both more real and more fictitious than reality or fiction: Incorrect as it would be, if the entities in question [fictions] were considered as being, in point of reality, upon a footing with real entities, as above distinguished, the supposition of a sort of verbal reality, so to speak, as belonging to these fictitious entities, is a supposition without which the matter of language could never have been formed, nor between man and man any converse carried on other than such as hath place between brute and brute.19

The basic supposition of language is that there is a verbal reality, ‘‘so to speak.’’ For Bentham, this ‘‘so to speak’’ is the name for ‘‘interest,’’ the

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name for the fact that in trying to speak about people as both material and immaterial entities, we must always qualify our terms. ‘‘Interest’’ designates the reality of a fiction of fictions; it highlights the possibility that the verbal reality of fictions is more ‘‘real’’ than the reality of pleasure and pain; and it makes clear that the utilitarian subject is, above all, interested in this verbal reality that will make the (fictive) existence of its fictions possible. For Bentham’s human being, the ultimate interest, ‘‘so to speak,’’ is in being able to use language to speak about language. Bentham did not pursue the relationship between his linguistic theory and his doctrine of utility, and subsequent liberal political philosophers have by and large disregarded his concerns and sought to convince us that our interests are not fictions at all. It is therefore crucial to recognize that Bentham’s preoccupation with the role of language in the conceptualization of the difference between an ideal and a material reality is shared by the central figure in classical political economy, Adam Smith. Traditionally, the major controversy in Smith scholarship centers on the perceived incompatibility between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, or more specifically, on the notion that whereas Smith’s philosophy of sympathy assumes that human beings are necessarily interested in the fortunes of others, his economics does not. It has recently been argued that the two books are compatible insofar as pursuing one’s self-interest is not necessarily the same thing as pure selfishness.20 Nevertheless, the debate is important because it bespeaks disquiet with the broader narrative of intellectual history that traces the development of economics ‘‘out of’’ moral philosophy, as if once modern social theory set forth on a course of empirical analysis, replacing its reflections on human nature with arguments about wealth and scarcity, metaphysical speculations were left behind. Smith thus becomes the crucial test case, the one in whom we locate the impetus for such an epistemic shift, or from whom we (happily or unhappily) learn that no such change took place. As we attempt to evaluate these questions in detail, the first thing to decide is whether the basic economic act in Smith is an act governed by interest. Smith’s study of modern political economy begins with the analysis of the division of labor. Although sometimes given credit for having coined the term, Smith is rarely said to have invented the idea.21 The notion that it is advantageous for a social group to divide responsibilities among its members is older than Plato’s Republic and, however justly Smith’s account

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of pin making at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations has been celebrated for its clarity and elegance, he was not the first to describe division within a particular production process as an essential feature of the modern workshop. Smith’s originality lies rather in the awesome power he accords the division of labor: ‘‘The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor.’’22 Smith’s emphasis on this facet of ‘‘improvement’’ is so extreme as to exclude almost all other factors in material production. Marx echoes a common view when he writes, ‘‘Adam Smith said nothing at all new about the division of labor. What characterizes him as the quintessential political economist of the period of manufacture is rather the stress he lays on it.’’23 From its opening sentence, the word ‘‘labor’’ has a central place in The Wealth of Nations, but in contrast to many of his contemporaries, Smith saw little need to explain what he meant by the term: ‘‘The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labor, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.’’24 Smith’s celebration of the power of labor’s modern organization has led to a number of misconceptions about his understanding of labor’s place in his broader economic model. Notwithstanding his claim that ‘‘labor was the first price, the original purchasemoney that was paid for all things,’’ it is probably incorrect to speak of him as the first proponent of a labor theory of value.25 Joseph Schumpeter offers the well-known argument (made by David Ricardo and Marx, among others) that Smith does not actually claim that labor is the source of value, but rather uses labor as a commodity with which to express prices, which are factors of the costs of production.26 Further adding to the idiosyncrasy of Smith’s position is the primordial status he accords exchange as an explanation for the division of labor since for Ricardo, Marx, and others, labor is what makes exchange possible in the first place.27 To understand Smith’s unique methodological posture, we must be precise about the extent to which he treats labor as a physical phenomenon rather than a metaphysical act. It is often assumed that Smith proceeds in The Wealth of Nations ‘‘from one point of view, namely, the empirical one.’’28 In this account, his work is an attempt to explain the conditions of society, beginning with the basic query: Why are primitive societies in which every-

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one works poor, while England, many of whose citizens are idle, is rich? An alternative view stresses that Smith never relinquishes a philosopher’s concern with the systematic organization of human knowledge. As Mary Poovey has proposed in A History of the Modern Fact, Smith ‘‘makes the inadequacy of empiricism and the necessity of postulating a system the subjects of the opening chapters of [The] Wealth of Nations.’’29 The question is whether disagreement on this point arises from differences of opinion concerning the goals and procedures of Smith’s project or from more fundamental concerns about the very distinction Smith draws between philosophy and empirical social science. According to Poovey, the division of labor is an abstraction produced by Smith’s philosophical assumption that knowledge should be systematic; indeed, the idea of a division of labor, which enables one to imagine physically separated workers as somehow participating in a single activity, was the philosopher’s unique contribution to that epistemological division of labor that enabled manufacturers to reconceptualize (and modernize) their enterprises. Philosophers, according to Smith, are those individuals ‘‘whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe every thing; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.’’30

The possibility that the division of labor might not simply be something one can see with one’s own eyes (or at least not with a single set of eyes) is readily granted by Smith in a remark Poovey also cites: ‘‘We can seldom see more, at one time, than those employed in one single branch [of the manufacturing process].’’31 Poovey’s claim is that Smith proceeds not through a compromise of convenience, but on a level of genuine abstraction: ‘‘Like [David] Hume, Smith believed that creating abstractions was essential to the production of general knowledge, not simply because a single eye could not see all the workmen at the same time, but because what one needed to analyze was nowhere visible as such—nowhere, that is, except in the writing of political economists like Smith.’’32 The impression that Smith’s division of labor is an abstraction is bolstered by the common charge that in analyzing it he simultaneously discusses specialization within a specific enterprise (the production process of a single commodity), differences between enterprises, and more generic classifications of social activity—often without acknowledging that these might be three essentially

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different kinds of division. It is in this context that Marx raises the question of Smith’s penchant for abstraction and the subjective position of the observing philosopher: ‘‘Now it is quite possible to imagine, with Adam Smith, that the difference between the . . . social division of labor and the division of labor in manufacture, is merely subjective [and] exists merely for the observer.’’33 According to Marx, Smith fails to realize that the division of labor within the manufacture of a commodity, which is essentially capitalist, presumes the social division of labor, which is not: ‘‘The division of labor in society at large can exist in the most diverse economic formations of society; the division of labor in the workshop, as practiced by manufacture, is an entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production.’’34 Smith may very well be guilty of abstracting from social reality to develop a comprehensive system structured by a concept called the division of labor. Given the complex relations in his thought between individual behavior and the sum of its effects, however, we should pause before concluding that what he ‘‘needs to analyze,’’ as Poovey puts it, exists entirely in ‘‘the writing of political economists.’’ Why is it obvious that a division is any less ‘‘real’’ an historical force than population growth, climate shifts, or technological change? As is clear from Marx’s almost compulsive reinterpretations of the opening sections of The Wealth of Nations, the importance of Smith’s theory of the division of labor lies not simply in its claims for the productive powers of division, but in its explanation of the division’s origins, as well. The key section is the centerpiece of chapter 2, the historical narrative of the emergence of economic organization. From the perspective of Poovey’s critique, this story is presumably to be viewed with considerable suspicion; indeed, as with many eighteenth-century fables concerned with the genesis of human behavior, it sounds almost too self-evident. At first, explains Smith, people acted self-interestedly in their dealings with one another, which in this case means that they gradually assumed different tasks based on their respective abilities: ‘‘As it is by treaty, by barter, and by purchase, that we obtain from one another the greater part of those mutual good offices which we stand in need of, so it is this same trucking disposition which originally gives occasion to the division of labor. In a tribe of hunters or shepherds a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other.’’35 This is the Smith with whom the liberal tradition is familiar, the Smith who champions individu-

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ally motivated agents who, as if by an overarching design, see to it that labor is sensibly divvied up: ‘‘The division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility, the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.’’36 It is generally assumed that these passages rely on the notion that people are guided by self-love, which is to say, they trade with one another in an effort to act on their own behalf rather than out of concern for their neighbors. Yet Smith’s stress on the guiding force of the ‘‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,’’ indeed, his insistence on its absolute causal primacy, unsettles the authority of this psychological truism: ‘‘Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given, or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts.’’37 Such remarks are typical of the understated, even humble style with which Smith sets forth far-reaching claims. Unlike labor, which in all its manifestations is invariably described as a ‘‘foreseen and intended’’ act, the propensity to ‘‘truck, barter, and exchange’’ is not part of a plan or project designed to realize ‘‘opulence.’’ Given Smith’s skepticism about our ability to understand this propensity, not to mention its place outside the ‘‘present subject,’’ it is important to recognize that he goes on to consider it at great length, both here and in a number of versions of the argument that antedate The Wealth of Nations by several decades. It is also striking that it is the ability to make contracts, not labor itself, that Smith designates as the trait that distinguishes humans from animals. Eighteenth-century thinkers encountered considerable difficulties in trying to explain the authority of contracts in either rational or empirical terms. Not only could the binding power of a contract not be seen, but it was also curiously resistant to being integrated into any broader model of human knowledge. The force of the injunction that ‘‘we should keep our word’’ was frequently treated as a mysterious ‘‘violence,’’ an utterance that lies entirely outside the discourse with which we customarily craft argumentative syllogisms or describe our intuitions of the world. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence,

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delivered about fifteen years before The Wealth of Nations, Smith follows his predecessors—most notably Hume—in distinguishing the ‘‘promise’’ as the key element of contract theory. How, he asks, can saying ‘‘I promise’’ create an obligation that other statements do not? Smith’s first move is to distinguish ‘‘I promise’’ from ‘‘I intend.’’ If I promise to pay someone ten pounds tomorrow but have no intention of doing so, he suggests, the promise is just as binding as if I intend to keep it because it produces the same degree of expectation in my interlocutor. More precisely, Smith argues that a promise produces an obligation because one makes a ‘‘plain declaration that he desires the person to whom he makes the declaration to have a dependence on what he promises.’’38 The obligation of a contract thus arises ‘‘entirely from the expectation and dependence which was excited in him to whom the contract was made.’’39 In other words, the power of contracts lies not in one’s ability to do what one says one will do or to say what one really means, but in the ability of language to create an expectation in another person. Furthermore, this exposition of promises is predicated neither on an assumption of self-love on the part of the one who makes the promise nor on the premise that the promiser feels sympathy for the one promised. The argument is also made without any reference to the power of language to persuade. Although the basic elements of a nonpsychological theory of contracts— and hence, a nonpsychological theory of economic behavior—are in place at this point, Smith does not ask what founds this peculiar power of language. In A Treatise of Human Nature, a text on which Smith clearly relied in preparing his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Hume did take this next step, arguing against any understanding of a promise as a particular act of the mind, the willing of an action, or the expression of a wish, motive, or intent. A promise, he claims, is not a resolution on the part of one who promises, because it does not necessarily produce anything but the willing of an obligation. Going further than Smith, Hume maintains that the power of the promise has nothing to do with the feelings of the person who makes the promise, which is to say, the capacity of language to create an obligation has nothing to do with its effectiveness as a medium of communication. Having offered such a potentially extreme argument, Hume’s conclusion is anticlimactic: he announces that contracts are ‘‘artificial contrivances,’’ an ‘‘invention for the interest of society.’’40 In the context of Smith’s parable about the origins of society, however, it is clear that contracts are not one

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example of contrivances among others, but the very form of contrivance on the basis of which sociality itself is possible. This suggests not that language is conventional, but rather that conventions emerge through acts of language. The importance of such speech acts for Smith becomes clearer in The Wealth of Nations, where he subtly but decisively begins to diverge from his positions in the Lectures on Jurisprudence. Having said that only humans can make contracts, he writes: Two greyhounds, in running down the same hare, have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. . . . This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal, by its gestures and natural cries, signify to another, this is mine, that yours: I am willing to give this for that. When an animal wants to obtain something either of a man or of another animal, it has no other means of persuasion but to gain the valor of those whose service it requires.41

The ‘‘logic’’ of this scene has troubled many commentators. It is only partly in jest that Smith’s twentieth-century editor Edwin Cannan observes: ‘‘It is by no means clear what object there could be in exchanging one bone for another.’’42 For Cannan, the ‘‘rational’’ motivation for the exchange (‘‘the benefit to self’’) is presupposed, so the exchange is evaluated by asking why the two parties will participate in it. What, for example, are the dogs’ motives for exchanging their bones? Smith’s interest in contracts, however, concerns the possibility of exchange prior to the empirical motives on the basis of which a given individual enters into a given transaction. More specifically, Smith is trying to characterize the form an exchange must take in order to distinguish itself from an ‘‘accidental concurrence.’’ Cannan’s objection could presumably be leveled at a great number of trades between people since many transactions are incomprehensible to those not directly involved (and even to some who are). What Cannan misses in Smith’s text is its shift away from a notion of exchange as a dynamic of self-interest or of self-love and sympathy (as those who identify a continuity in Smith’s thought from his earlier to his later work would have it). For Smith, rationality, understood as self-love or ‘‘reasoned’’ decision making, cannot explain contracts, which are linguistic phenomena. At stake in the murky

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origins of the division of labor is nothing less than the power of language to facilitate relationships that otherwise could not exist. The model under consideration here is not based on the capacity of language to influence others. Smith is not concerned to deny that animals have some rhetorical powers, a point that becomes clear when he subsequently discusses the skillful tactics of fawning puppies. Whatever beasts lack, it is not the ability to broadcast sentiments. As the foundation of contracts, however, human language is considered neither as expression nor perlocution. In this regard, the argument of The Wealth of Nations differs from the Lectures on Jurisprudence, where the disposition to barter and trade is located in the inclination to persuade: If we should inquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly the natural inclination everyone has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest. Men always endeavor to persuade others to be of their opinion even when the matter is of no consequence to them.43

Even in this earlier passage, however, we can begin to detect elements of Smith’s thought that cannot readily be assimilated to the ideas normally attributed to him. The view of exchange as persuasion may sound like a one- or two-sided negotiation, but if we momentarily bracket the ensuing two hundred years of economic ideology, we see that what Smith actually says is that people exchange because they want to persuade ‘‘even when the matter is of no consequence to them.’’ Persuasion itself is the goal in this negotiation that takes place for the sake of negotiation, a negotiation in which the result may very well turn out to be Cannan’s trade of an identical bone for an identical bone.44 Throughout Smith’s work, the ‘‘rational’’ self-interest that ostensibly drives scenarios of negotiation is always complemented by another impulse or drive that cannot be reduced to the same set of motives or desires, for instance, the possibility that persuasion as such may (always) be an end as well as a means. As the greyhound passage from The Wealth of Nations makes clear, the propensity to exchange, the engine of everything in Smith that can be called economic, is grounded in the capacity of language to found an exchange before exchange—a promise that engenders the prospect that subsequent exchange will be an exchange: ‘‘I am willing to give this for

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that.’’ In this respect, the fact that one considers this act as part of a larger persuasive enterprise designed to get what one wants is irrelevant for understanding how the act is possible in the first place. A contract is the linguistic act, the ‘‘labor’’ of language, that allows human beings to ‘‘truck’’ with one another in such a way that, unlike dogs, they cannot be accused of merely doing things ‘‘by accident.’’ Only because language can pro-pose (pre-propose) through an articulation that is distinct from the psychological impulses of its speaker can an action be identified as self-directed. The question, then, is whether the very possibility of willing an obligation can itself become a token in a negotiation. Can the propositional force of language be regarded as a power, like labor power, to be bought and sold? Can language assume the form of a system of exchange, or does it remain ‘‘monofiscal-logical’’? For the foes of capitalism, these passages from Smith’s oeuvre necessarily betray the repressive ideology at the heart of his system. Does not his discussion assume that exchange is inherently symmetrical? Surely the very notion of freely entering into transactions is precisely the lie that gives rise to the deluded notion of the division of labor’s boundless benefits for society. Whatever our ultimate conclusions on these points, it is crucial to realize that the propositional power of the linguistic contract must be grasped as independent of any logic of equivalence or equality. If the act of the mind involved in establishing a contract does not, as Hume would have it, resolve, will, or promise anything, this is because it resists assimilation into a schema in which its activity could be measured by a standard external to it even as it establishes a paradigm within which exchange becomes feasible. In other words, the real point about the opening section of The Wealth of Nations is not that Smith assumes that exchange explains the division of labor, but that linguistic pre-posing, a division within language between a discourse of promises and a discourse of communication, is the condition of possibility for what we have come to understand as economic exchange. If this claim bears all the marks of an ‘‘abstraction’’ that diverts us from the real problems of human experience, it is worth pointing out that Smith’s position may constitute a crucial corrective to the last thirty years of efforts in cultural criticism to demonstrate substantive parallels between material and symbolic dynamics. In Smith’s terms, language, far from providing the key to a ‘‘general equivalent’’—be it money, the word, or the phallus—is precisely what makes the entire discussion of equivalence secondary rather than

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primary. Similarly, to argue that the semiotic logics governing the reality of consumer life obey economic laws, or vice versa, is erroneously to presuppose that language and economics were ever separate. Perhaps uncomfortable with the degree to which his book on wealth begins by nearly lapsing into a full-fledged treatise on the origins of language, Smith shifts his account of the origins of the division of labor and suggests that it arises because there are innate differences in people and they learn, through exchange, that it is efficient to pursue one’s strengths and let others cultivate theirs. Ever precise, Smith immediately adds, ‘‘The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of.’’45 This last point is made even more graphically in his Lectures on Jurisprudence: ‘‘This disposition to barter is by no means founded upon different genius and talents. It is doubtful if there be any such difference at all, at least it is far less than we are aware of. Genius is more the effect of the division of labor than the latter is of it.’’46 Smith’s ‘‘historical’’ account of the emergence of the division of labor is overtly contradictory because the division is said to produce the differences that generate it. This problem did not escape Marx’s sharp eye. In his notebooks, he cites Smith’s claims about the origin of the division of labor and argues that Smith falls into a circular logic, explaining the division by presupposing exchange, but explaining exchange by presupposing differences in human capacities that exist on account of the division.47 The more closely we scrutinize these opening pages of The Wealth of Nations, the less confident we become that the process whereby ‘‘the different produces of [people’s] respective talents’’ are ‘‘brought, as it were, into a common stock’’ takes place in a determined way rather than by accident, like the dogs who happen to help one another in an endeavor that is mutual in appearance alone. Ultimately, the linguistic ‘‘division’’ that makes exchange possible—the enunciation internal to language that divides the discourse of promises from communicative expression—exposes Smith’s various genealogical accounts of the division of labor as abstractions from the individual logics of interest they purport to illustrate, stories that mistake happenstance for cause and effect. In contrast, the division within language prior to exchange and labor is not an abstraction, but the moment at which language is considered in its own right, independent of the figures—intention, will, or telos—that customarily disguise it. Is Smith’s model of contracts and exchange just one more attempt to promote a myth of freedom in a society in which individual agency lacks

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any real authority? Before gloomily answering yes, we need to ask in what sense language itself can be said to labor. Is the language of contracts one type of praxis among others, or is it the ground of all wealth-producing acts? Can this discourse (or prediscourse) be regarded as productive or unproductive in its own right? From the perspective of these queries, we will begin to appreciate that The Wealth of Nations offers the possibility for a more radical reconsideration of the theory of labor than is customarily recognized. When it comes to the ideological controversies surrounding even the word labor, many of the issues that plagued eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinkers are disturbingly similar to ones we confront today: Is labor a natural process, like eating and breathing, or is it the ultimate social act with a unique role in the formation of culture? Will machines gradually free us from daily drudgery, allowing us to pursue more leisurely lives, or will capitalism rather develop better technology in order to render people obsolete and discard them? It can be argued that a focus on labor helps social theory replace speculative models of self-consciousness with a physical or materialist predication of the self. Among other things, this is supposed to make it possible to speak about a praxis that is decidedly not the philosophical work of the concept. There is a danger, however, that such a conceptual shift constitutes no threat to productivity as the supreme value of Western capitalist societies. As Pierre Bourdieu has proposed, ‘‘it is [today] taken for granted that maximum growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions; or that economic forces cannot be resisted.’’48 This argument would appear to be consistent with the longstanding worry that nineteenth-century Marxism succeeded in critiquing only the mode of capitalist production rather than the primacy of productivity itself.49 To see how emphasizing the role of language in Smith enhances our understanding of production paradigms, we must first turn to the valorization of labor power in Marx. Historically, efforts to champion labor and the laborer are not the provenance of any particular political persuasion and run the gamut from communism to liberalism to fascism. Leaving aside the obvious point that any move to glorify the worker must necessarily fall under suspicion of being a ploy of the status quo rather than a protest against it, labor serves as the calling card of any mass movement because of its claim to universality. As the saying goes, ‘‘Everybody has to work.’’ In

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the case of Marx, it is common to speak of a shift in his thought from a notion of emancipation through labor to a vision of emancipation from labor.50 This view fits nicely with the idea that the young metaphysician is gradually supplanted by the adult social scientist. When Marx insists in the 1844 manuscripts that estranged labor is to be swept away and replaced by ‘‘spontaneous, free activity,’’ it is said that at that point he was still rooted in the German and ancient Greek philosophy of his school years.51 Only after he has shed his penchant for abstractions, the story runs, can he move on to determining how people can improve their lives by working less. To complicate this picture slightly, there is disagreement about whether this supposed shift in Marx’s project should be viewed positively or negatively. Some would argue, for example, that the early Marx is the true humanist, whereas the later Marx is a sterile scientist, entirely under the spell of the economic thinkers he attempts to critique. Moreover, it is not difficult to muster quotations to show that Marx’s positions do not undergo a radical change. If in The German Ideology (1845–46) he describes the overcoming of private property and the domination of the division of labor as the coincidence of self-activity with material life that ‘‘corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals,’’ in the Grundrisse (1857–58), he stresses that labor is the ‘‘action’’ of ‘‘self-realization’’ and ‘‘real freedom.’’52 Later still, in the Gotha Program (1875), Marx argues that the strictures of bourgeois life will be broken only ‘‘after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.’’53 Across his oeuvre, there is arguably no change in the status of labor as the key to self-determination and no wavering on the need to treat labor as an end in itself rather than a means.54 One of the most enigmatic passages in this trajectory is the famous section in the posthumously published third volume of Capital in which Marx writes of a realm ‘‘where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases. . . . Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.’’55 The metaphysical idiom recalls Marx’s so-called early writings and appears to champion not so much freedom from labor as freedom to labor under different assumptions. Marx immediately complicates the issue by stating, with startling abruptness: ‘‘The shortening of the work day is [the true realm of freedom’s] basic prerequisite.’’ Does this indicate that, though still willing

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to speak in the philosophical language of his youth, the mature Marx is practical enough to realize that the ideal goal for laborers is to labor less? Alternatively, Marx may be trying to describe a different kind of labor, one that would escape determination as the production of surplus value and the realization of use value as the bearer of exchange value. This would be a labor whose independence could be distinguished from the self-(re)productive autonomy of capital. Its necessity would lie in its freedom from necessity, and its ultimate measure would not be the workweek, that is, time.56 Whatever our conclusion, it must be stressed that Marx never understands labor as some sort of transhistorical paradigm, an unchanging fact about people. Indeed, the challenge Marx sets us is to avoid the error of bourgeois political economy after Smith, which, though it correctly identifies labor as the source of value, invariably conceives of it as a thing. If labor is to be grasped as an activity, as an act rather than an object, then we must take care not to conflate it with the laborer. The complexity of this task becomes evident in any exposition of ‘‘praxis,’’ a concept central to the discussions of the Left Hegelians and forever enshrined in Marxist thought by the Theses on Feuerbach: ‘‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality [Wirklichkeit], sensuousness [Sinnlichkeit], is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts] or of intuition [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [sinnlich menschliche Ta¨tigkeit, Praxis], not subjectively.’’57 A focus on praxis has been heralded as the aspect of Marx’s thought that definitively separates him from both Idealist doctrines and classical political economy.58 In the broadest terms, it has been suggested that Marx is part of a larger trend in the nineteenth century to collapse Aristotle’s distinction between poie¯sis (from the Greek poiein, ‘‘to bring into being’’) and praxis (from prattein, ‘‘to do’’). For Aristotle, poie¯sis involves the creation of a product, whereas praxis is a willful activity to be performed well (eupraxia).59 In contrast, Marx is said to have shown that any free human act is a material transformation of both the world and the human being, which is always a dynamic entity rather than a fixed essence.60 Agency is productivity, productivity is agency; and ethical and economic activity are one and the same. It is by no means certain that the position just characterized distinguishes Marx from the psychophysics of bourgeois political economy, for which labor is always a coordination of mental and material change. Naming JeanBaptiste Say as his authority, the nineteenth-century economist William

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Stanley Jevons describes labor as ‘‘any painful exertion of mind or body undergone partly or wholly with a view to future good.’’61 At the end of the nineteenth century, the painful quality of labor will be formalized as disutility, as in Alfred Marshall’s proclamation: ‘‘We may define labor as any exertion of mind or body undergone partly or wholly with a view to some good other than the pleasure derived directly from the work.’’62 The key points these authors make about labor—it is an intentional act, pursued with foresight; it involves some cost or change to the laborer; it aims at producing or altering something beyond the mere person of the one who labors—are not overtly at odds with the descriptions of labor in Capital.63 As a result, Marx has frequently been attacked for remaining under the rule of classical economic thought by underestimating the extent to which an emphasis on labor per se is a reduction rather than an elevation of the human being. At its worst, this amounts to nothing less than a furthering of capitalism’s plan to degrade people such that the animal laborans never graduates to the status of Homo faber, much less animal rationale.64 In fact, Marx explicitly states in Capital that he is not concerned to distinguish between mental and physical labor, as if to equate the work of the bricklayer or chimney sweep with that of the scholar or politician. The crucial focus of his analysis of the commodity form is rather something that classical bourgeois political economy does not grasp, namely, the complex relation between labor as a ‘‘function of the human organism’’—a singular expenditure of energy aimed at material subsistence—and the social form labor assumes the moment ‘‘men start to work for each other in any way.’’65 In stressing that labor is invariably both singular and generic, both concrete and abstract, Marx underscores that on its own no given conception of independence or equality, of autonomy or universality, can capture labor’s dynamic character. Well aware that the productivity of labor is an extremely volatile paradigm, Marx always presents it as superadequate, that is, as the source of both value and surplus value. Of course, if all labor is a superadequate transformation of both the world and the laborer, it is reasonable to ask how far this transformation goes. Will our investigation of the labor process, provisionally understood as the activity of a self, reveal that productive agency does not necessarily take the form of an individual subject with various predicates? In this regard, it is crucial to recall that for Marx the event of labor is not an unassailable, holy occurrence, but an eminently corruptible phenomenon. We tend

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to think of a worker’s estrangement from the products of his labor as an experience in which one confronts what one has made but does not own. From his earliest essays, however, Marx insists that the productive act first and foremost divides the self against itself. In the 1844 manuscripts, he writes: ‘‘How would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself?’’ What is more, ‘‘the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act [Akt] of production, within the producing activity [Ta¨tigkeit] itself.’’66 Production, the ability to be productive, is ‘‘the activity of alienation.’’67 Considered as a predicate of a self, labor is never simply an activity of self-confirmation or self-realization. It is always a process of self-externalization and self-expropriation, to the point that the act of labor is no longer self-evidently the act of a self that performs it. As a result, one cannot simply appeal to labor as a naturally liberating power that can automatically be valorized as a privileged act over and against supposedly mediated or mystified behaviors. Nor can it be regarded as the essence of the human being, as if looking at any given form of labor at any given time would as a matter of course explain present economic circumstances. In one of his most far-reaching condemnations of the capitalist status quo, Marx argues in the 1844 manuscripts that the problem we face with the estrangement of the laborer is that nothing is what it is: ‘‘Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is in itself something different from itself—that my activity is something else and that, finally (and this applies also to the capitalist), all is under the sway of inhuman power.’’68 The point is not merely that the exploitation of workers by Mr. Moneybags has destroyed our control over our property, activity, or ideas, but that it is precisely the quality of labor as superadequate, as hyperproductive, that makes this state of affairs possible. Do Marx’s hopes for an alternative to capitalism depend on some realization of the revolutionary potential of labor or on the transcendence of work as such? Very much a student of Adam Smith, Marx consistently approaches labor under capitalism as divided labor. Indeed, in his terms this is the only labor people have ever known. In The German Ideology, prospects for change are thus said to depend on a ‘‘transformation from labor into self-activity,’’ a transformation that demands that individuals ‘‘abolish’’ the division of labor.69 At this point, Marx is primarily discussing what we have previously

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referred to in his critique of Smith as the ‘‘social’’ division of labor, the segmenting of the work force into different occupations. Fifteen years later in A Critique of Political Economy, he is more concerned with the division of labor in the workshop, that is, with specifying the capitalist production of surplus value through a study of manufacturing practices. At the same time, he is not yet ready to differentiate sharply between the various models of division, as he will in Capital: ‘‘This form of the division of labor we are considering here [i.e., in the workshop], in no way exhausts the division of labor. Ultimately [the division of labor] is, in a certain relationship, the category of all categories in political economy.’’70 The division of labor is the ‘‘category of all categories’’ because political economy is built on a conception of labor as both a divided phenomenon and a force of division in its own right, a force that traverses all economic models and concepts. The significance of this dividing (or perhaps, divisive) force becomes more evident in the famous passage in The German Ideology in which Marx argues that it is because of the division of labor that ‘‘each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.’’71 This leads to his oft-cited claim that under communism ‘‘society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’’72 Classical political economy manages the divisive power of labor and the inexorable pitting of the worker against the products of the worker’s exertions by recuperating the worker’s identity with the abstraction we call a ‘‘profession.’’ For Marx, we must respond to the expropriating force of labor so destabilizing to our category of the subject by denying that any individual action of an agent can determine that agent’s identity, that is, by paradoxically confirming the autonomy of the subject vis-a`-vis any specific deed at the very moment that we define subjectivity as activity. In slightly different terms, the power of human beings to create themselves and in some basic sense to be what they do is always in tension with the independence of productive processes over and against putatively self-productive beings. The self-transformation that distinguishes Marxist accounts of human praxis as human self-realization can be understood in its full radicality only insofar as we recognize that the division that makes this dynamic

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possible potentially conflicts with any claim on the part of the self to act by, in, or for itself. In distinguishing between material activity as a reproduction of the conditions of existence (e.g., subsistence farming) and material activity as a determination of a role imposed by society to the exclusion of all other roles, does Marx in effect respond to the authority of the division of labor by erasing the distinctions between types of labor? To see if his vision of a communist society truly amounts to an overcoming of ‘‘the category of all categories in political economy,’’ we must return to the question posed earlier in our discussion of Smith: Is the division of labor an abstract concept imposed on society by the philosophical observer who seeks to systematize its workings and describe its productive forces and forms of ownership? Or is the division of labor less an abstraction than the condition of possibility of abstraction? In one of the decisive passages of The German Ideology, Marx considers whether our very ability to ask if the division of labor is a ‘‘fact’’ about the world or an ‘‘idea’’ in someone’s model of the world is evidence of its fundamental importance: With these [increases in population, needs, and productivity] there develops the division of labor, which was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then that division of labor which develops spontaneously or ‘‘naturally’’ by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g., physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labor only really [wirklich] becomes such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. [Marginal note by Marx: The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.] From this moment onward consciousness can really [wirklich] flatter itself [sich einbilden] that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real [wirklich etwas vorzustellen, ohne etwas Wirkliches vorzustellen]; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘‘pure’’ theory, theology, ethics, etc.73

At issue is how consciousness comes to believe that life follows a logic of thought rather than a logic of material existence. Why, in other words, is it possible for consciousness to fall into the traps of ideology, or in the simplest sense, to err? The insistence of wirklich in the passage (primarily as an adverb, ‘‘really’’ or ‘‘truly,’’ but also as an adjective, ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘actual’’) suggests that we are dealing not just with the degree to which the division of

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labor is real, but with reality itself. For us as social beings, the division of labor is ‘‘more’’ real than natural dispositions or accidents because it is a division in reality itself, a division by virtue of which consciousness comes to believe that it is something ‘‘other than consciousness of existing practice.’’ In other words, it really is true that consciousness thinks that it ‘‘really represents something without representing something real.’’ It is in this sense that the division of labor allows reality (die Wirklichkeit) to manifest itself not as an unchanging constant, but as something that can ‘‘really’’ be altered. For Marx, labor is both the labor of this division—which means labor in and against reality, including the reality of labor—and a phenomenon that appears as split, segmented into different forms (farming, manufacture, etc.). From this perspective, the division of labor is definitely not an abstract classificatory system imposed on society by its philosophers. To the contrary, it is the very condition of possibility of theories about what ‘‘really’’ is the case, which means that it is also the condition of possibility of inaccurate theories. The point is not that the division of mental and material labor allows discourses like metaphysics, social theory, or religion to emerge because it frees up one group of people to pursue a life of the mind while the rest do the grunt work. Rather, such discourses are defined precisely by the way in which they conceptualize the authority of labor as dividing and divisive. If in Smith the division of labor can appear as a stable organizing principle that allows the hypothetical observer to label and compartmentalize the various parts of the workforce, for Marx, consciousness under capitalism is always chiefly a consciousness of this division as a ‘‘real’’ divide, a permanent contradiction between consciousness and its environment: Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labor implies the possibility, nay the fact that intellectual and material activity—enjoyment and labor, production and consumption—devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labor.74

Labor is simultaneously a singular sensuous transformation of the material world and a social product because it is made possible by the labor of divi-

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sion, a labor of clashes. For Marx, consciousness is the contradiction between intellectual and material activity; it is the coming-into-contradiction of the human being with the forces of production and the structure of society. In this respect, Marx breaks sharply with the humanist individualism dominant since the Renaissance for which a human being is an entity that knows its work to be its own. He argues not only that our work is never entirely our own, but also that our knowledge of ourselves is always a consciousness of a conflict we cannot appropriate as ‘‘our’’ labor or as someone else’s. As long as we remain in the language of bourgeois economics—and Marx is by no means confident that there is an alternative—the division of labor can only appear as what Poovey in her reading of Smith calls an ‘‘abstraction,’’ a category imposed by us on the world rather than a force intrinsic to it. Faced with Smith’s conception of individuals as beings who promote the interests of society by pursuing their own, Marx responds that for a society under the reign of the division of labor, interests—individual or group—never exist as unique, autonomous impulses, but only in and as their collision with other interests. Whether as clashes within the family, between families, or across the community, interests emerge out of a war of interests, a state of conflict that runs ahead of any specific goal, object, or program. Before it can be considered as a preference or an aim, an interest must be understood as a contradiction with other interests, and hence, as a ‘‘real’’ act of violence. What this means is that any interest—of a person, a tribe, or a state—is always a counter-interest. Moreover, as it is only an interest by virtue of being a counter-interest, any interest necessarily runs counter to the idea of interest itself. Existing primarily as interest against other interests, an interest always works to undermine the logic by virtue of which it could appear as the expression of a given desire or end. The liberal dream of synthesizing principles of individuality with principles of equality can never be realized: by their very nature, interests manifest themselves as forces that resist being weighed and evaluated with reference to other interests. By the time they have been incorporated into a paradigm that allows them to be compared with one another, interests are, properly speaking, no longer interests. The question, then, is what it would mean to ‘‘do’’ politics or to ‘‘do’’ theory without pretending to control the division of labor, without pretending to flatter ourselves that we have mastered the self-flattery of conscious-

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ness and transcended the dynamics of interest. If existence under capitalism is the permanent collision of the ‘‘forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness,’’ then who can pretend to coordinate a model of this existence? Who can show, as Marx suggests, that social relations are in conflict with the forces of production and that this is why theory can contradict or even ignore real existing relations? What concept can grasp the division that for Marx allows for the manifestation of conceptuality in the first place? Insofar as the only labor we know and have ever known is labor that emerges in and through the division of labor, radical theory cannot simply aim to reunite workers with their work. At the same time, there is always a danger that in trying to explain the divisive force of the division of labor we have unwittingly idealized the concept of labor itself. Is not the very proposition that ‘‘the division labors’’ more germane to abstract philosophy than to materialist analysis? For Marx, as for Smith, the key lies in the work of language, which is to say, efforts in contemporary social criticism to describe the semiotic systems that organize consumer society have a long pedigree. The peculiar reversals and negations effected by commodity language, in which the singular history of what is produced by labor becomes the abstract objectivity of a functional product, are most famously explored in the first section of Capital. Yet already in an 1844 essay on the British philosopher James Mill (father of John Stuart), Marx tried to envision a language other than the language of commodity equivalence: The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognized and felt as being a request, an entreaty [als Bitte, als Flehen], and therefore a humiliation, and consequently uttered with a feeling of shame, of degradation. By the other side it would be regarded as impudence or lunacy and rejected as such. We are to such an extent estranged from man’s essential nature that the direct language of this essential nature seems to us a violation of human dignity, whereas the estranged language of material values seems to be the well-justified assertion of human dignity that is self-confident and conscious of itself.75

Today, we are apt to refer to ‘‘the language of capitalism’’ or ‘‘the language of oppression’’ without fully appreciating the complexities involved. Marx was less confident than many of his inheritors that an alternative to this dominant discourse could present itself to us as something coherent rather

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than as the ravings of a mad poet. What would it mean, then, to take seriously the notion that all our assumptions about form and content, syntax and semantics, or constation and performance are determined by the schemas of commodity value ruling our lives? What, furthermore, would be involved in ending our reliance on the language of material values and adopting another tongue, as if these were simply coats or hats that we could put on and take off at will? In exploring linguistic problems through the logic of exchange and commodity fetishism, there is a temptation to reduce words to the status of things that can be bought and sold, but in Capital, it is the commodities that speak, not us.76 Moreover, attempts to adopt and exploit Marx’s insights on these points have largely neglected to ask the basic question of why ‘‘language’’ should continue to be a privileged term for the characterization of social and political reality. A critique of inhuman requests and entreaties can proceed only if we accept that the notion of an alternative language may itself be the ultimate mystification. In a very direct fashion, Marx proposes that linguistics must begin by considering the potential loss of language as a workable concept. Whatever a truly ‘‘human’’ language would look or sound like, it would not simply be a collection of terms drawn from outside the vocabulary of political economy. To skirt the assertions of equivalence characteristic of commodity speech, a human language would have to constitute a genuine alternative to the discourse of propositional identity in which sentences are articulations of attributes (accidents) connected to a fixed object, the ‘‘subject’’ of the sentence. Much of Marx’s fascination with Hegel had to do with moments in Hegel’s thought where just such a language seems to emerge. In the 1844 manuscripts, describing the culmination of the Hegelian dialectic in absolute knowledge, Marx writes that for Hegel, the subject first emerges as a result. This result—the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness—is therefore God. . . . Real man and real nature become mere predicates—symbols of this esoteric, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute reversal [Subjekt und Pra¨dikat haben daher das Verha¨ltnis einer absoluten Verkehrung zueinander]—a mystical subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object. . . .77

Fully aware of the nuances of Hegelian thought, Marx would never argue that Hegel privileges spirit as a subject over individuals as its predicates and that the task of the materialist thinker is simply to reverse the hierarchy

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governing the representational content of idealist propositions. Indeed, what Marx recognizes in his predecessor’s work is a far more radical challenge to the logic of subjectivity. Hegel formalizes the task in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he describes the way in which the speculative proposition calls into question the objective base of thought in the subject by interrupting the seamless transition from subject to predicate. In a speculative sentence such as ‘‘God is being,’’ argues Hegel, thought discovers that the subject is effectively conflated with one of its predicates and becomes lost in the universality of the trait that was ostensibly just one attribute among others.78 No longer the ‘‘bearer of accidents,’’ the subject unites with this predicate, discovering in it both itself and something else, an identity and a difference, as well as the grounds for a new proposition about a now slightly different subject. For Hegel, the concept is this movement of negation and return, the loss and (re)discovery of something that is at once the same and different. The question, then, is what Marx means by claiming that in Hegel subject and predicate are related to each other ‘‘in absolute reversal.’’ Far from confirming a movement whereby the subject finds itself in its predicates, such a ‘‘shift’’ appears to suggest either that the subject and predicate are perfectly substitutable for one another (a ‘‘mystical subject-object’’), or that they are entirely independent, a ‘‘subjectivity reaching beyond the object.’’ In either case, how can this reversal preserve a relation between the subject and object, as Marx maintains? Is the ‘‘absolute’’ reversal merely a formality, a confirmation that what is really absolute in Hegel is relation itself? Or is the point that in rehearsing the implications of this proposition thought is set adrift rather than being turned back on itself and its own subjectivity? What Marx tries to describe with this ‘‘absolute reversal’’ is a structure of predication that does not subordinate itself to a model of subjectivity in which the self, as agent, will always be privileged over and against its activities. If we can still speak of the ‘‘subject’’ of such a discourse, it is not a self that emerges through a process of finding itself in its own loss and recovery. The figure of ‘‘absolute reversal’’ interrupts the implicit logic of recognition and misrecognition that organizes thought’s travels through the twists and turns of Hegel’s speculative sentence. In this sense, the reversal is absolute: it affords us no linear or circular chronology to confirm that the reversal has or has not taken place as a transfer of terms between places or times— nothing to look back at and identify retrospectively as having been the pre-

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supposition of our procedure all along. Rather than being thrown back on itself, as Hegel says, thought is at least momentarily thrown outside the field where it could serve as its own point of reference. Such a reversal necessarily remains a mystification—hence Marx’s emphasis on this term— unless we realize that it calls into question the very schema, the very syntax, of reversal as such. The absolute reversal forces us to think of a language— perhaps, finally, a ‘‘human’’ language—not defined by words that take their places in sentences. The negativity at work here does not belong to a system that generates its own aberrations in order to become complete by including incompleteness within itself. As with Ho¨lderlin’s hyperbole of hyperboles, the hypotaxis of a hierarchy of subject and predicate (or predicate and subject) is haunted by a para- or alter-taxis that allows for no logic of inclusion and exclusion that would facilitate a dynamic of generality and particularity. For Marx, this ‘‘absolute reversal’’ constitutes nothing less than an alternative to the commodity language of propositional equivalence. From this perspective, we begin to understand why he never views language as a mere presentation or reflection of reality. As he writes in The German Ideology, language is material life: ‘‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.’’79 One may object that Marx is speaking metaphorically, but it is around precisely such a conception of life that he organizes his account of the relations between form, content, and the modalities of human expression. Considering the way in which human beings distinguish themselves from animals by producing their own food, Marx writes, ‘‘By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life,’’ then immediately qualifies this ontology of self-production: ‘‘The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce.’’80 In this preliminary formulation, the very creation of the conditions of life— production—depends on the conditions of reproduction and on a contingent encounter outside the control of its producer. To this day, the varieties of Marxism can be classified by their approach to these relations between human beings, nature, and their respective finitudes. Of course, Marx has only begun to expound on the complexities of production: ‘‘This mode of production must not be considered simply as being

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the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.’’81 At places in Marx’s work, production can seem virtually omnipotent, but here it is only a form of expressing life, and not necessarily the only one, for the self both produces and expresses itself, and neither activity holds sway over the other. In this manner, the self is what and how it produces, but this ‘‘how’’ is never available as a given phenomenon, like a reserve of berries to be gathered or a deer to be hunted. This is why life is a material activity and must be grasped as both productive and produced rather than as just a product. A dynamic of form, content, and expression, life can neither be reduced to a thing, nor reified as a transcendental form of agency. Life rests on a mode of expression it does not produce, and the expression of life relies on a production that it does not express. This is the ‘‘material intercourse of men,’’ the ‘‘language of real life.’’ It is therefore always an open question whether a human being is something that can be studied as an extant entity that can be brought under our microscope. Marx stresses that life production ‘‘only makes its appearance with the increase in population,’’ which is to say, life manifests itself not as the activity of a given individual or group of individuals, but as an activity of an ever greater number of individuals.82 The expression of the noncoincidence of what and how that never becomes a paradigm of what is or should be, human existence is always existence as difference, which in the first instance means the state of being ever more (or less) than itself. If this sounds overly abstract, the problem is not an opposition between fact and theory, but the need to take into account the full ramifications of a theory of fact. In one of the best-known passages of The German Ideology, Marx writes: From the start the ‘‘spirit’’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘‘burdened’’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well [das praktische, auch fu¨r andre Menschen existierende, also auch fu¨r mich selbst erst existierende wirkliche Bewußtsein]; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse [Verkehr] with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the

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animal does not enter into ‘‘relations’’ with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.83

To maintain that consciousness is spirit and matter because it is always conscious of something outside of itself would be to remain within a completely Hegelian schema. Although language may be permanently external to the self, this superficial loss of control is easily recuperated as an impetus for self-development at increasing degrees of self-awareness, each prompted by a further deferral of this unruly linguistic ‘‘other.’’ Indeed, for Hegel consciousness exists only by acting beyond itself, by encountering what it cannot master. By stressing that it is essentially a social product, then, Marx maintains that consciousness cannot relate to itself as its own product or process of development, that is, as something present and proper to itself. Being a product of something more than just an individual, consciousness is always open to activities beyond its own self-consciousness and never fully recognizes itself in the relations that constitute it. Insofar as this is not an insight that can be recuperated as the self’s awareness of its own lack of selfawareness, Marx will insist on not so much consciousness of but consciousness for: consciousness for an other, consciousness for the necessity of intercourse with others. If it can be sustained, the break with the Hegelian legacy lies in the idea that such a social consciousness can neither appropriate its other as that of which it is conscious, nor recognize itself in (or in its difference from) this other. In this sense, language is instrumental in that it is the means of human communication (Verkehr), but it is also productive of social relations. This does not amount to identifying language as a ‘‘realm’’ independent of material existence, as Marx suggests the metaphysicians have done.84 As ‘‘practical consciousness,’’ language is existence, or more specifically, the existence of relationships. Since consciousness can never fully master language as an object but only as a relation, it cannot know language as its own product or even as a product of society. Hence ‘‘real’’ linguistic consciousness, consciousness of the relations that make consciousness possible, is impossible, and language remains in crucial respects an unknown. As the basis for all social relations, language can only be grasped as a hyperbolically social idea, an idea whose supersociality outstrips the very potential to relate that defines the members of a given society. Language

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exposes consciousness to an array of social configurations it cannot master, and language therefore constitutes as much the impossibility of social life as its possibility. Marx finds that Feuerbach’s efforts to establish the interdependency of human beings miss this central point. As he explains, Feuerbach wants to establish consciousness of this fact [that men need and have always needed each other], that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things. We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavoring to produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher.85

To cease being a philosopher, one must acknowledge that facts are never passively present to consciousness, which is part of a broader dynamic—the conflict between the forces of production, social relations, and consciousness itself—by virtue of which something first appears as a fact. Without some ‘‘consciousness’’ of what allows an ‘‘existing fact’’ to achieve its status as extant, all the theorist can understand is a tautology of epistemology in which one learns how one has learned what one has learned—the empty formality of identity thinking, as Hegel might have put it. From this perspective, Marx hopes to do more than merely describe a future alternative to the status quo: ‘‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.’’86 As a real movement, communism takes place not as a projected future opportunity, but as the transformation of the present’s relationship to future possibilities—and to its own status as one state of affairs among others. This movement cannot amount to the substitution of one ideal for another or of one reality for another since both such transpositions can take place entirely within ‘‘the present state of things,’’ which is, after all, no stranger to change. Communism, then, must herald a negation of the language of the division of labor, a negation that occurs as a syntactic or ‘‘altertactic’’ rupture within practical consciousness. Such a rupture must emerge as the force of relation itself, prior to any specific connections between concepts and things. Only by emphasizing the constitutive role of this linguistic

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labor of division is it possible to understand Marx’s claim that real human labor is the ‘‘language of real life’’—a force that divides consciousness from the needs that give rise to it, a people from its status as a population, mental from material activity. Nothing at all like what Poovey calls an abstraction in Smith, this ‘‘language of real life’’ is as much the power to disrupt, disorder, or even destroy as it is the power to create. In approaching human agency through this language of division, we can for the first time conceive of labor as something that may escape teleological determination as a means to an end, freeing itself from the necessities of nature and culture alike. We have traced a trajectory from Smith’s labor of contracts to Marx’s theory of linguistic relations. Although at odds in many respects, both these thinkers accord enormous privilege to language, not as an ideological or cultural phenomenon, but as a constitutive feature of material reality. They suggest that economic productivity is not reducible to a set of formative acts or exchanges and must be grasped in terms of a linguistic division that is potentially as arbitrary or destructive as it is productive. If the story we have told is still incomplete, this is because we have not yet examined what is frequently regarded as Marx’s greatest improvement on the bourgeois theory of labor, namely, his focus on labor power or labor capacity. If for Marx classical political economy correctly designates labor time as the determination of value, it still fails to account for the specificity of the commodity form. Capital’s description of workers toiling in the service of money making money seems to displace the theoretical privilege that earlier thinkers, and Marx himself, accorded to the distinction between mental and material labor. In the Grundrisse, Marx speaks of mental labor as distinct from other kinds: the use value that the worker has to offer to the capitalist ‘‘becomes a reality only when it has been solicited by capital [and] is set in motion, since activity without object is nothing, or, at the most, mental activity, which is not the question at issue here.’’87 In Capital, however, he clearly defines ‘‘labor-power, or labor-capacity, [as] the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.’’88 Like the bourgeois economists, Marx insists that labor takes place only when laborers subordinate themselves to a purpose. Labor is the opposite of whim or caprice; it is never a ‘‘momentary act,’’ for ‘‘apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire

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duration of the labor.’’89 Throughout his oeuvre, Marx maintains that labor is always a singular material action of a physical entity, yet he also claims that human activity differs from animal activity in that people’s labor always possesses an external end. Labor is never labor for labor’s sake; such activity—and again, in this respect Marx is every bit the bourgeois economist— would be mere play. The presence of this external goal explains why labor, defined since Hesiod as what ‘‘ought’’ to be done, is always vulnerable to appropriation and misappropriation. Labor exposes laborers to interests beyond their own. It is the opening of self-interest to other-interest and is thus always the labor of at least two interests. For its part, the ‘‘physical form, the living personality, of a human being’’ presents itself not as a stable reference point, but as the potential for an activity that can be co-opted from the very start. No individual act of labor can prevent itself from becoming the basis for an ethics or religion of labor, an ideology about why work should be done and who should do it. Far from constituting a pure, unequivocal expression of power like a machine or a battery, the worker offers something profoundly divided: ‘‘On the one hand, all labor is an expenditure of human labor-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labor that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labor is an expenditure of human labor-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labor that it produces use-values.’’90 As the expenditure of human labor power, labor is essentially disinterested activity; oblivious to any goal or project, it is the very force of equality as such. As power ‘‘in a particular form and with a definite aim,’’ labor is essentially interested; it is the epitome of a multiplicity of competing desires. Labor power differs from other commodities, Marx explains, because it ‘‘exists only as a capacity of the living individual’’ and ‘‘becomes a reality only by being expressed; it is activated only through labor.’’91 Never present as a physical form, labor is more the mark of the tenuous connection between the potential to labor and its actualization as labor power.92 In emphasizing that labor power ‘‘becomes a reality only by being expressed,’’ Marx hints that capitalism’s great achievement may have been to make us forget that any given laborer is as much the embodiment of the ability not to work as to work. The human being is equally a ‘‘physical form’’ of potential and impotential, as much on strike as on the assembly line.

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In introducing the distinction between labor and labor power, Marx invites us to consider the true other of labor power, an activity defined not as a lack or absence of labor, but as positive action that could never be reduced to the form of its actualization as timed work. This does not mean that labor’s primary achievement is to articulate an abstract distinction between the modalities of possibility and actuality. In defining labor as potential, Capital demands that we come full circle back to the vocabulary of Marx’s early texts and consider a linguistic activity that would be neither mental nor physical, but by virtue of which the division of mental and material labor could first be expressed as the acts of ideology Marx calls ‘‘pure theory.’’ What remains to be seen is whether this linguistic activity is simply one facet of a bourgeois paradigm of self-knowledge or whether it instead constitutes the impetus for a genuinely revolutionary conception of human experience.

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Ideology, Obviously But to restore to ‘‘ideology’’ this complex way of dealing with its roots in its own social reality would mean reinventing the dialectic, something every generation fails in its own way to do. — f r e d r i c j a m e s o n , ‘‘Postmodernism and the Market’’ For a theoretical account of the category of progress it is necessary to scrutinize the category so closely that it loses its semblance of obviousness, both in its positive and its negative uses. — t h e o d o r w . a d o r n o , Critical Models (emphasis added)

What Paul Ricœur called the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion’’ has become the sine qua non of literary and cultural studies. Whether one thinks in terms of an unconscious, a superstructure, or a subtext, the analysis of intellectual and social phenomena begins from the assumption that things may not be what they seem, even where our most tangible intuitions and deeply held beliefs are concerned. From a methodological perspective, this has led to the emergence of what we might call ‘‘an archaeology of the presupposition.’’ An argument demonstrates its rigor by rendering its own aims and procedures as explicit and transparent as possible, thereby protecting itself against the charge of harboring ulterior motives or falling prey to latent ideological error. With everything out in the open, we still may not be able to avoid essentialist thinking, but at least we will be clear on where our mistakes lie. The question is whether such clarity about presuppositions is really cause for celebration. In a passage from the 1844 manuscripts, Marx writes: ‘‘The147

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ory is capable of seizing [ergreifen] the masses as soon as its proofs are ad hominem and its proofs are ad hominem as soon as it is radical. To be radical is to grasp [ fassen] the matter by the root. But for man, the root is man himself. A radical revolution can [thus] only be a revolution of radical needs, the presuppositions and birthplaces of which appear precisely to be lacking.’’1 In this paradoxical humanism, we grasp ourselves by taking hold of something for which the ‘‘presuppositions and birthplaces’’ do not yet exist. The radicality of the ad hominem proof is the radicality of a project according to which ‘‘man’’ grasps ‘‘himself’’ as impossible, and theory becomes radical by enjoining us to establish a relation to ourselves as the connection between what is and what cannot yet be. These lapidary pronouncements are the kernel of everything that has been called ‘‘utopian’’ and ‘‘messianic,’’ not to mention apocalyptic, in Marx. The radical grasp of a radical theory, the recognition that human beings do not yet have themselves in hand to grasp, is ad hominem as ad inhumanum—the proof of humanity’s inhumanity and of the need for another humanity whose very preconditions are not yet conceivable. In these terms, the work of theory—the labor often derided as the most domesticated, impotent, or ineffectual of human undertakings—is something extremely powerful, not to mention dangerous. Far from a mere negation, it is a violent rending, a tearing of its subject matter (itself ) from itself before there can be a model with which to explain from whence this subject emerged, much less what should be done with it. A radical theory of humanity radicalizes its subject by irrevocably dividing it from the safety of its own self-image, self-understanding, or self-development. It is in this sense that such a theory becomes revolutionary. Since the above passage and others like it seem to take for granted that the root of man is man, the Marx of 1844 is often called a philosophical anthropologist. A year later, he opens The German Ideology with a discussion of this presupposition of presuppositions, the existence of human beings: ‘‘The presuppositions [Voraussetzungen] with which we begin [our process of inquiry] are not arbitrary, they are not dogma, they are real presuppositions. . . . The first presupposition of human history is the existence of living human individuals.’’2 Initially, these announcements may not appear to be part of a radical theory. Far from staging a revolution in the need for presuppositions, Marx begins by presupposing human existence itself. In fact, he is concerned with what it means to ‘‘begin’’ a demonstration. Is a pre-sup-position (Vor-aus-setzung) a form of positing (Setzung)? Does it give

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order to chaos or produce something that did not previously exist? For Marx, a presupposition proves itself to be ‘‘real’’ only in turning against itself and unsettling the presumption that a presuppositional logic can facilitate a coherent analysis of reality. At the beginning of The German Ideology, this takes place in the passage in which human existence is described as the production of its own material conditions. Human beings come into being by encountering themselves ‘‘there,’’ as something they have ‘‘already’’ made. The evident circularity in this account of an entity that produces itself as something to be found ‘‘already there’’ comes perilously close to confirming Marx’s fear that the critique of political economy will never get beyond the tautologies of bourgeois thought and is condemned to demonstrate nothing more than that production produces, labor labors, and so on. In Marx’s terms, however, the starting point of his argument is ‘‘real’’ precisely because of the failure of the circularity at work to structure a tidy schema of ground and consequence. The inaugural presupposition is a real presupposition because it disrupts any Idealist account of conceptual development whereby human existence would be shown to be the ‘‘actualization’’ of a concept of the human being that preexists it. Far from opening and closing the discussion in one fell swoop, presupposing human existence challenges the assumption that human beings can be treated as subjects with predicates or as objects of formal systems of reference. It also calls into question any abstract model of self-determination on the basis of which human individuals could be established as the entities that presuppose themselves. From this perspective, it is tempting simply to dismiss as mystification the very idea that a discourse could ever fully account for its own methodological tenets—that where its own presuppositions are concerned, it could ever be suspicious enough. In fact, this is only one aspect of the problem. Marx is uneasy about the language of bourgeois economics and its selfpresentation as a finite discourse, a bounded set of determinations controlled by an epistemologically delimited logic. His interest in the language of presuppositions is paralleled, however, by an interest in the presupposition that language itself is available as an inexhaustible praxis of reference and signification, one that can tirelessly facilitate the dynamics of self-reflection and self-determination. In this sense, the starting point of Marx’s argument is ‘‘real’’ because it forces us to ask why the commitment to the finitude of our own presuppositions is coupled with an equally strong com-

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mitment to the notion that verbal positing and performance are an unlimited forum of self-representation. At stake are nothing less than our most basic ideas about what uses human beings make of language and what uses language makes of them. In this chapter, I trace the legacy of this problematic in the twentieth-century discussion of ideology, focusing on the particular understanding of the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion’’ that emerges in both Roland Barthes’s and Louis Althusser’s analysis of obviousness. In the final section, I turn to the great nineteenth-century critic of utilitarianism, Edgar Allan Poe, and consider the political consequences of the ‘‘obvious’’ truth that people make use of language, particularly when it comes to talking about themselves. The contemporary analysis of ideology is one of the most metacritical discussions in the humanities, tending to deal less with individual sets of beliefs than with the question of whether the term ‘‘ideology’’ itself continues to be of any use. More like a cockroach that will never die than a phoenix rising from the ashes, ‘‘ideology’’ has demonstrated a curious ability to resist all assaults and to survive its constant relegation to the dustbin of intellectual history, invariably living on to be reinterpreted with renewed vigor. Other concepts come in and out of fashion, but ideology is forever. The reasons for this are not immediately obvious. As E´tienne Balibar has observed, Marx relied far less on the term than have many of his inheritors, for ‘‘ideology’’ all but vanishes from his oeuvre after 1846, only to reappear after his death in Engels’s ‘‘Anti-Du¨hring.’’3 It is not apparent, however, whether this philological observation is evidence of the genuine absence of a notion of ideology in Marx’s work (and hence an indication of its failure as a concept), or more a sign that the term ‘‘ideology’’ names a concern so ubiquitous that it becomes unnecessary to designate it with a specific label. Today, ‘‘ideology’’ has acquired a wide range of definitions, to the point that any reference to it is forced to begin with an obligatory gesture toward the extraordinarily disparate ways in which it can be understood—positively valorized in some instances, negatively in others, and even at times ‘‘valueneutral.’’4 The effort to sort out these different valences is itself often deemed ideological, as if ‘‘ideology’’ named the means by which a critical category were valorized, or perhaps the belief that a discourse could control the valorizations of its terms. In this regard, the debate over the meaning of the word can degenerate into the most old-fashioned rationalist project of replacing

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false ideas with true ones. Similarly, the gesture to refine our understanding of ideology may itself turn out to be exactly the sort of mystification that the critique of ideology takes as its target, namely, the fantasy that one can reduce an idea to a fixed form or object. The alternative to such approaches is encapsulated in the pithy truism—the reigning ideology of ideology— that any gesture that declares the death of ideology is bound to be mocked as proof to the contrary. Going one degree of abstraction further, it has been pointed out that in almost any model of ideology, the move to distinguish between the ideological and the nonideological can easily be demonstrated to be thoroughly ideological.5 Indeed, once ‘‘ideology’’ is introduced as a descriptive or diagnostic term, it inexorably expands its range to the point that literally everything falls under its scope. Recent efforts to privilege anthropological understandings of the concept of ideology in which the term names the totality of social life can thus be read as a sort of preemptive strike on the concept’s tendency to generalize, as if defining it as the sum of human experience from the start might somehow preserve its usefulness down the road. If ideology nonetheless survives these various stumbling blocks, this may have to do with the fact that it is widely regarded as the last bastion of antirelativism. Renouncing the term ‘‘ideology’’ ’s pretense to representing a useful critical category would mean abandoning all hope of using other terms such as ‘‘truth’’ or ‘‘reality.’’ One of the concerns at the heart of Theodor W. Adorno’s cultural theory was the suspicion that many analyses passing as critiques of the status quo in fact rely on a logic that obliterates any possibility of an alternative: The [traditional ideology] critique was conceived against idealism, the philosophical form that reflects the fetishization of culture. Today, however, the definition of consciousness in terms of being has become a means of dispensing with all consciousness that does not conform to existence. The objectivity of truth . . . is tacitly replaced by vulgar positivism and pragmatism—ultimately, that is, by bourgeois subjectivism.6

For Adorno, materialism is always on the brink of defaulting to a determinism in which any prospect for a ‘‘future’’ is shaped entirely by the forms and powers that compose the ‘‘present,’’ and the mere thought of real change is impossible. In seeking, for example, to show that all social relations have irreducibly material origins, we risk tacitly confirming the absolute author-

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ity of current economic forces and their glowing prospects for eternal selfreproduction. Above all, we should not lose confidence in the practical power of theory: ‘‘Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory and practice demanded, we have become all too practical. Fear of the impotence of theory supplies a pretext for bowing to the almighty production process, and so fully admitting the impotence of theory.’’7 By insisting on the preeminence of the economic system, the self-proclaimed materialist unwittingly ends up colluding with it, preemptively achieving the very barbarism toward which capitalist culture drives us, a state of affairs in which human beings know one another only as items to be bought and sold. Adorno’s perception of an inadequacy in traditional ideology critique is most evident in his account of the dual nature of ideological systems. For him, a ‘‘ruling’’ ideology is never simply a mechanism of dissimulation, control, and trickery, but also a kind of apology: ‘‘Ideology is justification [Rechtfertigung],’’ as he puts it.8 Any ideology must transcend the interests it serves because its very presence marks a deficiency, a failure in the existing order. Far from functioning as a myth of self-sufficiency or self-evidence, ideology confesses the need for a supplement—the need, that is, for ideology. As an apology for the status quo, ideology always generates another idea or ideology that it fails to control. Adorno’s hope is that this other ideology may in fact work counter to the very interests the former ideology serves. At the same time, he never tires of reminding us that the apologist need not be a reformist, much less a revolutionary. Ideological confessions of inadequacy on the part of the dominant social order can take the place of genuine critique by removing the perceived need to speak against a system that is happy enough to show that it can do so on its own. Contemporary cultural studies has been quick to acknowledge its debt to Adorno, although perhaps less quick to embrace his championing of Scho¨nberg, Beethoven, and Goethe. Much of the confidence cultural studies brings to its analyses of contemporary phenomena stems not, however, from Adorno’s dialectical strategies, but from the belief that the last forty years of French theory have left us with a host of semiotic tools that allow us to understand the machinations of capitalist reality with a precision and exactitude that earlier Marxists could not. In this context, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies enjoys cult status. Any who have even momentarily fancied themselves cultural critics dream of dissecting television commercials, sporting events, or political campaigns with even half the flair of the master.

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Whether or not we can approximate Barthes’s wit or pithy descriptive prowess, we certainly cannot be condemned for striving to continue his legacy and explain, as he puts it, ‘‘the general semiology of our bourgeois world.’’9 At the same time, one cannot help but suspect that Barthes’s own insights into the implications of his work have been ignored or conveniently forgotten, as if contemporary cultural studies had assimilated him by turning him into one of the myths he describes rather than dealing with the complex relationship between formal and historical argument that is at the heart of his project. Mythologies opens modestly: ‘‘The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality . . .’’ (11). This ‘‘naturalness,’’ Barthes argues, is the ‘‘decorative display of what-goes-without-saying [ce-qui-va-de-soi], the ideological abuse . . . hidden there’’—an abuse he also terms ‘‘false obviousness’’ (11). Barthes appears to be working with a conventional model of ideology as dissimulation: the media or common sense present as ‘‘natural’’ something that is anything but ‘‘obvious.’’ In this sense, ideology is mis-representation; it is in some essential way inaccurate, or rather, it is an accurate—devious, even diabolical—miscoordination of accuracy and inaccuracy. Barthes’s more original insights are to be found in his characterization of myth, which he terms a ‘‘second-order’’ system of signification. Myths function by taking up preexisting relations of concept and image, or as Barthes puts it, ‘‘myth is always a language-robber,’’ a metalanguage that uses existing language for its own ends (131). In one of his most famous examples, Barthes considers a cover of Paris-Match on which a young African soldier in French uniform makes a salute, ‘‘with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour’’ (116). The ensuing analysis raises a host of questions about even this short summary. What does it mean, for instance, that the soldier is probably looking at the flag? Barthes’s major claim, however, is that a ‘‘language-object,’’ the soldier saluting, becomes a statement about France and its relation to the rest of the world. We will not be surprised when Barthes ultimately concludes that this particular myth functions by trying to remove the fabricated, historical quality of European oppression and present the facts of imperialism and colonialism as a natural event. Undergraduates everywhere today are expected to perform similar demonstrations—a testimony to Barthes’s awesome influence.

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Barthes is not arguing that myths are a stable typology, a set of practices that permit of unproblematic decoding or a puzzle that will be exhausted as soon as it has been solved. One does not demystify a myth simply by noting that it is false. On the contrary, myth acquires its peculiar power because the metalanguage and the language-object it appropriates coexist in an unstable dynamic; indeed, what a myth ‘‘achieves’’ depends essentially on this instability. Barthes is often accused of bracketing the question of reference and assuming a perfect coincidence of sign and meaning. Here, however, he undertakes an analysis that is rhetorical rather than semiotic in that it considers reference and signification as two distinct, possibly opposed, processes that take place simultaneously. Through the theft of the metalanguage, the saluting soldier is not entirely metamorphosed into a symbol of the French Empire, for he retains ‘‘too much presence, he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image’’ (118). At the same time, in being robbed the soldier’s presence is ‘‘tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent’’ (118). One can discourse at length about the historical specificity of the subjugation of the African soldier on the magazine cover, describing in great detail the fantasies of autonomy and subjugation being depicted, but myth has at its disposal what Barthes calls a ‘‘perpetual alibi,’’ whereby its most literal signification—a soldier in uniform saluting—always returns, potentially erasing the supposed symbolism. Shifting back and forth between language object and metalanguage, myth is a ‘‘sort of constantly moving turnstile’’ (123). ‘‘The meaning [of the myth],’’ writes Barthes, ‘‘is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning. And there never is any contradiction, conflict or split between the meaning and the form: they are never at the same place’’ (123). Myth acquires its peculiar power in the realm of ideas as a discourse of missed crossings. We probe its intricacies, looking for a mystification that never manifests itself because the straightforward correspondence between sign and meaning for which we search is only one moment in myth’s broader dynamic rather than its ultimate achievement. The ‘‘appropriation’’ of a language by a metalanguage is always incomplete, but this is precisely what gives myth its intractable quality. As Barthes writes, ‘‘It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth’’ (118). At the same time, the game of hideand-seek never becomes mere concealment since myth ‘‘hides nothing and

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flaunts nothing: it distorts’’ (129). The false obviousness of a myth is never mere dissimulation; it does not disguise the truth or pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. On the contrary, the crucial terms of the setup are never hidden. Myth is ‘‘neither a lie nor a confession,’’ but a discourse of the obvious (129). It remains an open question, then, what analyzing a myth will actually entail. ‘‘[Myth’s] form is empty,’’ writes Barthes, ‘‘but present, its meaning absent but full. To wonder at this contradiction I must voluntarily interrupt this turnstile of form and meaning, I must focus on each separately, and apply to myth a static method of deciphering; in short, I must go against its own dynamics . . .’’ (124). In being forced to work counter to the logic of their object of study by breaking it into its static parts, critics of myth risk merely reproducing it: the gesture to evaluate myth in terms of a standard of reference external to it can never be thorough enough to keep up with the many meanings of the turnstile, nor ideal or material enough to enumerate its ever changing forms. In the face of this dynamic, scientists of myth are confronted with a dual dilemma: they are unable to avoid the possibility that all representations may occur in a mythic mode, but they are also incapable of basing their study solely on what myth represents, as if it could be reduced to a mimetic picture of a world, real or fantastic. Is there such a thing as a nonmythic language, or is all language effectively two languages at once, language and metalanguage? To answer, Barthes speaks about a language of ‘‘man as producer’’: ‘‘Wherever man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image, wherever he links his language to the making of things . . . myth is impossible’’ (146). He then provides an example of this intriguing claim: If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am felling, whatever the form of my sentence, I ‘‘speak the tree’’ [ je parle l’arbre], I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operation, transitively linked to its object; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labor, that is to say, an action. This is political language; it represents nature for me only inasmuch as I am going to transform it. It is a language thanks to which I ‘‘act the object.’’ The tree is not an image for me; it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer ‘‘speak the tree.’’ I can only speak about it, on it. My language is no longer the instrument of an ‘‘acted-upon tree.’’ It is rather the ‘‘tree-celebrated’’ which becomes the instrument of my language. (145–46)

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For Barthes, political language represents only the objects of future transformations, objects that become meaningful by virtue of being acted upon by human hands. This is not a theory of language as act, but of language as the representation of a connection between the subject and the direct object of a transitive verb. It is a language in which ‘‘to speak’’ itself becomes transitive such that ‘‘language is operation,’’ an operation almost indistinguishable from the labor of cutting. In these terms, all productive acts are accompanied by a parallel act of language that transforms an activity such that it can be understood as a relationship between an agent and an object of the agent’s action. We may puzzle over Barthes’s conviction that only a woodcutter can ‘‘speak the tree,’’ suspecting that it betrays precisely the mystification about the division of labor that troubled Marx. At the same time, the passage is important for its emphasis on language functioning not as a medium of signification, but as one facet of a dynamic that changes the world. Barthes explains: ‘‘Revolution is defined as a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world; and its language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making’’ (146). As much a fuel as a system of signs, language produces the form that allows an entity to be defined as a maker and is then consumed in the ensuing refashioning of the world through revolution, which, proclaims Barthes, ‘‘announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth’’ (146). Despite the confident tone of this proclamation, it remains far from clear how we are to distinguish between revolutionary language and a language that speaks about the world, for Barthes has stressed that myth, too, ‘‘announces itself openly’’ whenever it likes. On the basis of what, then, are we to tell the difference between the ‘‘false obviousnesses’’ of myth and ‘‘true’’ ones? If myth is the making obvious of the obvious, then we seem to have returned to Marx’s interest in the logic whereby we presuppose control over our own presuppositions. We have yet to clarify, however, whether the category of the obvious simply performs, as it were, the obvious—whether it reveals that systems of power aim to subjugate us through deception—or whether the obvious instead demands a new way of understanding the discourse about ideology as a discourse about discourse itself. Perhaps the most sustained analysis of this difficulty is Louis Althusser’s ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ (hereafter ‘‘the ISA essay’’), in many respects a remarkable complement to Barthes’s work. With his notion of ideology as a set of material practices rather than a group of beliefs or ideas, Althusser

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offers a wholesale rethinking of classical Marxist categories, new hope for a reinvigoration of Freudo-Marxism, and a model for how speech act theory can become part of a progressive politics. Although some of its arguments respond to specific debates of the European Left in the 1960s and 1970s and may seem dated, the article is on the verge of becoming a classic. The ISA essay opens with what would appear to be an eminently practical point of theory: ‘‘As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not produce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year. The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production.’’10 As Althusser points out, this claim is likely to be accepted or dismissed as a truism. Notably, he does not present it as overtly paradoxical, although one could certainly ask whether asserting the primacy of reproduction over production raises temporal questions similar to those we have encountered in the opening pages of The German Ideology. Concerns about this detail have led some to argue that Althusser in fact essentializes reproduction as a primal drive rather than studying it as an effect of a particular political organization or economic system. Althusser’s point, however, is that to proceed solely from the perspective of production without some account of the production-reproduction dynamic is to remain at an overly abstract level of argument. While the reproduction of the conditions of production has been familiar since the publication of the second volume of Capital, it has also been ‘‘uniquely ignored,’’ for the ‘‘tenacious obviousness’’ of the point of view of production as both a practice and a goal makes it impossible to ‘‘raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction’’ (128). It is precisely the relative ‘‘obviousness’’ of different points of view that will ultimately become Althusser’s central topic. In the discussion that follows, Althusser maintains that the reproduction of the relations of production (i.e., capitalist conditions of exploitation) is primarily secured by the exercise of state power in the state apparatuses, which include the ‘‘Repressive State Apparatuses’’ and, in the term he coins, the ‘‘Ideological State Apparatuses’’ or ISAs. As the name suggests, repressive state apparatuses function predominantly by repression, whereas ISAs—including churches, schools, families, unions, and the media—do so primarily by means of ideology. ‘‘No class,’’ writes Althusser, ‘‘can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses’’ (146). From this

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standpoint, he argues that the classical Marxist theory of state power needs to be supplemented by a model of ISAs not so much because it is inaccurate, but because it is only a ‘‘descriptive theory’’ (136). Such a theory allows for the accumulation of many examples to support its claims, but it risks ‘‘blocking further theoretical developments’’ (140). The essence of these ‘‘blockages’’ lies in the nature of the obviousness that a descriptive theory generates: ‘‘For it is clear that if the [Marxist tradition’s] definition [of the State] . . . really does give us the means to identify and recognize the facts of oppression by relating them to the State, conceived as the Repressive State Apparatus, this ‘interrelationship’ gives rise to a very special kind of obviousness, about which I shall have something to say in a moment: ‘Yes, that’s how it is, that’s really true!’ ’’ (139). Whether as a theory claiming that the state is repressive or one claiming that production depends on the reproduction of the conditions of production, descriptive theory does not know if its claims are the logical consequences of given premises or singular representations of ‘‘how it is.’’ In Marx’s terms, a descriptive theory is always in danger of being unable to escape the categories of the discourse it strives to take as its object of study. It can represent this object, but it cannot ask whether what it represents is a transcendent feature of reality or a historically conditioned fact. The key to the entire ISA essay, then, will be the content of the statement: ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ In everyday speech, this comment implies not that what has been said is somehow in error, but that there was no need to say it since whatever was said goes without saying. At the same time, there is always the possibility that what is obvious is not or was not always obvious, and indeed only becomes obvious as soon as someone points it out. In this sense, the very need to expose the obvious as obvious suggests that the obvious is never obvious enough for its own good, always requiring a supplemental gesture of confirmation. This strange logic drives the latter half of Althusser’s essay, although he arrives at the matter somewhat circuitously. Ideology, he maintains, is not a set of ideas or beliefs, but ‘‘actions inserted into practices’’; moreover, ‘‘these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus’’ (168). At first glance, this matrix of action would appear to be Adorno’s nightmare, a closed system in which all human agency is mechanically driven by a prepared script that permits of no dissent: ‘‘It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted

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by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual, practices which exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief’’ (170). This subject of ideology is a mere puppet, conscious of beliefs produced by a set of practices over which it has no control and of which it has little or no comprehension. This is a fearsomely mechanized reality, a world gone awry in which we are imprisoned in a web of rituals, and the truth of our status as mindless automatons is concealed from us. If this were the entirety of Althusser’s argument, he might justly be critiqued for a pre-Marxist determinism of the clumsiest sort, a demonstration with little trace of the conflict that runs through almost every page of Marx’s work. This would be a superstructuralism that could never account for its own conditions of possibility, nor allow for ISAs to become sites of class struggle, as Althusser insists they are. A better-known passage from the ISA essay is Althusser’s account of how an individual is first constituted as a subject within this matrix. Here, in the text’s most famous line, we begin to see where the structuralist understanding of society reaches its limits: ‘‘Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’’ (170). Althusser’s memorable example of this act is ‘‘the most commonplace everyday police hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ’’ ‘‘Assuming,’’ Althusser writes, ‘‘that the theoretical scene . . . imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-andeighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)’’ (174).11 To turn around and answer the hail of the law is to grant the ideological apparatus the recognition that you occupy the place it has designated for you. Althusser notes that this example may be misleading since it presents something that has always already taken place as if it unfolded in a linear fashion: ‘‘Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived’’ (176). His readers have further questioned the validity of the example, arguing that it presupposes more than it explains about the mechanics of power, relying on an unexamined notion of consciousness as primal guilt. One might also ask what this scenario assumes about the language of the law, particularly the idea that one can understand

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and answer the law’s hail before actually having become a subject, as if the human individual, the ‘‘presubject,’’ must somehow be premarked such that the recognition of the address and resulting response are always-already precoded. Similarly troubling is Althusser’s claim that ‘‘experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man’’ (174). Once again, if the speech act of the ISA never misfires and its language always ‘‘gets its man,’’ it is hard to imagine how Althusser is doing anything other than proposing that the power of the ruling system is absolute and its determinations impossible to challenge. In this sense, his hailing is not a speech act, but a speech fact, a statement that functions within a preestablished matrix of call and response in which the spontaneity of performance is subordinated to the prior guarantee of its successful completion. What would it mean, then, to resist interpellation or to be incompletely or even unsuccessfully interpellated? For Althusser, the primordial act of interpellation, the interpellation on the basis of which all others are conceivable, is God’s address to Moses: ‘‘God the Lord (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud. And the Lord cried to Moses, ‘Moses!’ And Moses replied ‘It is (really) I! I am Moses thy servant, speak and I shall listen!’ And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am that I am’ ’’ (179). Althusser comments: ‘‘God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am that I am’) and he who interpellates his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation, i.e., the individual named Moses’’ (179).12 God’s power to interpellate, to subject His subjects to their subjecthood under His own Subjectivity, lies in His ability to speak as the one who can interpellate Himself independently of any external summons. Whereas Moses identifies himself in response to being called (‘‘It is I!’’), God says, ‘‘I am that I am,’’ which is to say, ‘‘I am the being that can announce itself in and through its own self-enunciation.’’ For Althusser, all subjective identity rests on the sovereignty of this divine proposition, this fundamental self-legislating utterance. The question is how the singularity of any given individual who is on the way to becoming a subject can relate to the universality of such a master discourse. Althusser’s interest in ideology as interpellation is shared by Barthes, who writes that ‘‘myth has an imperative, buttonholing character: stemming from a historical concept, directly springing from contingency . . . it is I whom it has come to seek. It is turned towards me, I am subjected

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to its intentional force, it summons me to receive its expansive ambiguity.’’13 For the one addressed, the experience of the contingent, even arbitrary quality of one’s relationship to the solicitation becomes the experience of being the target of a language that has singled one out. The result is not the constitution of subjectivity through a synthesis of general and particular. Barthes explains: ‘‘For this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, it suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent. . . . This is a kind of arrest, in both the physical and the legal sense of the term.’’14 For Barthes, ideological interpellation takes place through a language that in the very moment of hailing an individual as its specific target suddenly repositions itself and speaks instead to a generic addressee, as if the personal trajectory of its call had been an illusion all along. Captured by an utterance that cannot fail to get us, we are startled to discover that language looks the other way, ‘‘neutral and innocent,’’ as if it had never been talking to ‘‘us’’ at all. Ideological language arrests us, ‘‘in both the physical and the legal sense of the term.’’ It arrests us as subjects of a language that is itself under arrest, unable to feign mastery of the relationship between the singular and universal dimensions of reference and signification. For Barthes and Althusser, the individual on the way to becoming a subject is detained or even imprisoned by a discourse that may never speak to, for, or about it. If Barthes’s argument helps us to elucidate some of the ramifications of the hailing scenario, Althusser explores its consequences more thoroughly still by asking what it means for our understanding of language in general. Initially, he considers how the subject relates to its status as a subject: As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the ‘‘Logos,’’ meaning in ideology, that we ‘‘live, move and have our being.’’ It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary ‘‘obviousness’’ [une ‘‘e´vidence’’ premie`re] (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc. . . .). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘‘name a thing’’ or ‘‘have a meaning’’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘‘transparency’’ of language), the ‘‘obviousness’’ that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so since these are ‘‘obviousnesses’’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction

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of crying out (aloud or in the ‘‘still, small voice of conscience’’): ‘‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’’15

Ideology constructs a confrontation with the obvious, eliciting the declaration that the obvious is indeed obvious. The emphasis that has been placed on the ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ in the interpretation of Althusser’s text needs to be rethought from the perspective of this other speech act, the one uttered by the subject rather than the law: ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ From the perspective of the ideological state apparatus, this exclamation is intended to be entirely descriptive; it is a statement about what is the case, which is precisely how a ‘‘descriptive’’ theory of the state apparatus will understand it. As Althusser makes clear, however, the basic model of obviousness is language—the transparency of language, the obviousness by virtue of which a word can ‘‘name a thing’’ or ‘‘have a meaning.’’ In this respect, the statement ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ has to be regarded as the act of speech that makes speech possible. The ‘‘obviousness’’ that words signify or refer rests on the ability of language to prove that its own obviousness is obvious—linguistic self-presentation as pure self-evidence. Ideology, for its part, would therefore be the organization of structure and act that would make this utterance the presupposition by virtue of which any utterance would be meaningful. When we announce, ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ we affirm nothing less than the existence of an entire language of words, all of them signifying the obviousness of the obvious. From the perspective of Adorno’s understanding of ideology as apology, we must consider whether this need for language to manifest its own obviousness may confirm that it is anything but obvious. Althusser makes it clear that the demand for this transparency of language comes from language itself. Indeed, language is first and foremost this demand. Only in the confirmation of the obviousness that words ‘‘name a thing’’ or ‘‘have a meaning’’ does language reveal itself in its full authority—prior to its subjugation to any individual act of reference or signification. Language is obvious, and as such, nothing is more apt to be overlooked than the fact that there is such a thing as language in the first place.16 This detail is crucial when it comes to asking, as does Barthes, what language would be capable of resisting this ideological logos in which we exist as subjects. Can any discourse avoid presenting itself as semantically meaningful or referentially reliable? Is there a form of utterance that could short-circuit its own inter-

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pellative self-arrest? Even Barthes’s ‘‘tree-speak’’ would seem to fall under the sway of the obvious since it is precisely its transparent directness that he identifies as the key to its connection between language and action. Far from hindering us in our efforts to understand ourselves or the world by hiding things from us, the ideology of the obvious overwhelms us with semantic plenitude—we are ethical, we live in a just society, and best of all, we speak meaningfully about ourselves: ‘‘It is obvious that you and I are subjects. . . .’’ The fact that we ‘‘live, move, and have our being’’ in the logos is forgotten before it is ever known because language, the obviousness of the obvious, is identified entirely with the sense it is presumed to convey. In this respect, Althusser’s description of the elementary ideological effect reminds us that any statement about signification necessarily takes for granted the very possibility of signification it aims to describe. The science of language is always doubly in bad faith, at once presupposing and ignoring its object of inquiry insofar as it can only refer to itself as a signified content rather than a signifying system, as a meaning rather than a pre-semantic signifier.17 The problem is that this supposed ‘‘insight’’ into the pitfalls of approaching language as an object of study tends to acquire the status of a concrete fact, becoming the cornerstone of a theoretical positivism that claims to tell the truth about discourse and its discontents.18 In Althusser’s terms, language is the presentation of transparency; that is, language ‘‘appears’’ by retreating in the face of the self-evidence it provides. Strictly speaking, this retreat is a permanent fait accompli; as the obviousness of the obvious, language is always something that we have already overlooked. The discourse of ideology is, in effect, yesterday’s news. Althusser’s point is not that we are failing to ask the right questions about the powers that be, but that there are never any questions left to ask. Once again, we must consider where the opportunity for resistance lies in such a model. What is it in or about language that is not entirely dissolved in the appearance of obviousness? In fact, it is in the exclamation ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ that we can begin to locate the possibility of a different verbal order. With this utterance, language formally announces the power of words that is ostensibly at work in every other statement. On the other hand, if all language represents its ability to refer to things as obvious, the articulation ‘‘That’s obvious!’’ must mean something more or less than this mere ‘‘fact’’ of linguistic transparency. More simply, if what words do is

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obvious, must not obvious be the one word whose function is anything but obvious? Althusser explains that the transformation of the individual into the realm of the ‘‘Subject’’ does not end with the response to being hailed, as the ISA requires a follow-up announcement that ‘‘everything really is so.’’19 This confirmation, this ‘‘concrete material behavior,’’ is none other than ‘‘the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘So be it’ [Ainsi soit-il].’’20 Althusser repeatedly insists that ‘‘So be it’’—the inscription of the subjunctive into life and of life into the subjunctive—is ‘‘material’’ life, not a web of lies or deceptions. ‘‘This phrase,’’ he continues, ‘‘which registers the effect to be obtained [by subjecting subjects to interpellation] proves that it is not ‘naturally’ so (‘naturally’: outside the prayer, i.e., outside the ideological intervention). This phrase proves that it has to be so if things are to be what they must be, and, let us let the words slip: if the reproduction of the relations of production is to be assured. . . .’’21 In the very instant at which it heralds the triumph of ideology, ‘‘So be it’’ reveals interpellation to be the imperative of an apparatus rather than a naturally given fact. In introducing a minimal difference between what is and what has to be, ‘‘Ainsi soit-il,’’ the ultimate gesture of acceptance, turns out to be the slogan of revolution, the one exclamation that can call the logos-logic of the ISA into question. Althusser’s point is not that ‘‘So be it’’ negates what came before it, in which case it could easily be reincorporated into the ruling discourse. Nor is he suggesting that the subject fails to complete her interpellation because she says, ‘‘So be it!’’ but ‘‘really’’ means, ‘‘Let it not be so!’’ His focus on the ritualized nature of ideological practice is designed to distinguish sharply between the external effects of performance and intrinsic beliefs or intentions. It would be contrary to his entire model to suggest that it matters whether in pronouncing its prayers the interpellated subject means something else (ironically or sincerely). If ‘‘So be it!’’ can nevertheless reveal the language of interpellation to be an ongoing construction of the present rather than a determination always already given as a preexisting fact, this has to do with its status as a pronouncement that, like Kant’s judgment of taste, is neither constative nor performative. ‘‘So be it’’ does not refer to itself, to an external state of events, or, most important, to another linguistic articulation. If anything, the word it functions not as the ultimate generic pronoun that can and must refer to anything and everything, but as a mark of the failure of this utter-

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ance to betray any pretense to expressing a given set of ideas or hailing a specific group of people. ‘‘So be it’’ effects arrest, but it does so intransitively, without capturing us under its singular spell or suspending thought in the universality of linguistic generalities. In this way, ‘‘So be it’’ articulates a discourse that could never take the form of a structural apparatus, an image on a magazine cover, or an ax that fells a tree. For Althusser, it is the sole act of language that treats its own power of reference or signification as something other than an obvious given. In the terms we used to explore the autonomy of ethical discourse in Kleist, it is the means by which language presents itself as independent of even the dictates it would prescribe for itself, including the very presupposition that there is language. If the resulting effect is nevertheless ideological, this is because the articulation of ‘‘So be it’’ also confirms that language invariably misrepresents itself as derivative of a system over which it has no authority. It thus remains unclear to what extent this act of language is to be regarded as a human act, or whether it precisely underscores the ad inhumanum quality of its proofs. Although many have tried to expand on Althusser’s study of linguistic reality as an ideal or material given, basic presuppositions about language remain extraordinarily difficult to identify, much less to challenge, and where the humanity of language is concerned, no ideology is more pervasive than the reigning doctrine of use. ‘‘For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word users,’’ writes Roman Jakobson, ‘‘the meaning of any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign. . . .’’22 The long shadow of Saussurean thought has left its mark on every discipline in the humanities, but what should interest us in Jakobson’s eminently familiar comments is something only occasionally singled out: the figure of the human being as a ‘‘word user’’ or ‘‘user of language.’’23 Post-structuralism has done a great deal to unsettle our confidence in the self-evidence of linguistic phenomena, but the conviction that people make use of language has by and large survived intact. Even to claim that we are helpless puppets of the signifier, as fewer and fewer do today, is merely to express the flip side of a relationship in which discourse and human being are linked as user and used. Thinking in terms of speech acts, auto-productive words, or the signifier as a dual force of positing and counterpositing will not necessarily change this fundamental stance. Whether it is treated as a natural system, an institutional construct, or a historical process, language is still evaluated by an

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external standard of utility that assesses how well it signifies, refers, or represents. It can be argued that the paradigm of use extends far beyond our understanding of language. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the imperative to make proper use of oneself is the point at which a humanist ethics dovetails with a capitalist imperative to consume labor power.24 Similarly, for Marx it is important both that human labor produces use-values and that labor can be defined through the concept of use itself: ‘‘The use of labor-power,’’ he writes, ‘‘is labor.’’25 From this perspective, we might say that the goal of bourgeois ethics is to disguise the fact that labor involves not just using laborers, but using them up—by which point they are expected to have spawned some children to serve as replacements.26 Such ethico-economic arguments take us beyond the realm of semiotics into concerns about the authority of global capital in the twenty-first century. They also suggest that the use of words and the use of people rest on one and the same logic. It is to the particular nature of this use and its critique by an unlikely contemporary of Marx that we now turn. As Charles Baudelaire tells us, the utilitarian dimensions of our understanding of language were attacked in the nineteenth century by Edgar Allan Poe. ‘‘For a long while,’’ writes Baudelaire, ‘‘there has existed in the United States a utilitarian movement that seeks to encompass everything, including poetry. There are poets of humanity and poets of universal suffrage, poets whose mission it is to break down corn laws and poets to build up workhouses. . . . In his lectures [Edgar Allan Poe] declared war on them.’’27 Throughout his oeuvre, Poe distinguishes the ends of literature from the uses to which it may be put. In one of the most playful of his studies, a brief story entitled ‘‘The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,’’ he interrogates the notion of linguistic utility through an exacting evaluation of the most commonplace of words: man. The story opens with a narrator at a loss: ‘‘I cannot just now remember when or where I first made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.’’28 Indeed, the narrator continues, their introduction ‘‘was attended . . . with a degree of anxious embarrassment which operated to prevent any definite impressions of either time or place’’ (127). Such lapses in memory serve only to highlight the extent to which little has been forgotten about this man. The narrator goes

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on to describe the General’s physical appearance in great detail, body part by body part, and he is able to recall every word of his lengthy name. The name itself calls attention to the strange relationship between the memorable and the forgettable since it is elaborately adorned with titles and middle initials at the same time as it possesses a thoroughly John Doe–like quality. It is perhaps this curious coordination of the singular and the generic that contributes to the narrator’s sense that ‘‘the remarkable something,’’ the ‘‘je ne sais quoi which hung about [the] new acquaintance,’’ lay in something other than his ‘‘bodily endowments’’ (128). The narrator is encouraged in his view about the General’s uniqueness by a friend who, upon introducing the two men for the first time, whispers in the narrator’s ear that this is ‘‘a remarkable man—a very remarkable man’’ (129). From this point on, it becomes clear that gossip will be the key to unraveling the mystery of the General’s identity, although it turns out to be gossip of a very peculiar sort. As the narrator’s friend proceeds to detail the General’s escapades in his campaigns against the Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians, he arrives at the sentence that appears to contain the heart of the matter—‘‘He’s the man . . .’’—only to be interrupted by the General himself, who exclaims, ‘‘Man alive, how do you do’’ (129). At this moment, the narrator is drawn into a conversation in which, try as he might, he can persuade the General to speak of nothing but mechanical inventions. As the story continues, we encounter a variety of hints that appearances are not what they seem.29 Encouraged by the overt play of deception and dissimulation, most interpretations of ‘‘The Man That Was Used Up’’ have regarded it as political satire and attempted to identify the General as a specific figure in American military history.30 One need only read a little further, however, to recognize that the story challenges the assumption that the noun man—if it is one—can refer unproblematically to a particular man, or even to mankind in general. In each of the subsequent conversations, the narrator’s sources of gossip are interrupted at the very moment they are ready to say something crucial about the General, and as in the above example, each source is cut off in the middle of uttering the sentence, ‘‘He’s the man—.’’ Moreover, each interruption begins with the word, the syllable, the letters m-a-n. ‘‘The Man That Was Used Up’’ might equally well have been titled ‘‘How Can We Interrupt ‘Man?’ ’’—although in that case, the answer would have been too obvious, for ‘‘man’’ is clearly interrupted, time and time again, by ‘‘man.’’

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In fact, by the conclusion of the story the series of interruptions that the word man has undergone has destroyed both our faith in the referential coherence of m-a-n and our confidence that we know when an interruption has occurred at all. In some cases, the ‘‘break’’ in the would-be gossiper’s sentence shifts the reference from the particular to the general, from ‘‘this’’ man to ‘‘mankind’’ as such (although one wonders whether the ‘‘general’’ of ‘‘general and particular’’ isn’t also the ‘‘Brigadier General’’). Listening to Miss Tabitha T., the narrator hears: ‘‘ ‘Why you know he’s the man—’ ‘Man,’ here broke in Doctor Drummummupp, . . . ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live; he cometh up and is cut down like a flower!’ ’’ (131). Far from confirming an analysis of the story in which the General could be localized as some particular historical figure, ‘‘He’s the man’’—the basic propositional gesture, one presumes, of any assertion of identity—stumbles on ‘‘man.’’ ‘‘Man’’ interrupts ‘‘man,’’ and in the case of the aforementioned exclamation ‘‘Man alive!’’ it even moves us from ‘‘man’’ the noun to ‘‘man’’ the ‘‘meaningless expletive, a synonym for ‘Sakes alive!’ ’’ as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. As a reference to an individual, whether historical or fictional, ‘‘man’’ comes to be no more than a mere sound or placeholder. At the same time, every ostensible ‘‘interruption’’ of ‘‘man’’ by ‘‘man’’ leads not to semantic chaos, but to a new and entirely comprehensible statement. Each social magpie the narrator encounters is cut off by another speaker, but fate, chance, or some mysterious social logic sees to it that their remarks are ‘‘connected’’ by the repetition of ‘‘man.’’ The phrase ‘‘He’s the man—’’ is never completed, so the special nature of ‘‘this’’ man, John Smith, is never explained. Nonetheless, ‘‘man’’ always gets its ‘‘man,’’ that is, ‘‘man’’ is always followed by another ‘‘man.’’ The more times this happens, the clearer it becomes that what I’ve been calling an ‘‘interruption’’ is one in local terms alone; on the larger level of the narrative, only the failure of each instance of ‘‘man’’ to be echoed by ‘‘man’’ would constitute a true break in the story. Even when the story’s syntax makes it difficult to tell precisely who is interrupting whom, we never lose sight of these three little letters: m, a, n. It is precisely letters that are at issue when the gossiping chatter takes another turn and begins to challenge the autonomy of the word man. As one of the narrator’s fellow theatergoers begins the now familiar ‘‘He’s the man—’’ the character Climax interrupts, ‘‘Mandragora / Nor all the drowsy

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syrups of the world . . .’’ (132).31 By this point, ‘‘man’’ no longer designates a connection between a word and a concept; all that is repeated is a syllable. ‘‘Man’’ is therefore now doubly ‘‘semantic’’—both a word in its own right and the beginning of another word—at the same time as it is evacuated of any (fixed) ‘‘meaning.’’ Yet even if the interruption of ‘‘man’’ by ‘‘man’’ demotes it from word to the mere portion of a word, this does not necessarily challenge its conceptual or ideological authority. The very fact that this second m-a-n would be understood as a repetition of the m-a-n before it confirms that the first trio of letters holds sway over the second, which we inevitably read as a cryptoinstantiation of the first, that is, as the imbedding of ‘‘man’’ within another word. Far from losing ‘‘man’’ in ‘‘mandragora,’’ we confirm how easy it is to find the one word in the other (and perhaps, with a little scrutiny or paranoia, in every word). In this respect, the supposed ‘‘breakdown’’ of the autonomy of the word man highlights just how precarious the status of such interruptions as interruptions is. We are tempted to say that ‘‘man’’ stutters or stumbles, but these are slips in name or, rather, not in name alone since ‘‘man’’ remains the fundamental building block for all the comparisons and contrasts between the words one designates as meaningful in the attempt to ‘‘interpret’’ what is going on in the story. Even the testing of semantic borders effected by the General’s exclamation of ‘‘Man alive!’’ will turn out by the end of the story to make a great deal of sense, as the issue of what it means to be alive proves to be of particular concern when it comes to saying what sort of ‘‘man’’ he is. Given that the mysterious General’s middle initials are ‘‘A. B. C.,’’ it is not surprising that the letters m-a-n eventually start to run away with themselves in the figure of Theodore Sinivate, the final source of gossip the narrator seeks out, a gentleman whose peculiar drawl dismantles words: ‘‘He’s the ma-a-an—’’ (134). Here, it is the narrator himself who impatiently interrupts, and as if by magic, he interrupts not with ‘‘man,’’ but with ‘‘Mr.’’: ‘‘ ‘Mr. Sinivate,’ said I imploringly, ‘is he [the General] the man in the mask?’ ’’ (134). If the breakdown in the integrity of the m-a-n trio itself would appear finally to free ‘‘man’’ from the curse or blessing of its echo, the impression that Poe’s story demands to be read at the level of the letter rather than the word is further heightened by many of its proper nouns, which appear either to be near-nonsensical collections of consonants

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and vowels fashioned for their pleasant rhymes (Bugaboo, Drummummupp), or markedly abbreviated designations such as ‘‘Mrs. P.’’ or ‘‘Tabitha T.’’ (which rhymes, of course, with ‘‘ABC’’). Who in the story really controls what ‘‘man’’ means or has a legitimate claim to taking ‘‘m-a-n’’ as his or her name? The key to the riddle appears to lie in the person of John A. B. C. Smith, an individual possessed of the most generic of names, although one that flaunts its status as the building block of all others. Is the General’s proper name another name for ‘‘man’’? Is all language the language of man, so that all words begin or end (or are made up of ) m-a-n or a-b-c? Is this the true sense in which John Smith is Everyman? Foiled in all his attempts at finding out the answer through gossip, the narrator decides to go straight to the horse’s mouth and confront the General directly. ‘‘Here at least,’’ he avers, ‘‘there should be no chance for equivocation’’—which means, presumably, for saying ‘‘man’’ when one means ‘‘man’’ (134). Upon entering the chamber where Mr. Smith is said to be dressing, the narrator encounters nothing more than a bundle with a squeaky voice, then sits and watches in amazement as the General’s manservant assembles the jumbled collection of what turn out to be wooden body parts to form the imposing figure of Mr. Smith. The General is an almost entirely artificial contraption since all that remains of his body after his many campaigns in the Indian wars is one-eighth of his tongue. The fact that the last trace of his physical person should be a portion of the instrument of oral articulation invites us to reconstruct the General in the same way we have reconstructed m-a-n. Just as his body is made of wooden contraptions, so the gossip about him is composed of the alphabet—all twentysix prosthetic devices of it. As a social constructivist might say, he is a product of the communal discourse about him—the stories, the tall tales—but he is also a product of the mechanical inventions he himself lauds. Does this mean that we can neatly pass from the technologies of ‘‘ABC’’ to the technologies of ‘‘MAN,’’ our humanity intact the entire way? To this point, everything in the story has suggested that at best we can slide from ‘‘man’’ to ‘‘man’’ with little confidence as to whether we are dealing with one ‘‘man,’’ ‘‘mankind,’’ or the first syllable of some entirely different word. Time and time again, ‘‘man’’ has appeared twice, as ‘‘man man,’’ but this has been anything but a guarantee of anyone’s, any ‘‘man’s,’’ ability to speak about humanity. In this regard, the narrator’s closing pronouncement in the last lines of the story is decisive: ‘‘It was evident. It was a clear case.

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Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith was the man—was the man that was used up’’ (137). Already from the title of the story, we might have realized that we are not dealing with ‘‘The Man Who Was Used Up.’’ Whatever it will mean to use this man up, it will be a question of man as a thing, or more precisely, of the way in which man the person and man the thing may or may not be connected through the word ‘‘man.’’ In the 1830s, to be ‘‘used up’’ meant first and foremost to be ‘‘discussed thoroughly, talked of or written about, critically,’’ and only more colloquially ‘‘to be exhausted, tired out, or done in.’’ The expression would therefore appear to construct a parallel between the way the General is used up by the gossip that surrounds him and the way his body is used up in the Indian wars. At the same time, it is obvious that the General is not being criticized behind his back. He is a subject of some interest and envy, just as his reliance on mechanical conveniences has made him more rather than less imposing. In what sense is he used up if all this use only adds to his physical and social stature? At this juncture, we should return to the narrator’s initial encounter with the General, whose major topic of conversation was the rapid march of mechanical invention: ‘‘Indeed, lead him where I would, this was a point to which he invariably came back’’ (130). Man, a machine, always returns to himself, to the technology that has made his peculiar mechanical existence possible. Lauding recent inventions, the General says: ‘‘The most wonderful—the most ingenious—and let me add, Mr.-Mr.-Thompson, I believe is your name—let me add, I say, the most useful—the most truly useful mechanical contrivances are daily springing up like mushrooms, if I may so express myself, or more figuratively, like-ah-grasshoppers—like grasshoppers Mr. Thompson—about us and ah-ah-ah-around us!?’’ (130). If technological advances spring up like mushrooms, or, ‘‘more figuratively,’’ like grasshoppers, then John Smith, a man on the tip of everyone’s tongue—a man who invites another ‘‘man’’ to fall off the tip of any tongue that attempts to articulate who he is—is a man in name, or rather, in tongue alone.32 This Everyman, this man at the nonexistent end of every impossible-to-finish ‘‘He’s the man,’’ expounds his opinions concerning use by addressing the narrator by the wrong name, for although the narrator, unlike almost everyone else in the story, will remain nameless, he does make a point of telling us that his name is not Thompson. Whatever wisdom Mr. Smith will demonstrate about mechanical contrivances, it will not be a wis-

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dom about appellations, or at least not about useful ones. Instead, what this tongue tells us is that the useful is useful in the face of the stark finitude—in his case, bodily finitude—that human beings confront. The truly useful is always predicated on the fact that what we use is capable of being exhausted. Leaving us in the lurch, uncertain whether we can use the word man to identify ourselves as human, mechanical contrivance, or grasshopper, ‘‘The Man That Was Used Up’’ reveals that in assuming language to be part of a model of social constructivism, we are really attempting to confirm that we can be effortlessly constructed again and again, with no fear of disintegrating into a heap of clothing. In learning that ‘‘man’’ may be nothing but a prosthetic convenience, we are shown neither that humanity is so wondrously varied that no single word could ever encompass it nor that being enslaved to the usefulness of words is what makes us truly human. Rather, the doctrine of language as something constructive for ‘‘us,’’ a tool that distinguishes us from grasshoppers or mushrooms, leaves us with only one really useful self-conception, namely, an understanding of ourselves as an entity fated, like the General, to use itself up. In grasping the full implications of the human being’s status as a product of its own linguistic labor—in this case, gossip—Poe’s insights into the dangers of utility principles rival the most pessimistic economic doctrines of the nineteenth century.33 ‘‘The unideological thought,’’ writes Adorno, ‘‘is that which does not permit itself to be reduced to ‘operational terms.’ ’’34 As Althusser and Barthes demonstrate, ideology is not committed to dissimulating its machinations, but thrives precisely by explaining how it works. Indeed, ideology is committed to the notion that its functions can be delineated and described with considerable precision—gossiped to death, if you will—and all with no threat to its usefulness. In Poe’s story, each utterance of ‘‘man’’ calls into question the usefulness of the word man for the project of talking about humankind, but this gesture alone does not interrupt the broader model of techno-humanism in which language is something that can be taken apart and put together like a body—used, but, unlike a body, never used up. If such an interruption is to be possible, if ‘‘man’’ is to treat ‘‘man’’ as something more or less than what we dismantle a little more every time we say ‘‘man,’’ then we must conceive of language as being at once formally boundless and radically finite, as both absolutely self-evident and yet something for which ‘‘the presuppositions and birthplaces . . . appear precisely to be lacking.’’ This means that we must think of language before or beyond

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its use value as a medium of action, production, or signification, that is, without asking what it does for us or against us. It is only in this way that we can begin to free our politics from their crypto-utilitarian impulses, impulses that disguise not a faith in the usefulness of people, but a drive to make them go away.

Conclusion No theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object. — t h e o d o r w . a d o r n o , Prisms

In this book, I have argued that reading the texts of classical political economy together with post-Kantian literature offers us important insights into some of the central controversies of contemporary cultural theory. Ideological debates in the humanities will benefit immeasurably once we recognize that philosophical inquiry is not a hindrance to but an essential ally of empirical history. As Adorno frequently reminded us, the attempt to renounce all pretensions to subjective expression and surrender oneself to the objective authority of what exists (or has existed) is no less likely to lapse into idealism than the most detailed elaboration of self-reflexive constructs. Indeed, efforts to demystify the philosophy of the self are rarely more free of metaphysical baggage than the systems from which they seek to distinguish themselves. The hope that we can resolve the aporias that confound the speculative dynamics of self-consciousness by disregarding them altogether suggests a desire to return to a pre-Kantian metaphysics in which rigid polarities of subject and object constitute a fixed classificatory schema. This 174

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kind of ‘‘topological thinking,’’ as Adorno has written, ‘‘knows the place of every phenomenon and the essence of none.’’1 From the opening investigation of the concept of historical context in the work of Stanley Fish to the broader question of whether literary language is distinguished by its resistance to determination as the product of an individual, society, or era, the aim of this book has been to challenge the desire to interpret texts by describing their ‘‘place’’—whether it is their standing in a moral or aesthetic system, their value on the open market, or their popularity in the halls of power. In tracing the parallel developments of eighteenthand nineteenth-century aesthetics and economics and identifying their unique account of human praxis, we have examined a series of writers for whom language is neither simply a medium of individual or communal selfunderstanding nor an arena in which various values are tested prior to being unleashed on the world. In Schlegel’s vision of cultural development, Kleist’s theory of dramatic speech, and Ho¨lderlin’s poetic syntax, we discover an art that never takes for granted its own self-evidence—or, as Adorno put it, its ‘‘right to exist.’’2 Far from an escapist medium, art distinguishes itself through its strident critique of its own claim to autonomy vis-a`-vis the social. For these writers, literature is an extraordinary cultural phenomenon not because it expresses a particular group’s interests—the intelligentsia, the ruling class, or the proletariat—but because it forces us to rethink our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression and selfdetermination. It is in these same terms that the conceptualization of language comes to play a crucial role in the doctrines of production that structure modern political and economic thought. In Smith, Bentham, and Marx, linguistic performance becomes central to the analysis the moment the limits of selfinterest as a model of agency are encountered. The result is a theory of linguistic labor, a labor of language that accompanies every act we normally call ‘‘material praxis,’’ but a labor that can never be assimilated into the commodity system as a power that could be bought or sold. This theory does not rely on the glorification of language as a transcendental force that shapes the physical or the metaphysical realm, depending rather on a definition of economic activity as the work that cannot be controlled by individual interests. The ideal of productivity underlying the reigning order of consumer capitalism is thus revealed to be as much a doctrine of speculative ideas as it is an explanation of the nature of material wealth.

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The concept of human agency that emerges from this book does not resemble the familiar paradigms of liberal democratic humanism because it demands that we think about politics less as the dynamic interaction of selfinterested groups and more as a struggle between those forces that are subject to human interest and those that are not. To this end, we have addressed the questions that preoccupied Kant and his inheritors: Does the singular quality of human taste challenge the claim of judgment to be a rational process? Can our model of human experience accommodate a figure of truly autonomous action? To what degree does a theory of production compromise rather than confirm the authority of the producer, particularly when the theory in question is a doctrine of self-production? We have focused on a tradition in which the exposition of these questions is integral to any genuinely historical analysis. We have also shown that an engagement with literary-critical arguments is essential if the study of culture is to be an investigation into possibilities of social change rather than an affirmation of the existing relations of power. Finally, we have demonstrated that our understanding of the intersections of aesthetics, economics, and politics must rest on an exposition of the concepts of spontaneity and autonomy. The freedom they name is real precisely because it is linguistic.

notes

preface

1. In two influential studies, The Economy of Literature and Money, Language, and Thought, Marc Shell makes far-reaching claims for the extent to which all literary texts ‘‘can be analyzed in terms of economic form.’’ Shell, Economy, 7. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels examines the models of selfhood inherent to capitalist modes of representation. For an analysis of ‘‘the language and logic which poetic and economic ‘systems’ share,’’ see also Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination, xi. 2. In Cultural Capital, John Guillory argues that ‘‘a consideration of the texts, pretexts, and contexts of Adam Smith and Kant reveals an original indistinction of aesthetics and political economy as discourses. Both . . . gestate in the body of what . . . was called ‘moral philosophy,’ and they can be said, with only the slightest recourse to the grotesque, to have been separated at birth’’ (302–3). A number of other studies have sought to elaborate similar dynamics. In Models of Value, James Thompson maintains that political economy and the British novel are both produced by the crisis that ensues with the ‘‘modern reconceptualization of money from treasure to capital’’ (2). David Kaufmann makes a similar claim in The Business of Common Life, arguing that political economy and the novel achieve newfound intellectual significance concurrently at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that both discourses should be regarded as efforts to respond to the demand for ‘‘new descriptions of and apologias for the economy, the state, morality, and citizenship’’ prompted by ‘‘the rapid growth and institutional consolidation of commercial capitalism’’ (169). 3. In ‘‘The Interests in Disinterestedness,’’ Martha Woodmansee has argued that the modern notion of art as an autonomous object to be contemplated disinterestedly arose in eighteenth-century Germany as a defensive effort on the part of authors who feared that their own work would not fare well if its significance were measured by its success in the emerging market for reading material. It is not obvious whether Woodmansee can account for how the spe177

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cific circumstances that organized the ‘‘origin’’ of this idea affected its critical or ideological function in debates over the next two centuries. Today, Pierre Bourdieu is often cited as the preeminent theorist of the contingency of aesthetic value. See, in particular, Bourdieu, Distinction. In American literary scholarship, these controversies are most familiar from critiques of the canon as a hegemonic edifice grounded in a hierarchy of contingent valorizations. For an analysis of the ironies that plague the dialectics of universality and particularity encountered by relativist projects, see Guillory, Capital, 269–340. 4. See, in particular, Paul de Man, ‘‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’’ and ‘‘Kant and Schiller,’’ in Aesthetic Ideology, 70–90 and 129–162, resp. introduction: production, history

1. Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 4. 2. Ibid., 4–5. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. In Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish writes, ‘‘Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce’’ (322). 5. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Towards a Poetics of Culture,’’ 12. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 170. 7. On Karl Philipp Moritz as a crucial anticipation of the Critique of Judgment, see Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, esp. 37–57. 8. ‘‘Art,’’ Kant writes, ‘‘is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or operating in general (agere); and the product or result of art is distinguished from that of nature, the first being a work (opus), the second an effect (effectus).’’ Kant, Judgment, 170. 9. Ibid., 171. Kant is often accused of remaining within a bourgeois aesthetic in which art is merely the negation of the realm of political economy rather than a genuine examination of its ‘‘antilabor’’ aspects. For one version of this argument, see Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, esp. 39–40. 10. Kant, Judgment, 170–1. 11. Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 36. 12. Kant, Judgment, 230. 13. These remarks echo a distinction Kant makes in his Logic when he says that cognition must conform to a rule that is either Manier (‘‘free’’) or Methode (‘‘constrained’’). Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 9:139. 14. Kant, Judgment, 182 (translation modified). 15. In Kant’s corpus, the trials and tribulations of imagination (Einbildungskraft) are most familiarly rehearsed in the two versions of the Transcendental

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Deduction written for the Critique of Pure Reason. In both, the imagination produces the synthesis of the manifold in the ‘‘act of putting together [the] various presentations’’ given by intuition that is necessary for any cognition. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A118 (see also B152; as is customary, this and all subsequent references to the first Critique are to the original pagination of the A and B editions). In this respect, the imagination is the very possibility for coherent experience, that is, for the establishment of affinities and associations between different appearances. In the first version of the Deduction, Kant argues that ‘‘the transcendental unity of the synthesis of imagination is the pure form of all possible cognition’’ and that ‘‘all objects of possible experience must be presented a priori through this form.’’ Ibid., A118. ‘‘By means of this transcendental function of the imagination,’’ he continues, ‘‘the two extreme ends, viz., sensibility and understanding, must necessarily cohere.’’ Ibid., A124. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger accuses Kant of shying away from this radical account of the imagination as the condition of possibility of both sensibility and understanding and of downplaying this formative dimension of human subjectivity in the second version of the Transcendental Deduction as reason ascends in relative prominence (95–116). 16. Kant, Judgment, 186. 17. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 176 (translation modified). 18. Kant, Pure Reason, B103. 19. J. G. Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 244. 20. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 194. Throughout, I have modified the citations from The Science of Knowledge, replacing ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘not-self’’ with ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘not-I.’’ 21. Ibid. 22. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has been more than four centuries since the English word poetry was a synonym for ‘‘imaginative or creative literature in general,’’ but this is precisely what we should understand by Kant’s ‘‘Dichtkunst,’’ which for him names one of the two verbal arts (the other is oratory). For Hegel, ‘‘Poesie’’ will similarly designate ‘‘the art of language’’ and include as its sub-genres lyric, epic, and drama. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, 960. It is arguable that the British Romantics also use poetry as a synonym for what we would today call ‘‘literary language,’’ as when Percy Shelley writes in ‘‘A Defence of Poetry’’ that ‘‘poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination,’ ’’ and is ‘‘the center and circumference of knowledge,’’ ‘‘the root and blossom of all other systems of thought’’ (480, 503). 23. Kant does tentatively propose an analogy between the divisions of the arts and ‘‘the way people express themselves in speech so as to communicate with one another as perfectly as possible. . . .’’ Kant, Judgment, 189. Poetry,

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then, is both one art among others and the model of the divisions between them. In this regard, it could be argued that language for Kant is first and foremost the power to figure difference. 24. On nonsense in the Critique of Judgment, see Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense. 25. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 32. 26. Ibid., 5. 27. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, 57. 28. On contingency and language as (im)potentiality, see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. 29. Schlegel, Fragments, 31–32. 30. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ 52–53. 31. Bertold Brecht, Ausgewa¨hlte Werke, 6:218 (my translation) 32. Hegel, whom Brecht read with great care, writes: ‘‘Accordingly we consider the contingent to be what may or may not be, what may be in one way or in another, whose being or not-being, and whose being on this wise or otherwise, depends not upon itself but on something else.’’ G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, 205. 33. On language that tests the demands of possibility, see Werner Hamacher, Premises, esp. 1–43. 1. the art of interest

1. Kant, Pure Reason, B833. 2. Fichte, for one, will argue: ‘‘The highest interest and the ground of all others is self-interest,’’ adding that for the philosopher, ‘‘the desire not to lose, but to maintain and assert himself in the rational process, is the interest which invisibly governs all his thought.’’ Fichte, Knowledge, 15. Intriguingly, Novalis will designate self-interest as the opposite force: ‘‘Yet raw self-interest seems to be immeasurable, anti-systematic. It has not allowed itself to be limited at all, though the nature of every political organization demands this.’’ Novalis, ‘‘Faith and Love,’’ 45. 3. Kant, Pure Reason, B492. 4. On the ‘‘fate’’ of reason, see Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, esp. 1–4. 5. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 77–78. Earlier Kant writes: ‘‘But why should I, as a rational being, and why should all other beings endowed with reason, subject ourselves to this law? I will admit that no interest impels me to do so, for that would then give no categorical imperative. But I must nevertheless take an interest in it.’’ Ibid., 66. 6. Ibid., 78. 7. Baumgarten first uses the word aesthetics in the last pages of his dissertation, Reflections on Poetry, published (in Latin) in 1735. There and in the Aesthetica, the goal of aesthetics is the ‘‘perfection of sensate cognition.’’ For

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Baumgarten, the arts are entirely representational (he defines discourse as ‘‘connected representations’’), and the highest form of art is ‘‘perfect sensate discourse’’ (which is his definition of poetry). See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Theoretische A¨sthetik, esp. 171–205. 8. See the entry on aesthesis in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, 8–15. 9. Kant, Pure Reason, B35n. 10. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1. 11. Adorno, for one, expresses skepticism about the assumption that philosophers after Kant sublate the concept of natural beauty into a higher level of aesthetic analysis. Natural beauty, he argues, was simply ‘‘repressed,’’ a phenomenon for which he holds Schiller and Hegel responsible because they transpose Kant’s conceptions of human freedom and dignity from ethics to aesthetics, thereby making all aesthetic worth dependent on a reference to the productivity of an autonomous subject. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61–62. 12. Kant, Judgment, 181, 188. Hereafter cited in text. 13. Seemingly ignoring Kant’s stress on the accidental quality of this harmony, Heidegger has a different focus. ‘‘According to the common notion,’’ he writes, ‘‘disinterestedness is indifference toward a thing or person: we invest nothing of our will in relation to that thing or person.’’ Heidegger, Nietzsche, 108. The result, he continues, is that people have assumed that in the case of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, ‘‘every essential relation to the object is suppressed.’’ Ibid., 110. But, argues Heidegger, ‘‘the opposite is the case. Precisely by means of the ‘devoid of interest’ the essential relation to the object comes into play. The misinterpretation fails to see that now for the first time the object comes to the fore as pure object and that such coming forward into appearance is the beautiful. The word ‘beautiful’ means appearing in the radiance of such coming to the fore [das Wort ‘scho¨n’ meint das Erscheinen im Schein solchen Vorschein].’’ Ibid. Heidegger also speaks of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgment allowing the object to come to the fore as a pure object, a claim that is in line with his account of Kant’s transcendental imagination as the original freedom of the opening of a space (called ‘‘time’’) in which it first becomes possible for subjectivity to encounter anything. It is hard to escape the impression that Heidegger is engaged here more in an interpretation of Hegel and his famous dictum that the beautiful is ‘‘the pure appearance of the idea to sense’’ than in a reading of the Critique of Judgment. Hegel, Aesthetics, 111. 14. In particular, Kant has been criticized for his declaration that the analytic of concepts from the Critique of Pure Reason will be the guide for exploring the various dimensions of an aesthetic judgment. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is largely a meditation on this problem. For another ‘‘skeptical’’ approach to the Critique of Judgment, see Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Parergon,’’ in The Truth in Painting, 15–147.

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15. Kant says that ‘‘a concern for universal communication is something that everyone expects and demands from everyone else, on the basis, as it were, of an original contract dictated by [our] very humanity.’’ Kant, Judgment, 164. It is on this basis that he makes his notorious argument for the presupposition of a sensus communis (Gemeinsinn). Somewhat later, Kant will refer back to this discussion and claim that, even if a mistake is made in a judgment of beauty, the authority of the idea of universal assent may still survive. Derrida maintains that by presupposing this ‘‘common sense’’ rather than considering whether it is a constitutive or a regulative principle, Kant short-circuits his analysis and opens his argument to charges of being empiricist. Derrida, Painting, 35. 16. Schlegel writes: ‘‘Concerning this reciprocal communication of ideas, what can be more compelling than the question of whether such communication is even possible? And what could be more suitable than to experiment with this possibility or impossibility by either writing a journal like the Athena¨um oneself or taking part in it as a reader?’’ Friedrich Schlegel, ‘‘On Incomprehensibility,’’ 119. 17. Schlegel, Study, 17. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. For the most confident documentary claims about the dates of the ¨ ber manuscripts, see Hans Eichner, ‘‘The Supposed Influence of Schiller’s ‘U ¨ naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’ on F. Schlegel’s ‘Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie.’ ’’ 20. Such a cynical claim should not of course discourage us from comparing and contrasting Schlegel’s and Schiller’s arguments. For a masterful analysis of the issue, see Peter Szondi, ‘‘Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische.’’ In the context of our subsequent discussion, it will be worth bearing in mind that both Szondi and Wilhelm Dilthey (in Leben Schleiermachers) praise Schlegel for providing a better account of history than Schiller. For a review of the criticism on Schlegel’s text, see Ernst Behler’s introduction to Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, clxxi–clxxv; Richard Brinkmann, ‘‘Romantische Dichtungstheorie in Friedrich Schlegels Fru¨hschriften und Schillers Begriff des Naiven und Sentimentalischen’’; and Willy Michel, A¨sthetische Hermeneutik und fru¨hromantische Kritik, esp. 84–97. 21. Schlegel, Fragments, 1. 22. Friedrich Schiller, Werke, 2:628 (my translation). 23. Schlegel, Study, 99. 24. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 5. 25. Schlegel, Study, 17. 26. Fichte, Writings, 152. 27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 149. 28. Schlegel, Study, 20. Hereafter cited in text. 29. Søren Kierkegaard, who famously critiqued the German Romantics in his dissertation on irony, explored some of Schlegel’s concerns with the inter-

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esting, as well. ‘‘The first form of the interesting,’’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘‘is to love change; the second is to want repetition,’’ adding: ‘‘the interesting can never be repeated. . . .’’ Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, 326, 147. In Schlegel, the interesting strives for a receptivity that takes the form of a change that can be repeated, but it finds itself perpetually confronted with a counterpart of ‘‘more’’ content or energy that never fully becomes either ‘‘the same’’ or ‘‘something different.’’ 30. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘‘Essay on the Concept of Republicanism Occasioned by the Kantian Tract ‘Perpetual Peace,’ ’’ 99–100. 31. Schlegel, Study, 95. 32. Schlegel, Fragments, 4. 33. Over the past decade, ‘‘performance’’ has been one of the hottest topics in the humanities. Viewed as a cornerstone of the kind of interdisciplinary analysis it is hoped will unite the social sciences and humanities, its explanatory powers appear virtually unlimited. In discussions of aesthetics and politics, the status of performance as an antiformalist, antiessentialist category has earned it the title of ‘‘the unifying mode of the postmodern.’’ Michel Be´namou, ‘‘Presence and Play,’’ 3. In gender studies, performance has assumed many of the roles formerly filled by concepts such as power, self-representation, or identification, largely because of the influence of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Efforts to characterize the relations between liberalism and capitalism have also focused on the formative function of performance in social systems. For an exemplary attempt to describe our ‘‘performative society,’’ see Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance. In this context, it is worth noting that the theory of performance has always been a prerequisite for elaborating notions of praxis, creativity, and conceptuality in general and cannot be understood as the innovation of a particular period—be it postmodernism, the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance. What is perhaps even more important, the concept of performance has historically proven to be as much a stumbling block as an asset for analyses of art. Its limitations as a model of aesthetic or political agency certainly warrant as much scrutiny as its strengths. 34. On Czech Dada of the period, see Jindrich Toman, ‘‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t.’’ 35. Allen Thiher, Franz Kafka, 80; Meno Spann, Franz Kafka, 166. 36. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, 268. Hereafter cited in text. 37. It has been maintained that empirical hunger artists both pre- and postdate the story’s composition. In ‘‘Purification unto Death,’’ James Rolleston describes the eyewitness account of a colleague who saw such a performance in Frankfurt in 1952 (135). In Zirkus und Artist(e) in Franz Kafkas Werk, Walter Bauer-Wabnegg stresses that the typical hunger artist was not, as in this story, a graphically emaciated individual. So-called skeletal men constituted a distinct variety of freak show, and drawings of their hunger artist counterparts indicate

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that the latter were often portly individuals. Kafka’s gaunt performer, concludes Bauer-Wabnegg, is essentially a conflation of the two types. 38. At one point, the narrator suggests that the decline in interest reveals something stronger than disinterest, but again offers no explanation for the change: ‘‘Everywhere, as if by secret agreement, a positive revulsion from professional fasting was in evidence.’’ Kafka, Stories, 273. 39. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art, 9 (emphasis added). 40. The Encarta World English Dictionary puts even more emphasis on the constructed quality of live: ‘‘Broadcast as it happens . . . in person . . . recorded while a performance is happening.’’ The third sense of the term no longer refers directly to a ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ but to the technology for preserving and transmitting ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ into subsequent ‘‘heres’’ and ‘‘nows.’’ 41. Hans Richter, Dada, 51. For more history of Zurich Dada written by its participants, see Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time, and Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer. 42. Richter, Dada, 54. 43. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4:267. 44. Eric Andersen, as recorded in the Danish documentary film The Misfits. 45. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings, 193. 46. Kaprow’s work has been poorly served by the assumption that his undertakings are elusive simply because they blur the boundaries between art and life. At times, Kaprow himself appears to take this position, and the view has certainly been put forth by many artists involved in similar projects. Ben Vautier, a major figure in the Fluxus movements in Europe, claims: ‘‘We are trying to do live art, and live art cannot exist because . . . if it’s live it’s life and then nobody knows about it.’’ Ben Vautier, as recorded in The Misfits. At the same time, Kaprow insists that what he is doing is not an exercise in experiencing life ‘‘as it is,’’ adding that in happenings ‘‘art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is [rendered] uncertain.’’ Kaprow, Assemblage, 82. Kaprow’s happenings are thus an experiment in what ‘‘happens’’ to the notion of an occurrence if we suspend the organizational parameters that normally define what we mean by art and life. 47. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, 34. 48. Martha Wilson, ‘‘Performance Art,’’ 2. 49. Kafka, Stories, 268. 50. The possibility that Kafka’s story was originally to have included an encounter between the hunger artist and a cannibal is explored by J. M. S. Pasley in ‘‘Asceticism and Cannibalism.’’ 51. Kafka writes: ‘‘Why stop fasting at this particular moment, after forty days of it? He had held out for a long time, an unlimitedly long time; why stop now, when he was in his best fasting form, or rather, not yet quite in his best fasting form? Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting

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longer, for being not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already, but for beating his own record by a performance beyond human imagination, since he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting?’’ Kafka, Stories, 271. 52. Ibid., 272. 53. Margot Norris, ‘‘Sadism and Masochism in Two Kafka Stories,’’ 437. Norris explores the sadomasochistic dimensions of the master-slave relationship between the artist and impresario in an effort to dislodge the interpretation of ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ from the spiritual reading to which it is often submitted. Her article is one of the best attempts to characterize the artist’s activity as performative. At the same time, it should be noted that Norris’s psychological account is unable to entertain the idea that hunger could in any sense be an art. In ‘‘Hungerku¨nstler und Menschenfresser,’’ another discussion of art and ritual in Kafka, Gerhard Neumann gives a provocative account of the hunger artist as a self-defeating sign system in which the various dimensions of a communicative field are collapsed into a single person. 54. Kafka, Stories, 276. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 276–77. 57. Ronald Gray, Franz Kafka, 180. Proceeding from the same assumptions, one could go further and claim that the asceticism at work here is so radical that it will not permit itself the vanity of the name ‘‘asceticism.’’ This would be an asceticism that renounces its very claim to renunciation. In its most extreme form, it could not be said to do anything at all, and would thus be powerless to protect itself from appearing completely idle. From this perspective, ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ can be read as a meditation on the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and his concerns about whether the ascetic ideal can ever be countered by anything but its own self-destructiveness. In his notebooks, Kafka writes about the ‘‘insatiable ones,’’ ascetics who undertake hunger strikes in order to elicit a series of seemingly incompatible dictates about what will count as eating and fasting. Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, 242–43. These ascetics differ from the hunger artist because his performance could never allow for the simultaneity of voices that hail these ‘‘insatiable ones,’’ nor for the structure of now that punctuates the injunctions to them. 58. The artist’s comments about not being able to find the right food could be read as an ironic jab at the philosophy of aesthetic taste. In these terms, the hunger artist would be a Kantian subject who is unable to find those mysterious beautiful objects that facilitate singular exercises of disinterested aesthetic judgment, and hunger art would be a discourse of whims and preferences rather than a set of serious claims about beauty that demand universal assent. 59. Kafka, Stories, 277. 60. Ibid.

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61. This ‘‘free’’ figure in a cage recalls a characterization that Kafka elsewhere reserves for human beings. The ape in ‘‘A Report to an Academy’’ writes: ‘‘In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other’s arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. ‘And that too is human freedom,’ I thought ‘self-controlled movement.’ What a mockery of holy mother nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.’’ Ibid., 253. 62. The prevalence of Judeo-Christian imagery in ‘‘A Hunger Artist’’ has often been noted. In this regard, the narrator’s insistent references to salvation encourage parallels between this final scene in the cage and Christ’s words at the crucifixion: ‘‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’’ (Luke 23:34). The obvious difference between the two passages is that Christ asks for forgiveness for others, a forgiveness only He can provide. The point is not ill taken, however, for the more crucial connection may be the link between eating and forgiveness: ‘‘While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’ ’’ (Matthew 26:26–28). In this twist to the cannibalism theme, the artist assumes neither the place of Christ nor the Disciples because he proves unable to partake of the Eucharist or to offer up a body for transubstantiation. In this respect, the artist doubly confounds the logic of a resurrection in which the dissolution of the body would pave the way for its transcendence and redemption. 63. On an unlimited or absolute forgiveness, see Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. 64. Extending the insights of J. L. Austin, it has been suggested that a speech act can occur only because it is not an undifferentiated, instantaneous expression of a self-identical intention and takes place by repeating or citing an iterable statement. Of course, by definition a speech act neither describes nor reports, so to understand it with recourse to anything that preexists it is in effect to transform it into a constative reference. To be a speech act, a performative must supersede any principle of codification or formalization, corresponding to nothing but its own act and proving itself to be as much determining of as determined by the circumstances or context of its articulation. In this sense, any performative will reveal itself to be essentially misaligned with respect to the intent that precedes it; that is, assessed as actions, performatives will always appear to misfire or to misact. The notion of iterability has been decisively discussed by Jacques Derrida in ‘‘Signature, Event, Context,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, 307–30. On the failure of performative and cognitive language to converge, see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, and Werner Hamacher, ‘‘Afformative, Strike.’’

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65. The verb verzeihen comes from the Middle High German ver-zihen, ‘‘to refuse,’’ ‘‘to renounce,’’ which is from the Old High German far-zihan, ‘‘to misfire,’’ ‘‘to deny.’’ Zihen/zihan initially meant ‘‘to indicate,’’ ‘‘to announce,’’ and later ‘‘to point to a guilty party.’’ Deutsches Wo¨rterbuch (my translations). In Middle High German, verzihen shared the connotation of reconciliation with entschuldigen. A broader consideration of the theo-linguistico-philosophical dimensions of Verzeihung would have to begin with the Greek apo-logia and examine the complex relationship between apology and autobiography from Plato to Saint Augustine to Rousseau. 66. In this respect, the attendant’s gesture to his associates indicating the hunger artist is crazy only supplements the act already under way within the artist’s request; that is, the attendant actually mimics rather than rebukes the artist. 67. The irreducibly verbal structure of action is most famously explored by Nietzsche in his study of the predicative and positional powers of language in The Will to Power and the Genealogy of Morals. His analyses, particularly the concept of interpretation he develops, are in many respects expositions of arguments made by Kant, Hegel, and, to a lesser degree, the German Romantics. Two of the most important studies of Nietzsche’s work on these problems are de Man, Allegories, esp. chaps. 4–6, and Hamacher, Premises, esp. 81–180. 68. The Oxford English Dictionary defines perform as ‘‘to carry out an action, command, request, intention, script, agenda, promise or undertaking; to carry into effect, execute or fulfill; to bring out, bring to pass, cause, effect, or produce a result.’’ Perform was originally par-former (per-form), ‘‘to carry through in due form,’’ or a modification of the Old French par-fournir, ‘‘to furnish, to accomplish or achieve.’’ 2. breaking the laws of language

1. Mill begins his book by stressing that his concern is not ‘‘the so-called ‘liberty of the will,’ ’’ but rather ‘‘civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.’’ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 59. 2. Kant is an important figure for contemporary American political theorists—most famously John Rawls, who is routinely called a ‘‘Kantian.’’ Nevertheless, it can be argued that Rawls’s considerable stature in his discipline is primarily a product of those features of his arguments that can readily be assimilated to empiricist models of individual rights. 3. Kant, Foundations, 38. For a thorough exposition of the complexities of Kant’s categorical imperative, see Werner Hamacher, ‘‘The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche,’’ in Premises, 81–142. Kant’s commitment to the term ‘‘maxim’’ has been discussed by Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason, 265, and by Peter Fenves in ‘‘Chatter,’’ 157–62.

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4. Kant, Foundations, 49. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 26. 6. Kant, Pure Reason, B575 (translation modified). 7. Ibid. 8. Kant, Foundations, 29. 9. Hegel, Logic, 88. 10. Kant, Foundations, 30. 11. Ibid., 36. 12. Ibid., 64. 13. To his stepsister Ulrike, Kleist remarks matter-of-factly in a letter: ‘‘A play of mine taken from Brandenburg history is being performed in the private theater of Prince Radziwill and is subsequently to appear at the national theater, and when it is printed, it is to be given to the queen.’’ Heinrich von Kleist, Sa¨mtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:833. To a prospective publisher, Georg Andreas Reimer, Kleist speaks of the text as ‘‘a ‘patriotic’ work.’’ Ibid., 2:871 (translations of all quotations from Kleist, Werke are mine). On the history of the play, see William C. Reeve, Kleist on Stage, 1804–1987, and Klaus Kanzog, Text und Kontext. 14. On some of the problems posed by a (or ‘‘the’’) Kant-Kleist relationship, see Claudia J. Brodsky, The Imposition of Form, 21–87, and Michael Shae, Dramas of Sublimity and Sublimities of Drama, 7–36. 15. On Kleist and Kant’s moral law, see Ernst Cassirer, Idee und Gestalt, 157–202. On the role of Kantian duty (Pflicht) in Prince Friedrich, see Felicitas Sieger, Die Aporie der Freiheit, esp. 176–85. 16. This division calls into question the possibility of aligning the play’s self-reflexive structure with its communicability. For one attempt to do so, see Thomas Groß, Die Selbstreferentialita¨t der Texte Heinrich von Kleists, 240–88. 17. The Prince is not a tragic hero in any classical sense insofar as he never engages in a contemplation that takes place as self-division, which is to say that his self-understanding never achieves the level of subjective insight that is selfdestruction. For a discussion of the self-reflexivity of the play as Schauspiel as opposed to Trauerspiel or Lustspiel, see Renate Homann, Selbstreflexion der Literatur, 379–425. 18. Kleist, Werke, 1:629. The full text of Helmut Sembdner’s edition of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg appears in ibid., 1:629–709. Hereafter cited by line number in text. As noted above, all translations are my own. 19. It has been suggested that Kleist’s stage direction for the first scene that describes the Prince sitting ‘‘half-awake, half-asleep’’ is the one element of the drama that will always elude presentation on stage. The audience, it is argued, can never ‘‘see’’ half-waking, half-sleeping, as though the obscurity of the Prince’s mental state marks the entire work as impossible to perform. In these terms, all of the Prince’s perplexities—his obsession with Natalie’s glove, his inability to write down his orders for the battle, and so forth—are (ultimately

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unsuccessful) efforts to make this stage direction manifest. For an excellent analysis of these questions, see Carol Jacobs, ‘‘A Delicate Joke,’’ in Uncontainable Romanticism, 115–37. 20. Unlike Napoleon, the Prince is not permitted to become an example of Hegel’s world-historical agent, the agent who, by objectifying his own activity, transforms his subjectivity into the absolute universality of the Subject (Geist). In Kleist’s eyes, this is probably just as well. His antipathy toward the French Emperor is so well documented that Heidegger refers to him sarcastically as the poet who was principally motivated by dark plans to get rid of Napoleon. Typical of Kleist’s ruminations in this regard is a letter of 1805 in which he marvels that nobody has yet put a bullet in the head of this ‘‘evil world spirit [bo¨sen Geiste der Welt].’’ Kleist, Werke, 1:761. 21. The easiest way to answer questions about the Elector’s behavior is to seize on his sense of poise in the final act and argue that he is a benevolent educator who never intends to execute the Prince but is merely guiding him through a Bildungs-ritual. This conveniently resolves the issue of the Prince’s strange mental state by making it irrelevant for the interpretation. When the Elector is viewed as a jealous competitor of the Prince, much is made of the parallel between their two nondeaths (the false report of the Elector’s fall in battle and the Prince’s rescinded death sentence). The other characters underscore the sense of rivalry between the two through references to their shared name, as when Natalie tells the Elector that the Prince has acted ‘‘for the glory of his name,’’ which of course can mean either one of them (1105). For a thorough summary of the various interpersonal dynamics of the Prince-Elector relation, see John Ellis, Kleist’s ‘‘Prinz Friedrich von Homburg.’’ 22. Even by Kleist’s standards, the garden scene of act 1 is overburdened with biblical imagery, complete with a grasp at forbidden fruit, so a full account of the play as a kind of extended interruption would have to consider it as a time and place opened up after the Fall from the Garden of Eden. 23. Jacobs, Uncontainable, 123–24. 24. This is the opposite of the Kantian predicament. For Kant, it is essential that any judgment reveal something about the structure of judgment itself. Without this minimal degree of reflexivity, a judgment polarizes into an opposition between synthetic and analytic propositions, or it lapses into a permanent disjunction between modes and objects of knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the understanding judgment facilitates is constantly at odds with the very rules that make it possible to conceive of judgment as a feature of the understanding. At the moment it appears to facilitate analysis, judgment marks as incomprehensible the relationship between the performance of cognition and the cognition of cognition. This is why Kant often speaks of judgment as a faculty devoid of cognition. In this play, the problem seems to be that the judgment of the Prince only reveals something about the structure of judgment, which is to say, it renders it entirely formal, without, properly speaking, any object at all.

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25. Hegel views the Prince as precisely the sort of character that should not be included in art: ‘‘From the sphere of art, however, these dark powers are precisely to be banned, for in art nothing is dark; everything is clear and transparent. With these visionary notions nothing is expressed except a sickness of spirit; poetry runs over into nebulousness, unsubstantiality, and emptiness, of which examples are provided in Hoffmann and in Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg.’’ Hegel, Aesthetics, 243. 26. The Prince is referred to as ‘‘Friedrich’’ only in the title of the play and in the list of characters at the beginning of the text. To the other characters (and himself ), he is always ‘‘Arthur.’’ 27. In line with the biblical subtext, the characters’ speculations about the origin of the plant that composes the wreath can be seen as an attempt to have knowledge about the tree/wreath of knowledge from within Paradise, rather than from the external perspective of a postlapsarian state. This garden ‘‘fall’’ (or lack thereof ) will ultimately have to be related to the Elector’s refusal to accept a victory won by chance (Zufall—732), as well as to the accident (Unfall) of the Prince’s fall (Fall) from his horse that temporarily makes it possible that it may not be he who led the cavalry in their premature attack. 28. Adam Mu¨ller, one of Kleist’s most important contacts in Prussian court circles and a figure often identified (if incorrectly) as a major source for this play’s ideas, writes: ‘‘It is not in rigid adherence to the letter of particular concepts and principles that the secret of truth and strength lies, just as the sublime sense of domestic and political life generally does not allow itself to be composed in words and letters. Only in movement can tranquillity and truth be seen, only in mobility the strength of the heart: for the heart is calm in a different way than a stone is.’’ Adam Mu¨ller, Elemente der Staatskunst, 1:33. 29. On Fall and Zufall in Kleist, see Hamacher, ‘‘The Quaking of Presentation,’’ in Premises, 261–93. 30. Gordon Craig suggests that Kottwitz’s speech might have been understood by an 1811 audience in Germany as a statement of sympathy with a group of officers led by Neidhart von Gneisenau who opposed cautious policies vis-a`vis the French. Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Unpolitical, 71. 31. Of course, Kottwitz is hardly the dummy here, and any ‘‘misunderstanding’’ attributed to him may prove to be intentional. Indeed, it could be shown that his arguments on behalf of the Prince are designed precisely not to succeed. 32. Adam Mu¨ller argues that ‘‘the law as it is expressed in the letter’’ must be supplemented by ‘‘a living user of the law, a sovereign.’’ But this sovereign can in turn only reign ‘‘with constant consideration for the law.’’ The conclusion: ‘‘Thus the sovereign should not and the law cannot reign alone. It follows that what in fact rules is a third, higher term that emerges from the conflict of the law with the sovereign at every instant, receiving life from the sovereign, but the quality of continuity from the law. This is the idea of right.’’ Mu¨ller, Elemente, 1:72–74. In Kleist, there is never a point at which an ‘‘idea of justice’’

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can be understood as an autonomous third term. The manifestation of such a position would be nothing less than the destruction of the law, which is precisely what happens in Mu¨ller, where the adjudicators of the law do not decide cases but simply compare positions that never confront one another in an opposition between the just and the unjust. Despite Kottwitz’s best efforts, the Elector will never allow the debate to shift from the clash of justice and injustice into comparisons of right and wrong. We must therefore take issue with Luka´cs’s claim that Kleist’s critique of the Prussian state is limited by an absence of any ‘‘objective historical content’’ and remains a ‘‘subjective, individualistic revolt that grows into subjective, individualistic affirmation and enthusiasm.’’ Georg Luka´cs, Werke, 7:217–19 (my translation). 33. ‘‘Elector: Do you think that luck will always be there, as it has been recently, / Bestowing a crown on the disobedient?’’ (1567–68). 34. At one point in their encounter, Natalie tells the Elector that he cannot first crown the Prince and then behead him. The claim seems out of place, since, as we have discussed at length, the Elector has definitely not yet crowned the Prince. The motif of heads (or the lack thereof ) and their suitability for crowning runs throughout the play and is the subject of the Prince’s own ruminations two scenes later in a monologue where the gradual ‘‘fall’’ of the head marks the passage of life: ‘‘Who today still has his head on his shoulders, / Hangs it tomorrow trembling at his waist, / And the following day it lies by his heel’’ (1290–92). 35. Of course, the fact that the play does not develop by generalizing a dream predicament is not in itself a guarantee that there is a question to ask before the law other than ‘‘Is it a dream?’’ On the problem of (un)consciousness and dreams in the play, see Helmut Arntzen, ‘‘Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,’’ and Roland Heine, ‘‘ ‘Ein Traum, was sonst?’ ’’ 36. The Elector adds, ‘‘I reckoned on your approval [Beifall],’’ reinvoking the Prince’s inability to supply the correct Fall (1310). 37. Aside from the obvious point that there are two Friedrichs, virtually every unit of time in the play is expressed with zwei. Particularly notable is the shift from the phrase einen Augenblick, an instant, which appears perhaps fifteen times in act 1, to the unusual construction zwei Augenblicke, used by the Prince in act 3 to describe his premature attack in battle. 38. In this confrontation between the two Friedrichs, at least one of them is rather uncertain about his relation to their common name, not to mention the status of their common name as the grounds for their relationship: ‘‘The Prince: My lord, whom I used to call / A sweeter name, now forfeited, / I throw myself at your feet, deeply chastened! [Doch dir, mein Fu¨rst, der einen su¨ßern Namen / Dereinst mir fu¨hrte, leider jetzt verscherzt: / Dir leg ich tief bewegt zu Fu¨ßen mich]’’ (1765–67). 39. For a far-reaching discussion of Kleist’s relations to Prussian ideology, monarchism, and militarism, see Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie.

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40. The play’s concluding scene is often treated as a resolution of conflict. See, for example, Ilse Graham, Heinrich von Kleist, Elmar Hoffmeister, Tau¨schung und Wirklichkeit bei Heinrich von Kleist, and Walter Mu¨ller-Seidel, Versehen und Erkennen. Alternatively, some commentators have viewed the end as fundamentally ambiguous or ironic. See Valentine Hubbs, ‘‘Die Ambiguita¨t in Kleists Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,’’ Roger A. Nicholls, ‘‘ ‘Schlug meiner letzte Stunde?’ ’’ and Erika Swales, ‘‘Configurations of Irony.’’ 41. For a somewhat different discussion of linguistic performance, see Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative. 3. on the poetics and politics of voice

1. Schlegel, Fragments, 46. 2. Ibid. 3. Fichte, Knowledge, 97. 4. Kant, Pure Reason, B132. 5. Fichte, Knowledge, 97. 6. Ibid., 99. ‘‘Lyric Poetry,’’ 53. 7. For a far-reaching analysis of this problem, see Werner Hamacher, ‘‘Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetological Transposition of Fichte’s Absolute Proposition,’’ in Premises, 222–60. 8. Paul de Man’s work has been extremely influential for the discussion of positing in American literary criticism. See, in particular, his ‘‘The Concept of Irony,’’ in Aesthetic Ideology, 163–84. The results of this line of study are formalized by de Man in his late essay ‘‘Shelley Disfigured’’: ‘‘The positing power of language is both entirely arbitrary in having a strength that cannot be reduced to necessity, and entirely inexorable in that there is no alternative to it.’’ The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 116. Considering this aspect of de Man’s work, Derrida writes that ‘‘even if [positing] remains (as Heidegger says) a metaphysical determination of Being, it will give its name to a movement which cannot be reduced to metaphysics.’’ Derrida, Me´moires, 138. 9. The essay ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit’’ was written during the first half of 1800, at the conclusion of Ho¨lderlin’s stay in Homburg. Although there is no basis in the manuscript for doing so, it is usually referred to ¨ ber die Verfahrungsweise by the title given to it in F. Zinkernagel’s edition (‘‘U des poetischen Geistes’’), which was then adopted by Friedrich Beißner in the Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe. 10. The ‘‘Poetic Spirit’’ essay is Ho¨lderlin’s most elaborate discussion of alternation (Wechsel) and has been crucial for analyses of his doctrine of the alternation of tones (Wechsel der To¨ne). See, in particular, Lawrence Ryan, Ho¨lderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der To¨ne. See also Ulrich Gaier, Der gesetzliche Kalku¨l; Michael Konrad, Ho¨lderlins Philosophie im Grundriß; Gerhard Kurz, Mittelbarkeit und Vereinigung, esp. 77–109; and Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdop-

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plung. Although it lies outside the scope of the present chapter, a thorough assessment of these commentaries would have to challenge the assumption that the ‘‘Operations’’ essay is consistent with Ho¨lderlin’s other major poetological texts, most notably ‘‘On the Different Forms of Poetic Composition’’ and ‘‘On the Difference of Poetic Modes.’’ 11. Fichte, Knowledge, 99, 104. Ho¨lderlin’s relationship to Kant and his inheritors is much debated. In The Literary Absolute, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy suggestively characterize Ho¨lderlin’s obsession with Kant and move on to a direct engagement with Idealism proper; they also note with approval Heidegger’s claim that Ho¨lderlin’s poetic gesture ‘‘remains entirely foreign to the metaphysics of German Idealism,’’ then hasten to confirm that Ho¨lderlin did participate in Idealism’s ‘‘genesis’’ (28). The best-known discussion of Ho¨lderlin’s relationship with Hegel is Dieter Henrich, ‘‘Hegel und Ho¨lderlin.’’ See also Der Grund im Bewußtsein, Henrich’s book-length study of Ho¨lderlin’s brief text ‘‘Urtheil und Seyn,’’ in which Henrich treats Ho¨lderlin’s description of an inequality between absolute being and identity as a critique of Fichte. For a response to these arguments, see Andrzej Warminski, ‘‘Endpapers: Ho¨lderlin’s Textual History,’’ in Readings in Interpretation, 4–11. Taking Henrich’s work as his starting point, Manfred Frank gives a comparative sketch of Ho¨lderlin’s and Schelling’s respective engagements with Fichte in Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Other important contributions include Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Ho¨lderlin und der deutsche Idealismus,’’ in Idee, 113–55, and Jean-Franc¸ois Courtine, Extase de la raison. Much of the work on these problems has taken place within debates about the authorship of the so-called Systemprogramm text. For a survey of the arguments, see Otto Po¨ggeler, ‘‘Philosophie im Schatten Ho¨lderlins.’’ The widespread unease inspired by Heidegger’s Ho¨lderlin commentaries may at least in part be a consequence of Heidegger’s efforts to distinguish the poet from his Idealist contemporaries. In this context, see Hans Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Anmerkungen zu Ho¨lderlins ‘Andenken.’ ’’ 12. For a discussion of the ‘‘Poetic Spirit’’ essay as a radicalization of Fichte, see Frank, Mangel. Frank observes: ‘‘Although Fichte had been unable to demonstrate that self-consciousness preexists all reflexive thematizations of the self as an immediate condition and makes reflection as such possible, Ho¨lderlin and Sinclair find fault with the fact that a kernel of reflexivity creeps into Fichte’s ‘first’ and ‘absolutely unconditioned’ principle.’’ Ibid., 107–8 (my translation). This claim can be compared with Walter Benjamin’s comments on Fichte and the early German Romantics: ‘‘Reflection and positing are two different acts. And indeed reflection is, at bottom, the autochthonous form of infinite positing: reflection is positing in the absolute thesis, where it seems related not to the material side but to the purely formal side of knowing.’’ Benjamin, Writings, 1:124. Or as Dieter Henrich observes: ‘‘Considered as an act, positing also includes a relationship—one between a production and its product.’’ Dieter Henrich, Fichtes urspru¨ngliche Einsicht, 19 (my translation).

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13. Fichte, Knowledge, 104. 14. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit,’’ 14. 15. In the first pages of Ho¨lderlin’s essay, the activities of the poetic spirit strongly resemble those of Fichte’s imagination, which is defined as ‘‘absolute activity that determines a reciprocity,’’ or as Fichte also writes, ‘‘the interplay of the self, in and with itself, whereby it posits itself as finite and infinite—an interplay that consists, as it were, in self-conflict. . . .’’ Fichte, Knowledge, 150, 193. 16. Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘Poetic Spirit,’’ 67. 17. Ibid., 68. 18. Ibid., 71. 19. Schlegel, Fragments, 32. Winfried Menninghaus calls attention to the curious ‘‘parallels’’ between the writings of Ho¨lderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel in the 1790s, noting that nowhere in Schlegel’s extensive notebooks does Ho¨lderlin’s name appear. ‘‘The degree of these resemblances is astounding since there were evidently no direct connections between the contemporaries.’’ Menninghaus, Verdopplung, 99 (my translation). In the midst of his study of Fichte, Ho¨lderlin does often sound very much like Schlegel, as when he writes to Schiller: ‘‘I am trying to develop the idea of an infinite philosophical progress; I am trying to show that the irreducible demand that must be made of each system, the unification of subject and object in an absolute—I or whatever you want to call it—is possible aesthetically in intellectual intuition, but theoretically only through an infinite approximation, like the squaring of the circle . . .’’ Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Sa¨mtliche Werke (Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe), 6, part 1, 181 (my translation). On Ho¨lderlin and the Romantics, see also Mark Grunert, Die Poesie ¨ bergangs. des U 20. Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘Poetic Spirit,’’ 70, 71. 21. Ibid., 71 (translation modified). 22. On the primacy of reflection in Fichte’s philosophy, see his discussion of the ‘‘I’’ as the unthinkable union of the reflecting subject and the reflected object, and his acknowledgement that his project can only get started if it is granted that ‘‘reflection is free.’’ Fichte, Knowledge, 60–61, 94. Also significant in this context are Fichte’s comments about the spontaneity of spirit as that which brings forth reflection: ‘‘It was the spontaneity of the human mind which brought forth not only the object of reflection—those very possibilities of thought, though according to the rules of an exhaustive, synthetic system—but also the form of reflection, the act of reflecting itself.’’ Ibid., 198. For a discussion of the Idealist dimensions of Ho¨lderlin’s poetry and poetics in terms of remembrance (Andenken), recollection (Erinnerung), and Fichte’s imagination (Einbildungskraft), see Dieter Henrich, Der Gang des Andenkens, esp. 140–57. On the central role of recollection (Erinnerung) in Ho¨lderlin’s break from the thought of German Idealism, see Rainer Na¨gele, Literatur und Utopie, and Warminski, Readings.

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23. Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘Poetic Spirit,’’ 71–72. 24. Ibid., 73n. 25. De Man, Rhetoric, 75–76. 26. Ibid., 78. 27. For Quintilian, a trope is ‘‘the transference of words and phrases from the place which is strictly theirs to another to which they do not properly belong. A figure, on the other hand . . . is the term employed when we give our language a conformation other than the obvious and the ordinary. . . . [A] figure does not necessarily involve any alteration either of the order or the strict sense of words.’’ Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, IX, i, 4–6. 28. Schlegel, ‘‘Essay,’’ 101–2. 29. Schlegel, Study, 101. 30. For a treatment of Ho¨lderlin as a Jacobin, see Pierre Bertaux, Ho¨lderlin und die Franzo¨sische Revolution. On Ho¨lderlin’s political thought, see also Kurz, Mittelbarkeit, and Franz Gabriel Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom. The only sustained discussion of ‘‘Voice of the People’’ as a political argument is Rainer Na¨gele’s excellent ‘‘The Discourse of the Other: Ho¨lderlin’s Voice and the Voice of the People,’’ in Reading after Freud, 47–65. On saga (Sage) as a speech act and as the key to the broader logic of Ho¨lderlin’s poem, see Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst, 176–88. 31. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Sa¨mtliche Werke (Frankfurter Ausgabe), 5:593 (my translation). 32. Alcuin, as quoted in George Boas, Vox Populi, 9, which explores the complex history of the proverb. 33. Alexander Hamilton, as quoted in Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:299. 34. Hesiod, Theogony; Works and Days; Shield, 86. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 12. 36. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewa¨hlte Werke, 167 (my translation). On Zarathustra’s news that God is dead, see Avital Ronell, ‘‘Street Talk.’’ 37. ‘‘I am who [what] I am’’ is the familiar rendition of the Hebrew Eh’yeh asher eh’yeh. It is often argued that the original is in the future tense and is therefore more accurately translated as ‘‘I will be what I will be,’’ ‘‘I am he who I will be,’’ or ‘‘I will be with whomever I will be.’’ 38. Klopstock, Werke, 168. 39. Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Frankfurt), 5:596 (my translation). 40. In ‘‘Cultural Studies and the Canon,’’ Russell Berman writes: ‘‘For cultural studies, however, [Stefan] George’s challenge is the claim that a poetic project to transform language transforms the terms with which the community understands itself. It is this function that is at the core of the canon as institution: poetic language as the defining paradigm of the life of the nation’’ (175). The consequence, argues Berman, is that ‘‘cultural studies depends, vitally if not exclusively, on the study of the literary canon, and—I take this one step

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further—it depends vitally on the canon’s most literary part, lyric poetry.’’ Ibid., 172. 41. Friedrich Beißner dates ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ around the fall of 1803. D. E. Sattler, the editor of the Frankfurter Ausgabe of Ho¨lderlin’s work, argues that it could have been written in the summer of 1805, and others have placed it as late as 1806. Earlier versions of the poem’s title included ‘‘The Nymph’’ and ‘‘The Sign.’’ 42. In his translation of Pindar’s eighth Olympian hymn, Ho¨lderlin writes ‘‘Geda¨chtnis’’ for the Greek mne¯mosyne¯. Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Frankfurt), 15:173. In What Is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger discusses the poem’s title and suggests that ‘‘this Greek word may be translated: Memory [Geda¨chtnis]’’ (10). In ‘‘. . . / Die eigene Rede des andern,’’ Roland Reuß offers some interesting remarks on the etymological resonances of the goddess’s name. He mentions the Greek mnaomai, ‘‘to bear in mind,’’ and menein, generally thought to have meant ‘‘to remain’’ and to stand in some relation to the German Meinung; stresses the synthetic function of the suffix syn-; and ultimately argues that ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ could just as well be the goddess of remembering (Eingedenken) as of memory (Geda¨chtnis) (374–76). In the Theaetetus, Socrates proposes a model of Mnemosyne’s ‘‘gift’’ in which the mind contains a block of wax on which perceptions or ideas are imprinted ‘‘as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression, we have forgotten and do not know.’’ Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 897. This conception of memory as a trace structure plays a crucial role in Jacques Derrida’s studies of Husserl and Freud. See Speech and Phenomena, and ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’’ in Writing and Difference, 196–231. 43. The Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe offers three versions of ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ each three strophes long, Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1:193–98. Beißner’s decision to take a strophe from a separate page of the manuscript (‘‘Reif sind . . .’’) and deploy it as the first strophe of the third version has proven his most controversial move. In the introductory volume to the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Sattler treats the strophe as a separate fragment, which is how it appears in the most recent major English-language translation by Richard Sieburth. Norbert von Hellingrath, editor of the first critical edition of Ho¨lderlin’s work that began appearing in 1913, offered a three-strophe version of ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ which, like in Beißner’s second version, began with the stanza ‘‘Ein Zeichen sind wir. . . .’’ To complicate matters further, some commentators have argued for a four-strophe version of ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ in which the strophe ‘‘Reif sind . . .’’ either begins the poem or appears as the second stanza (in which case the third and fourth strophes are usually identical with the second and third strophes of Beißner’s third version). See, in particular, Emery George, Ho¨lderlins ‘‘Ars Poetica,’’ Reuß, ‘‘Rede,’’ and Flemming Roland-Jensen, ‘‘Ho¨lderlins

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‘Mnemosyne.’ ’’ In his edition of the later poems, Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, ‘‘Bevestigter Gesang,’’ Dieter Uffhausen also presents ‘‘Reif sind . . .’’ as the first part of a four-strophe poem. In ‘‘Ho¨lderlins Hymne ‘Mnemosyne,’ ’’ an essay he characterizes as a revision of his earlier interpretation of the poem, Jochen Schmidt gives a useful summary of the debates about the text’s constitution, ultimately finding a threestrophe version (a` la Beißner’s second or third version) most persuasive. See also Jochen Schmidt, Ho¨lderlins letzte Hymnen. Discussing the contested ‘‘Reif sind . . .’’ strophe in ‘‘Die F(V)erse des Achilles,’’ Rainer Na¨gele writes, ‘‘It admittedly remains disputed here what ‘the’ text is. It is uncertain whether the first strophe belongs to ‘Mnemosyne,’ as in general in the later texts the identity of a single text often becomes blurred’’ (my translation, 211n). 44. In the introductory volume to the Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1:55–70, Sattler provides an initial typeset (unamendierte) version of ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ that shows the different levels of revision; a stage analysis (Phasenanalyse), in which he reconstructs various sections of the manuscript into quasi-strophes; and a ‘‘finalized’’ three-strophe text (Ho¨lderlin, Werke [Frankfurt]). Facsimiles of the handwritten manuscript pages of ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ are available in Sattler’s edition of the Homburger Folioheft. In the newer Hesperische Gesa¨nge, Sattler offers two different five-strophe reconstructions of the manuscript, ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ and ‘‘Die Nymphe.’’ On the premises of the Frankfurter Ausgabe—in particular, the readers it presupposes and its place in various aesthetic debates—see Sattler’s remarks in ibid., 1:16–19, as well as F. E. Sattler, ‘‘Friedrich Ho¨lderlin ‘Frankfurter Ausgabe.’ ’’ Dieter Uffhausen’s 1989 edition constitutes another recent attempt to produce a palimpsest-like typeset version of Ho¨lderlin’s poetry. 45. For an analysis of some of the theoretical challenges posed by the editing of the Ho¨lderlin corpus, see Hans-Jost Frey, ‘‘Textrevision bei Ho¨lderlin.’’ 46. In ‘‘Parataxis,’’ his essay on the late hymns, Adorno stresses that Ho¨lderlin’s poetic praxis of parataxis takes place not only on what he terms the ‘‘micrological’’ level (through the notorious manifestations of aber and nemlich—words in which, Adorno says, form takes precedence over content), but also on the broader level (of the stanza, or even between poems), where, Adorno argues, form and content are one. In this respect, the formal patterns of the poems are not identical with the text itself, revealing something about the poem’s content rather than its materiality. 47. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Hymns and Fragments (Sieburth), 117; Werke (Frankfurt), 1:67. The Sieburth translation of this strophe follows Sattler’s reconstruction of the poem in the introduction to the Frankfurter Ausgabe. Sattler’s final version of the opening strophe is virtually identical to the second version of the poem Beißner provides in the Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 195. 48. Although pietistic sects with which Ho¨lderlin was well acquainted went so far as to predict Christ’s return in 1832, the Spinozists of Ho¨lderlin’s time

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were equally virulent in their claim that a true pantheism has no need for a Messiah. 49. This point (the clash between Christian and ancient Greek figures) is often made in debates about Beißner’s controversial ‘‘Reif sind . . .’’ strophe, which is deemed thoroughly Hellenic (in contrast to the Christian imagery of the strophe otherwise presented as the beginning of the poem). 50. Ho¨lderlin, Homburger, 117. 51. Ibid. (my translation). 52. In a later reworking of this section of ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ Ho¨lderlin adds to the sense of a world never quite in order by writing, ‘‘And it finds a home / The spirit,’’ then crosses out all but the last two words. Ho¨lderlin, Homburger, 117 (my translation). 53. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 117; Werke (Frankfurt), 1:67. 54. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 118–19 (translation modified); Werke (Frankfurt), 1:68. 55. Friedrich Beißner, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 2, 828. 56. David Ferris examines this line in terms of the status of Achilles as a name: ‘‘When Ho¨lderlin writes that his Achilles has died to him, he is not referring to the mere death of Achilles but to the death of his ability to appropriate the name of Achilles. No longer can he simply say ‘my Achilles’ because what has died is the relation of this phrase to him. The fateful difficulty toward which Ho¨lderlin’s thought leads is implicitly present here: at its most essential, individuality is a sign whose possession, or desire to possess, either involves a death or, in the case of Ho¨lderlin’s Achilles, is met with a death.’’ David Ferris, Silent Urns, 179. 57. As has been argued convincingly by both Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Andrzej Warminski, the Wincklemannian effort to imitate the Greeks encounters only the ruin of imitation, that is, the impossibility of modeling that which is never a model to or for itself. See Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Ho¨lderlin and the Greeks,’’ and Warminski, Readings, 23–71. 58. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 119; Werke (Frankfurt), 1:68. From the handwriting of the manuscript, it is impossible to decide whether Ho¨lderlin wrote ‘‘Der’’ (as Sattler, for one, consistently assumes) or ‘‘Die’’ in line 3 of the excerpt. Roland-Jensen argues: ‘‘We have proceeded from the assumption that the pronoun refers to Mnemosyne. That can only be the case if Die begins the sentence: Only ‘Mnemosyne’ and not her ‘city’ can cast off the cloak. . . . If one regards Der as the intended correction, [however,] it can be determined that the prepositional phrase Am Kitha¨ron and the genitive appositive Der Mnemosyne Stadt are both subordinate to the subject of the sentence, Elevthera¨, in that they both geographically and mythically characterize this proper noun that appears in the middle of the passage and at the beginning of the verse. This means that the locks of Mnemosyne must be those of her city, hence, that the hair of the goddess is identical with the trees of her city.’’ Flemming Roland-Jensen, Ho¨lderlin’s Muse, 135–36 (my translation).

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Reuß disagrees slightly on the implications of Der, arguing: ‘‘It is undecidable whether the dative ‘der’ refers to Mnemosyne or to her city. Evidently, it refers simultaneously to both. Insofar as Eleutera¨ represents/represented the former existence of Mnemosyne in a place, this representation is unthinkable.’’ Reuß, Rede, 655 (my translation). Beißner notes: ‘‘According to ancient superstition, the divine messenger of death rends a lock of hair from the sacrificial victim.’’ Friedrich Beißner, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 2, 829 (my translation). 60. In ‘‘Ho¨lderlins Hymne ‘Mnemosyne,’ ’’ Jochen Schmidt considers the various arguments for and against Beißner’s analysis, then sides with him. Reuß, who leaves the question of the goddess’s sacrifice undecided after an even more extensive discussion of the issues, goes out of his way to applaud Flemming Roland-Jensen for his courage in offering the single skeptical voice in the face of what at the time was an overwhelming critical consensus. Reuß, Rede, 654. See Roland-Jensen, ‘‘ ‘Mnemosyne,’ ’’ and Muse. Others who have subsequently entertained the antisacrifice argument include Hans-Dieter Ju¨nger, Mnemosyne und die Musen, esp. 264–72, and Uffhausen, Ho¨lderlin. 61. In Theogony (14), Hesiod speaks of Mnemosyne as the ‘‘mistress of the Eleutherian hills,’’ while Pausanias describes the city as ‘‘devastated ruins.’’ Reuß, Rede, 648 (my translation). On this figure, see also Schmidt, ‘‘ ‘Mnemosyne,’ ’’ 149–51, and Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning, 44–47. 62. In ‘‘Parataxis,’’ Adorno argues: ‘‘The poetry of the late Ho¨lderlin becomes polarized into names and correspondences on the one hand and concepts on the other. Its general nouns are resultants; they attest to the difference between the name and the meaning evoked. They acquire their strangeness, which in turn incorporates them into the poetry, by having been hollowed out, as it were, by names, their adversaries’’ (123). 63. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 119 (translation modified); Werke (Frankfurt), 1:68. 64. Beißner writes: ‘‘Mourning . . . errs like he who has not pulled himself together and has aroused the displeasure of the heavens. Mourning makes the same mistake in also allowing itself to slide into death without resistance. Even in the third version [of the poem] the sentence can clearly still be understood in this way.’’ Friedrich Beißner, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 2, 830 (my translation). Although the concluding ‘‘in this way [in diesem Sinn]’’ hints at the potential for dispute, Sattler agrees with Beißner, arguing that mourning for the dead is errant because it corresponds to the sin of wishing to die. He adds that to understand ‘‘gleich’’ as ‘‘immediately’’ and ‘‘fehlt’’ as ‘‘not present’’ would be a misunderstanding. D. E. Sattler, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Frankfurt), 1:69. Sattler’s position is also supported by Bernhard Bo¨schenstein, Konkordanz zu Ho¨lderlins Gedichten nach 1800, 27. Haverkamp asks why it is so obvious that the ‘‘Gleich fehlt . . .’’ line is the intensification of the previous line rather than

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something that calls it into doubt. How, inquires Haverkamp, could mourning err except by its absence? In these terms, ‘‘mourning’s error is grounded in the absence of mourning and consists in nothing but its lack. Freud’s treatment of this state of affairs is no different: ‘melancholy appears in the place of mourning.’ ’’ Haverkamp, Mourning, 42. Our subsequent discussion will offer a somewhat different account of the challenge provided by the line’s ambiguity. In this context, see Ho¨lderlin’s remark in his Seven Maxims that ‘‘all knowledge should begin with the study of the beautiful, for he who has learned to understand life without mourning has achieved much.’’ Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Seven Maxims, in Werke (Frankfurt), 14:71 (my translation). It remains to be seen whether this ‘‘beauty’’ (which ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit’’ calls ‘‘the most beautiful moment where there lies the actual expression, the most intellectual language’’) amounts to a definition of poetic activity as the opposite of mourning. Ibid., 79. In a slightly different vein, one could characterize melancholy as the pathological insistence of epic patterns within the ‘‘poetry of the self.’’ On the epic treatment of the lyric poem, see Peter Szondi, Ho¨lderlin-Studien. 65. The full import of the need to gather oneself is far from clear. Bo¨schenstein argues that this passage is a reference to Rousseau’s fifth reˆverie. Bernhard Bo¨schenstein, Ho¨lderlins Rheinhymne, 91. In a 1965 essay, Paul de Man argues that ‘‘the ‘one’ [einer] designated in these lines can be none other than Rousseau. . . . His act: to re-collect oneself.’’ De Man, Rhetoric, 45. In an essay written a year later, de Man interprets the passage again, this time with no mention of Rousseau: ‘‘The ending of ‘Mnemosyne’ names this protecting act of the logos through which the soul preserves itself safe in folding back upon itself [replacing the violent temporality of action with the sheltering temporality of interpretation].’’ Ibid., 63. The passage has also been interpreted in conjunction with an image from the disputed ‘‘Reif sind . . .’’ strophe: ‘‘But we shall not look forward / Or back. Let ourselves rock, as / On a boat, lapped by the waves.’’ Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 196. Both Na¨gele, Literatur, 148–49, and de Man dispute the influential conclusion of Beißner, who reads the forward and backward movement as a description of a temporary lapse into apathy. See Friedrich Beißner, ‘‘Ho¨lderlins letzte Hymne.’’ Na¨gele and de Man also dispute Kerenyi’s reading of the scene as an image of completion (Vollendung) and timelessness (Zeitlosigkeit). Na¨gele emphasizes that this ‘‘letting ourselves rock’’ should not be regarded as the enactment and fulfillment of the ‘‘loyalty’’ described in the previous clause, whereas de Man argues that it designates a rhythm that ‘‘causes a ‘forgetting’ of time, without nevertheless effacing it’’ (Rhetoric, 297n53). 66. For Freud, melancholy arises as the failure of the ego to reassert its narcissistic autonomy over and against the lost object. Through an identification with the lost object, the melancholic actually transforms the loss into a loss internal to itself, that is, it makes the loss a part of itself, which it then criticizes (hence the conjunction of narcissism and self-abjection). In insisting that at this

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moment in the poem an absent mourning is replaced by melancholy, Haverkamp may be describing not the work of the poets but the work of the gods. Their ‘‘struggles in the heavens,’’ far from being heroically angry, wild, or courageous, may be the zenith of melancholy. 67. The editorial history of ‘‘Remembrance’’ is far removed from the debates surrounding ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ if only because there is no surviving handwritten version of the poem (although a draft of the final strophe does appear on a manuscript page of ‘‘The Ister’’). The text was first published in 1808 in Leo Freiherrn von Seckendorf’s Musenalmanach, and save for a few typographical errors uncovered by Beißner, the apparatus is minimal. With regards to the date of its composition, ‘‘Remembrance’’ was probably written at approximately the same time as ‘‘Mnemosyne.’’ Beißner, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 2, 816, places it in the spring of 1803, while D. E. Sattler, in Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, 609, puts it as late as 1805. 68. Beißner, who published Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Andenken’’ among the other vaterla¨ndische Gesa¨nge, criticized Norbert von Hellingrath for having decreed the poem to be lyric in the strict sense in that it takes the singular personal experiences of Ho¨lderlin as its object. Beißner, in Ho¨lderlin, Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 2, 802. It is difficult, however, to dispel the impression that there is something inaccessible about the text’s content. Eric Santner, for example, claims: ‘‘What makes ‘Andenken’ so fascinating for the reader familiar with Ho¨lderlin’s major works is the presence of purely private memories that remain, so to speak, ‘unredeemed.’ That is, the personal recollections of Bordeaux are not assimilated to any metaphysical narrative or philosophical argument.’’ Eric Santner, ‘‘Sober Recollections,’’ 133. 69. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 109; Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 189. 70. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 107; Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 188. For a review of the traditional conceptions of poetic memory informing Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Andenken,’’ see Cyrus Hamlin, ‘‘Die Poetik des Geda¨chtnisses.’’ 71. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 107; Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 188. 72. Writing about Ho¨lderlin, Heidegger speaks of memory as precisely that which ‘‘demands’’ to be thought. Martin Heidegger, Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze, 136–37. 73. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 107; Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 188. 74. Adorno, ‘‘Parataxis,’’ 135. Adorno is quoting from Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Two Poems by Friedrich Ho¨lderlin,’’ in Writings, 1, 18–36. 75. Anselm Haverkamp provides an extended discussion of the figtree, concluding: ‘‘If the figtree in ‘Andenken’ stands for remembrance, then it stands in ‘Mnemosyne’ for the impossibility also of this remembrance that is ‘Andenken.’ . . . If the figtree in ‘Andenken’ triggers recollection, then it stands in ‘Mnemosyne’ for the impossibility of this recollection.’’ Haverkamp, Mourning, 53–54. Timothy Bahti pursues an interpretation of chiasmus in the poem in Ends of the Lyric, 127–45. 76. Ho¨lderlin, Hymns (Sieburth), 109; Werke (Stuttgart), 2, part 1, 189.

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77. Martin Heidegger makes this claim forcefully in Elucidations of Ho¨lderlin’s Poetry; see esp. 172. 78. No translation of which I am aware disputes this position. Similar to the Sieburth version cited above, Michael Hamburger offers: ‘‘But it is the sea / That takes and gives remembrance, / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, / But what is lasting the poets provide.’’ Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Poems and Fragments, 491. In Jean-Franc¸ois Courtine, Ho¨lderlin, 27, J. P. Lefebvre translates this: ‘‘Mais la mer qui l’emporte / Donne aussi la me´moire, / Et l’amour encore attache assiduˆment les yeux, / Mais ce qui reste est œvre des poe`tes.’’ 79. ‘‘Was bleibt, geht stiften,’’ writes Erich Fried, in Die Freiheit den Mund aufzumachen, 26. Timothy Bahti cites two suggestions provided by the audience at a talk he gave: ‘‘What remains however, the poets cut’’ (‘‘Was bleibet aber, schneiden die Dichter’’) and ‘‘What remains, however, the tailors found’’ (‘‘Was bleibet aber, stiften die Schneider’’). Bahti, Lyric, 274n. In this context, see Bahti’s critique of Haverkamp, ‘‘Was bleibet is the Signifier,’’ in ibid., 136–45. 4. economics beyond interest

1. The German word for ‘‘interest,’’ Interesse, does not have the connotation of ‘‘usury’’ it has in English or the Romance languages. 2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1937), 423. 3. In The Passions and the Interests, Albert O. Hirschman describes the emergence of interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a middle ground between excessive reason and excessive emotion. Important in statecraft, where one must be ever vigilant against ‘‘the calamitous state of affairs that prevails when men give free rein to their passions,’’ the term increasingly took on an overtly economic connotation, designating the reflection and calculation that order the world when people decide what to do with themselves and their wealth (32). 4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 4, 5. In his later work, Rawls is similarly mute on these points. See, for instance, John Rawls, Political Liberalism, esp. 50–52. 5. Rawls, Justice, 12–13. 6. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 12. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 12n. 10. Jeremy Bentham, Deontology Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and The Article on Untilitarianism, 7. 11. Ibid., 6. Bentham defines per genus et differentiam as ‘‘an exposition which is performed by naming a class or genus of objects within which that which is

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designated by the term thus undertaken to be defined is included, and thereupon, some circumstances or others by which the contents of this lesser class are considered as being distinguished from all the other contents of the greater and containing class.’’ Ibid., 77. 12. Jeremy Bentham, Works, 8:197. 13. Ibid., 8:126. 14. Bentham, Deontology, 75. 15. Ibid., 76. 16. Ibid., 92. 17. Bentham, Morals, 2. 18. Bentham, Works, 8:198. 19. Ibid., 8:126n. 20. In A Moral Economics, Claudia C. Klaver writes: ‘‘Recent Smith scholars, by resituating both [The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments] within the discursive and intellectual contexts of late-eighteenth-century England and Scotland, have been able to demonstrate the continuities and shared commitments of these two texts’’ (6). On the potential tensions internal to Smith’s oeuvre, see also Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue, E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable, and William K. Tabb, Reconstructing Political Economy, esp. 32–52. 21. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) is customarily considered as an immediate precursor to Smith on this topic. Other oft-cited forerunners include Sir William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1609) and J. Harris’s An Essay upon Money and Coins (1757). 22. Smith, Wealth (1937), 3. 23. Marx, Capital, 186n19. In A Treatise on Political Economy, the influential French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, a contemporary of Hegel, took the same position: ‘‘The celebrated Adam Smith was the first to point out the immense increase of production, and the superior perfection of products referable to this division of labor’’ (91). Twentieth-century economic historian Joseph Schumpeter states a similar view: ‘‘Nobody, either before or after A. Smith, ever thought of putting such a burden upon division of labor: With A. Smith it is practically the only factor in economic progress’’ (History of Economic Analysis, 187). 24. Smith, Wealth (1937), lvii. Smith’s nineteenth-century editor, J. R. M’Culloch, notes the absence of a definition of labor, but feels clear about what is at stake: ‘‘Dr. Smith has nowhere stated the precise meaning he attached to the word labor. It seems, however, that generally speaking, he supposed it to mean the exertions made by human beings to bring about some desirable result’’ (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1863], 435). 25. Smith, Wealth (1937), 30. 26. Ibid., 188–89. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault repeats this widely held view: ‘‘The difference between Smith and Ricardo is this: for the

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first, labor, because it is analyzable into days of subsistence, can be used as a unit common to all other merchandise (including even the commodities necessary to subsistence themselves); for the second, the quantity of labor makes it possible to determine the value of a thing, not only because the thing is representable in units of work, but first and foremost because labor as a producing activity is ‘the source of all value’ ’’ (254). For David Ricardo’s famous polemic against Smith, see David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, in The Works and Correspondence, 1:11–66; see esp. 12–20. ‘‘Sometimes [Smith] speaks of corn,’’ Ricardo writes, ‘‘at other times of labor, as a standard measure; not the quantity of labor bestowed on the production of any object, but the quantity which it can command in the market. . . .’’ Ibid., 1:14. Marx argues that Smith confuses the determination of value by wages with the determination of value by the labor time objectified in the commodity. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 326. 27. Foucault, in Order, 254, argues: ‘‘Whereas in Classical thought trade and exchange serve as an indispensable basis for the analysis of wealth (and this is still true of Smith’s analysis, in which the division of labor is governed by the criteria of barter), after Ricardo, the possibility of exchange is based upon labor.’’ Marx, in Grundrisse, 99, maintains that ‘‘there is no exchange without division of labor, whether the latter is spontaneous, natural, or already a product of historical development.’’ In his economic manuscripts of 1857–58, Marx claims that Smith ‘‘tries to accomplish the transition from concrete labor to labor which produces exchange value, i.e., the basic form of bourgeois labor, by means of the division of labor. But though it is correct to say that private exchange presupposes division of labor, it is wrong to maintain that division of labor presupposes private exchange. For example, division of labor had reached an exceptionally high degree of development among the Peruvians, although no private exchange, no exchange of products in the form of commodities, took place.’’ Karl Marx, in Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 29:299. 28. Milton L. Meyers, The Soul of Modern Economic Man, 112. Pierre Force, in ‘‘Self-Love, Identification, and the Origins of Political Economy,’’ concurs: ‘‘Unlike The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations does not start from first principles. It proceeds analytically’’ (61). 29. Mary Poovey, A History of Modern Fact, 238. 30. Ibid. 31. Smith, Wealth (1937), 4. 32. Poovey, Fact, 239. 33. Marx, Capital, 475. 34. Ibid., 480. 35. Smith, Wealth (1937), 15. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Ibid. 38. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 87. Four years later, Smith rewords this point: ‘‘A promise is a declaration of your desire that the person

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for whom you promise should depend on you for the performance of it. Of consequence the promise produces an obligation, and the breach of it is an injury.’’ Ibid., 473. 39. Ibid., 92. 40. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 525, 524. 41. Smith, Wealth (1937), 13–14. 42. Ibid., 13n2. 43. Smith, Lectures, 352. 44. In defining the mechanics of persuasion, Smith is explicit that in bargaining one appeals to the self-love of the other, which is to say, the basis for being able to persuade another person is your presumption of that person’s selfinterest, not some appeal to his or her benevolent humanity. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, he formalizes this claim: ‘‘If an animal intends to truck, as it were, or gain anything from man, it is by its fondness and kindness. Man, in the same manner, works on the self-love of his fellows, by setting before them a sufficient temptation to get what he wants. The language of this disposition is, give me what I want, and you shall have what you want. It is not from benevolence, as the dogs, but from self-love that man expects anything. The brewer and the baker serve us not from benevolence, but from self-love. No man but a beggar depends on benevolence, and even they would die in a week were their entire dependence upon it.’’ Ibid., 493. 45. Smith, Wealth (1937), 15. Smith is once again following Hume, who remarks on ‘‘how nearly equal all men are in their bodily force, and even in their mental powers and faculties.’’ David Hume, Essays, 467–68. 46. Smith, Lectures, 170. 47. Marx writes: ‘‘Smith’s circular demonstration is extremely amusing. In order to explain the division of labor, he assumes exchange. So that exchange will be possible, however, he must already presuppose the division of labor, the differentiation of human activity.’’ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Gesamtausgabe, 4, part 2, 336 (my translation). 48. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, 30–31. 49. In The Mirror of Production, Jean Baudrillard has made this argument: ‘‘The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production. All the concepts it articulates describe only the dialectical and historical genealogy of the contents of production, leaving production as a form intact’’ (17). 50. For Marx as the ultimate thinker of technology, see Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techne¯ in the Thought of Karl Marx. For a discussion of how Marx’s doctrine of labor shifts with his changing understanding of energy, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor, esp. 72–81. 51. Karl Marx, in Marx and Frederick Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 77. 52. Ibid., 192; Marx, Grundrisse, 611. 53. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 531.

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54. At points in Capital, Marx writes of labor as a basic presupposition of the human being, which can be neither escaped nor transcended. It is ‘‘the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather, it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.’’ Marx, Capital, 290. 55. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 441. 56. Werner Hamacher considers the nature of this freedom in ‘‘Lingua Amissa.’’ 57. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 143. 58. For a discussion of praxis in Marx as well as a rejection of any simple opposition between an ‘‘early’’ and ‘‘late’’ Marx, see Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action. 59. On the Aristotelian distinction between poie¯sis and praxis, see Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, The Philosophy of Praxis, and Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, 72–76. 60. Offering one version of the positive assessment of Marx’s achievement, in The Philosophy of Marx, E´tienne Balibar considers ‘‘Marx’s materialism in The German Ideology [to be], effectively, a new materialism: not a mere inversion of the hierarchy—a ‘theoretical workerism,’ if I can put it thus (as has been the charge of Hannah Arendt and others), i.e., a primacy accorded to poie¯sis over praxis by virtue of its direct relationship with the matter—but the identification of the two, the revolutionary thesis that praxis constantly passes over into poie¯sis and vice versa. There is never any effective freedom which is not also a material transformation, which is not registered in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of the self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant ‘essence’ ’’ (41). 61. William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 189. Thirty years before Jevons, John Stuart Mill had taken a similar position: ‘‘Labor is either bodily or mental; or, to express the distinction more comprehensively, either muscular or nervous; and it is necessary to include in the idea not solely the exertion itself, but all feelings of a disagreeable kind, all bodily inconvenience or mental annoyance, connected with the employment of one’s thoughts, or muscles, or both, in a particular occupation.’’ John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 22. In his definition of labor, Jean-Baptiste Say emphasized the continuity of the act: ‘‘By the term labor I shall designate that continuous action, exerted to perform any one of the operations of industry, or a part only of one of those operations.’’ Say, Treatise, 85. 62. Alfred Marshall, Principles, 65. 63. Marx writes: ‘‘At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally [schon ideell vorhanden].’’ Marx, Capital, 284. 64. Hannah Arendt famously makes this argument in The Human Condition.

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65. Marx, Capital, 164. 66. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 73. 67. Ibid., 74. 68. Ibid., 100. 69. Ibid., 192. 70. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Gesamtausgabe, 2, part 3, chap. 1, 242 (my translation). 71. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 160. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 159. 74. Ibid. 75. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Works, 3:227. 76. For one of the most detailed efforts to describe the logic of exchange, see Thomas Keenan, ‘‘The Point Is to (Ex)Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically.’’ On speaking commodities, see Hamacher, ‘‘Lingua.’’ 77. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 121 (translation modified). 78. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 38–39. 79. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 154. 80. Ibid., 150. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 158. 84. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Works, 5:446. 85. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 167–68. 86. Ibid., 162. 87. Marx, Grundrisse, 267. 88. Marx, Capital, 270. 89. Ibid., 284. 90. Ibid., 137. 91. Ibid., 274. 92. ‘‘The use of labor-power,’’ writes Marx, ‘‘is labor itself. By working, the [worker] becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labor-power in action, a worker. The purchaser of labor-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work.’’ Marx, Capital, 283. 5. ideology, obviously

1. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, 69. 2. Marx, in Marx and Engels, Reader, 149. 3. See E´tienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, esp. 87–124. 4. For a good history of the term ‘‘ideology’’ and a summary of its diverse definitions, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction. 5. Slavoj Zizek demonstrates this thesis convincingly in ‘‘The Spectre of Ideology.’’

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6. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, 29. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 44. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Beitrag zur Ideologienle¨hre,’’ 465 (my translation). 9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 11. Hereafter cited in text. 10. Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ 127. Hereafter cited in text. 11. On Althusser’s theoretical scene, see Thomas Pepper, ‘‘Kneel and You Will Believe,’’ and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, 24–25, 31–33. 12. Althusser continues: ‘‘And Moses, interpellated-called by his Name, having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God, a subject through the Subject and subjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him, and makes his people obey God’s commandments.’’ Althusser, ‘‘Ideology,’’ 179. 13. Barthes, Mythologies, 124. 14. Ibid., 125. 15. Althusser, ‘‘Ideology,’’ 171–72. 16. The problem of the existence of language has been explored by Christopher Fynsk, in Language and Relation. ‘‘The linguistic turn in modern thought tends to sweep right by the most basic, but admittedly elusive fact—the simple fact that there is language’’ (2). 17. Over the last century, discussions of the problem of signification in language have been too widespread to permit of any brief summary, but some texts of particular importance include Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’’ in Writings,1:62–74; Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language; and Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,’’ in Margins, 207–72. 18. On the issue of a positivist approach to language, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology.’’ 19. Althusser, ‘‘Ideology,’’ 181. 20. Ibid. (translation modified). Ainsi soit-il is a translation of the Biblical Hebrew amen: ‘‘certainty,’’ ‘‘truth’’ (the verb aman means ‘‘to strengthen’’ or ‘‘confirm’’). In the Pentateuch, a-men is usually used adverbially, meaning ‘‘verily, surely, truly.’’ In contemporary French religious services, it is far more common to say ‘‘Amen’’ rather than ‘‘Ainsi soit-il’’ at the end of prayers. Brewster’s translation of the ISA essay renders ‘‘Ainsi soit-il’’ as ‘‘Amen’’ throughout. 21. Ibid., 182. Although Althusser is less than explicit on this point, it is useful to note that in the texts from which many of his examples of interpellation are drawn, for example, the Old Testament and the Synoptic Gospels, ‘‘Amen’’ is not merely an assent or corroboration, but a mark of participation. The one who says ‘‘So be it’’ (‘‘Amen’’) is to be regarded not simply as having agreed with what has been or will be said, but as having actually uttered the prayer in question.

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22. Roman Jacobson, Language in Literature, 429. 23. Stressing the teleological nature of language use, Jakobson writes: ‘‘In point of fact, any verbal behavior is goal-directed, but the aims are different and the conformity of the means used to the effect aimed at is a problem that evermore preoccupies inquirers into the diverse kinds of verbal communication.’’ Ibid., 64. 24. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard writes: ‘‘In the process of satisfaction, [the individual] valorizes and makes fruitful his own potentialities for pleasure; he ‘realizes’ and manages, to the best of his ability, his own ‘faculty’ of pleasure, treated literally like a productive force. Isn’t this what all of humanist ethics is based on—the ‘proper use’ of oneself?’’ (136). 25. Marx, Capital, 283. 26. Marx stresses that the ‘‘sum of the means of subsistence must include the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market.’’ Ibid., 275. 27. Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘Edgar Allan Poe,’’ 24. Baudelaire cites Poe’s Richmond lecture: ‘‘That poetry may be subsequently and consequently useful is beyond question; but that is not its end, that is something supererogatory.’’ Ibid. 28. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,’’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories, 127. Hereafter cited in text. 29. In ‘‘Poe’s ‘The Man That Was Used Up’: Another Bugaboo Campaign,’’ Joan Tyler Mead discusses the noncoincidence of essence and appearance in the story’s references to Iago, the book of Job, and Robinson Crusoe. 30. See William Whipple, ‘‘Poe’s Political Satire,’’ and Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, 193–95. 31. Climax is quoting Iago upon Othello’s entry: ‘‘I did say so. / Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora, / Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep / Which thou ow’dst yesterday.’’ William Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.330–33. 32. My interpretation of Poe’s story shares much with that of Jonathan Elmer in Reading at the Social Limit, 47–56. Elmer provocatively connects the General’s monstrosity with the monstrous construction of the nineteenth-century reading public. In particular, he describes the General as a ‘‘singular figure for the self-deluding public, as the ideological utterance, the mystified endproduct of a discursive operation which has erased all traces of its enunication.’’ Ibid., 53. ‘‘Man,’’ in these terms, is ‘‘a perfectly empty signifier that pins together an otherwise rambling and directionless signifying stream,’’ becoming ‘‘overdetermined with meaning.’’ Ibid., 52. My analysis parts from Elmer in emphasizing that ultimately neither language nor the body can be put together or dismantled like building blocks.

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33. The development of economics in the nineteenth century is often characterized as a shift from the classical discourse of Smith, Mill, and Marx, in which the human being is first and foremost a producer, to the neoclassical discourse of William Stanley Jevons or Carl Menger, in which the human being was first and foremost grasped as a consumer. Poe’s story ironizes this shift before the fact, as it were, by revealing that what the ‘‘Consuming Man’’ consumes is precisely himself. On the cultural implications of changing economic paradigms, see Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants. 34. Adorno, Prisms, 29. conclusion

1. Adorno, Prisms, 33. 2. At the opening of the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes: ‘‘It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.’’ Adorno, Aesthetic, 1.

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index

aber, 102, 108–10 absolute reversal, 139 ad hominem proof, 148 Adorno, Theodor W., 10, 12, 107, 162, 172, 174–75 on ideology, 151–52 ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ 96 ‘‘Parataxis,’’ 197n46, 199n62 aesthetic judgment, 14, 16, 17–19, 181n13 aesthetic striving, 30 Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 15 aesthetics, 15–16, 180–81n7 Alcuin, 88, 89 Althusser, Louis, 156–60, 162, 163, 164–65 amen, 208n20. See also ‘‘So be it’’ ‘‘Andenken’’ (Ho¨lderlin), 106–9 Andersen, Eric, 36 Aristotle, 130 asceticism, 39, 41, 185n57 Austin, J. L., 186n64 ‘‘Autobiography of De-Facement’’ (de Man), 84

Balibar, E´tienne, 150, 206n60 Barthes, Roland, 152–56, 160–61, 163 Baudelaire, Charles, 166 Baudrillard, Jean, 166, 205n49, 209n24 Bauer-Wabnegg, Walter, 183–84n37 Baumgarten, Alexander, 5, 15, 16, 180–81n7

beauty, 19–20, 29, 30–31 Beißner, Friedrich, 97, 102, 199n50, 199n64 Be´namou, Michel, 183n33 Benjamin, Walter, 36 Bentham, Jeremy, 115–18 Berman, Russell, 195–96n40 body art, 37 Bourdieu, Pierre, 128, 178n3 Brecht, Bertolt, 10–12 Cannan, Edwin, 124 Capital (Marx), 131, 133, 138, 144 capitalism, 132 categorical imperative, 48–49 commodity equivalence, language of, 138 communication, 20–21, 26, 29 communism, 143 comparison, hyperbolic, 82 consciousness, 134–36, 141–44, 151 context, 2–3 contracts, 122–26 counterpositing, 80–82 Craig, Gordon, 190n30 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 14–15, 21, 26, 29, 31 Critique of Political Economy, A (Marx), 133 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 5–6, 13, 16, 48, 50, 54, 77 Dada, 36 de Man, Paul, 84, 200n65

223

224

Index

Derrida, Jacques, 182n15 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 24–25 dramas, 10–11, 52

Elmer, Jonathan, 209n32 ‘‘Essay on the Concept of Republicanism’’ (Schlegel), 29 exchanges, 84, 124–26, 127 expectations, 123

Ferris, David, 198n56 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 143 Fichte, J. G., 6–7, 17, 24, 29, 77–79, 194n15 fiction, voice of, 85–86 fictitious entities, 116–17 Fish, Stanley, 2–3, 175 forgiveness, 43–44, 45 Foucault, Michel, 203–4n26 Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 14, 48, 55 freedom, 4, 5, 42, 47–48, 81, 103–4, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 200–201n66

George, Stefan, 10 German Ideology, The (Marx), 129, 132–34, 140, 141–42, 148–49, 157 God, voice of, 89–90, 91–92, 95 Goldberg, RoseLee, 35 Gotha Program (Marx), 129 Greenblatt, Stephen, 3 Grundisse (Marx), 129, 144 Grundsa¨tze, 78, 81 Guillory, John, 177n2

Hamilton, Alexander, 89 Haverkamp, Anselm, 199–200n64, 201n75 Hegel, Georg, 16, 50, 138–40, 142 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 179n15, 181n13 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 196n43 Hirschmann, Albert O., 202n3 history and literature, 2–3, 75–76 History of the Modern Fact, A (Poovey), 120

Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich, 75, 78–82, 86–87 ‘‘Mnemosyne,’’ 96–106 ‘‘Remembrance,’’ 106 ‘‘Voice of the People,’’ 93 Hume, David, 123, 126 hunger artist, 185n53 Hunger Artist, A (Kafka), 31–33, 34, 38–44 ‘‘hyperbole of hyperboles,’’ 81, 83, 96, 140 ideology, 150–51, 172 Althusser and, 157–59 of obviousness, 163 values of, 150–51 ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ (Althusser), 156–65 imagination, 5–7, 17, 178–79n15 imperatives, 49, 51, 165 interest, 136, 202n1, 202n3 interesting, concept of the, 22–26, 28–30, 32–33, 182–83n29 interests, ideology of, 13–14, 112–14, 136 interpellation, 160–61, 164 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, An (Bentham), 116–18 ISA essay, 156–65 Jacobs, Carol, 59 Jakobson, Roman, 165, 209n23 Jevons, William Stanley, 130–31 judgment, 189n24 Kafka, Franz, 31–34, 38–44 Kant, Immanuel, 4–8, 13–16, 77, 114 on beauty, 31 Critique of Judgment, 4, 14–15, 21, 26, 29, 31 Critique of Pure Reason, 5–6, 13, 16, 48, 50, 54, 77 Fichte’s theory of positing and, 77–78 Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, 14 on imagination, 178–79n15 imperatives, 49–50

Index on judgment, 189n24 ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ 85 on self-determination, 48–49 on taste, 16 Kaprow, Allan, 36–37, 184n46 Kaufmann, David, 177n2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 182–83n29 Kleist, Heinrich von, 52, 75, 165 Klopstock, Friedrich, 91–93 labor, 119, 130–31, 203–4n26 division of, 118–22, 127, 132–34, 204n27 power, 128–30, 144–46, 166, 207n92 theory of, 128 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 193n11 language, 44, 127–28, 139–40, 156, 164– 65, 172–73 of beauty, 19–20 of commodity equivalence, 137 consciousness and, 141–44 expectations and, 123 fictitious entities and, 116–17 myth and, 155–56 obviousness and, 161–63 rules of, 51–52 Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 16 Lectures on Jurisprudence (Smith), 122–23, 124, 127 literature and history, 75–76 lyric, 86–87, 96 ‘‘Man that was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign, A’’ (Poe), 166–72 Marshall, Alfred, 131 Marx, Karl, 131–50, 156 on Adam Smith, 121, 127, 205n47 Capital, 131, 133, 138, 144 concept of ideology in works of, 150 Critique of Political Economy, A, 133 on Feuerbach, 130, 143 on Hegel, 138–39 German Ideology, The, 129, 132–34, 140, 141–42, 148–49, 157 Gotha Program, 129

225

Grundisse, 129, 144 ideology in works of, 150 on labor-power, 128–30, 145–46, 166, 207n92 on language, 137–38, 140–42 materialism, 206n60 melancholy, 200–201n66 memory, 101–4, 106, 108 Menninghaus, Winfried, 194n19 Mill, John Stuart, 48, 187n1 ‘‘Mnemosyne’’ (Ho¨lderlin), 19–20, 96–107 Morris, Margot, 185n53 Mu¨ller, Adam, 190–91n32, 190n28 myth, 153–55, 160–61 Mythologies (Barthes), 152–53

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 193n11 Norris, Margot, 39

obviousness, 158, 161–62 ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’’ (Adorno), 96 On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (Schiller), 21 ‘‘On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit’’ (Ho¨lderlin), 78–84, 108 ‘‘On the Study of Greek Poetry’’ (Schlegel), 21, 25, 29

perfectibility, 25 performance, concept of, 31 performance art, 34–38, 45–46, 183n33 persuasion, 85, 125, 205n44 Phelan, Peggy, 37 Phenomenolgy of Spirit (Hegel), 139 pneuma, 84, 106–7 Poe, Edgar Allen, 166–72 poetic spirit, 80–83, 193n12, 194n15 poetry, 7–11, 26–27, 179n22 language of, 79–80 lyric, 86–87, 96 modern, 23–30 Poovey, Mary, 120–21, 136, 144

226

Index

positing, Fichte’s theory of, 77–79, 193n12 praxis, 130 presuppositions, 92, 147–49, 165 Prince Friedrich of Homburg (Kleist), 53–74 Principles of Morals (Bentham), 116 production, 4, 140–41, 149, 157 promises, 122–23, 125–26, 204–5n38 prosopopeia, 84, 85 rationality, 124–25 Rawls, John, 114–15, 187n2 reality, 116–18, 134–35 reflection, 193n12, 194n22 remembrance, 107 ‘‘Remembrance’’ (Ho¨lderlin), 106–8 representation, 85, 86 repression, 157 Reuß, Roland, 196n42, 199n59, 199n60 revolution, 76–77 Richter, Hans, 36 Roland-Jensen, Flemming, 199n60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24–25 rumor, 89, 95 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 130, 203n23, 206n61 Schelling, F. W. J., 6, 16 Schiller, Friedrich, 21, 22 Schlegel, Friedrich, 9–10, 20–31, 76, 77, 89–90, 182n16 on the fiction of voice, 85–86, 89 on interesting, 182–83n29 on modern poetry, 23–24 on romantic poetry, 81 on Shakespeare, 25–26 Schmidt, Jochen, 197n43, 199n60 Schumpeter, Joseph, 119 self-determination, 48–49, 129 self-love, 205n44 Shakespeare, William, 25–26 Shell, Marc, 177n1 should, 30, 49–51, 122 Smith, Adam, 111, 118, 122–27, 134, 137, 205n44

Lectures on Jurisprudence, 122–23, 124, 127 ‘‘So be it,’’ 164–65, 208n20 Socrates, 196n42 Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (Fichte), 24 speech acts, 40, 43–44, 78, 124, 160, 165, 186n64 striving, Ho¨lderlin’s concept of, 80–81 subjectivity, 77–78, 79 surrogation, 85, 86 syntax, 76–77, 78 System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling), 6, 16 ‘‘Tables of the Springs of Action’’ (Bentham), 116 taste, 15, 16, 19, 20, 41–42 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 114–15 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 118 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 130 ‘‘Thirst for Knowledge’’ (Klopstock), 91 Thompson, James, 177n2 Treatise on Human Nature, A (Hume), 123 voice, 85 divine, 92–94 fiction of, 85, 89–90 in lyric poetry, 86 of the people, 89–90, 93–94, 95 of the poet, 84 ‘‘Voice of the People’’ (Ho¨lderlin), 86– 88, 90, 94–96 Vox populi vox dei, 88–90 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 112, 118, 124, 126 What is Called Thinking? (Heidegger), 23 will, the, 9, 49 Wilson, Martha, 37 Woodmansee, Martha, 177–78n3 Wordsworth, William, 85