Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno 9780674054721

Citation preview

Looking Away

Looking Away Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno

rei terada

harvard univ e rsity p re ss Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2009

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Terada, Rei. Looking away : phenomenality and dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno / Rei Terada. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03268-2 (alk. paper) 1. Appearance (Philosophy) 2. Perception (Philosophy) 3. Satisfaction. I. Title. BD352.T47 2009 190—dc22 2008035604

for Eyal

Contents

1

Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Textual Note

ix xi

Pretext

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Coleridge among the Spectra 1. Purple Haze 40 2. Thoughts and Things

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51

3. Contemporary Theories of Derealization and Mistrust 68

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Appearance and Acceptance in Kant 1. From Mere to Necessary Appearance 2. No Fault 81 3. The Right to a Phenomenal World 4. Legalize It

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73 76 83

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No Right: Phenomenality and Self-Denial in Nietzsche

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1. Genealogy of Phenomenality 118 2. Stolen Phenomenality 130 3. The Disappearance of Appearance 137

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Court of Appeal, or, Adorno 1. Critique of Facticity 158 2. Illusion in Total Illusion 173

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contents

3. Circus Colors 4. Court of Appeal

183 190

Postscript

199

Bibliography Index

207 219

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute for their support of this project. I enjoyed the advantages of conversations about materials in this book with colleagues at these places and at the Claremont Colleges, Cornell, Emory, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, the University of Southern California, Utretcht University, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I’d like to thank especially Aaron Kunin, James Morrison, Marc Redfield, Cynthia Chase, Cathy Caruth, Neil Hertz, Michael Snediker, Jordan Stein, John Mowitt, Daniel Tiffany, Ortwin de Graef, and Sara Guyer for their engagement. Julia S. Carlson, David L. Clark, Michelle Cho, Anne-Lise François, Eleanor Kaufman, David Lloyd, Robert Meister, David Mikics, and Irene Tucker read and commented on various parts of the manuscript, and Ian Balfour and anonymous readers for Harvard UP on the whole. Bernard Richter and Erin Trapp helped with German texts, read much of the manuscript, and suggested many useful things. Tom Pepper contributed to the conception of the book, the early chapters, and my understanding of the kinds of experiences explored within it. Adela Pinch steered me to object relations in the late 1990s, which helped me to think many of these thoughts. I could not have done without the imaginative support of Charles Altieri, Charles Fisher, Judith Goldman, Ian Leong, Little Tokyo Service Center: A Community Development Corporation, Eliza Richards, Ann and Bill Smock, and Sea Level Records.

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acknowledgments

It’s been a lovely surprise of this period to find that academic departments can actually be inspiring and critical places, with admirable colleagues and students at every level. I hope that elected and appointed officials will care to preserve the University of California system, the best public university in the world, and especially its small interdisciplinary departments, where people are working around the clock on manifold interesting projects. A collective acknowledgment to “graduate students” fails to convey the nature of my connection to the brilliant people who happen to be pursuing Ph.D.’s at UC Irvine. Their thoughts are reflected throughout; individual contributions in addition to those mentioned above are cited in footnotes. I also learned a lot from the improbably talented members of the spring 2005 undergraduate seminar “Psychic Recovery/Working Through,” from which I’m still recovering. Thanks especially to Scott Kulek and Toshi Tomori. I don’t really know how to express my gratitude to Eyal Amiran for life together. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Studies in Romanticism (2004), published by the Trustees of Boston University, and is reprinted by permission.

Abbreviations and Textual Note

theodor w. ad orno AT GS

Aesthetic Theory Gesammelte Schriften

HF History and Freedom HTS Hegel: Three Studies MM Minima Moralia NaS Nachgelassene Schriften ND Negative Dialectics s . t. coleridge N Notebooks PW Poetical Works s ig m und freud SE

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works

i m m anuel k ant CJ

Critique of Judgment

CPR Critique of Pure Reason

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abbreviations and textual note

friedrich n ie tz sche BT The Birth of Tragedy GSc The Gay Science KSA Sämtliche Werke WP The Will to Power tex tual note Citations of Critique of Pure Reason use A and B page numberings. Numbers for Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment refer to the German pagings given in the margins of the English editions. Spelling of “judgment” and “spectre” has been regularized throughout; German orthography has not been regularized.

Looking away shall be my only negation. —Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Pretext Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a world provided it contradicted this world and furnished them with a pretext for speaking ill of this world. It has been hitherto the grand school of slander; and it has imposed itself to such an extent that today our science, which proclaims itself the advocate of life, has accepted the basic slanderous position and treated this world as apparent, this chain of causes as merely phenomenal. What is it really that hates here? Die Philosophen haben nie gezögert, eine Welt zu bejahen, vorausgesetzt, dass sie dieser Welt widerspricht, dass sie eine Handhabe abgiebt, von dieser Welt schlecht zu reden. Es war bisher die grosse Schule der Verleumdung: und sie hat so sehr imponiert, dass heute noch unsere sich als Fürsprecherin des Lebens gebende Wissenschaft die Grundposition der Verleumdung acceptiert hat und diese Welt als scheinbar, diese Ursachenkette als bloss phänomenal handhabt. Was hasst da eigentlich? —Nietzsche, Will to Power §461; KSA 13.319

Nietzsche’s fulminations against the invention of phenomenality are the high water mark of the moralization of arguments about appearance and reality. While Nietzsche’s complaint against metaphysics is clear enough— proposing that there is another world is “speaking ill of this world”—the psychology he attributes to metaphysical philosophers is less transparent. Nietzsche insinuates that uneasiness is the compliment these philosophers pay to the given world; apparently, they take the elaborate detour of metaphysics because they feel they have to be careful about their criticism. Why, we might ask, do they need “a pretext for speaking ill of this world”? What is it about the trompe l’oeil of appearance and reality that gets this job of tacit world-criticism done so well? And what does Nietzsche imag-

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ine would happen if these philosophers spoke more openly? Who, indeed, is hating whom? We hardly need Nietzsche’s indignation to remind us how thoroughly the language of appearance is taken personally, in actual exchanges and in philosophers’ fantasies of them. Stanley Cavell’s work has made the psychology of this strain a philosophical subject, focusing especially on one figure, the person usually referred to in the lonely singular as “the skeptic,” who seems to care inordinately about appearance and reality. Interpreting the mutually irritable conversation between the skeptic and her or his—almost always, his—interlocutors, Cavell explains that the skeptic is perceived as wanting something fundamentally unreasonable, something more than conditions on our planet can provide. Cavell interprets the skeptic’s language as a request for social acknowledgment in the guise of a failed epistemic statement. In his account, skeptical scruples about appearance and reality transmit fears and desires about interpersonal understanding: “acceptance in relation to objects” corresponds to “acknowledgment in relation to others.”1 I’ll return to Cavell, since I share his emphasis on the infusion of the problem of appearance and reality with value judgments and psychological needs. Like Cavell in The Claim of Reason, I am interested in how one might feel about aspects of existence that, in their exigency and impersonality, transcend feelings. Such exigencies are often called “facts.” The notion of the “given” in the Kantian sense, meaning appearances that present themselves and the laws and limits that produce them, is another such figure of exigency, and the “given world” can function as a figure of the largest fact—not directly perceivable, but knowable through Kantian critique.2 Nietzsche is outraged that anyone could imagine liking or disliking a necessity as powerful as “this world.” That he can be suggests that fact perceptions are normative, not only of actions, but of likes and dislikes, thoughts and feelings. We must not only take fact perceptions into account when navigating reality, but our feelings about them 1. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 454; Cavell refers as well here to his own “Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), 267–353, p. 324. 2. I’ll always use “given” in this sense, not the pre-Kantian one of the surfaces of things.

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must stay within acceptance. Cavell’s analysis too assumes that “acceptance” is the default response to objects. My first thesis is that such an endemic normative pressure on thoughts and feelings cannot be without consequence. Obviously, figures of exigency stand within the social. One can and should argue about what counts as a fact, a natural law, a given, and my assumption throughout is that these arguments are always ongoing. They may also concern different objects: fact perceptions, psychic facts, social facts, givens, the given world. One of the reasons the arguments never stop is that one comes under some pressure from every perceived fact. And since that pressure arises even in cases that are mistaken, my main point is not to say where I think the argument about what counts as a fact (or a given, or the given world) should end. At issue is the dynamic that unfolds when someone approaches or arrives at what counts in the case at hand as one of these things. I’m especially interested in the way this happens after Kant establishes that the world of stable appearances is the given world. The idea of “accepting” givens or not—especially on the largest scale, that of the Kantian enabling conditions of space, time, and consciousness—can seem fantastic from the outset. When we persevere in such thoughts anyway, it’s with embarrassment about extending them to the areas where they seem to matter the least. Amid that embarrassment, I want to suggest, the discourse of mere phenomenality registers surreptitiously the difficulty of opining about the given. “Appearance” here carries the Nietzschean connotation of “mere” appearance, of pejorative attenuation. We think about appearance in this way when we want to create distance between ourselves and the given world, and this distance reads as a failure to endorse the given world, just as Nietzsche charges. At the same time implying, as Nietzsche also does, the illegitimacy of any desire to refrain from endorsing the given, the discourse of mere phenomenality stops short of objection: it only registers a wish to be relieved for a moment of the coercion to accept whatever one does not dispute. If the idea of mere appearance is a consequence of the felt pressure of fact perception, this effect takes on a particular intensity in the postKantian era for the very reason that Kant normalizes appearance. After Kant, one needs particularly ephemeral perceptual experiences, perceptions that seem below or marginal to normal appearance, to figure the possibil-

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ity of fleeting relief from the pressure to endorse what Kant calls the world “as is.” I’ll refer to the cultivation of such perceptions—as we’ll see, it takes a little technique—as “phenomenophilia.” Phenomenophilia is looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view. Studies of looking away have been undertaken in various disciplines. Erving Goffman, citing Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, remarks on a “kind of inward emigration from the gathering [that] may be called ‘away,’” to which “strict situational regulations obtain.”3 Observing his data source, a group of hospitalized mental patients, Goffman notices that they “frequently employed . . . ‘toy-involvements’ as a means of going away. Walking up the steps in a line of patients coming back from lunch, one person would suddenly stoop and take delight in examining a small fleck of color in the concrete” (Behavior in Public Places, 74). Jonathan Crary has documented the history and visual technology of such gestures eloquently and understands well their imbrication in “a tangled social and psychic machinery of sublimation.”4 The romantic and post-romantic discourse of mere appearance reflects, positively and negatively, a subterranean practice of phenomenophilia in which the most transient perceptual objects come to be loved because only they seem capable of noncoercive relation. Although I agree with Cavell that one can only think about what it means to “accept” the given in psychological, not strictly philosophical, terms, his conclusion that the skeptic needs to have concerns acknowledged by others, and in return acknowledge the inescapable conditions of interpersonal relation, calls for further analysis. The origin of the friction between skeptic and realist is no less obscure in social than in epistemological terms, and the imperative to acknowledge unavoidable

3. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963), 69. 4. The “absorbed perception” of Manet, Cézanne, and Seurat, Crary explains, involved “the evasion of a vision that laid bare an injured horizon of unfulfilled yearnings. Yet in its suspension, it also produced the conditions in which the apparent necessity and self-sufficiency of the present could be dissolved” (Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture [Cambridge: MIT P, 1999], 362). My project is wholly in sympathy with Crary’s, although I emphasize phenomenophilia’s responsiveness to a newly stabilized fact perception.

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conditions of relation to others is no more self-evident than the imperative to accept objects. Leszek Kolakowski points out that while one can bear to imagine that objects are illusions of a Cartesian demon, one cannot bear to imagine that other people are.5 While this thought experiment shows hunger for communication with others, there remains a gap between the value of the communication itself and the value and content of its affirmation. The question becomes important because the need for communication per se is usually not in dispute in the first place, while what one should feel about its presence is. There are times in Cavell’s work when the requirements of acknowledgment seem lighter or heavier than at other times; and in the texts I read, what counts as “acceptance” varies as well from bare registration to emphatic affirmation. What counts as acceptance is as ambiguous as what counts as given. I will argue, however, that even registration at its barest brings an expectation of some endorsement and hence potential difficulty. Maybe this expectation—an expectation that goes by the philosophical name of the fact/value problem—even accounts for human beings’ resistance to the mere recognition of unwelcome facts. Although I realize that the fact/value problem is not going to clear up, I do believe that the rigidity of particular assumptions within it causes unnecessary duress. In this book, I try to dwell in the space before the acceptance of any perceived fact, and hope by doing so to make available a different kind of epistemological therapeutics. Its first and, if necessary, only phase is letting the duress be there. The realm of mere phenomenality to which Nietzsche objects dilates in the romantic era to compensate for the absence of such a free space. From the perspective from which such a space is desirable and possible, one can hope to understand better what was and remains at stake in the margins of phenomenality. There is probably no such thing as a quick outline of my argument, but I’ll summarize its stages now, and afterward will address further some of its main suppositions and aims. In Chapter 1, I consider S. T. Coleridge’s Notebooks as a case study of the mind that feels guilty about its discomfort with the coercion of the given and becomes a connoisseur of ephemeral phenomenality in order to manage a discomfort that remains unspeakable. 5. Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, ed. Agnieszka Kolakowska, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 25.

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Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I’ll argue, sets up structures whose unforeseen consequences Coleridge lives out. Coleridge becomes enamored of optical illusions and other visual ephemera (which he calls “spectra”) because they make no claim on his endorsement, over and against obsessive thoughts and memories, which he experiences as immutable internal facts (“spectres”). Although Coleridge considered himself a Kantian, his psychic life reads like an involuntary flight from critical philosophy, with its inexorable inner laws from which he seeks respite in the most transient and merely apparent phenomena he can find. In Chapter 2, I explain how Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason triggers the interest in offbeat perception in which Coleridge participates. By normalizing appearance (Erscheinung) and requiring its acceptance, Kant unwittingly encourages fantasies of aberrant perception that might escape his strictures and hence his recommended path to world-acceptance. To understand the resistance Kant inspires, it helps to understand that the First Critique proposes a kind of therapeutics: by establishing narrow limits for knowledge, the Critique of Pure Reason isolates minimal responsibilities of acceptance. What’s radical about the First Critique is how minimal Kant is willing to be: Kant would make accepting the world bearable by miniaturizing the endorsement due to it. Kant wants his readers to realize the given world’s limits—in the pejorative sense of liabilities as well as boundaries— in order to realize, secondarily, that the amount of respect we have already paid it in this very apprehension is all we owe. What Kant succeeds in conveying, however, is mostly that the world “as is” is necessarily appearance. So, in the new circumstances of replete appearance that Kant furnishes, to anyone who is not ready to accept Kant’s world aberrant appearance becomes suddenly indispensable. This result also bears implications for postKantian aesthetics. The Critique of Judgment excludes the most ephemeral and indefinite perceptions from aesthetic experience because they cannot sustain the thought of commonality that Kant wishes to affirm; from the phenomenophilic point of view, however, that’s exactly the appeal of these perceptions. Because no one can be imagined to share them, no one can be imagined to appropriate, benefit from, or push one to endorse them. They offer a glimpse, not of spontaneous accord but of freedom from the demand for agreement. Of course, spontaneous accord is itself a figure of freedom from the obligation to agree. But while Kant’s aesthetic is posi-

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tive, looking away is its negative other: nothing less than an alternative to aesthetics, a counteraesthetic that plays on the periphery of the aesthetic. In the third and fourth chapters, I explore Nietzsche’s, Hegel’s, and Adorno’s reactions to Kant. Chapter 3 skips forward to Nietzsche’s response to the First Critique, especially in The Birth of Tragedy and late fragments. An even guiltier phenomenophile than Coleridge, Nietzsche alternately extols the pleasures of phenomenophilia and expresses contempt for anyone, most of all himself, who needs its help. He identifies anxiously with the “nihilist” who “cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it” and consoles himself by looking away at “attenuated, transient [verflüchtigt]” phenomena, “the less real, the more valuable,”6 yet repels this same impulse as a sign of constitutional weakness. Eventually Nietzsche rejects the very concept of appearance and attempts to force acceptance of totality in the theory of the eternal return. In Nietzsche’s typically hyperbolic language, robust affirmation is required for acceptance. The phases of Nietzsche’s career, moving from commitment to appearance to radical affirmation, demonstrate the tension between affirmation and the concept of phenomenality as such, and what Nietzsche believes to be the need to choose between them. Chapter 4 reads Adorno’s reply to philosophy’s policing of worldacceptance through his 1960s lectures and writings on Hegel and his major late texts, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. On the way this section also circles back to take stock of Hegel’s response to Kant. Deploying legal figures of right and appeal that recall Kant’s “tribunal” of critical reason, Adorno dialecticizes “fact” and “illusion” to analyze their ambiguity and susceptibility to ideological use. As Adorno points out, Hegel works in a territory of explicitly social facts that sharpens questions about what counts as given. Hegel too dialecticizes appearance and actuality, but only to reinforce the authority of facts. Although he argues that mere appearance is more valuable than mere existence, he is no friend to ephemera; his belief that appearance is a stage in the development of

6. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), §12, §572, hereafter WP; Sämtliche Werke (Kritische Studienausgabe), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–1977), 13.48, 12.253, hereafter KSA.

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actuality is the opposite of the phenomenophilic appeal to mere appearance for a reprieve from endorsing the inevitable. Hegel intensifies facts’ capacity to intimidate by positioning them as outcomes of legitimate historical processes. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory argue for the value of unfulfilled possibility and the insignificant particular over and against historical process and the dominant facts it seems to produce, redialecticizing fact and illusion to undo Hegel’s bias. For Adorno, “Schein”—the word Kant reserves for illusion, often rendered by Adorno’s translators as “semblance”—is most of all fact perception itself, naturalized and emboldened to coerce. Adorno’s relation to phenomenophilia, though, is almost as conflicted as Coleridge’s and Nietzsche’s. Aesthetic Theory follows the Third Critique more than the First, canonical aesthetics more than phenomenophilia. On the one hand, artworks that struggle against the Schein of facticity by trying to bare their own illusion win Adorno’s allegiance. In Adorno’s aesthetic theory, the artwork’s explosion of fact perception frees its perceivers, for a moment, to do the same. Its self-negation provokes the thought that the given world could and should be otherwise; it demonstrates the “concrete possibility of doing things differently” from the given prescribed as a norm.7 On the other hand, to do this, Adorno believes, artworks have to risk the status and borrow the illusory authority of facts in the social world. Adorno therefore passes over phenomenophilia, which, rather than negating, declines to affirm, and discovers a free space before rather than within the aesthetic. Like Nietzsche, Adorno is phenomenophilic in a guilty mode, and is reluctant to undermine the artwork by indulging in perceptions that cannot be imagined to be shared. Nonetheless, Adorno is the great philosopher of dissatisfaction with the given. With Adorno, I’ll argue that one may feel justified in having desires even when there is no possibility of fulfilling them, and in the dissatisfaction that is their shadow; and that the absence of a grammar for such feelings reflects a prevailing, and deeply internalized, unfreedom. Unlike Adorno, I’ll also suggest that these sentiments whose value he recognized are best expressed on the edges of the artwork and outside it. 7. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 68, hereafter HF.

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Finally, by reading features of the texts in this book that have often been understood as queer—for instance, the recurrent fear that alienation is caused by bodily difference, and the justifiable intuition that alienation is grounded in some difference—I would like, throughout, to show that the phenomenality/dissatisfaction connection reflects a momentous collision between enlightenment epistemology and queer thought. Reread through this idea, Kant may be seen to observe the collision and arrange terms for its assimilation by philosophy. Attention to the queer strands of the discourse of mere appearance helps to explain the conflict between accepters and dissenters from the given. Historically, it’s queer consciousness that has sensed most keenly the moments when fact is ambiguously social or natural, and has had motive and energy to examine and reexamine even those pervasive conditions that seem most natural. In the persistence of the queer mind and body, dissatisfaction “against nature” discerns its own durability and legitimacy. This is a point I won’t make in any one place, but neither will it ever be far away.

The origin of Western culture’s association of phenomenality with a discourse of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, in which to call something apparent is usually to imply dissatisfaction with it, is often traced to Greek and Christian metaphysics. In the passage I’ve used as an epigraph, Nietzsche pushes further, asking why metaphysicians ever thought of a merely apparent world in the first place. I agree with Nietzsche that the question demands a fuller answer. The phenomenality/dissatisfaction coupling is too odd to be taken for granted, even as its entrenchment channels notions of experience toward teleology and affirmation. As a result, too much interest in phenomenality for itself, whether celebratory or critical, becomes hard to understand. No one less than Sextus Empiricus announces, “Nobody, I think, disputes about whether the external object appears this way or that, but rather about whether it is such as it appears.”8 Sextus’s point is that 8. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. with introduction and commentary by Benson Mates (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), Book 1, §22. Mates notes that the secondary literature on Sextus often suggests that since a skeptic of Sextus’s type “is not sure of even the most elementary facts about the external world, he will be paralyzed or hesitant in many circumstances in which confident behavior is

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no matter what position one takes on object skepticism, it shouldn’t matter whether objects seem pale or vivid. Nonetheless, it’s striking that even Sextus, philosophy’s major advocate of the consequences of particular sensations, wants to claim that “nobody” is interested in the phenomenology of phenomenality. Berkeley similarly dissociates himself from such an interest, partly to ward off the suspicion that there is something qualitatively different about experience for someone who believes that all experience is phenomenal. Berkeley finds the implication of deviance hard to shake, and believes that it is projected onto him by an audience that fears that its quality of life is imperiled by his system. “Be not angry,” he writes to an imaginary reader in his Commonplace Book. “You lose nothing, whether real or chimerical. Whatever you can in any wise conceive or imagine, be it never so wild, so extravagant, and absurd, much good may it do you. You may enjoy it for me. I’ll never deprive you of it” (quoted in The Skeptic Way, 73). Berkeley fantasizes an interlocutor like Nietzsche who takes phenomenalism personally, as an offense against the given world—or somebody’s given world.9 Who is imagined to threaten here? If turning to phenomenality gives offense, that is because fact is so deeply conflated with value. Much as Cavell argues that acknowledging others and accepting objects are versions of the same problem, here two problems are really one: debates about dissatisfaction and satisfaction, on the one hand—how to feel about givens that are either natural or so pervasive as to be possibly natural, as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents— and debates about appearance and reality, on the other. The latter conversation is a transposed, politer rendition of the former. Now, the close relation between the positive terms in these two series—satisfaction and reality—is well recognized in discussions of the fact/value problem, beginning with Hume’s classic diagnosis of fact/value conflation:

called for; and that even if he somehow overcomes this handicap, he will, at the very least, talk in odd ways and thus suffer the consequences of being considered eccentric or worse.” For his part, Sextus tries to make it clear that “the Skeptic will be hard to distinguish from the common man” (Mates, Skeptic Way, 70). This slide in the discussion of skepticism from the merits of differing epistemologies to style and conformity is common, as Mates points out. 9. “Phenomenalism” is Berkeley’s term for the belief that physical objects can be redescribed as sensations.

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In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.10 John R. Searle summarizes the “modern version” of Hume’s observation this way: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.11 Although the naturalistic fallacy may have been standardized in the era of late positivism during which Searle was trained, it afterward lapsed into unpopularity again. Hume’s skepticism regarding fact and value remains 10. A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–1740], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1888), 469. 11. “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” in The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy, ed. W. D. Hudson (London: Macmillan, 1969), 120–134, p. 120.

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remarkable; many twentieth-century thinkers decline the “precaution” he prescribes. J. L. Austin famously refers to the fact/value distinction as a “fetish.”12 Today critics are properly likely, like Austin, to doubt that facts can present themselves at all without preexisting values that help them to their factive status. Fact/value conflation is defended not only by value relativists and analysts of ideology, but also by moral realists who still hope to use facts to stabilize values. Thus Searle continues, “one of the things wrong” with “the traditional empirical view. . . . is that it fails to give us any coherent account of such notions as commitment, responsibility, and obligation”—a good description of what is productively radical about Hume (“How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” 130). About two thirds of The Is-Ought Question, the 1969 collection of essays in which Searle writes, including his own essay, is devoted to reducing “ought” to “is” or deriving “ought” from “is” for disparate motives. Cumulatively, the essays in the collection give a strong impression of the force of the fact/value conflation, if not of the arguments in its favor. My point is not that the fact/value conflation can or should be purged—through a reading of Kant’s First Critique in Chapter 2, I’ll agree with Kant that at a single crucial point, fact and value do come together—but to give a sense of the enormous pull of the fact/value conflation and therefore of its potential psychological violence.13 Psychoanalysis provides a naturalistic ground for valuing fact, and adds that the fact/value conflation runs in both directions: from value wishfully to would-be fact as well as from fact to value. In Freud’s and Ferenczi’s pioneering essays on the formation of the sense of reality, the infant ignores all external and internal unwanted facts. In the infant’s world, protoversions of both the ego and external reality are felt to be omnipotent. Before fact and value can be said to exist in mature form, “whatever was 12. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), 150. See also Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002). 13. When George Kateb notes that “the world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just because it is given” (“Technology and Philosophy,” Social Research 64 [1997]: 1225–1246, p. 1241), he writes from within the fact/value conflation, against the dislike. Kateb believes that dislike can be explained by a primary preference for action and frustration with action’s limits. Possibilities left out by assuming a primary preference for action are explored in Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008).

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thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner.”14 To survive, the infant has to trade magical principles for empirical ones and learn to distinguish fact and value enough to recognize “what [is] real, even if it happen[s] to be disagreeable” (Freud, “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” 219). Still, psychoanalysis does not maintain that fact and value should remain entirely independent. While the infant proceeds from value to fact, the adult may proceed from fact to value, striving to see whatever is or has happened as deserving respect to some degree. The question is how much value facts are owed. Ferenczi writes that facts are “reckoned with,” a figure that posits an ability to calculate the respect different facts are owed. Radically, for psychoanalysis even psychic fact has a hold by its very existence on value, so that part of the challenge of working through is to recognize adequately both psychic and external facts, even when they conflict. Freud’s principle of minimal value reaches even to one’s illness, for example, which “must no longer . . . seem contemptible,” but rather be understood as a “worthy” enemy “out of which things of value . . . have to be derived.”15 By itself this principle sets psychoanalysis apart from traditional a priori moral systems. Complementary to Hume’s empiricism, which refuses to value any type of fact a priori, psychoanalysis declines to exclude a minimum positive value from any.

14. Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” [1911], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), XII: 218–226, p. 219, hereafter SE. See also Sandor Ferenczi, “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality,” in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis [1916], trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Brunner/ Mazel, 1952), 213–239; and “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas—Advances in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” [1926], in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie et al., ed. John Rickman (London: Hogarth, 1950), 366–379. Hans Loewald adds that “not only the ego, at such a stage, has magical powers or is a magical power, but also reality is a magical power.” See “Ego and Reality,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 3–20, p. 19. 15. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” [1914], in SE XII: 147–156, p. 152. The pragmatic situation of the infant shows that any knowledge of fact is potentially useful and hence valuable, and that fact’s usefulness outlasts that of wishing. This utilitarian explanation implies that the reality principle is defenseless when there seems to be no point to grasping a difficult fact, or not enough to overcome the advantage of ignoring it.

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Again, there are many ways of imagining what it means to “value” facts—from the bare identification of a piece of reality, at one pole, to “accepting” it (the most undertheorized possibility), to endorsing it, to cheering it on. Not only is fact/value conflation ingrained in psychology; the various senses of “value” are also, as a consequence of the fact/value conflation, secondarily conflated. The more you conflate fact and value, the more you’re going to count identifying the bare existence of something as endorsing it. And as already mentioned, it’s also uncertain what counts as a fact. There’s all the difference in the world between natural, inevitable facts or conditions and contingent, temporary ones, yet it’s often obscure which are which, and that ambiguity is available to be exploited. Gardenvariety facts may be treated as though by their facticity as such they participated in a more significant and lawful necessity. In the realm of the social, there are probably very few true inevitabilities, yet many conditions are constant or recurrent enough to make one ask whether they might possibly be inevitable, even though questions about the bounds of the social can never be laid to rest from within the social. Freud’s question about whether the baseline discontent caused by “states and societies” is finally “a piece of unconquerable nature” is the paradigm of all such open questions.16 Now, the association between phenomenality and dissatisfaction—the subject of this book—is the underside of the fact/value problem, formed by the negative members of the series appearance/reality and dissatisfaction/satisfaction. Descartes describes the “various motions . . . traced out in the air by the tip of the quill” while he is writing, which sketch a second script behind him “even though I do not conceive of anything real passing from one end to the other.”17 Like that second, aerial script, the problem of phenomenality and dissatisfaction follows that of fact and value in an unattended way. There would seem to be something illegitimate about the position of “appearance” within this formulation. Even before Kant, an appearance is

16. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], in SE XXI: 64–145, p. 88. 17. Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 1: Rule 12.

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not the opposite of a fact. Rather, in the vernacular notion of appearance, vision across distance is a metaphor for seeming: an appearance is something like a hypothesis that is either borne out or discovered to be misleading on closer inspection. (Because of the metaphor that links seeing with understanding, and for other reasons that will emerge later, visuality is the privileged form of phenomenality involved in the discourse of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.) By the logic of this figure, perceiving an object as an instance of appearance—in the mode of appearance—comes to be experienced as postponing the requirement to endorse it as reality. This faux-logical inference insinuates itself into various styles of thought. Analytic philosophy’s useful distinction between object perception and fact perception, for example, deploys it, and helps to show why the demand for affirmation raised by the fact/value conflation could make one want to linger in a self-conscious mode of appearance. According to this distinction, perceiving an object (it passes across my field of vision) isn’t the same as perceiving the fact of the object (I recognize that it’s there, what it is); and it is perceiving the fact of the object that’s generally taken to produce, seamlessly, knowledge of and belief in the existence of the object. Only fact perception induces belief.18 The question is what is entailed by “belief”—minimal realization? Consent? Affirmation? But the difference between reluctant acceptance and robust affirmation isn’t as great as one might think, since fact/value conflation tends to make acceptance count as affirmation, and so to demand affirmation. That whatever is entailed, however, is not required by object perception suggests that if one wants to avoid the value entailments of fact, it might seem possible to do so by lingering in object perception. The luxuriousness of lingering comes from the lifted obligation to declare oneself. So, Walter Benjamin prefers one hashish experiment to another by noting that while the first one “loosened objects, and lured them from their accustomed world,” the second “inserted them quite quickly into a new one—far inferior to this intermediate realm.”19 For as long as object perception refrains from fact percep18. For an open consideration of the epistemic issues, see Fred Dretske, “Seeing, Believing, and Knowing,” in Visual Cognition and Action: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 2, ed. Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen Michael Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach (Cambridge: MIT P, 1990), 129–148. 19. On Hashish, trans. and ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006), 27.

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tion, the teleology of judgment is eluded, and the world feels lighter. We’re a hair’s breadth here from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgments, which also enjoy the lightness of nonconceptual perception. I’ll explain in a moment why this hair’s breadth nonetheless makes the difference between Kant’s aesthetic and its other. For now, I only want to point out that the suspensiveness and potential evasiveness of appearance with regard to fact—the manner in which object perception holds itself apart from fact perception without negating it, and so lends itself to personification as gentle and noncommittal—gives appearance its fanciful appeal. The association of appearance with mereness, lightness, radiance, and hypothesis is our only way of registering the absence of a weight we carry without knowing it, the perceived pressure of the given world and its natural laws on our potential endorsement.20 This pressure is itself “Phantom or Fact,” as Coleridge would put it. To feel the pressure is to personify facts, projecting on them a desire for approval that only other people could really demand. Keats appreciates the flower for declining to call, “admire me I am a violet!”21—and while Keats was no stranger to the enigmatic force of other people’s mere existence, it’s possible to measure the distance between his state of mind and Coleridge’s 20. As some forms of appearance have the effect of deferring the imperative to endorsement, appearance may also be experienced as qualifying the endorsement required by presenting or seeming to present degrees of facticity. Some facts are better established than others and could merit different degrees of acceptance; the experience of mere appearance before or after fact perception awakens our sense of such a possibility. As though we thought too many givens were all too well established, the notion of degrees of facticity can also become attached figuratively (and weirdly) to different types of objects. Elaine Scarry, for example, argues that flowers charm because they are already filmy and imagelike (Dreaming by the Book: Imagining under Authorial Instruction [New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001]). Sextus rightly dismisses the epistemological significance of variously organized objects: laciness or diaphaneity cannot lend an object a lesser degree of actuality, or qualify our fact perception of it. The attractiveness of rarefaction, though, responds to the desire for more degrees of actuality, fewer exigencies, more options. The transient objects typically celebrated by lyric poetry may be experienced as less demanding with more legitimacy, since they can obligate us only for the few moments they last. On the various associations of substance understood as rarefied or “massy,” see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000). 21. Letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 61.

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by the fact that Coleridge does think the violet requires an admiration he cannot deliver: he sees, not feels, how admirable it is, and feels guilty accordingly.22 Even the idea that other people take an interest in one’s ability to endorse facts must be in part a holdover from the fantasy of omnipotence. But the feeling of coercion isn’t just paranoid, either; social pressure is sometimes merely imagined or anticipated and sometimes actually polices fact/value conflation. The reception of skepticism often validates the fears of the skeptic, as Cavell demonstrates. Phantom or fact, one can feel it: an imperative to value facts that is itself a good example of something ambiguously natural. There is no more logic in endorsing exigencies than in withholding endorsement from them, however. The main rationale for accepting givens is the hope that it may make the perceiver or the community feel or do better, while refraining from accepting them may make them feel or do worse. But this defense basically reiterates the fact/value conflation, asserting that valuing facts is in itself productive. The asymmetrical resistance to negative, but not positive, feelings about givens is tendentiously normative. In this way we come around again to the implication that people who are a little too interested in phenomenality are dodging their affirmative obligations, and that beneath their evasion is a dissatisfaction that is incoherent and ought not to be possible. In the dynamic that is the subject of this book, guilt over what’s repeatedly called a lack of “right” to dissatisfaction with the given motivates a shift from fact perception to the merely phenomenal as an evasive manuever. The more dissatisfied the skeptic or nihilist is, and the guiltier he—almost always, he—feels about his dissatisfaction (because he supposes, by the logic of the fact/value conflation, the unnaturalness of his feeling), the more phenomenophilia seems to offer

22. Coleridge knew the answer to W. H. Auden’s rhetorical question: “How would you feel if the stars were to burn / With a passion for you you could not return?” Auden’s lines defend unrequited love and fear others’ feelings: “on earth indifference is the least / We have to dread.” See Auden, “The More Loving One,” in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (New York: Vintage, 1975), 282. Rilke’s Orphism is more typically lyric: “Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl [Yes, the springtime needed you]” (Duino Elegies, in Selected Poetry, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell [New York: Vintage, 1984], 151). Perceiving the fact/value conflation as a psychic pressure furnishes, in effect, another way to understand the literature of lyric animation.

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short-term relief from socially unacceptable sentiments. For tarrying with phenomenality implies but never spells out mental reservation. Much as the skeptic and the nihilist have become familiar figures, then, one can be aware of the solitary, apologetic figure of the phenomenophile, who is afraid of what he might have to say when called upon to endorse the world and tries to avoid that moment by lingering in object perception, looking away at something too slight to present a demand—some wavering reflection or trick of light. Judging by his interlocutors’ impatience and his own unease, the phenomenophile isn’t really fooling anybody. Cultivating mere phenomenality violates the fact/value conflation, whose logic requires that phenomena which are “not nothing”—a phrase the phenomenophile likes—be merely not yet discarded, rather than secretly loved. His stolen reservations are themselves noticed and criticized. Although premodern theories of appearance provide some indispensable reference points,23 I’ll focus here on the modern frame of the problem established by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. The First Critique constitutes a new era in phenomenality and dissatisfaction. It simultaneously creates a newly normative sense of appearance (Erscheinung) and proceeds as though the questions of how to know and how to come to terms with the world were deeply related. In the First Critique Kant seems to think he is demonstrating not only the limits of knowledge, but how one can accept what one does know, including those limitations themselves, by providing a methodology—Kantian critique—that both distinguishes the necessary from the contingent and shows why one must accept only the necessary. As I’ll explain, I believe that Kant largely fulfills these goals, and in that respect has offered more than his readers have cared to take. For thinkers in the wake of Kant, the First Critique is often experienced as raising the stakes of perception and rephrasing, rather than dissolving, the problem of accepting the world. Kant himself backs off from the implicit psychology of the First Critique, starting with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in that he supplements its de facto naturalism—what he might call its “anthropological” psychology—with moral systematization in the im-

23. The most relevant of these earlier theories are Platonic metaphysics’ use of “appearance” to render the given world provisional and the Lucretian theory of mere appearance as a kind of vacated shell.

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perative mode. In other words, Kant is himself one of the readers who is disturbed by the First Critique. All this happens, I think, mostly because the Critique of Pure Reason is too right: it shakes dearly held wishes for a nature that is inherently meaningful as it dissolves the fantasmatic responsibilities for endorsement that would go along with the existence of such a nature. Modernity still lives its phenomenality and its dissatisfaction in a peculiar style that comes into being as a kind of defense against the First Critique. Kant’s epistemological lexicon will be important, then, yet doesn’t completely encompass the various senses of phenomenality that arise in the texts I want to consider, nor the diverse vocabularies of Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Adorno. A combination of Kantian and other terms is needed. Most crucial from the First Critique, to begin with, is Kant’s distinction between “appearance” (Erscheinung) and “mere appearance” or illusion (Schein). For Kant, the whole of the plenum is appearance (Erscheinung) by definition; what is not appearance is “merely intelligible.”24 As Erscheinung, appearance is replete, lawful, and connotes no attenuation of the intensity or reality of what appears. In order to make this point, Kant stresses that Erscheinung differs from Schein (illusion or semblance, often translated as “mere appearance”). Unlike Erscheinung, Schein designates a sensory or cognitive aberrance, a wayward experience that really is an epistemological dead end. By this criterion, Schein is quite rare. I take it to be a consequence of Kant’s system that, apart from the exceptional interruption of Schein, in normal perception appearance is broken only by appearance, that is, by the renewal or reflexive awareness of appearance. Turning for a moment from Kant back to the useful distinction between object perception and fact perception, the reflexive appearance of appearance can be described as follows: much as one has object perception (something crosses my gaze) and fact perception (a dragonfly is passing in front of me), one can also focus on appearance as appearance (I realize that I’m seeing what I’m seeing, this blurry shape or multicolored dragonfly). Such reflexive

24. Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965); Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymond Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956), A259/B315, hereafter CPR.

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awareness of appearance, an appearance of appearance, can occur in object perception or in fact perception, whether one is perceiving Erscheinung or Schein at the time. Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, among others, like to describe what it feels like. Many epistemologists, including Kant, hold that some kind of apperception is necessary for any experience at all. In some models, this necessary apperception may be unconscious; if so, then conscious reflexivity of the sort above would not be the primary instance of reflexivity, but would only be experienced as if it were.25 If, to the contrary, basic apperception is normally minimally conscious, the reflexive “appearance of appearance” is a matter of intensity: I feel primarily “I am seeing this” rather than “(I am seeing) this.” “I am seeing this” is a perfectly rational thought and no illusion. Yet the funny thing is, appearance with an index has the subversive effect of seeming to suspend the fact/value conflation and its demand. And this side effect of suspension is illusory, a trick of the mind. The suspensive illusion comes about because the relationship between Schein and the reflexive appearance of appearance is close enough to be confusing: the latter has come to stand for the former in an almost Pavlovian way. Because of its exceptionality, Schein is more likely to trigger reflexivity. If you’re seeing a shower of silver dots, you can hardly forget that you’re having a perceptual experience. And because Schein induces reflexivity in this way, reflexivity can make us view Erscheinung as Schein—as it does every time one looks at something within a literal frame. In a passage of The Birth of Tragedy that I’ll read later, Nietzsche observes the suspensive side effect of the awareness in and of itself of appearance. He remarks of a lucid dream that by virtue of its lucidity we “have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance [die durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres Scheins],” and goes on to assert on the model of the lucid dream that “philosophical men . . . even have a presentiment that the reality in which we live and have our being is also mere 25. Daniel Dennett points out that “second-order thought does not itself have to be conscious in order for its first-order object to be conscious” (Consciousness Explained [Boston: Little, Brown, 1991], 307). Richard Moran argues that it is only when the second-order thought is unconscious that we strongly believe in the object (Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001]).

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appearance [Schein].”26 One could call such reflexivity attentiveness to appearance or to the “process of appearing [Erscheinen].”27 Reflexivity can seem to tarry in object perception by foregrounding the for-itselfness of the perception, its sheerness rather than its mereness.28 There’s a kind of analogy, then, between the permanent irrelevance of Schein to fact perception and the temporary, illusory suspensive effect of reflexive perception with its conscious second-order thought. The thing to remember about Schein and the appearance of appearance, given their confusability, is the following: (1) only Schein is “mere appearance” in the sense of being misleading illusion and an epistemological dead end; (2) Schein almost necessarily includes reflexivity, whereas reflexivity’s Schein-effect is itself an instance of Schein, even as its content may be Erscheinung; (3) both Schein and the “appearance of appearance” can have either heightening or attenuating emotive effects; and (4) both are suspensive in relation to fact perception, Schein epistemically and the appearance of appearance rhetorically. It is this reflexive, suspensive quality—included in Schein but also, without loss of reality, in the appearance of Erscheinung—understood as a temporary phenomenological event and rhetorical effect, in which I’m principally interested. Reflexive awareness of either Schein or Erscheinung, of object perception or of very fleeting phenomena, has liberating or faux-liberating effects, and the cultivation of any of these states is what I mean by “phenomenophilia.” If I said that Pessoa was

26. The Birth of Tragedy [1872, 1886], trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 34, KSA 1.26. 27. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing [2000], trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 4. Seel surveys appearing from Baumgartner to contemporary art in order to argue that art constitutes a special kind of appearing. Gestalt psychology and Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing provide related accounts of perceptual patterns. See Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1935); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968). For illuminating commentary, see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990). 28. For a brilliant account of the “mere [bloss]” in Kant, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 13–41. Gasché remarks that unlike the English “mere,” “bloss” does not connote the sheer or utter.

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phenemenophilic, I would mean that he is attracted to the way things appear to him, to his own awareness that they appear to him, and to the power of looking away to treat Erscheinung as Schein. Complementarily, when Erscheinung is not experienced as though it were Schein, or when Schein is perceived as though it were normal appearance, one is back in the realm of fact perception: the effect of freedom from the imperative to accept the given is unavailable. So, Kaja Silverman configures phenomenality and dissatisfaction quite differently when she (properly) emphasizes the identity between appearance and the given world. Silverman takes the part of the “world spectators” who, as she retells the story, decline ideality and remain in Plato’s cave out of commitment to the given world and the appearances that compose it.29 For her, the world spectator is a “desiring subject” who “derives pleasure from his own nonsatisfaction” (World Spectators, 11). Since she construes appearance as Erscheinung, it makes sense for Silverman to claim that seeing fundamentally “says ‘yes’ to the world” (20). By the same logic, though, if you do not want to say “yes” to the world, after Kant you need an alternative to appearance as Erscheinung. Silverman’s world spectator also belongs to a community of world spectators for whom one of the main purposes of language is to enable the comparison of perceptions. So, Silverman’s narrative moves from perception to language. Again, using the very same logic, the phenomenophile recedes from language to mere phenomenality: because no one can share (or appropriate) one’s merely suspensive, illusory or ephemeral perception, phenomenophilia becomes a way to get away, or imagine getting away, from other people. Defenders of the given tend to be impatient with less than explicit affirmation. Jean-Luc Marion, for example, objects to Pollock’s and Monet’s concentration on the “intentional” half of the phenomenological subject/ object dyad because to do so is to create a world “to itself,” “only that,” where intention dies on the surface of the painting. “Without the work of the invisible [that is, transcendental laws],” he writes, “what we perceive as visible actually would offer only a rhapsodic spectacle and confusion 29. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

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of colored spots.”30 Actually, Pollock’s and Monet’s paintings conform to transcendental laws as much as anyone’s; the laws would not be transcendental if they didn’t. They only omit what counts as rhetorical affirmation of those laws, that is, Albertian perspective. Marion’s theory of appearance is characterized throughout by hostility toward the diversity of perceptual experience. But it is only somewhat more aggressive than usual in its insistence on the endorsement of the inevitable. Phenomenophilia’s asocial moment makes it the other of Kantian aesthetics. Kant’s aesthetics too appreciates relief from the felt requirement to value objects that appear through concepts. But while Kant recognizes a panoply of perceptual objects in the Critique of Judgment, for him only some of these options are qualified to be objects of aesthetic reflection. Kant specifically excludes unstable, irregular, and very transient phenomena from the possible objects of aesthetic reflective judgments, classifying them as “charms [Reizen]” (literally, attractions or sensory stimuli). They are ineligible because in Kant’s aesthetic, the perceiver must feel as though everyone should agree that the object of contemplation is beautiful, even though one may also know that in fact not everyone will; and we can’t believe ourselves entitled to this feeling about a perceptual object so ephemeral that we can’t even imagine that someone else would see it as we do, or even see it at all. The beauty of phenomenophilia is the mirror image of Kant’s proto-communitarian beauty. It suits the occasions on which we don’t want to imagine that someone else could be with us; in which we want to be sure that someone else doesn’t have to share our perception. Theories of aesthetic pleasure after the Third Critique tend to ameliorate the asociality of such a desire. But, as I’ll elaborate in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, the possibility of a free aesthetic judgment depends on this desire’s being allowed to exist—even to exist indefinitely.

The dissatisfaction one finds around phenomenophilia is attenuated, diffuse, and reflexive. One can suffer, or just be uncomfortable, without 30. The Crossing of the Visible [1996], trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 21, 12.

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minding it (one can even enjoy it); dissatisfaction is minding. Dissatisfaction is discomfort—probably suffering as well, felt with apologetic understatement as discomfort—accompanied by the comment that it ought not to be. I can find no reason to distinguish it from the “Unbehagen” of Civilization and Its Discontents, translated as “discontent” or “malaise.” Freud’s observation of the social character of Unbehagen and the extra layer of frustration that comes with its apparent gratuitousness describes the dissatisfaction associated with phenomenality. It is stronger in social than in solitary settings; bearable and nontragic, yet relentless. It is reputedly common, so common that it might be natural and inevitable, yet its commonness only becomes an excuse for suppressing conversation about it (why complain about the natural and inevitable?). Freud’s Unbehagen, the “unbefriedigend” (dissatisfaction) of Nietzsche’s nihilist, and Baudelaire’s “insatisfaction” decline to name their cause; and that is not surprising, because phenomenophilic dissatisfaction is diplomatic through and through. Unlike straightforward derogations of the given world that believers in another reality feel free to express, it insinuates a reservation it never articulates. Yet in spite or because of the fact that the phenomenophile’s mild implication of dissatisfaction promotes no violent thoughts or feelings, it’s often attached to an internal intolerance of its presence so cruel that it brings real suffering after all.31 The phenomenophile is convinced that he has “no right”—this legal and political figure runs throughout the texts at hand—to his dissatisfaction. In his dilemma, the phenomenophile effectively raises the questions of queer desire. Whether the pervasive conditions from which one demurs are natural and inevitable, or possibly not; what it means to “accept” the given world, and by whom and why one’s acceptance seems to be solicited; whether one would want to endorse it even if one did conclude that its conditions were necessary and inevitable; what would happen to someone who decided these were inevitable and yet not acceptable—these concerns of Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno resonate with the problems of queer sensibility. In particular, they are the concerns of closeted desire. Although phenomenophiles can thematize dissatisfaction’s association 31. Sharp guilt and nonviolence are causally connected, since guilt, like depression, suppresses violent thoughts prophylactically.

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with phenomenality, in itself their recourse to phenomenality politely postpones judgments. Indeed, phenomenophilia would seem to be the province mostly of solitary, conflictedly heterosexual and vaguely homosexual unmarried and mismarried men of dubious or unusually configured health. In this book, Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche are surrounded by penumbral characters such as Wordsworth, Kleist, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Pessoa, and Wittgenstein, and associated discourses of addiction and deviance. Unfolding within the closet in Eve Sedgwick’s sense—the closet as a figure for the islanded mind with a good reason to select its own society32—the phenomenality/dissatisfaction connection reveals the impact of queer imagination on post-critical thought. It is not simply that Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno need to be included in the annals of queer literature (they already have been).33 Rather, the phenomenality/dissatisfaction axis shows that the annals of queer literature pose what is taken to be, as the subtitle of The Is-Ought Question puts it, “the Central Problem of Moral Philosophy.” In and through its tact, looking away sheds light on interior and exterior depths of obligation to the given; the dilemma of givens experienced as mutually exclusive (the dual intransigences of what is and what ought to be, each of which may be brought to support either the socially normative or the socially marginal); and the vast cultural generativity of phenomenophilia as a psychological strategy. Cavell notes that “if we speak of perversions of human existence, this will encompass disturbances of satisfaction no more sexual 32. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990). 33. On Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche, see for example Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989); David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 (2001): 201–289; and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, respectively. Adorno’s relation to queer sexuality has been interpreted variously. Thomas Pepper argues that Adorno makes available a critique of the “property relation of human beings” without noticing that this relation “is even more primordial than the gender relations it conditions”; he suggests that homophobia in texts like the Minima Moralia entry “Tough Baby” serves to distance the implications Adorno’s thought might have for gender (Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 48, 42). For more on homophobia in Adorno, see Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996). Adorno’s determined advocacy of homosexuals’ civil rights, however, expresses his vision of a society free of coercion.

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than epistemological, and no more these than political” (The Claim of Reason, 471). In turn, to read looking away as something other than trivially perverse is to trouble the waters of sexual, epistemological, and political acceptance of the given as such.

The sections of this book are arranged not quite chronologically. I have not written a history of aesthetics, perceptual techniques, or post-critical literature.34 The plot designates not a progressive historical development, but the errant route of the recurring association between phenomenality and dissatisfaction, from which glimpses of the history of philosophy can be seen, like the ocean from the road. The texts I consider contribute to larger cultural movements, each of which potentially opens a new arena. Coleridge’s fondness for optical transience informs his invention of a type of modern lyric—a first-person poem that rotates around a single transitory “image” (the prototype is “Frost at Midnight,” and it models a privileged brand of lyric poem into the 1970s). Coleridge’s and Nietzsche’s struggles with phenomenal consolation and self-denial flow from and into the nineteenth-century culture of decadence through Pater, Wilde, and others. Both Coleridge and Nietzsche (trailing aspects of Kant’s thought as well, and resembling the postKantian De Quincey’s) associate the optical manipulations of looking away with appearance-altering drugs. The dynamic of phenomenality and dissatisfaction contributes in various ways to Goethe’s and Schopenhauer’s color theories; the development of post-Kantian irony in Kleist and Kierkegaard; the phenomenality-enthralled nineteenth-century painting criticized by Duchamp and others as “retinalist”;35 and avant-garde tech34. For a reconsideration of phenomenology that hopes to do justice to perception for itself, see Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception [1999], trans. Paul R. Milan (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006); for a phenomenological approach to phenomenality that treats appearance in historical and rhetorical terms, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance [1981], trans. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia UP, 1994). 35. On post-Kantian developments in visual taste, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT P, 1990). On Goethe’s optical theories, see Claudia Brodsky, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). Thanks to Mia McIver for drawing my attention to the latter.

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niques of defamiliarization. Photography, film, and video experiment with fantasies of solitary phenomenophilia and communal aesthetics. Although I didn’t feel that I could or should pursue each of these tempting avenues, I do what I can along the way to indicate where the phenomenality/ dissatisfaction association sparks cultural production, and treat a few subplots in more detail than the others. As it stands, the texts in this book are Germanic—even Coleridge is an honorary German. As I didn’t limit the scope of the project in advance to a national tradition, and am in no way a Germanist, I take this result to confirm the extraordinary effect of the First Critique upon the problem and project of accepting the world. The texts of phenomenality and dissatisfaction are usually written by men, as I noted earlier. I’m not sure I can make this impressionistic observation into something more definitive, or that I know enough about noncanonical nineteenth-century literature to have a chance of doing so. Women participate enthusiastically in two discourses next door to that of mere phenomenality—the Gothic novel, and the romantic activity of affirming mineral and vegetable nature in a way that notes a problem with human nature. Both of these modes provide normative terms that could be more attractive to women writers, who may have had both more motive and more obligation to practice affirmatively social forms of writing. The Gothic mode of prolonging object perception, deferring for as long as possible a determination of fact, is phenomenophilic in desire, while the ostensible frame of the Gothic emphasizes purposive investigation and finally closes on facts and their attendant values as solidly as possible. Similarly, if praising nature is romanticism’s dominant way of criticizing the all too human—congenial to mainstream romantics like Wordsworth and Goethe—that’s because the criticism is at least delivered in the act of endorsing something more enduring and deep—or so it’s hoped—than society. The negative power this mode can muster can be seen in a remark attributed to Anaxagoras by Aristotle and quoted by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind: “When asked why one should choose rather to be born than not—a question, incidentally, that seems to have preoccupied the Greek people and not merely philosophers and poets— [Anaxagoras] replied: ‘For the sake of viewing the heavens and the things there, stars and moon and sun,’ as though nothing else were worth his while.”36 But like Nietzsche’s metaphysicians, praise of nature “affirm[s] a

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world” as it speaks ill of another, and so both protects and compromises its negative force. In the twentieth century there are more female phenomenophiles; Virginia Woolf is a spectacular and complicated example.37 I don’t, however, want to support the cliché that until recently women could not afford speculation, or some such idea, so I’m not satisfied with these reflections. The only thing that’s clear to me is that I somehow write about male writers in order to write about myself (thus my choice of third-person pronoun). The great philosopher of post-Kantian appearance is Arendt, but she is not a phenomenophile. I thought of ending this book by considering her reflections on thinking and the high value she places, in those reflections, on being able to achieve a robust judgment that fulfills Kant’s dream of a liking and disliking freely added to cognition. For Arendt, to think is to perceive a fact and render a judgment on it that is no longer minimal or obligatory.38 Unlike all the other readers of Kant in this book, Arendt reads Kant the way he wanted to be read: appearance for her is always Erscheinung, with no stolen thrill of the mere or sheer; and she follows Kant’s direction to progress from reflective withdrawal, to the minimal acceptance accomplished by critique, to a full-fledged evaluative judgment that she never hesitates to render. What Arendt has to say about fact perception begins a related but distinct line of thought about what to do about world-acceptance amid the all but unassimilable traumatic facts of the twentieth century. It doesn’t belong to the paradigm of looking away which I want to consider in and for itself, and which Arendt rarely uses because she is so good at confronting the Kantian world. Here, I’d like to give space for once to the notion that one might wish to do something else. If the phenomenality/dissatisfaction association furnishes yet another

36. The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 133–134, quoting Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. J. Solomon, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 2: 1:1216a. 37. Ann Banfield describes Woolf’s effort to organize “sensible ephemerids” that resemble Lucretian appearances into a modernist theory of matter. See Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 154–158. 38. I address Arendt in “Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt,” ELH 71 (2004): 839–865.

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way to understand the social meaning of an epistemological assumption, one might still ask, given the availability of other approaches, what particular interest lies in this one, which raises consciousness about a relatively mild and possibly unavoidable psychic bruise. Obviously enough, impulses to elude the pressure of the given, calling out what Adorno calls the “too many legitimate reasons for fleeing” reality,39 furnish an opportunity to explore the quality and significance of that pressure. More pointedly, though, I’d like to propose that not only the capacity for insight in the phenomenophile’s look away is respectable. Its very desire to withdraw from what it perceives is worthy of respect, and this desire does not need to be linked to any future possibility (for genuine sociality, critical perspicuity, etc.). It is a desire that remains after the suspension of ephemeral perception has ended, after the ability to withdraw from a perceived demand has been exhausted. It doesn’t need to be expunged when the hopes that gave rise to it have expired; it needs not to have to be expunged. I’ll explore the perhaps utopian implications of this idea through Adorno’s defense of the particular’s dissatisfaction with the universal in Chapter 4. Because I want to give the feeling behind phenomenophilia unconditional space, I won’t argue that looking away justifies itself through the transcendental movement of reason, reaching for the impossible and thereby creating a logical space for new possibility. Sartre argues that Baudelaire “called insatisfaction” what “philosophers today call transcendence,” that is, the sense that “infinitude [is] the lot of consciousness”; Blanchot reads Kafka’s Castle as the tale of “an avid and dissatisfied will that always exceeds the goal and always reaches beyond.”40 This stance, a legacy of both Kant and Hegel, is adopted by all of the thinkers in this book at times. I too think psychic and social structures may be reimagined when one finds one-

39. Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 9, hereafter AT. 40. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire [1946], trans. Martin Turnell (New York: New Directions, 1967), 38, translation modified; Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Brod,” in Friendship [1971], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 240–251, p. 247. Blanchot connects K.’s overreach to the Kantian world of appearance and transcendental illusion: “K. senses that everything outside of himself—himself projected on the outside—is only an image. He knows that one cannot trust images nor become attached to them” (249–250). The association of Erscheinung with mistrust is part of the misreading of Kant I will be exploring through Coleridge and Nietzsche.

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self thinking “unthinkable” thoughts. The idea of transcendental dissatisfaction can also, however, be a somewhat guilty attempt to instrumentalize dissatisfaction, if only hypothetically, recasting its recoil as a socially useful impulse. Although phenomenophilia does have social motives and potential, when mere phenomenality becomes a figure for the imperative quality of such a potential, it is no longer part of the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction. In other words, while heretofore unknown, less compulsory forms of sociality may be conceived through dissatisfaction and the kind of appearance that’s related to it, it would be wrong to figure the appeal of mere phenomenality as a call to which one must respond. It’s just the opposite. In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the spectre is an idealization on the model of transcendental illusion—an idealization that is never substantialized, but is “not nothing.” For Derrida, however, the spectre that is “not nothing” saturates the interior of life. By virtue of its very ontological indeterminacy it possesses “spectral density” and, with the density of psychic fact, executes the demand of fact: in Marx’s phrase, it “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”41 In Chapter 2 I’ll suggest, in 41. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 109. See also Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). Cheah extends Derrida’s spectrality to nationality as an image for the state, then to the postcolonial nation, the image of unrealized but ever possible freedom (395). ÒiÓek argues that “the pre-ideological ‘kernel’ of ideology thus consists of the spectral apparition that fills up the hole of the real. . . . What the spectre conceals is not reality but its ‘primordially repressed,’ the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’ reality itself is founded” (“The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj ÒiÓek [London: Verso, 1994], 1–33, p. 21. Later he gives this X the negative content of “freedom”; and since “the spectre itself already emerges out of a fear, out of our escape from something even more horrifying: freedom,” it follows that “our primary duty is not to the spectre” but to what it defends against (27). Comparing Derrida and ÒiÓek, Orrin N. C. Wang argues that, unlike Derrida, “ÒiÓek’s analysis of the spectre is still entrenched within the vocabulary of an opposition between physically genuine materiality and simply mental idealism,” as seen in ÒiÓek’s use of “the notion of a ‘concrete social analysis’ [ÒiÓek, “Spectre of Ideology,” 25] that would determine whether class struggle is indeed the dominant form of antagonism today” (Wang, “Ghost Theory,” Studies in Romanticism 46 [2007]: 203–225, p. 222). I too believe that “our primary duty is not to the spectre,” but for me both Derrida and ÒiÓek are too idealistic, and too “concrete” in the sense that they are too idealistic. Derrida is idealistic to the extent that the spectre is felt to

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contrast, that in the First Critique transcendental illusion’s status as “not nothing” means that we have no obligation to act on its basis, no requirement to respond to its demand.42 As Coleridge finds, the experience of the spectre is anything but phenomenophilic; looking away seeks out perceptual objects that ask for nothing, like violets in Keats and friends in Kant. It turns toward these perceptions to deflect the other’s invasion, by the reasoning—the comically quick and amoral reasoning typical of the unconscious—that if the other is inexorable once perceived, then obviously one should put off perceiving it or not look straight on. Weightless, merely phenomenal perception complements the spectre as figure of the other: it is the other of the inexorability of the other, and of equal rank. To the idea of dissatisfaction as transcendental promise we may contrast the notion that transgression possesses an immanent value, an argument found in strains of queer theory such as Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.43 Edelman asks queer theory “to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (No Future, 4), and suspends along with that insistence “a faith in the consistent reality of the social” (4, 6).44

present an injunction whose “power . . . lies not in its certitude but in exactly the opposite, in constative inconstancy,” as Wang points out (Wang, “Ghost Theory,” 204); ÒiÓek is idealistic because, similarly, he figures the negative force of the real as compulsory and transcendental. Mere phenomenality is the other of the spectre that presents a demand, and looking away is the opposite of ÒiÓek’s “looking awry” that projects a new and repressed real, however unrepresentable it remains. 42. The case is different in later works by Kant. In my canon the Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s best work of moral philosophy. 43. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004). 44. Writing in a very different register, Dana Villa observes that “across the political spectrum we find an emerging consensus that worthwhile criticism must be of the connected or ‘immanent’ sort,” and continues, “the price of such effectiveness is that no real challenge to reigning orthodoxies occurs.” Villa asks whether community “engagement as such is good, regardless of its form or tonality,” and advocates “a partial, never fully realized transcendence, not luxuriating in custom and convention but straining against it.” See Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 307, 300, 308.

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My argument is closer to this style of thought. The embrace of transgression—if that’s what it is; this characterization is already tendentious—is criticized for impracticability and self-contradiction; but to worry about whether the most compelling givens are really resistible, or what one gets out of resisting them, seems to miss the point, capitulating in advance to the instrumental.45 The point is the usual neglected one of what we think: whether, inevitable or not, we want the given world to be omnipresent as it is given, whether and to what degree we endorse it, and whether we want to have to endorse it. Further, the idea that the recession or even “refusal” of the phenomenophile is transgressive in the first place adopts a slightly paranoid point of view, in which simply declining to participate is society’s fantasy of an insult to itself. Much of what I will describe, and what Edelman describes for that matter, barely registers as refusal; difference is the real issue. One of the most moving parts of No Future is Edelman’s description of the way society, congratulating itself, pursues the merely omissive queer dissenter Scrooge in Dickens’s Christmas Carol: “‘Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,’ Scrooge urges his nephew, Fred; ‘Keep it!’ the nephew counters, ‘But you don’t keep it.’ ‘Let me leave it alone, then,’ his exasperated uncle responds” (45). Scrooge has complained aloud, but it’s not enough that he not complain: nothing would be enough except his active participation in what everybody is already affirming. It isn’t a new norm that’s being sought here, only a vacation from orchestrated affirmation. But from the perspective that has internalized the coercive point of view, leaving something alone is an aggression toward it. In contrast, Anne-Lise François expands noninstrumental thought by bringing forward occasions on which it may not matter whether one affirms something or not (Open Secrets). François makes the principle of minimal value I find in Kant and Freud into a principle of humane interpersonal labor, by which it can never be one’s unilateral job simply to make oneself known, or simply to provide an awaited endorsement. The imperative to accept, endorse, and/or affirm things that seem to

45. R. Benjamin Bateman’s review of No Future restores instrumentalism axiomatically, asserting that the argument “proves insufficient” politically because few readers, “we can safely assume, want to live in a void or die Antigone’s death.” See “The Future of Queer Theory,” Minnesota Review 65–66 (2006): 171–175, p. 174.

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stand beyond dispute may be understood differently, as a worthy enemy that is not, finally, more worthy than our feelings are when we feel constrained by it. One cannot alter inevitabilities, but can release oneself from hyperboles of affirmation and metaburdens of guilt about wanting them to be different—another thing from perceiving them as different. The phenomenophile’s suspensions and imagined suspensions of fact perception imply critical insight, as though they were proto-assertions of something that could be coming to be and does not yet have the liabilities of anything that is. Yet what’s most significant about the phenomenality/ dissatisfaction connection is neither its tacit wish for possibility nor its negativity per se, but—turning the fact/value conflation around one more time—its own inherent right to be. We’re within our rights to feel uncomfortable even with natural inevitabilities, to mind feeling uncomfortable, and to want to say something about it; and, often, right to wonder whether we can meet the eye of our neighbor as we think such thoughts. As I mentioned in connection with Arendt, there are, on the other hand, benefits that come only through confronting, evaluating, and making public one’s views about what Arendt always likes to call “the facts.” But that work can take place amid and beside minding them. Kant and Freud recognize that getting from A to B—for example, from Coleridge’s state of mind to Arendt’s—takes a process that Kant calls critique and Freud calls working through. There is no contradiction between Coleridge’s right to linger as long as he wishes in phenomenal consolation and Arendt’s satisfaction in taking on the facts. There is only the paradox of noninstrumental direction: to achieve a certain state of mind, the best way to set out is to drop the requirement to get there.46 Through the realizations of critical reason, the First Critique makes the judgments of the Third possible—only possible, not obligatory. To imagine ever sequencing errant looking away and Arendt’s fully realized, public Erscheinung, it’s actually necessary to refrain 46. Mary Jacobus reflects on D. W. Winnicott’s defense of noncommunication as a necessary personal resource, and reads Wordsworth’s exploration of similar experiences of privacy. Wordsworth is remarkable for the scale of his imagination of a mind cavernously free of objects and available to be filled with its own thoughts. See “Communicating and Not Communicating: Wordsworth and Winnicott,” in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 148–169. Thanks to Michelle Cho for this reference.

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from planning that the former give way to the latter: the deconstruction of instrumentalism is that noninstrumentalism comes first even from an instrumental perspective. This right of dissatisfaction with the given world to be there is “the other of the other”—the other side of the fact/value conflation and its minimal truth. If the fact/value conflation is minimally valid, as Kant and Freud hold, we shouldn’t be surprised if it relates to a minimal counterforce as natural and axiomatic as it is. The spiral of metasuffering that Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents begins by repressing feelings about minor sufferings because they are minor, because they are ours, because they are inevitable, because we know or imagine others would criticize them, or because we’re not sure what the point of being aware of them is. This is where moralized arguments about appearance and reality repeatedly end: in a debate not only about whether human life is inherently painful, but about whether we have a right to mind. If Adorno is right that we do, the dilemma of moral philosophy is to work through the discovery that the fact/value conflation and our resistance to its claims themselves have equal claims to value. The discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction consists of glimmerings of that discovery that surface only to disappear, doubting their own right to exist.

1 Coleridge among the Spectra

The last thing Coleridge wanted to be called was an empiricist, yet he devoted hours of his life to minute descriptions of optical illusions, hallucinations, and sensory oddities—“spectra,” as he calls them. He records occurrences as ordinary as afterimages of colors,1 double vision (N 1863, 2632), double-take (N 2212), and reflections taken as objects (N 1844, 2557, 3159), and as dramatic as flowers on the curtain that turn into faces (N 2082); “a spectrum, of a Pheasant’s Tail, that altered thro’ various degredations into round wrinkly shapes” (N 1681); a “spectrum” of his own thigh that registered touches as luminous white trails (N 1108); and the apparition of an acquaintance whom he knows not to be in the room. On the occasion of this last hallucination Coleridge recalls, “I once told a Lady, the reason why I did not believe in the existence of Ghosts &c was that I had seen too many of them myself” (N 2583).

1. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn with Merton Christensen and A. J. Harding, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957–1990,) 925, 1974, hereafter N.

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“Afterimage” is one of the literal meanings of the word “spectrum.” What Coleridge calls “spectra,” however, are more broadly afterimages, optical illusions, errors in perception, and very ephemeral visual experiences. Some of them are what Kant calls “charms,” the stimuli or “attractions” too fragile to be aesthetic. The meticulousness of Coleridge’s notebook entries on spectra indicates that Coleridge thought of his enterprise as a kind of research.2 It is because Coleridge isn’t a Lockean empiricist that he is interested in idiosyncratic or illusory appearances that contribute little to his knowledge; he gathers evidence against overreliance on appearance by noting every time it misleads. “Often and often I have had similar Experiences,” he explains, “and therefore resolved to write down the Particulars whenever they any new instance should occur/as a weapon against Superstition” (N 2583). Still, Coleridge often sounds as though he doesn’t quite know why he finds spectra so fascinating—for he is not only intrigued, but moved. He could fear and love for their own sake mere appearances that he believed to be insignificant and illusory; complementarily, he could not always summon fear and love for things that he thought real, pressing, fearsome, and lovable. His exclamation about the stars and moon in “Dejection: An Ode”—“I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!”3—is exemplary 2. A good example, for patient readers, of Coleridge’s scientific patience is this entry of 1804: “Tuesday Afternoon, 6oclock long on my bed within the musquitoe curtain, which was not drawn by its rings all round the iron rods of the bed, but was within half a foot or a foot of my face/the curtain muslin with french grass-like Streaks, a little less than 12 an inch broad/divided into three equal parts, the middle red, the 2 outward green/—As I lay, if I directed my eyes on these streaks, & looked at them, I saw them as they were/but when I merely lay, & suffered myself to see them only because they were there, one streak straight before my eye appeared at first to be just by the iron at the foot of the bed; but in a moment or so the iron rods were all within the streaks—& by opening voluntarily the pupil of my eyes a little, & rather thinking of them than looking at them, or to me still more accurately, looking at the walls of the room, & merely letting the streaks impress my eye, all these streaks fourfold or more as large as they really were, and much, very much more vivid, lay on the wall up to the very ceiling, bending up to the very with the wall & ceiling (an which formed an arch); and the iron rods all distinctly within these/—nay, by rapid glances I could produce a momentary sensation of the real streaks in their natural size & faintness, & real situation within the rods that were within these long & vivid Streaks on the wall of the room—The wall was about just 10 feet from my eyes—a small window right opposite to my eyes, the curtain about 9 feet or 9 1 4 from it/—” (N 2191). 3. Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 293, hereafter PW.

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of the state of mind in question, one long contemplated in the secondary literature and utterly characteristic of Coleridge. Coleridge’s generally pleasurable absorption in spectra stands in contrast to his terror of obsessive thoughts and ideas, memories, and dreams as opposed to daydreams. Although they may seem similar in that both seem epistemologically nearly useless—and what’s worse, one may turn into the other—there is a strong distinction for Coleridge between spectra and these experiences, which he calls “spectres.” I believe the terminological distinction between spectra and spectres is intended by Coleridge: although their contrast is nowhere thematized in the Notebooks, I cannot find a single instance when he deviates from the pattern (and he was, as we know, fond of disambiguation). A spectrum (plural: spectra) is a knowing collaboration with the sensorium; a spectre (plural: spectres) seems to take place inside the self, lacks visual distance and often even visualizable attributes, and is involuntary. Spectres are unwelcome, intractable impositions that might be called internal objects or psychic facts.4 If Coleridge is sometimes puzzled by his attraction to spectra, he is even more puzzled and frustrated by his fear of spectres he doesn’t believe in. “Most men affected by belief of reality attached to the wild-weed spectres of infantine nervousness,” he notes in a jotting of 1806, “but I affected by them simply, & of themselves” (N 2944). Coleridge’s concerns—his investment in external and internal objects in whose reality he doesn’t believe and his perplexity about what he should feel toward them—are not his alone. Phenomenological qualities of derealization and hyperlucidity have been treated as signatures of the aesthetic and of ideology. Recent analyses observe that ideology can captivate while leaving reality testing untouched: the magic of commodity fetishes and the senseless resilience of cultural prejudices affect many people simply and of themselves.5 Various philosophical traditions struggle, as Coleridge does, to articulate relations to merely apparitional appearances 4. Versions of Coleridge’s questions about spectra echo in psychoanalytic and psychiatric discussions of dissociation and in the literature of object relations, especially the work of D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok. Particularly relevant is Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971). 5. See Slavoj ÒiÓek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). See also Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

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and intransigent psychic facts. In the history of these struggles, I want to suggest, the attitudes that thinkers take toward phenomenality recurrently reveal attitudes toward diffuse, low-level dissatisfaction. In classical skepticism, dissatisfaction is what we’re supposed to feel toward appearance: the principle of akatalepsia, the idea that appearance tells nothing about nonappearance, is often treated as though it meant that appearance told nothing worth knowing. But too much dissatisfaction with appearance is also treated with suspicion, this time by realists, on the reasoning that even skeptics’ mistrust of appearance overvalues it. People who seem to be expecting something from phenomenality can expect to be accused of expecting too much. Too much what? Interest in phenomenality for its own sake is interpreted, and resented, as a desire to escape the inescapable. Skepticism toward appearance is resented on complementary grounds, as indicating the questioner’s queer craving, “against nature,” for more than experience can give. Behind discomfort on these topics lies the assumption that dissatisfaction with natural conditions—or with social relations broad enough to suggest dissatisfaction with natural ones—should not be uttered or perhaps even felt. The conflict over appearance and reality is a second-order social conflict about what conflicts it is sociable to have. Coleridge ponders the social dimensions of epistemological attitudes, as we can see in his remark about “wild-weed spectres.” In what turns out to be a frequent association, Coleridge attributes his enthrallment with spectra and his fear of spectres to something like but worse than the credulity of children. It’s childlike to attach “belief of reality” to ghosts; it’s worse than childlike—it’s incomprehensible—not to believe in ghosts and still be affected by them. Caring about phenomena he doesn’t believe in divides him from “most men,” Coleridge notes with both pride and exasperation. Although caring beyond belief shows off his autonomy, demonstrations of that autonomy, ironically, diminish Coleridge’s credibility with other people, or so he thinks. The situation can also be read the other way around, to imply that Coleridge cares about spectra because he feels alienated from most men in the first place. The circularity of explanations means more than either explanation alone, since it suggests the mutually constitutive relation of interpersonal and perceptual experience. While we accept in theory and yet often ignore the idea that every least perception is also a so-

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cial interaction, for Coleridge the interfusion of social and perceptual experiences is noticeable 24/7. One thing that interests Coleridge in spectra is their capacity to reflect social coercion negatively, their apparent freedom from the normative force of fact perceptions. By lavishing his imagination on spectra, Coleridge suspends perception; but even as spectra are escapist, they also reveal that the imperative to affirm fact perceptions constrains social relation, and register discomfort with that constraint. Of course, Coleridge explored social interaction in his philosophy and poetry, especially in his thought about collaboration and his development of the figure of conversation. His interest in spectra is highest when his partnership with Wordsworth is also at its height, and functions in part as a shadow commentary on their rivalry. This commentary appears in Coleridge’s poetry but more often in his Notebooks, as though his reflections on spectra were even in their private form alternatives to conversation; and indeed an association between looking away and fragment or note form recurs throughout the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction (we will return to this with Nietzsche and Adorno). The challenge of the Notebooks is that spectra are more rewarding than the personal exchanges from which they withdraw. This conclusion reaches further than the curious misfortunes of Coleridge’s interpersonal life. Coleridge’s thought about spectra suggests that philosophical denigration of the mode of appearance—dissatisfaction with appearance—displaces the crucial possibility that appearance is a mode of expressing and repressing dissatisfaction: that appearance appears where our hope for communication runs out. This idea radicalizes Georges Didi-Huberman’s observation that words and images supplement one another, that “an image often appears where a word seems to fail, a word often appear where the imagination seems to fail.”6 Dissatisfaction is built into the pre-Kantian concept of appearance, in which the appearing world must be underwritten by an ideal, eternal one. But what if we made these assumptions, invented appearance, in order to transfer dissatisfaction to appearance and absorb it there? Since dissatisfaction with nontragic facts and natural laws seems wayward, even 6. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz [2003], trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008), 26.

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impossible,7 it is displaced into attitudes toward our most explicitly contingent perceptions: Schein, fleeting visual phenomena, and the rhetorical trompe l’oeil of the appearance of appearance. Lingering among the spectra, Coleridge expresses something we do not feel entitled to say because it is so comprehensive and banal: the world as given leaves a lot to be desired, and we can neither be reconciled to it nor simply accept our lack of reconciliation.

1 . p ur p l e h aze Like many people who experience dissociation, Coleridge thought himself isolated and misunderstood. He ascribed this state of affairs to his phenomenological and epistemological deviance. The inverse ratio between Coleridge’s consciousness of his perceptions and his ability to communicate with others is partly a matter of philosophical taste, as he notes. Thus Coleridge complains of “the pain I suffer & have suffered, in differing so from such men, such true men of England, as [. . .], & their affectionate love of Locke” (N 1418; see also N 3566, N 4605). The dominant attitude of empiricism, he believes, is only nominally liberal, intolerant of alternative perspectives. In this context, Coleridge’s plagiarisms of idealists express his hunger to be in agreement with someone at last.8

7. Again, the situation is asymmetrical, since satisfaction with the inevitable is permitted: although it’s supposedly perverse to protest or object to nontragic natural conditions, it isn’t supposedly perverse to affirm the same conditions. It takes someone as meticulous as Wittgenstein to be annoyed by pointless affirmation. 8. Tillottama Rajan and Julie Ellison, especially, have pointed out the self-abnegation in Coleridge’s sociability, a subordination that renders suspect his desire to form happy alternative families. “The wish for vicarious gratification, in poems written throughout Coleridge’s career, produces stories of self-exclusion,” Ellison remarks (Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990], xii). Rajan reads Coleridge’s figuration of auditors within the conversation poems as the invocation of “a surrogate self, through whom the poet must represent himself in a place where he is not.” Unlike Wordsworth, “Coleridge remains physically isolated from the being on to whom he projects his own naiveté, able to live his dreams only through another and at a distance that seems to negate his claim of proximity to this being.” The distance and miscommunication conveyed by all this conversation, she notes, do not lead Coleridge to revise his ideal of conversation: “the inversion of the conversation mode . . . rather confirms, from a position of complete despair, a vision which Coleridge is content to celebrate in the mode of exile” (Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980], 229–230, 233).

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Coleridge views his estrangement from his peers not only as ideological, but as a necessary consequence of the sort of creature he must be to hold his beliefs: And yet I think, I must have some analogon of Genius, because, among many other things, when I am in company with Mr Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr Scarlet, &c &c, I feel like a Child—nay, rather like an Inhabitant of another Planet—their very faces act upon me, sometimes as if they were Ghosts, but more often as if I were a Ghost, among them—at all times, as if we were not consubstantial. (N 3324) Coleridge conflates his feelings of depersonalization with his derealized perceptions and queer sense of being differently embodied; and he associates all of these ideas with the involuntary state of childhood.9 Feeling like a child means living with the possibility of being dominated by another who may even claim access to one’s mind: if I think you overwhelm my autonomy, I may of course feel depersonalized, ghostly, and ontologically different from you. When “a thing acts on me . . . as purely passive,” Coleridge notes, “I am thinged” (N 3587). The power struggle has its delectations and plots of reversal, which Coleridge describes in the language of the sublime: “Ghost of a mountain—the forms seizing my Body as I passed & became realities—I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my Substance” (N 5242). A child feels like, and really is, the plaything of a stronger being; calling a child’s alienation an “analogon of Genius” only figures the inequality between child and adult in a positive way, turning ghostliness into refinement. But how does an adult sitting in a room with his peers come to feel “act[ed] upon” by “their very faces”? In a discussion of Swedenborg’s visions, Coleridge opines that effects of ghostliness are caused by insufficient consciousness of one’s actions. Swedenborg’s fantasies perhaps “arose out of a voluntary power of so bedimming or interrupting the impressions of the outward senses as to produce the same transition of thoughts into things, as ordinarily takes place on passing into Sleep.” Because the “successive Images and Sounds” pro9. For reflections on moments of queer spatial orientation, see Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

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duced in this way are still “distinguishable from actual impressions ab extra chiefly by the uniform significancy of the former,” however, and because the visionary fails to credit himself with the voluntary action that would account for the high organization of the imagery he experiences, he ascribes his visions to “a Will or multitude of wills alien from the Will of the Beholder” (N 3474). At a loss for other explanations, he posits supernatural presences.10 By this logic, superstition is a consequence of starting out from empiricism. If we didn’t believe in the first place that we were passive receptors of perceptions, we would never make the mistake of looking outside ourselves to account for them. This analysis would imply that Coleridge experiences himself in an attenuated way in the presence of his parlor companions because he “bedim[s]” certain sensory impressions at the outset. Again, two complementary explanations, one social and one perceptual, together make one circular one. We feel attenuated, first, when other people are active and we’re passive, as in cases involving adults and children; and, second, when we voluntarily filter out the perception of our activity. One hypothesis as to why, in turn, we do that is that it offers self-anesthesia in anticipation of social pain.11 We would rather see and be ghosts than people because however frightening ghosts are, they’re safer. The sequence child—alien— ghost moves through stages of a retreat: “I feel like a Child”; I’d “rather” feel queer but equal, “like an Inhabitant of another Planet”; I’d really rather feel “as if I were a Ghost” who, already dead, couldn’t be harmed and could frighten others. When Coleridge complains that his aberrant perceptual attitudes cause his isolation, he uses a language of bodily sub10. For a similar account of auditory hallucinations, see G. Lynn Stephens and George Graham, When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (Cambridge: MIT P, 2000). 11. Coleridge often describes hope as a kind of dread (N 3547). In his sonnet “Composed on a Journey Homeward; the Author Having Received Intelligence of the Birth of His Son, Sept. 20, 1796,” he describes a morbid fantasy that his newborn son is dead “(As sometimes, through excess of hope, I fear)” (PW 273–274). Coleridge’s idea that “motives by excess reverse their very nature” (Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983], 1:303–304) implies that the line in parentheses could be read “As sometimes, through excess of fear, I hope.” On the reversibility of affections, see also Thomas Love Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), 110–111.

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stance as a correlative for perceptual deviance. In the complementary theory, his motives run the opposite way: Coleridge is alienated from other people, so he profits from muting his impressions. Circularly, interpersonal and perceptual systems present themselves as two sides of a single surface. In order for the single surface model to hold, spectra would have to be more than symptoms of contingent neuroses. They certainly are more to Coleridge, who casts his experiences with spectra as rediscoveries of a very primary-sounding capacity to adjust one’s forms of contact with the world. Although Coleridge reinforces this point every time he praises the “esemplastic” imagination, it’s easy to underestimate his affection for the tiny perceptual modulations that indicate the awakening of imagination. Imagining is as easy as squinting. Bringing a book close to his eye (N 1681), putting on green spectacles and removing them (“O what a lovely Purple when you pull them off” [N 1974]), are fundamental aesthetic acts whose uses are familiar to visual artists. Man Ray liked to watch films “through his fingers, spread to isolate certain parts of the image”;12 “Sir G. Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from nature thro’ Gause Spectacles,” Coleridge notes (N 1973). We can create a similar effect anytime: “just half wink your Eyes and look at the Land, it is then all under water, or with that glossy Unreality which a Prospect has, when seen thro’ smoke” (N 1844). In his poems and notebooks Coleridge depicts the production of Schein-effects out of Erscheinung as effortless, on the model of the wink. In “To William Wordsworth,” Coleridge portrays himself in infantine thrall to absorptive pleasure at Wordsworth’s reading of The Prelude (PW 815–819). In a scene narrated in a notebook of 1801, Wordsworth again plays the adult to Coleridge’s child, but Coleridge subsumes Wordsworth’s influence into a world of his own vivifaction. At the beginning of the scene, Coleridge lies “abed” in the afternoon: Wednesday—Afternoon. Abed—nervous—had noticed the prismatic colours reflected transmitted from the Tumbler—Wordsworth 12. Robert B. Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost: And Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2001), 26.

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came—I talked with him—he left me alone—I shut my eyes—beauteous spectra of two colors, orange and violet—then of green, which immediately changed to Peagreen, & then actually grew to my eye into a beautiful moss, the same as is on the mantle-piece at Grasmere.—abstract Ideas—& unconscious Links!! (N 925) From the spectrum of prismatic colors arise “beauteous spectra” of more. Colors give way to aftercolors, as in the literal meaning of the word “spectra,” and words generate images and vice versa. The terms of Coleridge’s description suggest that this is the way things were longer ago than he can remember. While he is immobilized in the middle of the day in an infantine fashion (as in “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”), Wordsworth looks in on him. After the conversation has stirred Coleridge’s associations, he forms a kind of protopoem of resonances. Green spectra take on vegetal characteristics that typify the “streaminess” of association (thus Coleridge also writes of “wild-weed spectres” and perceives “grasslike Streaks” on his muslin curtains).13 The vegetation association brings up a “pea” shade of green, then the animation of associations allegorizes itself in the transformation of green color into “moss” as at “Gras(s)mere.”14 The model for contact with others here consists in finding oneself literally prone to their influence, then elaborately creating distance and context. Earlier we saw Coleridge identifying with the (relatively) powerless child; here we see what that child can do. Coleridge sketches his own version of the growth of the poet’s mind: the infant in his crib mingling thoughts and colors in free association before autonomy or even vision has fully developed.15 This radiant virtual environment responds to the mind’s wishes,

13. See N 1770. On Coleridge’s interest in vegetation in connection with his “immersion in a continual present-tense of pure phenomenality,” see Harold D. Baker, “Landscape as Textual Practice in Coleridge’s Notebooks,” ELH 59 (1992): 651–670, especially p. 667. 14. “Mere grass” is a good synonym for imaginary moss. 15. Colors exemplify the nexus of construction and perception in romantic color theory, since their appearance is context-dependent; Coleridge’s Notebooks show his enjoyment at being able to change the colors of appearances (N 1974, 2094). Coleridge is aware of himself as a colorist, even through the similarity of his name to the word “color.” Of an unnamed person—a painter, or even himself?—he writes, “Women . . .

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yet retains many of the values of nature. Marshaling ambiguities of scale, placement, and cause, spectra offer Coleridge a way to fantasize negotiations with conditions that seem to admit no possibility of negotiation. They become images of “freedom in unfreedom.”16 Coleridge’s musings imply particular psychological motives for entertaining spectra, as when Coleridge proves himself against the mountain. “Why do I seek for mountains,” Coleridge asks, when in the flattest countries the Clouds present so many so much more romantic and spacious forms, & the coal-fire so many so much [sic] more varied and lovely forms?—And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter/do I not more or less consciously fancy myself a Lilliputian, to whom these would be mountains—& so by this factitious scale make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing— “phantoms of Sublimity” which I continue to know to be phantoms? (N 2402) A similar constellation of fire, childhood, and animism informs the canonical lyric “Frost at Midnight.” There Coleridge’s narrator “makes a toy of Thought” by animating the slip of film that flutters on his fire grate— surely one of the most indefinite and transient objects ever to be the focus of a poem (PW 452–456). The notebook entry helps to frame the type of situation depicted in the poem: Coleridge looks for mountains in coal fires, forgetting scale to “fancy [him]self a Lilliputian.” He makes a toy of thought to imagine or remember himself at a size susceptible to being toyed with. At the same time, to the extent that the coal fire shapes stand in for memories or idealizations of bigger entities, comparing these entities to the fire shapes diminishes them. Coleridge is a Gulliver fancying himself a Lilliputian fancying himself a Gulliver—and so on. Despite their psychological uses, though, the beauty of Coleridge’s manipulations of ap-

are better judges of his Coloridng, than of his Design & Composition—” (N 4277). To be mostly color would be to be similarly context-dependent, a chameleon. 16. The phrase is the title of a lecture by Adorno in History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 200–208, hereafter HF.

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pearance is that they do not confine him to reshuffling the specific ideas that trouble him. Spectra may seem to be fancies, but in their repleteness they are opposed to mechanical recombination. Their coextensiveness with perception makes them as holistic as any natural phenomenon. Lingering over a purple afterimage, Coleridge does not thematize the struggle between child and adult or any other preoccupation, but brings about a wholesale shift in his way of engaging the world. On one occasion, Coleridge demonstrates this capacity of phenomenophilia to his son Hartley: March 17, 1801. Tuesday—Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said—Will yon Mountains always be?—I shewed him the whole magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing & the Image almost with convulsive Effort. (N 923) Hartley has a question about the most permanent natural facts of the earth, and seems to yearn for security. A conventional answer might go something like, “They’ll be there long enough”; answering in this way pretends to ignore the worry in Hartley’s question, and teaches that one doesn’t think too hard about this kind of thing. The literal answer is no, but that too fails to respond to the need implied in the question. Coleridge’s Zen-like response, bringing a looking glass to warp the landscape, respects the impetus of Hartley’s question by refraining from closing it off as either “yes” or “no” would do. Rather, it shows how the experience leading to the question can be adjusted, rather than erased, by reframing perception. It’s uncertain whether Hartley gets into the spirit of Coleridge’s gesture—he seems to take it as another emotional and epistemological struggle—but the gesture itself reveals Coleridge’s belief in the ability of self-modified perceptions to shift the terms of what seems to be given. In its ability to vary the terms of experience, looking away, like dreams, resembles art production. Whether one wants to say it is art depends

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on how one feels about the peripheral artlikeness of tiny private performances. Kant and Adorno would say that such performances may be protoartistic but produce no art (I’ll consider this in Chapter 4). Coleridge, however, goes so far as to call the coal fire fantasy “a voluntary poem in . . . picture-writing.” The metaphor of hieroglyphics—Freud’s metaphor for dreams—assimilates controlled perception, as in lucid dreaming, to the externalization of thoughts in writing, as though what Coleridge saw when he looked at the fire were his writing about it. Writing the account of a spectrum, too, is a final way of prolonging it. “I make this note . . . to preserve the circumstance,” Coleridge writes of a double image of a single candle (N 1863). While all writing is intended to preserve a circumstance, Coleridge’s propensity to time spectra gives his common phrase an uncommon resonance. One of the appeals of always writing something is that writing comes to frame all other relations, and provides an index to appearance that seems to qualify its factive authority and loosen the perceiver’s obligation to it. (Of his hashish experiences, Walter Benjamin observes, “perhaps it is only for this reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as ‘arranged,’ as ‘experiment’—so that one can laugh about it” [On Hashish, 20]). Of course, the relief of spectra is fed by social dilemmas; their freedom is valuable in proportion to the problematic relations they momentarily suspend. “Like the Gossamer Spider, we may float upon air and seem to fly in mid heaven,” Coleridge remarks, “but we have spun the slender Thread out of our own fancies, & it is always fastened to something below” (N 2166). Coleridge locates the virtue of spectra especially in their consensual quality. When he comes upon spectra he is eager to log, he plays with them and extends them. He savors them, confirming his participation in their appearance, and often notes how long a spectrum lasts. A dose of “Castor Oil in Gin & Water” helps to bring on a double image of Coleridge’s seal “exactly as if seen thro’ a common Reading-glass”; notable in this event, Coleridge writes, is that “I saw and (after noticing the circumstance) still continued to see it, like a fixed reality not dependent on my will, without dimness or swimmingness of Vision” (N 2632). In another incident he experiments with the lines of sight that support “a phantom of [his] face upon the night cap which lay just on [his] pillow.”

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It “came only as my head was bent low,” he observes; “I moved the Night Cap and lost it/the night cap & the associations” (N 1751).17 Another time, a chasm opens between Coleridge’s bed and chest of drawers and the wallpaper pattern grows larger and more vivid: As I gazed at this, I again voluntarily threw myself into introversive Reflections, & again produced the same Enlargement of Shapes & Distances and the same increase of vividness—but all seemed to be seen thro’ a very thin glaceous mist—thro’ an interposed Mass of Jelly of the most exquisite subtlety & transparency. But my reason for noting this is—the fact, in my second & voluntary production of this Vision I retained it as long as I like, nay, bent over with my body & looked down into the wide Interspace between the Bed & Chest of Drawers, & the papered Wall, without destroying the Delusion/— then started my eyes & something [. . .] of the Brain behind the eyes started or jirked them forward, and all was again as in common./ The power of acting on a delusion, according to the Delusion, without dissolving it/—carry this on into a specific Disease of this Kind— Prophets, &c— (N 3280) Coleridge’s cultivation of spatial distortion and hyperintensity through “voluntary production” and as long as he likes—at least, as long as he likes until it suddenly ends—is both a suspensive pleasure and a redramatization of perception as an epistemological problem that reminds him to be vigilant about the disease of credulity. Associating the Schein of the chasm he knows isn’t there with the absorption of delusional people in their visions, Coleridge plays on the edge of becoming a person who lives his Schein as Erscheinung. He remains aware, however, of the difference between himself and the “Prophets, &c,”18 and shows no mixed feelings about the 17. Peter Schwenger argues that Coleridge’s study of spectra leads him to discover that “dynamics of the framing process. . . . [generate] vision . . . whether it be the hypnagogic substratum made visible, or the shapes of the real world” (Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999], 160n36). 18. On Coleridge’s distinction between mystics and visionaries, enthusiasts and fanatics, see David Vallins, “The Feeling of Knowledge: Insight and Delusion in Coleridge,” ELH 64 (1997): 157–187.

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undesirability of what is for Kant the ultimate error—accepting Schein as Erscheinung, contrary to evidence. Such a belief would be evidenced by “acting on” the delusion, “according to the delusion.” As long as a spectrum lasts, then, Coleridge practices withholding his belief from it, even when it is “like a fixed reality” (N 2632). Sustaining a perception as long as he likes until it stops may seem like a contradiction, but it makes sense that Coleridge appreciates both dependence and independence in mere appearances. Fastened by threads to forces more fundamental than themselves, they nonetheless better display the mind’s competence in reality testing the more they can seem to have lives of their own—“outness”—and still be mere appearances. They can and should come vanishingly close to normal appearances. Logically, spectra need to remain distinct from ordinary appearances (in Coleridge’s vocabulary, “impressions”) in order to retain their advantage as releases from the imperative to affirmation instated by the fact/ value conflation. Of course, if a spectrum ever were identical to an impression, Coleridge would never know it. Interestingly, he doesn’t worry about it; he never asks whether an impression is actually a spectrum—whether Erscheinung is actually Schein. In the meditation on Swedenborg mentioned above, Coleridge notes that spectra are “distinguishable from actual impressions ab extra chiefly by the uniform significancy of the former, and by the absence of that apparent contingency and promiscuous position of Objects by which Nature or the World of the bodily sense is discriminated” (N 3474). Even if one accepts that spectra possess this distinction, by Coleridge’s own logic they achieve their maximum impact when the line of discrimination is “infra-thin.”19 Fetishizing the fragility of spectral self-consciousness itself, Coleridge praises the “interposed . . . Jelly” of his self-created atmosphere for “its most exquisite subtlety and transparency.” Still, when Coleridge transcribes spectra “as a weapon against Superstition,” he has in mind some harm that would ensue if spectra were ontologized. “What if instead of immediately checking the sight and then

19. Thierry de Duve develops Duchamp’s concept of the “infra-thin” nominalistic line drawn by aesthetic judgment (Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade [1984], trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991]), 159–161.

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pleased with it as a philosophical Case, I had been frightened, and encouraged it—& my Understanding had joined its Vote to that of my Senses?” (N 2583). What if? Coleridge would then be among the deluded, outside Kantian appearance. But if we ask what would be wrong, in turn, with that, a return to “Frost at Midnight” may suggest one answer. The poem asks which is more vulnerable, the speculative mock-animism of the spectrum collector Coleridge is at the time of writing or the “most believing” outlook of childhood. By the “mirror seeking” reasoning he attributes to himself, the “strange / And extreme silentness” the poet observes in the first stanza may be an artifact of manipulating perceptions from a distance. But the second stanza identifies the exposure in response to which this reserve forms, when as a child, the poet really believes the folklore that fire films “are . . . supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend” (PW 454n15): How oft, at school, with most believing mind, Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, To watch that fluttering stranger! . . . .... So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: Save if the door half opened, and I snatched A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face, Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! (PW 454–455) When we ask what would happen if Coleridge’s “Understanding . . . joined its Vote to that of [his] Senses,” the poem’s answer seems to be that it would return him to the state of childhood, when he felt the disappointment of omnipotent hopes that were not fulfilled. Making a toy of thought at least spares him from taking thoughts for prophecies (we would speak of

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wishes). The false prophecy attached to the film in “Frost at Midnight” occupies a place parallel to that of the spectrum in the Notebooks for which the understanding might “Vote.” The voting metaphor makes it explicit that appearances seem to offer themselves for endorsement. It also clarifies spectra’s appeal: casting a perception as mere appearance, like thinking of the power of the film as folklore, allows the mind to entertain it without endorsing it, splitting the difference between delusion and the renunciation of enjoyment—an option that may be more sensible than the moralized vocabulary of “bad faith” will admit. A perception, then, presents an array of mental choices, and the delicate balance struck by Coleridge’s most famous phrase, “suspension of disbelief,” is not necessarily easy to maintain. As we’ll see, although spectra for Coleridge are always “distinguishable from actual impressions ab extra,” they can still become reified in another way, by being loaded with symbolic freight and internalized. At that point they cease to be spectra and become the rigid mental entities— internal objects, psychic facts—that are their antitheses.

2 . th oug hts an d t h i n g s Those that come fresh from Visions: What saw you there?—That which I still see, that Which will not away.20

If children and prophets are magical thinkers, and fans of Locke dismiss spectra altogether, Coleridge wants to position himself in the middle, partaking of spectra without being obligated to them as to facts. As partnerships with perception, experiences that Coleridge has with his eyes open, spectra become figures of harmonious negotiation with Erscheinung. Perceptions can be invited, selected from, sustained. The spectral environment interfuses inside and outside—and of course assumes insides and outsides themselves—but preserves the perceiver’s sense of his or her participation. Oddly, though, comparison between spectra and spectres winds up suggesting that one can negotiate only with perceptions of the external

20. William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651), quoted in N 1932.

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world. It’s as though Coleridge can modify sense data, but do nothing about ideas he generates internally. The mental capacity demonstrated by the phenomenon of spectra is powerless to assist him with the internal world that his experience also posits. This world is often given over to nightmares and obsessional images, Coleridge’s “spectres of infantine nervousness.” Coleridge puzzles over spectres’ hold on him because, comparing them to spectra, he finds in both cases no epistemological basis for taking his experiences seriously. Spectra never compel his belief; he only voluntarily extends them his indulgence. He doesn’t give his internal objects any epistemic credit either, yet it doesn’t seem to matter that he doesn’t believe in them: they grasp him from within and twist. Unfamiliar with the notion of psychic fact, much as he was unfamiliar with the notion of physical addiction, Coleridge cannot understand why he should not blame himself for his own suffering, and this metafrustration makes him suffer even more. Coleridge’s question about spectres—why can’t he resist being moved by perceptions he doesn’t believe in?—recalls Kant’s consideration of transcendental illusion (to be discussed in Chapter 2), and also Freud’s question about how dreams supposedly created to fulfill wishes can be unpleasant or frightening—the question that eventually leads beyond the pleasure principle. Coleridge addresses the question with regard to dreams by rooting dream fear in physiology and splitting affect from cognitive content. In nightmares, he explains, we suffer “stupor of the outward organs of Sense . . . occasioned by some painful sensation, of unknown locality, most often, I believe, in the lower Gut, tho’ not seldom in the stomach, which withdraw[s] the attention to itself from its sense of other realities present” (N 4046). “The Understanding & Moral Sense” cannot control the “terror” of the nightmare “because it is not true Terror: i.e. apprehension of Danger, but a sensation as much as the Tooth-ache, a Cramp—I.e. the Terror does not arise out of the a painful Sensation, but is itself a specific sensation.” As critics have noted, this “gastric” hypothesis does not make for a gratifying dream theory—by making dream fear a pain rather than an emotion, and pain itself the end of inquiry, it short-circuits interpretation and discards the content of dreams.21 But Coleridge’s dream theory is an 21. See Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams, and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

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artifact of his much better developed philosophy of perception, which stresses the amelioration of the perceptual environment, and by definition only the perceptual environment, by control of the eye. In dreams there is a very impoverished environment, a “stupor of the outward organs of Sense,” that strips the phenomenophile of his favorite resource. Collaborating with the sensory world on spectra, the mind works on the façade of the outside, the outside of the outside. In dreams, the outside is inside, in oneself. And because derealization is something you can do only to a perception, you can’t derealize an internal object. The same is true for intensification and modification: commands for these adjustments don’t work on dreams. Dreams for Coleridge are defined by their possession of this autonomous inalterability, so that lucid dreaming is not really dreaming: “We are nigh to waking when we dream, we dream” (N 4410). One of Coleridge’s nightmares of 1811, for example, resists analgesia by virtue of its isolation: Last night before awaking or rather delivery from the nightmair, in which a claw-like talon-nailed Hand grasped hold of me,22 interposed between the curtains, I haved just before with my foot felt some thing seeming to move against it (—for in my foot it commenced)—I detected it, I say, by my excessive Terror, and dreadful Trembling of my whole body, Trunk & Limbs—& by my piercing out-cries—Good Heaven! (reasoned I) were this real, I never should or could be, in such an agony of Terror— (N 4046) The situation that never occurs with a spectrum occurs here with a spectre: Coleridge takes the dream for real, and realizes belatedly that it can’t be. He asserts not only that he can be affected by spectres, but that he is optimally affected by them, able to infer by his “excessive Terror” that the experience is a “nightmair.” Hartley Coleridge agrees that distressing images of “Men & faces” “seem when my eyes are shut open, & worse when they are shut” (N 1253). Hartley calls these anthropomorphic images “the

22. Not too long before, Coleridge had noted “The Claw of the Mammoth bird found lately in Siberia, 3 foot—which with the hind Claw would make the foot 6 feet, tho’ it had no palm or sole, which is scarcely possible in such a monster/say 7 feet—” (N 3958).

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Seems.” When his eyes are open Hartley takes action against the Seems by ordering a candle, that is, by intervening in his perceptual environment; but when his eyes are shut, there is no candle. Because nightmares unfold in nearly total seclusion from the perceptual world, there is little in them to attenuate. To Coleridge, the idea of an image immune to modification is perfectly petrifying. Internal scary objects are scariest of all because the imagination cannot reach them where they are, deep within itself; and they manifest themselves through figures of the more invasive senses, hearing and touch. Coleridge writes that such objects seem to be “behind” him, and records the black comedy of his attempts to get at them: Saturday Night, at Mr. Butler’s at Ridding—the Nightmair—so near awaking and my saying—Yes! Dreams, or creatures of my Dreams, you may make me feel you as if you were keeping behind me/but you cannot speak to me—immediately I heard impressed on my outward ears, & with a perfect sense of distance answered—O yes! but I can— Sunday, Oct. 21—1810. (N 3984)

Coleridge’s struggles with internal objects thus confirm his gastric hypothesis. Coleridge’s literal inner life, the life of his intestines, is tormented by constipation. The brave notebook entry of May 9, 1804, recorded during Coleridge’s ocean voyage to Malta, describes the low point of his condition, when, after a night and a day of medically assisted straining, “Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter” (N 2085). Coleridge models his dream theory on intestinal pain, it seems, because that pain figures so well what it’s like to be the involuntary vessel of autonomous internal objects. These mental contortions put an ironic spin on Coleridge’s testy criticism of empiricists. Empiricists, he argues, think themselves the passive receptors of givens, in effect believing in ghosts without knowing it. “I am no Ghost-seer—I am no believer in Apparitions,” he declares in one late rant. “During the years of ill health from disturbed digestion I saw a host of apparitions, & heard them too—but I attributed them to an act in my brain/You according to your own [sic] see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and strangely attribute them to things that are

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out of side of your skull/which of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which thate of superstitionist” (N 4605). Yet the presence left in the skull after imagination is exhausted is as autonomous, for better and worse, as a thing in itself.23 Against Coleridge’s well-known misgivings about “streamy” thought, then, we need to place his horror of immobile thought and hunger for lyric freedom, for “the molten Being never cooled into a Thing,” as he writes of the sea at Malta (N 3159). Coleridge’s appreciation of elemental transience can be hard to notice because in his criticism, especially, Coleridge does systematize the reification of subjectivity of which neo-Kantian idealism is often accused.24 He observes that “Thought is the past participle of Thing,” and implies the reverse as well: “thinking, i.e., thinging or thing out of me = a thing in me” (N 3587). In Chapter 12 of Biographia Literaria, he divides apperceptive consciousness from common sense only to assert that it consists of a form even more immediate. He begins the chapter by declaring that “there is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings” (1:236). He figures “the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental” (1:237), as an invisible territory on the other side of a mountain range. Aspiring philosophers conceive this territory through “thoughts” and “strong probabilities” (1:239). As soon as Coleridge has parted ways with those who rest content with sense data, however, he recasts con23. M. H. Abrams notes that in a letter Coleridge wrote to James Gillman at the age of fifty-three, he “implicitly describes his having succumbed, with the passage of time, to the actuality in his own experience of a concept of the mind in perception [Locke’s] against which his own philosophy of the active, projective, and creative mind had been a sustained refutation” (Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge [Boston, 1895], 2:742–743; Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature [New York: Norton, 1971], 459). 24. This charge is expressed well by Merleau-Ponty in Part I of The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), e.g. 28, 38–39. MerleauPonty’s phenomenology has much to offer as a negative diagnostic of prior philosophies and in its promotion of perceptual ambiguity as a constructive matrix of experience. However, it reifies that ambiguity in turn, redefining it as reality itself, “the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts” (24). For attempts to engage Merleau-Ponty and his critical heirs in contemporary scholarship, see Critical Quarterly 42 (2000), a special issue on “cultural phenomenology” edited by Steven Connor and David Trotter.

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sciousness as a unity of intellect and intuition in immediate form, in a fashion typical of nineteenth-century misreadings of Kant: “on the immediate, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends” (1:243). Separating “thoughts” and “probabilities” from “the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge” of the truths toward which they reach, Coleridge asserts that the means of bringing the two together “can be learnt only by the fact” (1:239–240). Making philosophic consciousness even more experiential, he states that intellectual intuition is available “not in every man,” but only in some, in much the way that some people possess especially well-developed “organs of sense” (1:242). The drift of the passage reasserts the logic of sense-certainty on the transcendental level, converting knowledge of the limitations of external sense into an internal sense. In Biographia Literaria, this move is desirable, since it purports to establish the comprehensive nature of ideality. Coleridge’s experience, meanwhile, shows its disadvantages: ideal certainties, in introspection, seem to harass and crowd the mind. For Coleridge, fixity and belief are mutually enabling qualities, as his discussion of nightmares suggests. Much of his horror focuses on nightmares’ keenly tactile effects (as in his dream of a “talon-nailed Hand”).25

25. For Coleridge the greatest threats and thrills are tactile; derealization, alienation, and the sense of touch, along with its opposite, numbness, form for Coleridge a “knot of ideas” or “involute” of the kind that John Barrell finds in De Quincey (The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism [New Haven: Yale UP, 1991], 32). One of Coleridge’s pet ideas is that a touch can be remembered, then transferred like any association to a variety of objects. Coburn points out that Coleridge’s friend and fellow aficionado of spectra Tom Wedgwood was also “very much interested in the subject of touch, and in the psychology of children” (note to N 838); see also Raimonda Modiano, “Coleridge’s Views on Touch and Other Senses,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 81 (1978): 28–41. This thought of the touch of a being that cannot be distinctly perceived sounds like a memory of passive infantile stimulation—a traumatic sexual touch. The idea of a primal touch exaggerates the imposition already present in any primal scene. Jean Laplanche dramatizes this sense well: “the child, powerless in his crib, is Ulysses tied to the mast or Tantalus, for whom the spectacle of parental coitus is imposed and intromitted” (Life and Death in Psychoanalysis [1970], trans. Jeffrey Mehlman [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976], 102, translation modified).

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Coleridge writes that “the very last [dream] which awoke [him]” on March 4, 1805, was a completed Night-Mair, as it gave [my italics—R.T.] the idea and sensation of actual grasp or touch contrary to my will, & in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external Form, actually appearing or (as sometimes happens) believed to exist/in which latter case tho’ I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of Hatred, a grasp, or a weight, of Hate and Horror abstracted from all (Conscious) form or supposal of Form/an abstract touch/an abstract grasp—an abstract weight! (N 2468) According to this passage a nightmare is a nightmare not because of its content but because it gives Coleridge the sensation of being acted upon. Coleridge dreaded and thrilled to passivity in several forms: the passivity of unwanted addiction, of fixed internal objects, of being touched, of portals vulnerable to uninvited stimulation. His agitation on behalf of the active imagination defends against appalling passive pleasure, as his diatribes against sensationalist reading imply. Opining in The Friend that “the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought” must reduce the understanding “to a deplorable imbecility,” Coleridge effectively adds readers of Gothic fiction to the list of the gullible victims of experience (children, prophets, women who hope for ghosts).26 As in his desperate auto-enematic act, Coleridge seems close here to panicking at the consciousness of a queer sensation—of something occupying the cavities of his imagination and body. Commenting on this passage of The Friend, Bradford Mudge observes that Coleridge’s “discussion of good and bad books remains inseparable from ideas of male and female pleasure, of good and bad sex.”27 So, the sensation of passive touch—to return to Coleridge’s 26. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend [1818], ed. Barbara Rooke (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), 2:151. 27. Bradford K. Mudge, “‘Excited by Trick’: Coleridge and the Gothic Imagination,” Wordsworth Circle 22 (1991): 179–184, p. 184. Mudge brings up Coleridge’s recycling in The Friend of his notebook witticism about having seen too many ghosts to believe in them (Friend 1:146, quoted in “‘Excited by Trick,’” 183), to argue that despite his supposed sangfroid, Coleridge is frightened by Gothic fiction’s power of suggestion. A sim-

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March 4 nightmare—resembles the sensation of interacting with an “external Form” capable of inspiring ontic belief. When such a sensation occurs in a dream, the dream idea becomes reified, or “actual”: a dreamed phenomenon that Coleridge calls “actual” appearance has the same tactile effect as an entity believed to exist. When dream entities inspire belief, they generate tactile effects, and when they possess those effects, they count as “actual” and/or believed in. Like the voice within that refutes him with “a perfect sense of distance,” abstract touch makes the point that for Coleridge, spectres are the paradigmatic things. Thus Coleridge often figures spectres as objects in or attached uncomfortably to the head. He also imagines heads, especially his own, detached or detachable, as though considering the surgical removal of his brain. He recalls that “Aristotle in his reasonings concerning vision adduces an instance of one Antipho, who always saw his own perfect image facing him [in] the air, wherever he was or whithersoever he moved” (N 2973). Coleridge laments “moral antiphos,” and pictures himself as an Antipho or Narcissus—imaginings that complement his poetic musings over Sara Hutchinson as “Phantom or Fact.” He is at least twice taken with a “well with shadows” and reflections where his own features may appear (N 981, N 2557), and compares the insubstantial form of his hallucinated acquaintance (mentioned above) to “a Face in a clear Stream” (N 2583).28 I’ve ilar line of inquiry is explored by Mary Shelley, who takes issue with what Coleridge means by “ghosts” in the same witticism. “These were not real ghosts” Coleridge referred to, Shelley writes; “they were shadows, phantoms unreal; that while they appalled the senses, yet carried no other feeling to the mind of others than delusion, and were viewed as we might view an optical deception which we see to be true with our eyes, and know to be false with our understandings. I speak of other shapes” (“On Ghosts” [1824], in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson [New York: Oxford UP, 1990], 334–340, pp. 336–337). For Shelley and Mudge, Coleridge’s spectres retain some claim to what is at stake in the idea of a ghost—unwilled presence that exceeds the self’s rationality. Yet I would argue that Coleridge regards spectres as false, in the sense that for all their psychic reality—with which, like Shelley, he is all too familiar—he also “know[s] [them] to be false with [his] understanding.” What puzzles him is that he feels obligated despite his knowledge that he is not obligated; nonetheless, he rightly rejects their entitlement to coerce him even as he feels coerced. Thanks to Ian Balfour for these references. 28. Coleridge declares that he is “convinced by repeated Observation, that if not perhaps always in a very minute degree, yet certainly but assuredly in certain states . . . we

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already mentioned, as well, the spectrum in which Coleridge’s face appears on the nightcap lying on his pillow, and the nightcap seems to contain the “associations” Coleridge has to it (N 1751). A cap can stand in for a head, as etymology suggests. Returning to Greta Hall after an absence, Coleridge is unnerved by the “astonishing Effect of a unbecoming Cap on Sara. It in the strictest sense of the word frightened me.” The ensemble had the “distressing character of one of those Dreams . . . in which all the features and stature, color, etc etc being altered, the person is still known and familiar” (N 3404). Coleridge reacts to Hutchinson’s change of cap as though she had changed her head, imploring her “a great deal too much in the Presence of others” to take it off. Coleridge sides with Sara’s contingent particularities over her ideal form, even though he recognizes the ideality: definitionally immutable, the ideality is “distressing.” Going over the incident in his notebook, he regrets his action as a tactical mistake, but never questions the significance of his perception. Since Hutchinson’s face tends to come to his mind before he goes to sleep, he worries that her new head will replace the one he loves and he won’t be able to do anything about it: “What if on my Death-bed her Face, which had hovered before me as my soothing and beckoning Seraph, should all at once flash into that new face, rendered of yet more affrightful expression by the action of the painful feelings produced by it, thence associated with it, thence returning with it in the same Trance of recollection, and of course modifying it” (N 3404)?29 Coleridge’s chain of associations leads to the idea that the strongest spectre is a certain kind of vivid memory, “returning . . . in the trance of recollection.” Coleridge gives it that name in an allegory of 1806: Memory, a wan misery-Eyed Female, still gazing with snatches of the eye at present forms to annihilate the one thought into which her see our own faces, and project them, according to the distance given them by the degree of indistinctness. . . . this may occasion in the highest degree the Wraith, (vide a hundred Scotch Stories, but better than all Wordsworth’s most wonderful as well as admirable Poem, Peter Bell, where he sees his own Figure)” (N 2583). 29. These good and bad Saras function apotropaically in Coleridge’s fantasy to divert his mind from death: as though the biggest problem with his own death were which version of Sara he might recall at the time.

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Being had been absorbed—& every form recalled & refixed—In the effort it seemed to be fluttering off—the moment the present form had been seen, it returned—She fed on bitter fruits from the Tree of Life—& often she attempted to tear off from her forehead a seal, which Eternity had placed there; and instantly she found in her Hand a hideous phantom of her own visage, with that seal on its forehead; and as she stood horrorstruck beholding the phantom-head so wan & supernatural, which she seemed to hold before her eyes with right hand too numb to feel or be felt/itself belonging to the eye alone, & like a rock in a rain-mist, distinguishable by one shade only of substance/(i.e. the vision enriched by subconsciousness of palpability by influent recollections of Touch) (N 2915) This fable explains how one becomes an Antipho. The protagonist is all Memory, to whom attention to phenomenality—“snatches of the eye at present forms”—offers a temporary counterweight. “Gazing . . . at present forms” is an “effort” more expressive than receptive, as though obsessive thoughts could escape through the eyes and be dissipated in nature—as in the later notebook entry in which “thinking” amounts to “thinging or thing out of me” (N 3587). Memory, however, is controlled by her thought; it can’t really be waved off, like the seal that has become inseparable from her head.30 When Memory tries to tear the thought away, she reduplicates both head and thought in her hand. The thought is no longer a thought of hers: rather, she is “absorbed” in it. What’s truly one’s property, Coleridge implies, can be expelled or detached: the thought fails to be Memory’s because it cannot be rendered external. We can learn how one comes to be possessed by a spectrum by recalling a thought with which Coleridge is perhaps obsessed: the primal scene of spectra, the idea of a possible sexual encounter between Wordsworth and Sara Hutchinson, represented by missing pages in Coleridge’s note30. Coleridge’s account of the head clarifies why the emptiness of Wordsworth’s head is solitary bliss and “deep vacation” in comparison, as in Mary Jacobus’s analysis. William Wordsworth, The Prelude [1805], in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 1979), III: 542, quoted in Jacobus, “Communicating and Not Communicating: Wordsworth and Winnicott,” in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 159.

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book. One evening Coleridge had come across Wordsworth and Hutchinson ambiguously “in bed.” He fled in panic to a local pub, where he drank the night away and wrote agitated pages in his notebook; afterward he ripped out the pages.31 What remains gives the reader to know that that night, Coleridge saw something that he believes was not there to be seen. The incident is perceptual, a spectrum (Schein) and not a sightless fantasy. Reflecting years later on the lasting sway this image has over him, Coleridge describes something like the conversion of a dangerous spectrum into a possessing spectre: Strange Self-power in the Imagination, when painful sensations have made it their Interpreter, or returning Gladsomeness from convalescence, gastric and visceral, have made its willed and evanished Figures and landscape bud, blossom, & live in scarlet, and green, & snowy white, (like the Fire screen inscribed with the nitrate & muriate of Cobalt)—strange power to represent the events & circumstances even to the Anguish or the triumph of the quasi-credent Soul, while the necessary conditions, the only possible causes of such contingencies are known to be impossible or hopeless, yea, when the pure mind would recoil from the very shadow of an an [sic] approaching hope, as from a crime—yet the effect shall have place & Substance & living energy, & no on a blue Islet of Ether in a whole Sky of blackest Cloudage shine, like a firstling of creation.—That dreadful Saturday Morning, at [. . .],32 did I believe it? Did I not even know, that it was not so, could not be so? Would it not have been the sin against the Holy Ghost, against my own spirit, that would have absolutely destroyed the good principle in my conscience, if I had dared to believe it conscientiously, & intellectually! Yes! Yes! I knew the horrid phantasm to be a mere phantasm: and yet what anguish, what gnawings of despair, what throbbings and lancinations of positive Jealousy!—even to this day the undying worm of distempered Sleep or morbid Day-dreams—Again— [. . .] how utterly improbable

31. Richard Holmes, Coleridge, Vol. 2: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 501, 83. 32. Ellipses indicate passages in cipher.

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dared I hope it! How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation health & activity of mind & body, at the heavenly hope of becoming, as much as is possible, worthy of the unutterably [. . .], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! . . . Sweet Hartley! What did he say, speaking of some Tale & wild Fancy of his Brain?—“It is not yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always, in here” (pressing one hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—“and then it will be—because it is not nothing.” (N 3547) Coleridge insists that what he thought he had seen was a mere appearance that affected him without his believing in its facticity, yet projects its potential transformation from hypothetical to psychic to actual reality. “Willed and evanished figures,” like sketches, stand ready to receive the elements he associates with streamy vivacity—green vigor, fire, and color. Coleridge’s respect for mental force leads him to ask himself whether he wishes this animation. The recurring language of “approach” and “recoil” hints that he is right to ask. The passage begins in abstraction, then moves from retreat from desire for Hutchinson—an “approaching hope” that Coleridge treats as a crime33—to hope that the events of “that dreadful Saturday” are implausible, then to what sounds like veiled hope for the events. It is as though Coleridge were implying that he has to hope the scene is “utterly improbable” because he is incapable of imagining Hutchinson in bed with himself, let alone with Wordsworth; and that, by a reversible logic, there is some profit in finding Hutchinson in bed with Wordsworth since that brings her closer, in a way, to being in bed with himself (and in the other combination, brings Coleridge closer to Wordsworth as well). In the sentence “How impossible for me . . . even to think of it, much less desire it,” the two unlikely possibilities seem to unite in one conveniently indefinite “it.” Observing that the effect of this spectrum of spectra in memory “is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny,” Coleridge shifts his attention from the dubiousness of the mere ap33. See footnote 11.

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pearance to the indubitable persistence of its trace in his mind. In the words Coleridge recalls, Hartley does the same. Trying like Memory to clutch at the contents of his head, Hartley declares that his thoughts are “not nothing” and therefore belong outside him. Hartley’s logic seems to be that an idea that feels this much like a thing cannot be only internal. By Coleridge’s reasoning, though, it is because Hartley’s “wild fancy” is solely in his head that it feels this much like a thing. From their place “behind” the self, memories and internal objects soothe or menace, and the mind is as helpless before their overtures as it ever is to sense data in empiricist epistemology. These mental entities may change, but not exactly because we change them; and in their reality effects, they can put fact perceptions in the shade. They “are often so dear & vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness” (N 308). Frightening spectres are definitionally strong because of their involuntariness; by a Darwinian kind of logic, if the imagination were capable of altering them, it would have done so already. Pressured by reifying impressions and reified objects, Coleridge drifts for relief toward the realm of spectra, to phenomenophilia, in which fact perception and mere appearance are divided by the infinitely fine line of Coleridge’s mental reservations. The thickness of the line would be the zone of perfect “suspension of disbelief” theorized by Coleridge, a suspension that never tips into positive belief. On the line, mere appearances are not something, and “not nothing” either, as Hartley carefully says. This territory of mere appearance is an antiontological attitude that is always available. If Derrida’s Spectres of Marx posits the spectre as the figure of the unassimilable other, and assumes the ethical necessity of one’s relation to that other, spectra are the other of that; they express a rightful dissatisfaction with, and an ethical right to withdrawal from, the coercion of the unassimilable.

As I bring these reflections on Coleridge toward their close, a brief comparison with Wordsworth may help to indicate the psychological range of the forms of suspensive perception that become available in the postcritical era, and Coleridge’s distinctiveness within it. Consider this de-

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scription of an “inverted scene” in Wordsworth’s popular touristic Guide to the Lakes (1810): Walking by the side of Ullswater upon a calm September morning, I saw, deep within the bosom of the lake, a magnificent Castle, with towers and battlements, nothing could be more distinct than the whole edifice;—after gazing with delight upon it for some time, as upon a work of enchantment, I could not but regret that my previous knowledge of the place enabled me to account for the appearance. It was in fact the reflection of a pleasure-house called Lyulph’s Tower—the towers and battlements magnified and so much changed in shape as not to be immediately recognized. In the meanwhile, the pleasurehouse itself was altogether hidden from my view by a body of vapour stretching over it and along the hill-side on which it stands, but not so as to have intercepted its communication with the lake; and hence this novel and most impressive object, which, if I had been a stranger to the spot, would from its being inexplicable have long detained the mind in a state of pleasing astonishment.34 Taken as it first appears, as a reflection with no obvious original, Wordsworth’s inverted castle is a veritable emblem of Kant’s Erscheinung—appearance that is stable, clear, and replete. Kant’s world is like that reflection, except that the vapor never lifts to reveal the inn. Still, while Wordsworth has “previous knowledge” that Lyulph’s pleasure-house is there to be reflected, in Kant’s philosophy we have an idea too, not of what’s there, but that something must be. Wordsworth’s lake reflection evokes Kantian appearance well because its scale is so vast and because Wordsworth’s reaction is so sensible. That said, his reaction is complicated. Wordsworth “regret[s]” his previous knowledge of the pleasurehouse, imagining what he assumes to be the intenser feelings that would

34. Guide to the Lakes [1810], ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 108. For a different reading of the epistemology of this passage, see Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 141–144.

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be aroused by a truly “inexplicable” appearance; but he regretfully regrets it, in a double negative (“could not but regret”) that remains within the secular while playing at departing from it. Moreover, Wordsworth’s imagination of what it would be like to be an unenlightened stranger—his assumption that that person would be able to be more pleased than he is—is contradicted by his self-description, in which he already has “gazed with delight . . . for some time, as upon a work of enchantment.” What would be the difference between this gazing and the hypothetical state of being “long detained . . . in a state of pleasing astonishment”? Only the “as.” And it’s plausible to suppose that that “as” clause actually allows Wordsworth more enjoyment than the befuddled stranger, because Wordsworth can know that Lyulph’s pleasure-house is there and pretend he doesn’t; he can frame the reflection as a normal appearance and pretend that it is an extraordinary illusion. Wordsworth’s knowledge is what allows him to choose to take the appearance as appearance (Erscheinung) or as though it were illusion (Schein). This ability to choose to frame mentally a natural appearance in order to consume it as though it were Schein exemplifies the new romantic (post-Kantian) relationship to scenery. Manipulating the appearance/ fictive illusion toggle is what visual enjoyment is all about; anyone who doesn’t know how to do this is prone to more bewilderment than pleasure. With the technics of phenomenal enjoyment, though, comes its potential commodification. It becomes worthwhile for someone like Wordsworth to show how he, personally, does it, which is why this episode is included in Wordsworth’s tourist guide. A similar thing happened to the Spectre of the Brocken: touristic literature recommended when to go and where to stand to increase the odds of experiencing the “illusion” (now an illusion-effect). The development of perceptual lore forms an analogue to the institutionalization of aesthetic singularity; following its thread would lead us eventually to cinema, with its splendidly staged fantasy of exceptional illusion for everybody. Coleridge’s manipulations of spectra, in contrast, underline their privacy, even as they are tinged with irony toward the unidyllic social dynamics which they imply and to which they still respond. On January 14, 1804, for example, Coleridge and Wordsworth took in “Images of Calmness on

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. . . Rydale Lake.” As they often do for Coleridge, perceptual mistakes about objects and reflections connote intimacy with appearances over and against other people: fresh Delves in the Slate Quarry I mistook for smoke in the reflection/ An islet Stone, at the bottom of the Lake, the reflection so bright as to be heaved up out of the water/the Stone & its reflection looked so compleatly one, that Wordsworth remained for more than 5 minutes trying to explain why that Stone had no Reflection/& at last found it out by me/ (N 1844) The closeness between object and reflection mirrors the incongruity between Coleridge and a rival perceiver—the difference suffered and prized by the connoisseur of spectra. Coleridge enjoys the spectrum itself, within a frame of experiment that renders this instance of Erscheinung Scheinlike, while Wordsworth experiences the reflection as an unusual stone. Coleridge relishes the solitude of his perception; he times this incident, too, at “more than 5 minutes,” but this time the object of the experiment seems to be Wordsworth. Since little is at stake here, Coleridge is mildly triumphant, confirmed in his difference and in his feeling that during such episodes, he can enjoy unmolested his capacity for mental reservation. But in a second entry Coleridge frankly sets harmonious negotiation between “Thought and Reality” in the context of a pervasive dissatisfaction with himself, the world, and others. In the mode of the “Dejection” ode and with an allusion to “The Ancient Mariner,” he reproaches himself for lacking the “Spirit of Life” that has to underwrite even the most superficial harmony: I work hard, I do the duties of common Life from morn to night/but verily—I raise my limbs, “like lifeless Tools”—The organs of motion & outward action perform their functions at the stimulus of a galvanic fluid applied by the Will, not by the Spirit of Life that makes Soul and Body one. Thought and Reality two distinct corresponding Sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the Sound Voice and which the Echo. O the beautiful Fountain or natural Well at Upper

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Stowey— [. . . . . . . . .] The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew from the Bottom/& so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that they their roots were not neighbours, & they side-by-side companions. So—even then I said—so are the happy man’s Thoughts and Things—(in the language of the modern Philosophers, ideas and Impressions.)—35 (N 2557) Coleridge’s reverie carries him from his present work, running on a “galvanic fluid” that is inefficient and unnatural, to an image of effortlessness and agreement that is also the memory of a spectrum. The thought of his own artificial fuel inspires a longing for the “beautiful Fountain or natural Well” with its spontaneous energy, and then for the thoughts and things that inhabit it on an equal footing. The “or” structure of the choice between “beautiful Fountain or natural Well” notes the alternatives of up and down, voice and echo, perception and illusion, while suggesting that there is no immediate reason to choose between them. The vivid spectrum in which the weeds growing down appear to be plants growing up— the difference between them emerges in slow time and after Coleridge becomes ready to touch the water—is figured in the social terms of leisure and companionability, yet recalled from within a description of “common Life” that completely lacks these qualities. Coleridge uses the spectrum to imagine a “happy man” who contemplates thoughts and things without hierarchizing them, and to whom it does not immediately matter which is which. A perceptual world so arranged, he hints, may give some idea of what a really socially companionable world would be like.

35. Although likely written a few years later, this entry recalls Coleridge’s letter to William Godwin of January 22, 1802, in which he notes the overvivacity of his own thoughts and “a diminished Impressionability of Things” which he believes leaves his “ideas, wishes & feelings . . . to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action” (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs [Oxford: Clarendon, 1956], 2: letter 432). On Coleridge’s speculations on how a natural language might ameliorate the relation between thoughts and things, see James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), especially 4–32.

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3 . c onte m po rary t h eo ri es o f d e realization a nd mi stru st In Difference and Disavowal, psychoanalyst Alan Bass describes something complementary to Coleridge’s fondness for spectra. He studies “concrete” patients, a term of art for patients characterized by their tendency toward interminable analysis, nonnegotiable certainty about specific beliefs, and manipulative interventions in their environments. These traits go together, as the patients protect their convictions by creating environments that support them. One concrete patient, for example, is “in the habit of playing with the plastic tissue box case next to the couch.” Finally he confesses that by angling the box, he can see the reflection of the analyst, hence breaking the analytic frame and replacing it with one of his own.36 Bass’s research on concrete patients is pointed at psychoanalysis, not at the patients. According to Bass, analysts deal poorly with concrete patients—thus leading to interminable situations—because the patients elicit concrete behavior from the analysts. A power struggle over versions of reality ensues. Freud’s theory of fetishism similarly mirrors the hallucinatory reification of the fetishist. In an infamous logical slip, Freud writes that the fetishist fantasizes the woman with a penis and disavows the “fact of castration.” As Bass points out, “the fetishist’s oscillation between the woman’s castration and noncastration, however, is an oscillation between two fantasies,” only one of which Freud recognizes as a fantasy (Difference and Disavowal, 30). Or again, “when Klein says that ‘the ego endeavours to keep

36. Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 13. I say that fetishism is “complementary” to looking away, not that looking away is fetishistic. Both fetishism and looking away stop short of accepting the given, because both deflect the coercion of fact perception. Bass’s thoughts about the dynamics of power struggles over reality seem useful for the analysis of both. Beyond this, however, their similarity ends. As Lacan points out, the fetish is like an inanimate object, and the fetishist uses it to render experience as static as possible. One can return to a fetish and, ideally, find it always the same (Le Séminaire IV: La relation d’objet (1956–1957), ed. J.-A. Miller [Paris: Seuil, 1994], 91). Spectra and other objects of looking away are singular and evanescent. The phenomenophile knows that their beauty consists partly in their never being found again. They are also susceptible to transformation and association, as we’ve seen, and are not used to prevent change. They are species of reverie rather than of fetishism.

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the good apart from the bad, and the real from the phantastic,’ she does not notice that what she calls ‘the real’ is actually fantastic” (181). The one-sided theory of reality Bass finds in Freud’s theory of fetishism also appears in the interpretation of Coleridge that most directly addresses his attitude toward phenomenality. Stanley Cavell’s reading of Coleridge in In Quest of the Ordinary illustrates his argument in The Claim of Reason and other works that skeptics displace their legitimate doubt regarding others’ thoughts onto objects, and thus animate objects by treating them as though they could sustain doubt. Understandable doubt about what’s going on in other people leaves room for aggression toward them; object skepticism, Cavell suggests, veils the possibility of aggression by depersonalizing doubt. In his essay on Coleridge, Cavell assimilates idealism to skepticism on the hypothesis that both are motivated by discontent with limits on interpersonal communication and thus attempt “to experience what cannot humanly be experienced.”37 For Cavell, idealist affirmation— which is to denial what hyperintensity is to derealization—is also selfdestructive, an “animation” of the world that winds up implying that the world is dead and in need of animation. Like the Ancient Mariner’s project of unifying known and unknown parts of the world, it is a “skeptic maneuver” toward the ordinary world for Cavell, “a denial that as we stand, we know” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 49). Thus in The Claim of Reason Othello murders Desdemona because he can’t possess her absolutely; in epistemological terms, he decides not to know her at all because he can’t know everything about her, because of his “disappointment over knowledge itself” (440). According to Cavell, the Ancient Mariner is even further from being able to acknowledge the limits of relation, since, always already invaded by others, he doesn’t even have a concept of distance to acknowledge. While the Mariner’s style of doubt does not lead inevitably to Othello’s rejection of relation altogether, the structure of The Claim of Reason—moving from diffident, curious skepticism to tragic, world-annihilating skepticism—implies that it may. At the least, object skepticism fails to advance the confrontation with aggression that might defuse tragedy. In the later Coleridge essay, Cavell sequences the two skepticisms outright, connecting the Mariner’s yen for the unknown to his murder of 37. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 50.

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his animal companion, which Cavell interprets as a misguided attempt to clear a minimal distance for the self. Cavell’s interpretation respects skepticism in that it does not claim that skeptics are seeing the world wrong, yet is surprisingly violent in figuring skepticism as murder (“say by stoning, or by hanging” [Claim of Reason, 493]). Both skeptics and realists are mistaken, he argues, in their shared assumption that the skeptic’s experience is “different” or “incomprehensible” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 58). In effect, someone like Coleridge errs not in experiencing derealization, but in overvaluing his experience and imagining that there is some other kind of experience—something more intense, real, or meaningful. What is striking about this summary of Cavell’s argument is how much Coleridge feels this way himself.38 “No person I can believe—no thing I can disbelieve,” Coleridge concurs (N 711). And he too believes that he overvalues his experiences. Although he would of course like to stop having nightmares, what really distresses him is not having nightmares, but being distressed about having nightmares. Most of Coleridge’s struggles follow from this position. In this way, his experience suggests that it may not be helpful to propose that skeptics need, not to admit that they have commonsensical perceptions, but only to acknowledge the distance and proximity built into the perceptions they do have. There are two separate problems with this line of thought. The first has a concrete structure, like Freud’s slip regarding castration. Cavell treats animism as nothing more than a delusion, with no vivifying effects; but if it is a delusion, then he should not figure skepticism as murder. The “denial” of the world, also, should have no destructive effects. If the point is rather that animism psychologically or actually destroys, then, again, skepticism should psychologically or actually vivify (as surrealists believe perceptual estrangement vivifies). Second, although Cavell’s Othello analysis advocates acknowledgment of mediation, it reasserts a kind of transparency of consciousness on a meta-level. For if denial and acknowledgment were symmetrical, then acknowledgment would mean affirmation. But it cannot mean that, because for Cavell affirmation is a self-destructive trap, deadening through animation. Therefore, acknowledgment must be

38. Cavell himself may even be suggesting that Coleridge feels this way, since it isn’t clear whether he thinks Coleridge endorses the motives of the Ancient Mariner, whose actions resembles Othello’s.

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neither denial nor affirmation. It winds up sounding like just seeing—not seeing the world with entire clarity, but seeing with entire clarity that we see the world in the limited way we do, and that our relations with it and with other people are structurally limited: just seeing this state of affairs rather than protesting or celebrating it. Perhaps acknowledgment is meant to be the minimal degree of affirmation that comes with cognition, as I will be arguing Kant proposes in his own epistemological therapeutics. As it stands, however, Cavell’s “own choice as the hero of this particular piece of history” is William Blake, a vigorous affirmer who demonstrates “a brave acceptance of the sufficiency of human finitude, an achievement of the complete disappearance of its disappointment, in oneself and in others, an acknowledgment of satisfaction and of reciprocity” (Claim of Reason, 471, my italics). At the least, the concept of acknowledgment needs more content so that we can know what degree of endorsement it entails and how much demurral it can encompass. I adduce celebration and objection as emotional extensions of acknowledgment and denial; Cavell never describes the Mariner’s or Coleridge’s attitude as a form of objection. “Denial” is not only less emotive than “objection”; it’s less tenable. One can mind something without denying that it is so or evading one’s aggression, and in this sense withhold acceptance in the sense of endorsement. When the absence of endorsement is conflated with denial, the very possibility of minding a state of affairs is lost. That conclusion is troubling, since both Cavell and Coleridge believe that perceptual realms are necessarily social ones. Perhaps skeptics and idealists are not denying the structural limitations of human communication so much as saying that they don’t like these limitations. According to realists, the reason we have to either acknowledge or endorse these limitations is that they make relation possible. The fact that something makes relation possible, of course, does not make the relation good. It’s not necessary to reject relation in order to register the residue of dissatisfaction we are left with; and it does not have to be possible for things to be different in order for it to be understandable to want to say that it would be better if they were. Of course, it isn’t the traditional task of philosophy to discuss what conditions of knowledge would be better than the ones we have.39 Hence 39. Alternatively, the history of epistemology can indeed be read as a series of imaginings of conditions that should pertain, disguised as descriptions of the ones that do.

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Coleridge’s discreet phenomenophilia, developed in his Notebooks sequestered from public theological and philosophical interests: only away from those interests, in the epistemological cul-de-sac of looking away, does it become possible to express more than they support. Hence too the animus of philosophers against too much interest in mere phenomenality, cast as irrelevant, infantile, futile, neurotic, delusive, or destructive. Adorno remarks that at times, emphasis on the mind’s limitations “amounts to . . . an embargo on further enquiry.”40 Kant’s “negative conclusions” and Kant’s and Fichte’s infinities, he observes, sometimes seem to contain the “negative meaning . . . that the utopia which is demanded of us should never take place . . . and we might almost say that it ought to remain a dream” (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 27, 73). A parallel embargo on desire inhabits contempt for the phenomenophile, a sentiment something like: “What’s the matter? World not good enough for you?” We should ask why it seems so inconceivable, even to people like Coleridge, to answer this question No. For if it were not inconceivable—if the thought of this answer did not send us into guilty fantasies of our own deviance—it might no longer sound like denial or ingratitude to say that the structural limitations that shape experience make relation possible without making it tolerably good.

40. Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1995], trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 47.

2 Appearance and Acceptance in Kant

As a self-help book for victims of transcendental illusion, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason achieved mixed results. Coleridge, De Quincey, Kleist, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are among the many who register the failure of Kantian comfort to soothe the nervous mind. Stanley Cavell remarks, “you don’t . . . have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about [Kant’s] settlement: Thanks for nothing.”1 “Thanks for nothing” is in fact close to Kant’s own point. As a project of reconciliation to the world, the Critique of Pure Reason asks what it means to accept necessary limits; what counts as acceptance (it may be less than thanks) and what counts as necessity are both at issue. From the point of view of acceptance, I’ll suggest, Kant’s notoriously narrow definitions of the indispensable make for relatively light—that is, strictly delimited—obligations to value. Kant views these obligations as so light that he has been interpreted as 1. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 31.

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severing fact from value altogether; so light that he himself sometimes discounts them. Kant’s figures for the distinction between understanding and reason, “is” and “ought”—an abyss, a chasm, etc.—seem to name the structural axis of the critical system. It goes without saying that for Kant, free moral and aesthetic judgments are different in kind from causal and cognitive mechanisms. Still, the assumption that organizes Kant’s project and has been read as nearly splitting it apart—that any truly causal connection between fact and value cannot at the same time be a free judgment—also implies the positive conclusion that only something ambiguously quasicausal and quasi-free could connect fact and value. If it existed, such a thing would blur the inner edges of “fact” and “value.” This ambiguous something does exist in the critical project. Fact and value blend in what must look, from the perspective of freedom, like a quasi-value, a value hardly worthy of the name. Value of this dubious, quasi-causal sort is carried by fact perception. In the Third Critique Kant calls it “objective liking.”2 I’ve contended that because the coercion of fact perception is hard to take, that is, because it seems to require an endorsement that we don’t want to deliver, it becomes appealing to flee from fact perception into phenomenophilia, which sidesteps it, and that many post-critical romantic texts are phenomenophilic in this sense. The Critique of Judgment is, in a way, another of these texts—the most organized, positive, and integrative of them.3 In the Third Critique Kant seeks a noncoercive, fully subjective alternative to objective liking, and finds it in aesthetic reflective judgments of taste. In retrospect, however, Kant’s trajectory from the First to the Third Critique obscures the alternative therapeutics of acceptance presented by objective liking in the First Critique. Although objective liking does not imply a basis for noncoercive, optional community, it does con2. Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 210, 366, hereafter CJ. 3. Meanwhile, in the sciences a concern to explain what produces fact perception drives theoretical and experimental optics in the post-Kantian era. Timothy Lenoir discusses in this context Helmholtz’s empiricist theory of perception, in which “nothing is given in the act of perception” itself and what analytic philosophy calls fact perceptions are achieved by learning and conditioning. See “Operationalizing Kant: Manifolds, Models and Mathematics in Helmholtz’s Theories of Perception,” in The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann (Cambridge: MIT P, 2006), 141–210, p. 143.

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stitute minimal acceptance of nonoptional reality and is the precondition for anything more affirmative. Objective liking is at least as significant as aesthetic reflective judgment, and necessary to aesthetic reflective judgment, which, to be free, must be free to follow or not. The function of fact perception in the critical system is overlooked because it is so prosaic that no one wants to look for it: tangential to the sphere of free thought, touching it at a single point, the value of fact as such is a thing of no circumference. Yet it is important to notice this fact of minimal fact value: as though reenacting a discovery of the reality principle, such a realization approximates an apprehension of the meaning of “reality” itself. The First Critique suggests that concluding by reason that seeming limits really are inevitable already constitutes a minimal, quasi-subjective endorsement of them, and that this minimal endorsement completes our obligation to accept the given world (in the new Kantian sense in which the given includes one’s own cognitive structures). To the extent that we can realize that we have already fulfilled this obligation—understand that we have already paid the entrance fee for life on Earth—we can know that our value judgments are voluntary: what is beyond is “free.” The principle of minimal fact value afforded by the First Critique is a major contribution to the literature of world-acceptance. When we keep this principle in mind, the unfinished business of the critical system is not how to connect fact and value—since they are already connected at a single point—but how to get from minimal value, which is obligatory and quasi, to a value judgment that is robust. While there is a chasm in the critical system, then, it’s smaller than one might think, and placed between acceptance (objective liking) and active affirmation (subjective liking). It surprises me to say it, but I’ve come to believe that this conclusion makes for a new interpretation of the relation between the First and Third Critiques, a relation made possible by Kant’s not taking acceptance of the given for granted in the first place. In part 4 of this chapter I’ll give some thought to Kant’s consideration of the contrast between objective liking and aesthetic reflective judgments in the Critique of Judgment. I’ll begin, however, by reading the First Critique on its own, less with an eye toward the eventual development of the aesthetic than with attention to the role of appearance in producing a version of reconciliation to the given world particular to the First Critique. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the question

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of necessity and acceptance leads through appearance, in the form of obligations to and freedoms from value that arise through necessary and contingent appearances.

1 . fr om mere t o n ecessary appearance What makes the First Critique’s solution to world-acceptance and responses to it peculiar is that both filter their attitudes toward acceptance through attitudes toward appearance and vice versa. Appearances—normal, replete Erscheinungen—are what Kant first asks us to accept. So, one of the unintended effects of the First Critique is to intensify attention to the forms of appearance marginalized by the First Critique—for instance, the optical illusions Coleridge records in his notebooks, or the ocular afterburns, “sparks of fire,” and “spectres of light” that populate Goethe’s Theory of Colors.4 For Goethe, timing the duration of afterimages, measuring conditions for “subjective halos,” and the like (Theory of Colors, §§89–100) form part of a straightforwardly post-Kantian exploration of perceptual infrastructure. Filled with the critical jargon of “exhibit[ion] . . . in an unbroken series” and “demands [for] completeness” (lvi, §60), Goethe’s Theory of Colors aspires to be a Critique of colors—to show “the circumstances under which they simply appear and are, and beyond which no further explanation of them is possible” (lviii). Unlike Goethe, Coleridge isn’t sure he is being as good a Kantian as he’d like to be. Kant emphasizes recognizable appearances as end products of successful cognition; Coleridge pursues exotic, transient images and associates them with deviance and procrastination. Kant assures us that many optical and logical illusions are normal and inevitable; Coleridge feels guilty about being interested in illusions for their own sake, even when he knows they are normal and inevitable. It isn’t unKantian for Coleridge to be affected by illusions; it’s un-Kantian for him to continue to mind being affected after Kant has explained why he must be, because Kant’s explanation of transcendental illusion is supposed in itself to be ameliorating. 4. Theory of Colors [1810], trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge: MIT P, 1970), §118.

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Thus, Kant’s establishment of appearance and necessary illusion as the realm of normalcy and proper frame of human life infuses abnormal appearance and contingent illusion with rebellious appeal. An eccentric, rarefied image now comes forward, figured as more eccentric and more rarefied than images used to have to be—De Quincey’s Spectre of the Brocken is a stellar example. The optical illusions that Coleridge tracks in his Notebooks often do and sometimes don’t conform to the normal appearances and necessary illusions that Kant carefully includes within the bounds of benign human perception. Whether they do or don’t, however, Coleridge, as a good reader of Kant, faces—or believes he faces—the new problem of having to figure out whether a perception is his fault or not. This obligation arises for the very reason that Kant urges us not to feel guilty about perceptions that aren’t our fault. In and after Kant, then, several varieties of appearance are available, including some new ones. There is still the traditional sense that appearance is always mere appearance, an obstacle to knowledge and immediacy; and there is Kant’s new sense of positive, normal Erscheinung. There are stable, explicable optical illusions, which are the heuristic model for normal appearance; and there are special cases of illusion, truly florid or exotic, that take on the burden of deviance which appearance in general used to bear. It is these rogue illusions to which Kant refers when he starts his discussion of appearance with the proviso that “we are not here concerned with empirical (e.g. optical) illusion” (CPR A295/B352). To distinguish the kinds of illusions that do concern him, Kant deploys fault and right.5 Anomalous illusions can reveal nothing very important, since they are happenstance mistakes “in the empirical employment of rules of under-

5. “Fault” (Schuld) and “right” (Recht) are not exactly opposites; the opposite of Recht is Unrecht, injustice. If you don’t have a right, what you have instead isn’t anything at all, but only a lack of right. The opposite of a fault, too, would seem to be less something positive than faultlessness, that is, freedom from fault. But for Kant, I’ll suggest, freedom from fault is a positive right that may be held subjectively; it is the very model of right.

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standing that are otherwise correct” (A295/B352). In contrast, the appearances we normally experience are no “mere illusion[s]”: when I say that the intuition of outer objects and the self-intuition of the mind alike represent the objects and the mind, in space and in time, as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear, I do not mean to say that these objects are a mere illusion [Schein]. For in an appearance the objects, nay even the properties that we ascribe to them, are always regarded as something actually given. . . . When I maintain that the quality of space and of time, in conformity with which, as a condition of their existence, I posit both bodies and my own soul, lies in my mode of intuition and not in those objects in themselves, I am not saying that bodies merely seem [scheinen] to be outside me, or that my soul only seems to be given in my self-consciousness. It would be my own fault, if out of that which I ought to reckon as appearance, I made mere illusion [Es wäre meine eigene Schuld, wenn ich aus dem, was ich zur Erscheinung zählen sollte, bloßen Schein machte]. (B69– 70; my italics) Kant’s introduction of “fault” here sounds the keynote of the First Critique: it’s no exaggeration to say that the mission of the First Critique is to absolve human beings, and specifically human reason, of blame for the transcendental illusions. This mission statement appears in the famous first sentences of Kant’s preface to the first edition: human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is not able to answer. The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault [Schuld] of its own. (Aviii) As we’ll see, ordinary appearances will be distinguished by associated qualities of regularity and innocence. In appearance “the objects . . . are always regarded as something actually given”; “appearance without anything that appears” would be “absurd” (Bxxvii, Bxxvi). While an appearance with

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no relation to consciousness could never appear in the first place,6 the appearances we do perceive need to be synthesized, and are synthesized, by the imagination (A120), which, acting through the senses, “combine[s] [impressions] so as to generate images of objects” for the understanding (A120n). “If the synthesis of the manifold of appearance is interrupted,” appearance breaks into fragments (A170/B212). “A pure imagination . . . is thus one of the fundamental faculties” (A124), since “otherwise” the senses, “though indeed yielding appearances, would supply no objects of empirical knowledge” (A124). The senses and/or imagination may malfunction and present errant appearances, “illusory representations to which the objects do not correspond, the deception being attributable sometimes to a delusion of the imagination (in dreams) and sometimes to an error of judgment (in so-called sense-deception)” (A376). If ordinary appearances are achievements of imaginative synthesis, then “illusory representations” are symptoms of sensory or imaginary disorder or errors of judgment. It’s “my own fault”—that is, the fault of a defective or misused imagination and/or understanding—if I render what could have been perceptions as illusions. The fact that a physical failing, as well as an error in judgment, may be responsible for a mistake in perception doesn’t necessarily mute the moralization of blame. As the social history of sexuality shows, blame can be cast upon a deviant body even when its flaws are involuntary, and the close proximity in Kant’s text of errors in imagination and errors in judgment invites the reader to remember that history. Unlike the blunders of substandard sense organs or imagination, the transcendental illusions of reason—for instance, my conviction that I ought to be able to solve a problem I can never solve—are not my fault. I can tell they are not my fault because they are so consistent and virulent. 6. As Lewis White Beck points out, at one point Kant writes startlingly that “appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to be in accordance with the principles of its unity. Everything might be in such confusion, for instance, in the series of appearances that nothing presented itself which might yield a rule of synthesis and so answer the conception of cause and effect” (A89–90/B122– 123, quoted in Beck, “Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams?,” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Kitcher [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988], 103–116, pp. 103–104). Beck shows that in the second edition of the First Critique and in the Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant makes efforts to countermand this assertion, which should be a contradiction in terms by his logic.

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Transcendental illusion [Schein] distinguishes itself from mere illusion— empirical or logical—by intransigence of effect: it “does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed” (A297/B35). As Michelle Grier points out, Kant insists that “although the illusions that ground the metaphysical errors are, in each case, ‘unavoidable’ and ‘necessary,’ the subsequent errors (fallacies) are not.”7 Kant can maintain both that the transcendental illusions are “inevitable” and that he can help us avoid their ill effects. It is at this point, to secure the contrast between contingent and inevitable illusion, that Kant brings necessary empirical (optical) illusions in, for they are marked by the same merciful regularity that allows us to adjust for them. Inevitable optical phenomena offer precedent for precisely the distinction between illusion and self-deception: We . . . take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts, which is to the advantage of the understanding, for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion [Illusion] which can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore, since we see it through higher light rays; or to cite a still better example, than the astronomer can prevent the moon from appearing large at its rising, although he is not deceived by this illusion. . . . That the illusion should, like logical illusion, actually disappear and cease to be an illusion, is something which transcendental dialectic can never be in a position to achieve. For here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion, which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective; whereas logical dialectic in its exposure of deceptive inferences has to do merely with an error in the following out of principles, or with an illusion artificially created in imitation of such inferences. There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason—not one in which a bungler might entangle himself through lack of knowledge, or one which some sophist has artificially invented to confuse thinking people, but one inseparable from human reason, and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not 7. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 304.

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cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction.8 (A297–298/ B353–354) The notion of fault runs deep here, so to speak, arranging avoidable illusions and transcendental illusions to shape the arena of normal experience. Release from fault arrives under the classic sign of mediated vision, the indirect light of the moon. For Kant, appearance that is no one’s fault is appearance to which we have a right, and with which we can be satisfied even when it leaves us perplexed.

2 . no fa ul t In the preface to the first edition of the First Critique, the analgesic Kant offers for reason’s “peculiar fate” is his assertion that it’s all right that we’re naturally made to pursue unanswerable questions.9 His remark that one

8. The harmlessness of necessary optical illusions is so intuitive that Grier can claim “that Kant does not consider the unavoidable illusion to be in itself or necessarily deceptive is clear from his frequent use of optical analogies” (ibid., 10; see also 129n51). J. L. Austin uses optical illusions as Kant does, to distinguish illusion from delusion via fault and pathology: “when I see an optical illusion, however well it comes off, there is nothing wrong with me personally . . . it is quite public, anyone can see it, and in many cases standard procedures can be laid down for producing it. Furthermore, if we are not actually to be taken in, we need to be on our guard; but it is no use to tell the sufferer from delusions to be on his guard. He needs to be cured” (Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock [London: Oxford UP, 1962], 24). 9. Starting his study of Kant with the preface to the First Critique, Peter Fenves claims that “whoever stands under the sign of fate . . . is consigned to the question, the outstanding instance of which is, doubtless, why this fate?” (A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991], 2). Fenves goes on to argue that “fate” is one of the concepts that Kant wishes to address with “the question: quid juris” (CPR A84/B117)—“the solicitation of a legal ground [Rechtsgrund] for, among other issues, an accountable fatality”—but that the metaphysical notion of fate must “persist even in the face of the most enlightened critique” (11–12). Thus Fenves finds that “lamentation is the only possible setting” for Kant’s text, “its fundamental tone” (7). If fate raises “why” questions, however, it is at least as often interpreted as compelling an end to questioning; it is part of Kant’s enlightenment reformism to grant that “Why this fate?” is a question that has a right to expect any answer. The First Critique is a largely successful secular comedy that modifies and domesticates fate, and the text is remark-

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doesn’t have to be a “bungler” or a “sophist” to be taken in by transcendental illusion clears us of shame and guilt respectively—and hence implies that shame and guilt are what we might be feeling. Since “even the wisest of men” “will never be able to free himself from the illusion [Schein], which unceasingly mocks and torments him” (A339/B397), Kant’s text calls on the reader to discriminate erroneous thinking and looking from judging and acting on the basis of erroneous thoughts and looks. The thinking/judging distinction recalls Stoic theories of mental consent to interior states, with their implication that moral life consists in self-correction. Unlike Kant’s later texts, however, the First Critique escapes the anxious hypervigilance of self-correction. Correction will be necessary, but most of all the point is that life will be easier if we don’t berate ourselves for being unable to keep unwilled thoughts and perceptions from arising in the first place. Kant’s calming appeal to “natural tendency” (A642/B670) has a familiar ring to contemporary ears: we know it from the psychiatric discourse of illness, addiction, and, most relevantly, homosexuality.10 The wisest of men cannot prevent the mental manifestations of these things from occurring, either, any more “than the astronomer can prevent the moon from appearing large at its rising.” It may seem odd to attribute psychological permissiveness to Kant, the inventor of the categorical imperative. But therapeutic discourse, too, means to ease responsibility by talk of “clear boundaries.” Kant exploits the convenience of boundaries methodologically when he asserts that philosophers “are not called upon to incur any responsibility through unnecessary undertakings from which we can be relieved” (A241). And in the psycho-

able for its absence of lamentation. A similar view is shared by H. W. Cassirer, who opines that Kant’s feeling “that it would not even be desirable if we possessed any knowledge other than that which we actually do possess. . . . goes to show that the metaphysical temperament proper is lacking in him” (Kant’s First Critique: An Appraisal of the Permanent Significance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [London: Allen & Unwin, 1954], 236). 10. On the covalence of historical logics for homosexuality and addiction, see Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 172; on the historical conjuncture of recreational drugs and romantic literature, see Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002). On the queer Kant, see Andrew Cutrofello, Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance (Albany: State U of New York P, 1994), and David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 (2001): 201–289.

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logical as opposed to moral realm, he demands little, refusing to prescribe thoughts and feelings. Kant regulates the self by maxims rather than by seeking to strengthen its capacities; he accepted depression and hypochondria as part of his personality—“staying-at-home à la Kant,” Nietzsche called it (WP §444)—and considered himself, in his own words, “healthy in a weak way.”11 About his own character Kant wrote to Moses Mendelssohn that “there may be flaws that even the most steadfast determination cannot eradicate completely” (quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 172).12 This is not the Kant of the moral writings. The psychology of the First Critique is peripheral, something that winds up in the text as Kant tackles epistemology; when Kant notices the tacit psychological laxity of the First Critique, he supplements its laissez-faire implications with overt moral schemes.

3 . th e r i g ht t o a ph en o men al wo rld When the moon rises in Kant’s text, inevitable empirical illusion comes into its own, separating from contingent empirical illusion to become the standard of normal appearance13 and benign illusion (for it is both). The 11. Quoted in Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 172. 12. In his lectures on moral philosophy, Kant opines that when it comes to interpersonal relations these flaws cannot participate: “Even to our best friend, we must not discover ourselves as we naturally are and know ourselves to be, for that would be a nasty business” (Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath, eds. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 188). The implication is that one would have to turn for self-expression to experiences that cannot be imagined to be shared with another person. For subtle commentary on this remark, see Candace Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), 48–85; for consideration of Kantian sexuality in the Ethics in general, see Lara Denis, “Kant on the Wrongness of ‘Unnatural Sex,’” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999): 225–248. Also compare Kant, “On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution,” in The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 233–327. Clark observes, “What is curious about this essay is that it ends by pointing out the inability and finally unwillingness of the mind to master its morbid feelings, a slippage that might remind us that the negative attention of refusal or abstraction is a leaving out which is never complete—why else would it demand such incessant reiteration?” (“Kant’s Aliens,” 271). 13. P. F. Strawson questions this reality of real appearance: “what sort of truth about ourselves is it, that we appear to ourselves in a temporal guise? Do we really so appear

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moon really does appear large; we can’t make it appear small by changing our position, squinting, or reading astronomy. If it’s hard to be dissatisfied with the moon, which is beautiful in every changing shape, perhaps that’s because the only relation we want to have to it is the only one we can have, namely, looking at it.14 The moon is a good figure for the satisfaction that consciousness of appearance affords, one that shows how its appeal lies in its not threatening to overwhelm—in there not having to be more. Thus Kant’s language of boundaries and rights comes together with the discourse of appearance and reality to make room for the odd notion of a right to appearance.15 We have a right to no more than appearance—to to ourselves or only appear to ourselves so to appear to ourselves? . . . But now what does ‘really do appear’ mean? The question is unanswerable; the bounds of intelligibility have been traversed, by any standard” (The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1966][London: Routledge, 1989], 39). This new notion of real appearance comes to dominate post-Enlightenment realism. Thus Ian Hacking writes that Thomas Kuhn’s nominalism is not “very strict”—it is informed by realism—because for Kuhn “the anomalies [in a scientific description] ‘really’ do have to seem to be resolved in order for a revolutionary achievement to be recognized” (Historical Ontology [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002], 40). 14. There are now legal arguments about property rights to astronomical objects, which would make it possible to resent them. 15. Obviously Kant’s project is built on legal metaphors. Kant describes the Critique itself as “a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims [gerechten Ansprüchen]” (CPR Axi) by investigating “in what way and by what right [Recht] reason has come into possession” of its concepts (Bxxxv). Kant specifies several rights of faculties, sometimes using the term “claim,” but associating the two terms, as when he writes of “all the rights and claims [Rechte und Ansprüchen] of speculation” (A669/ B697). Logically first, reason has a right to a fair tribunal: thus Kant defends the part of the Critique that might seem, as method, most controversial—the staged conflict of antinomy: “no one can be blamed for, much less prohibited from, presenting for trial the two opposing parties . . . before a jury of like standing with themselves, that is, before a jury of fallible men” (A476/B504). Beyond this, reason has a right to tools it legitimately possesses and a right to pursue ventures formed according to its “natural constitution [Naturbestimmung]” (Axiii). The understanding too may be “assured of its claims” and “possessions” and the ability to use them (A238/B297). Reason and understanding have rights to prescribe rules, “to serve as our guide” (A819/B847), and so on. Only reason and understanding ever have rights in Kant’s figurative legal system; sensibility doesn’t have a right to the appearance of the landscape any more than the bosom of the lake has a right to reflect the mountain. The understanding, however, with its obligation to apply concepts and principles to appearances, has a right to do so, even to the point of producing inevitable illusion (as opposed to appearances that do not connect to

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hear this as a lament, as Peter Fenves does, is to miss the relief Kant finds in being able to have, and being supposed to do, no more.16 As Kant’s critics complain, his writings tend to offer freedom from something more than freedom to do something.17 But the enjoyment Kant experiences when there’s nothing further to do indicates that the epistemological rights the First Critique establishes gratify not only because they ward off dangers, but because they ease preceding fears and guilts and render the pleasure of vanished pain. The idea of a right to appearance may seem, and may be, incoherent: rights and inevitabilities are usually opposed, and real appearances and necessary illusions of the sort Kant discusses are inevitabilities. If this is incoherence, it is very characteristic of Kant, who resists separating obligations from rights and urges that natural laws he locates within us be regarded as claims by us. The ambiguousness of the German word “Recht” (law, justice; right, claim, title—similar to French “droit”) assists him in this. Derrida remarks that for Kant, the “value of exteriority distinguishes pure rights from morals”; the reciprocal relations of the Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals, for example, compose the sort of “external constraint” that alone justifies “the consciousness of an obligation.”18 Obempirical intuitions and “are a mere play of imagination or of understanding” [A239/ B298]). Kerry Larson points out that Emerson takes up the possibility Kant avoids—extending the “rhetoric of natural rights” to nonintentional things: “we have as good right, and the same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there” (The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VI: The Conduct of Life, ed. Barbara L. Parker, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003], 134, quoted in “Justice to Emerson,” Raritan 21 [2002]: 46–67, p. 53). As Larson argues, Emerson uses the analogy to claim that people have no right to expect more security than things in nature possess. 16. Complementarily, Kant’s fear of addiction shows his horror at the idea of having to have more. See David L. Clark, “We ‘Other Prussians’: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late Kant,” European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 261–287. 17. Paul Guyer reconstructs Kant’s development of the notion that “we take a unique and indeed higher satisfaction in the fact of our freedom itself than in any of the products of this freedom,” and points out that for Kant freedom is in this way connected to happiness despite Kant’s restrictions on interest (Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000], 108). 18. “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I [1990], trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 46, 47.

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jective constraint like that of the laws of physics, according to Derrida, “is the very definition of right according to Kant” (“Privilege,” 51). Things that can’t be otherwise are the only ones that require our endorsement. This very Kantian issue of the endorsement of inevitability pertains especially vividly to appearances in the First Critique because Kant has just moved them from the column of contingencies to the column of necessities. At this moment, “right” is coming into being as the positive of a lifted guilt or resentment—a newly enjoyable state of not being wrong or wronged. Reason had been trying to get rid of certain appearances and feeling bad about them, and now it doesn’t have to: suddenly it’s free to regard them as exigencies in which, in typically Kantian style, we have a guilt-free duty/ right to participate. In this respect the First Critique draws on pre-critical writings such as Kant’s 1753 manuscript jottings on “optimism” and the 1759 “Attempt at some reflections on optimism.” By “optimism” here Kant means the science of determining the optimal. In these writings Kant defines the “best” as the most real, and the most real as that which couldn’t be otherwise. In the 1759 text, a jaunty and largely sympathetic response to Leibniz, Kant “equate[s] the absolute perfection of a thing with its degree of reality”19 and the maximal degree of reality with the concept of God. In effect, Kant identifies God with reality: “in God everything is reality, and nothing harmonizes to a greater degree with that reality than that which itself contains a greater reality [than other things]” (“Reflections on optimism,” 75–76). In one of the 1753 notes, Kant justifies the flaws in God’s world by “unavoidable necessity.”20 Although he agrees with Leibniz that this world is the best possible, he rejects, on the basis of contradictions internal to Leibniz’s argument, the notion that God wishes everything in the world to be just the way it is: “the being of the world is not as it is simply because God wishes to have it so, but because it was not possible in any other way” (“Reflection 3705: Defects of Optimism,” 82). Kant underlines the strain 19. “An attempt at some reflections on optimism by M. Immanuel Kant, also containing an announcement of his lectures for the coming semester 7 October 1759,” in Theoretical Philosophy 1750–1770, ed. and trans. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 72. 20. “Three manuscript reflections on optimism (Reflections 3703–05)” [1753], in ibid., 79, 81.

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in Leibniz’s logic, which allows that “at least it is not [God’s] fault” that the world is deeply flawed, at the cost of implying an “unfathomable conflict which exists between the general will of God . . . and the metaphysical necessity which is not willing to adapt itself to that end” (ibid., 81). Kant unravels this tangle by letting go of the absolute omnipotence that Leibniz wishes to preserve for God. For Kant, even God works under the constraint of a reality principle; and the effect is that both God and humans can only choose “the best” using “the greatest reality which can belong to a world” as a limit (“Reflections on optimism,” 76). Admitting the renunciation of absolute freedom in holding that one is “not . . . able to choose other than that which one distinctly and rightly recognizes as the best,” Kant declares that if he must “choose between errors”—between the constrained acceptance he is arguing for and the subjective freedom of being able to negate anything, including all we can have—he does not hesitate to “cry: ‘Happy are we—we exist!’” (ibid.). Having floated to this climactic fact/value conflation, Kant continues, back on the ground, “In the coming semester, I shall, as usual, be lecturing on logic using Meier,” etc.—an example of the existence one is able to go on with, perhaps: thanks for (almost) nothing. If exigencies are what we have a right to, we need to know how to tell what an exigency is. Identifying an exigency may be understood as the functional equivalent of what I’ve been calling having a fact perception, with the proviso that specific facts are of varying degrees of exigency. The peculiar problem for world-acceptance is that the model of conceptual recognition of a physical object cannot be extended to something like “nature as a whole,” which we can never apprehend. Kant imagines himself arriving to save the day: finding a way to deal with this stalemate is the project of critical philosophy. Kant figures the notion of a process for identifying exigency in the First Critique’s most conspicuous metaphor, in which he depicts knowledge as a foggy island in an icy sea, unpromising real estate but worth a second look: it will be well to begin by casting a glance upon the map of the land which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether we cannot in any case be satisfied with what it contains—are not, indeed, under compulsion to be satisfied [nicht allenfalls zufrieden sein könnten,

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oder auch aus Not zufrieden sein müssen], inasmuch as there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and, secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims. (CPR A236/B295) In this passage—the opening of the Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment—the given world seems to be a place much like England, the climatologically challenged isle of empiricism. Kant supposes that it’s hard to feel satisfied with a territory when insecure in one’s title to it and, typically, that having nowhere else to go would place us “under compulsion to be satisfied” where we are. Exemplifying the constraint by which Kant defines right, literal inability to move to another country becomes an argument for enjoying one’s current residence “allenfalls,” “if need be.” If “we are about to leave” the scene, that’s because only actual exigency, not mere probability or persuasion, can make us stay. We don’t automatically know—so it seems—how to recognize an exigency. For Kant no sooner asks whether we can be satisfied with our place than he answers that, at the outset of the procedure at least, we cannot: “we are not satisfied with the exposition merely of that which is true, but likewise demand that account be taken of that which we desire to know” (A237/B296). At this juncture, the difference between being where one is and being satisfied with where one is consists in being unsure whether there is anyplace else to go. The process of making sure opened here will take the entire time of the First Critique. There is nothing to accept until this time is exhausted: until, having done all we can, we’re free from blame if we do nothing more. In the 1787 edition Kant further traces “the cause of our not being satisfied” (A251), at first, with our only possible circumstances to the concept of appearance itself: The cause of our not being satisfied [befriedigt] with the substrate of sensibility, and of our therefore adding to the phenomena noumena which only the pure understanding can think, is simply as follows. The sensibility (and its field, that of the appearances) is itself limited by the understanding in such fashion that it does not have to do with things in themselves but only with the mode in which, owing to our

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subjective constitution, they appear. The Transcendental Aesthetic, in all its teaching, has led to this conclusion; and the same conclusion also, of course, follows from the concept of an appearance in general; namely, that something which is not in itself appearance must correspond to it. For appearance can be nothing by itself, outside our mode of representation. Unless, therefore, we are to move constantly in a circle, the word appearance must be recognized as already indicating a relation to something, the immediate representation of which is, indeed, sensible, but which, even apart from the constitution of our sensibility (upon which the form of our intuition is grounded), must be something in itself, that is, an object independent of sensibility. (A251–252; my italics) So far Kant reproduces the traditional attitude toward appearance: we are inherently dissatisfied with it because incompleteness is built into “the word appearance,” which “indicate[s] a relation” to “something in itself.” If Kant’s concept of the noumenon were positive, it would simply fill out the traditional scheme: noumena would be hypothetical things or hypothetical aspects of things, ever absent from our perspective, that correspond to the indication created by “the word appearance.” When Kant gives the concept of the noumenon “only . . . a negative sense” (B309; see also A252–253), however, he breaks new ground, and undermines the built-in disappointment indicated by “the word appearance” in an innovative way, with the idea of categories that extend further than appearances: if . . . I leave aside all intuition, the form of thought still remains—that is, the mode of determining an object for the manifold of a possible intuition. The categories accordingly extend further than sensible intuition, since they think objects in general, without regard to the special mode (the sensibility) in which they may be given. But they do not thereby determine a greater sphere of objects. For we cannot assume that such objects can be given, without presupposing the possibility of another kind of intuition than the sensible; and we are by no means justified in so doing.

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If the objective reality of a concept cannot be in any way known, while yet the concept contains no contradiction and also at the same time is connected with other modes of knowledge that involve given concepts which it serves to limit, I entitle that concept problematic. The concept of a noumenon—that is, of a thing which is not to be thought as object of the senses but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure understanding—is not in any way contradictory. For we cannot assert of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition. Further, the concept of a noumenon is necessary, to prevent sensible intuition from being extended to things in themselves, and thus to limit the objective validity of sensible knowledge. The remaining things, to which it does not apply, are entitled noumena, in order to show that this knowledge cannot extend its domain over everything which the understanding thinks. But none the less we are unable to comprehend how such noumena can be possible, and the domain that lies out beyond the sphere of appearances is for us empty. That is to say, we have an understanding which problematically extends further, but we have no intuition, indeed not even the concept of a possible intuition, through which objects outside the field of sensibility can be given, and through which the understanding can be employed assertoricially beyond that field. The concept of a noumenon is thus a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment. At the same time it is no arbitrary invention; it is bound up with the limitation of sensibility, though it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of sensibility. (A254–255/B310–311) There is a great deal of debate about Kant’s intricate noumenon, and especially about whether he really does mean it to be only negative. Why attempt to figure at all that which has an “only . . . negative” employment, why talk about it under erasure, why call what corresponds to an empty, agnostic space “a thing” and so substantialize it rhetorically? Robert Pippin gives a vivid summary of the problem: if noumena are merely “that which we could not know by means of any experience,” then “the claim that we ‘do not know noumena’ would not at all be a restricting claim on what we can know, but merely a needlessly involved way of insisting that

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we cannot know what we cannot know.”21 I would like to suggest, however, that Kant realizes that a “needlessly involved way” of coming to the realization that knowledge is limited to phenomena is exactly what we need therapeutically. We can realize appearance’s repleteness only by taking a long and necessarily rhetorical way around—all the way around the world, like Benjamin’s forward path to the Garden of Eden. Only by having simulated this journey, and taken the time to simulate this journey, do we work through the impossibility of knowing something outside phenomena. If we only realize anything by context or contrast with what it’s not, how could we ever begin to realize, in the full sense of the word, the repleteness of the apparent world, except through the heuristic aid of merely intelligible spaces? One can also understand the motive for thinking the noumenon in emotive terms. Kant states that the direct cause of our “adding” noumena to phenomena is “our not being satisfied [befriedigt] with the substrate of sensibility.” Given this inevitable dissatisfaction—the emotional correlative of reason’s overreaching—thinking the noumenon, like Freud’s negation, serves to recognize both the familiar object and one’s recoil from it. Thinking the noumenon commits aggression against the phenomenon by saying “I can think beyond you,” or, more confrontationally, “Not you.” As Freud and Winnicott argue, experiments with symbolic minor violence are a vital part of our negotiation with reality, and, completed successfully, 21. Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 202. To avoid this conclusion, Pippin argues that the noumenon should be considered to have both negative and positive meanings—that, even as “transcendentally considered, the concept of a thing in itself should be considered wholly negatively . . . there is another type of reflection on things in themselves, whereby we do not consider phenomenal objects as they are in themselves, but we consider types of objects which, by their very definition, could not be phenomenal objects” (200). Without this second way of thinking of things in themselves, “that is, if the concept of noumenon only means a phenomenal object considered independently of any way we could know it, then the supposed contrast between phenomena and noumena is hardly a contrast between what we can know and what we cannot know, but is instead just a difference between knowledge in general and the rather abstract notion of not-knowing-at-all. . . . But herein [that is, in the interpretation of noumena as nonphenomenal objects—R.T.] lies the familiar paradox again, since to establish something about noumena independently of this merely negative contrast with phenomena would violate the very restriction the whole phenomenality thesis is meant to establish” (201).

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bring the sense of reality into being.22 Winnicott calls this violence “destroying” to emphasize that at the moment the self commits the aggression, it does not know that the aggression is symbolic or minor. The distinction between symbolic and literal, minor and major violence is learned only by taking the risk of violent thought. The object remains unrealized as long as one remains afraid of the omnipotent power of one’s criticism. In “destroying” the object, expressing dissatisfaction with it, one makes contact with its actual independence and begins to realize that, for better and worse, one cannot think it away. The fact that there is no other world, by this logic, is precisely no excuse for prematurely “accepting” it, since accepting it before realizing that it exists independently of our acceptance sells it short. In the First Critique, the object challenged and realized through the challenge of thinking beyond it is nothing less than nature as a whole. Some readers of Kant, including Nietzsche, interpret the noumenon as an escape clause in Kant’s contract with Erscheinung. In order to do so, they identify reality with value. Correctly perceiving the noumenon as a slight to the given world, Nietzsche leaps to the conclusion that Kant’s acknowledgment of dissatisfaction with the world indicates his weak commitment to its reality. Kant, however, is demonstrating exactly the opposite: that one can harbor and express a natural dissatisfaction without implying that this dissatisfaction is the object’s fault or our own, much less that if we can think other worlds, they are real in something other than thought.23 Another kind of disappointed reader, best represented by Kleist, takes Kant to be asking us to be satisfied with dissatisfaction itself. Notoriously, Kleist’s response to Kant’s epistemological first aid was to feel “deeply 22. Freud, “Negation” and “Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in SE XII: 218–226; D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 1–34. 23. The thought of the noumenon is sensible, since a thought is “not nothing,” in Hartley Coleridge’s unbeatable phrase. But the thought of the noumenon is not the noumenon. Pippin believes that “Kant is quite interested in arguing for the ‘necessity’ of some determinate connection between the thought of things in themselves and phenomenal knowledge itself, as his position on regulative ideals make clear” (Kant’s Theory of Form, 200; my italics). But the thought of things in themselves is already part of the phenomenality of the inner world.

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wounded” “in the innermost sanctum of his being.”24 Readers in this group regard appearance as a diluted version of reality, and assume that dissatisfaction with a world of appearances must therefore either persist or be “denied.” To both audiences—those who feel that Kant damaged and those who feel that Kant didn’t inflict nearly enough damage to the hypothesis of another, more real world—Kant sounds contradictory simply because he continues to call the world “phenomenal” while promising “complete satisfaction.” The very fact that this sounds like satisfaction with dissatisfaction—that the seeming paradox of satisfaction with dissatisfaction is embedded in the idea of replete appearance—indicates the strength of the association between dissatisfaction and phenomenality from which Kant is trying to work free. Kant does not avoid conflating fact with value entirely, however, even though his relationship to the fact/value problem is differently deep. Kant assumes that at some degree of completeness, realization adjusts the emotions. Realization, for Kant, is a much larger field than that of fact perception; its boundaries are drawn by critical reason. Yet the project of critical reason remains true to the empirical spirit of fact perception. Kant embarks on it in order to be able to effect a recognition of reality when dealing with necessities that burst the bounds of fact perception—“objects” such as nature as a whole. By establishing necessary conditions through critical reason, new givens in the sense peculiar to himself, Kant makes fact perception equivalents of them, so to speak; and so, he hopes, he makes them valuable objectively. His radical humanism lies in his conclusion that where the intransigence of the world’s natural laws seems to run up against the persistence of equally natural human laws, there is no fault, since the dualism is illusory. For him, not winning is a bargain price to pay for the triumph of, for the first time, not losing simply by being a finite living thing. The psychological logic of the First Critique is circular in ways that echo the strengths and weaknesses of its epistemology. Kant’s assumption that we won’t feel guilty over perceptions and thoughts that aren’t our 24. Letter to Wilhemine von Zenge, quoted by Nietzsche in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 188–189. It’s ironic that Kleist feels raped by Kant’s phenomenalization of objects; Kant’s main purpose in the First Critique is to encourage a nonpenetrative relationship with objects, but Kleist feels violated by that.

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fault is no more plausible than the assumption it replaces, that we shouldn’t desire to experience what we know we cannot. Just as I may want to “see beyond phenomena” even after I recognize the contradiction, I may keep feeling guilty about the continuation of this desire even after I know its persistence is truly inexorable. Kant acknowledges the threat of interminability by positing the correction of “momentary aberrations ever and again.” It may be encouraging to know it’s possible, as Kant shows in his own person, not to feel angry or guilty about one’s limits. But the question remains whether we will want to count the minimal acceptance that objectively accompanies recognition of reality as value that is worthy of the name. Suppose a maximally unacceptable trauma meets the maximum of contextualization, perspective, and hence realization, given infinite time. Do we then endorse the trauma itself as an inalterable fact of the past?25 Kant’s answer is formal: our endorsement, like our knowledge, is framed by a set of exigencies that coincides exactly with our right, with what we may expect. Our obligation will never be more than to accept all we can, while the world’s part of the bargain is never to present us with anything we can’t conceivably accept: in Kant’s system, anything we can’t conceivably assimilate is guaranteed not to appear at all. “Accept only what you can”: a modest-sounding claim, until we remember how implausibly much we can stand. The meaning of “acceptance” is sliced correspondingly thin, however, its claim minimized: it means not that human experience is great or even good, but that it is tolerable—literally tolerable, in the sense that as long as we’re having experience, we’re minimally tolerating it, and that as soon as it becomes intolerable, we aren’t having any. These algebraic cancellations are neither tragic nor noble. That for Kant there was no space between minimal tolerability and “complete satisfaction,” that this makes him smile his Mona Lisa smile—people will feel different ways about this: amused, admiring, appalled. The solution of the First Critique resembles 25. Derrida’s modification of this theme holds that “forgiveness” includes forgiveness of the unforgivable, and that such forgiveness is incalculable and mad. Although the inevitable could be incalculable and mad, in Derrida’s terms such forgiveness is merely possible (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes [London: Routledge, 2002]).

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the ironic endings of Kleist’s stories, in which something that occupies the place of justice loses all its glamour in prevailing. The audience is not asked to celebrate these outcomes. In the First Critique, Kant is satisfied with this kind of conclusion (it leaves one’s judgment free of further obligations). For Kleist, a freedom like this fails to make life worth living. As long as one is convinced that the world as described by the First Critique is the only one but doesn’t—yet—feel like endorsing it, and, like Kleist, believes that endorsement is a voluntary affirmation one has to generate entirely from within, then the tendency to read fact perception as entailing acceptance loads the philosophical question about phenomena—Is this real? Am I seeing what I’m supposed to be seeing?—with the awkward aggression of aesthetic and moral judgment: Do I like it? Is this good enough? Given the parameters of Kant’s solution, protest at the given conditions of a world assumed to be inevitable looks, in the mode of appearance, like derealization: I must be dreaming. Once the apparent world is recognized as the only real one, objections generate the image not of an alternative world but of the absurd, unjustified (ungereimte [CPR Bxxvi]), or unjust one of absurdist literature. So, Coleridge flees the realm of coerced endorsement of appearance for the peripheral domain of temporary optical illusion, the stranger and more transitory the better; when he compares his fondness for these ephemera to Kant’s doctrine of benign appearance, Kant seems to torture him by drawing a line of normalcy just in front of him. Similarly, Goethe asserts that “physiological colors” hitherto regarded “as illusion and infirmity” (Theory of Colors, §1) are in fact “healthy” and “necessary” (§101), only to create another category for “pathological colors” that really do function as “deviation from the general law” (§109). Without making any reality claim that post-Kantians would perceive as false, such phenomena seem to suggest that we can sidestep necessity, if not escape it. So, Nietzsche pours scorn on lyrical imagery for celebrating “the more subtilized, attenuated, transient” objects, and blames this pathos on the psychology of metaphysics (WP §572; KSA 12.253). Lyrical imagination after Kant finds would-be exceptions to exigency in phenomenal rarities. Depicted longingly by poets, such ephemera seem to solicit sympathy with all that is irregular. Among feral phenomena that fail to make the factive claim of normative appearances, the pressure for acceptance disappears. Despite Kant’s

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efforts to rehabilitate phenomenality, these marginalized phenomena are once again figured as deviant. There is an utterly paradigmatic meditation on the whole complex of phenomenal errancy and its queer affinities in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which the elderly but “youthful” GreatUncle Alphonso initiates his nephews into the pleasures of looking away. Alphonso is a full-time phenomenophile who “generally [wears] glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames” and produces art that consists of “faint images” in fainter colors of fragmentary natural shapes.26 He takes his nephews moth-watching on summer nights, and explains that the “trails of light” that moths seem to “leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals . . . did not really exist, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone” (Austerlitz, 92–93). Like the wavering images in Coleridge’s Notebooks, the trails of light lead Sebald’s characters into a queer idyll, as if they raised the hope that their apparent irregularity made them fitting representatives of all we wish the world would make exceptions for, even when we know it won’t. “Such unreal phenomena,” Sebald writes, “the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person . . . [kindle] our deepest feelings, or at least what we [take] for them” (93).

4. legalize it What is the relation between the minimal satisfaction afforded by the First Critique and the development of critical philosophy? How would the reading I’ve offered here affect one’s reading of the whole? This is a fair, if large, question; in what follows, I’ll sketch a few possibilities. Critical reason in the First Critique extends what counts as given beyond what the senses can experience, yet remains in the spirit of fact perception. Kant assumes that the recognition of exigency it establishes carries a minimal value. He often indicates that knowing can “bring by itself 26. Austerlitz (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 88. Thanks to Bernie Richter for giving me this book.

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[bei sich führt]” a kind of value or “liking” (CJ 366). Such an objective value, Kant makes clear, is coerced—“carried,” as Kemp Smith’s translation has it.27 I’ve suggested, however, that the value coerced by recognition of exigency in the First Critique is not as coercive as it may at first seem, for various reasons. The value it requires is very small—a near-zero degree of value—and all but automated. To the extent that this value is “carried” by a conclusion of reason, we do not have to will it, and it is not bestowed by a separate operation. But because the conclusion of reason itself is never automatic, this value is not completely empty, either—only nearly so. When we look very closely at “objective value,” in other words, we can discern an ambiguous quasi-subjectivity that, I want to suggest, is just the thing Kant needs to get from fact to value. Looking away, I’ve argued, expresses resistance against coercion by fact perception where Erscheinung takes on the authority of a given. If I’m right that the First Critique’s coercion of value is real, yet minimal and untraumatic, then phenomenophilic romantic texts that take Kant to have intensified the obligation to affirm the given world, and especially its given mode of appearance, are mistaken. A reader like Kleist imagines himself asked to praise the startlingly neutral post-Kantian world and doesn’t know how to do so; he doesn’t understand that he can revise not only his epistemology, but with it his moralization of epistemology. We are not obligated to support a disenchanted world with the enthusiasm we would have for an enchanted one. The subsequent narrative of the critical project hints that even Kant was no stranger to the impulse to downplay the no-fault vision of the First Critique, as though it were “too austere even for Kant himself,” as Paul Guyer comments.28 Like the subterranean discourse and practice of phenomenophilia and the literature of absurdity, Kant’s devel-

27. For a contemporary analogue to Kant’s sense of “carrying,” see Robert Nozick on “tracking.” Nozick points out that “when a belief is caused appropriately by the fact, that connection appears desirable and plausibly is held to constitute knowledge.” I’m indebted, in general, to Nozick’s pursuit of “a way for action to parallel belief, to be so connected to the world, even causally, in a way that is desirable”—what he calls his “project of paralleling.” See Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981), 170–171. 28. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 225.

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opment of the aesthetic is itself, in part, a nervous reaction to the Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, phenomenophilia is different from the aesthetic. The phenomenophile cherishes his marginal status and the private, temporary nature of the perceptions he collects; Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgments of taste are felt to be universally valid and shareable. Still, aesthetic reflective judgments have something in common with the techniques of looking away, as we’ll see, and both lines of thought respond to weaknesses they perceive in the “satisfaction” of the First Critique. The anti- or protoaesthetic of phenomenophilia and aesthetic reflective judgments are cousins—illegitimate and legitimate cousins. It’s almost as though Kant had learned from romantic misinterpretations of the First Critique and their recourse to contraband phenomena (though he didn’t really get his ideas for the aesthetic in this way). The best way to describe the relation of the Critique of Judgment to phenomenophilia is to say that it legitimizes it. The Third Critique, we might say, selects from phenomenality in order to define aesthetic reflective judgments. I mentioned at the outset that there are various ways to achieve the phenomenophilic effect. One can (1) actually have an aberrant perceptual experience or make a perceptual mistake, (2) frame perception to emphasize object perception over fact perception, for example by intervening in the conditions of perception; or (3) concentrate on a transient or supposedly unstable object. Now, (2), cultivating object perception, produces results very similar to aesthetic reflective judgment—subjective feelings of liking without a concept. One can make a case that aesthetic reflective judgments, which use no concept and abstract any concern with the actual existence of their objects, are constructed to contrast with fact perception—that what the subtractive logic of aesthetic reflective judgments seeks to subtract is precisely the coercive effect of fact perception. This hypothesis suggests something of a new way to understand what the implausible “disinterest” of aesthetic reflective judgments is all about. Kant wants aesthetic reflective judgments to do more than elude fact perception and their normative force, however (the marginal experiments of the phenomenophile also do that). Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgments therefore exclude avenues (1) and (3): contingent mistakes and responses to objects that are too irregular or fleeting to make us imagine that other people ought to feel about them the way we feel. Relieving the coercive effect of fact perception—an effect I would argue we

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can extend as well to Kant’s critical supplement to fact perception, that is, reason’s recognition of the conditions that limit knowledge—aesthetic reflective judgments are also able to present themselves as necessary conclusions to which everyone ought to come. In developing a universalist aesthetics, Kant trades irregular enjoyment for what he hopes is something better: a glimpse of a basis for spontaneous community. Kant cannot stress enough that the free liking of aesthetic reflective judgment differs in kind from various coerced likings.29 In the Third Critique, “objective value” paradigmatically belongs to what we call good, and “objective liking” is what we feel when confronted with perfection (CJ 210, 366). The objective value of the good corresponds to “what we esteem, or endorse [billigen],” or “respect” (210), and respect is what we feel when we recognize our own limits. Kant notes in the clarifying “Comment” of §54 that objective value can be added to sensations: we can like or dislike “in addition” our own joy or pain. Thus objective value “is the same as approval or disapproval” (331), and includes metafeelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with our own reactions. Produced by reason’s conclusions, objective value is required from everyone. Although I’m approximating, and putting together passages that Kant never joined, objective value would seem to describe the “satisfaction” attainable through critical reason in the First Critique. Critical philosophy’s verification of the conditions of possibility for knowledge is the utmost of reason’s conclusions, and the endorsement of the given relation of reason to nature as a whole carried by the Critique of Pure Reason would seem to be the apex of objective value. The question of whether the First Critique is satisfied merely with itself or with its object is a live one here; certainly Kant’s mind is satisfied with its own capacities, but I think not only so. Kant writes of the land we must live in that we can “be satisfied with what it contains [was es in sich enthält]” (CPR A236/B295; my italics). This is not to say that it becomes beautiful. When Kant considers the “objective liking” that responds to perfection (a kind of good [CJ 241]), he similarly points out that the judgment of perfection is a task of reason (228´). The intellectual judgment of a circle’s perfection, in Kant’s example, “carries with it an objective liking [objektive 29. It’s also distinct from interested pleasure, of course, but that’s not as relevant to my point.

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Wohlgefallen]” or “intellectual liking [intellektuelle Wohlgefallen]” that may be “commonly called beauty,” though “it would be better to call it . . . relative perfection” (366). Remember the conclusion of Kant’s notes on optimism, that one should judge the optimization of the world according to “its degree of reality” (“Reflections on optimism,” 72), and we are closer yet to viewing satisfaction with the givens of our world as a whole as a kind of objective liking. Aesthetic pleasure must “go beyond the concept of the object, and even beyond the intuition of the object” (CJ 288), to go beyond objective liking. Therefore, Kant wishes to “add as a predicate . . . something that is not even cognition: namely [a] feeling of pleasure (or displeasure)” to which one feels everyone should assent (CJ 288–289). The spatial metaphors in which pleasure “go[es] beyond” or is “add[ed]” to the concept are misleading; what counts is whether pleasure is off the concept, paraconceptual. Reflective judgment according to Kant famously meets this criterion by “devis[ing] a law of its own” to use as a principle instead of subsuming the particular under a concept (179), “refer[ring] the presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure” alone (203). For this purpose, stopping short of the concept works as well as ignoring or going beyond it. In §39, “On the Communicability of a Sensation,” pleasure occurs by means of a procedure [that is, reflection—R.T.] that judgment has to carry out to give rise to even the most ordinary experience. The only difference is that in the case of ordinary experience the imagination has to engage in this procedure in order to [obtain] an empirical objective concept, whereas in the present case it has to do so merely in order to perceive that the presentation is adequate for harmonious (subjectively purposive) activity of the two cognitive powers in their freedom, i.e., in order to feel the presentational state with pleasure. (292; translation modified, my italics) Here we don’t “add” liking or disliking to cognition. Rather, in aesthetic judgments the imagination “merely” finds out whether the presentational state gives pleasure, whereas in ordinary experience it has to engage reflection “in order to” find the concept—as though, as in the logic of phenomenophilic consolation, the imagination declines to continue on to fact perception. So, Rodolphe Gasché can use a chronological metaphor

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diametrical to Kant’s metaphor of adding on—“aesthetic judgment precedes all conceptual understanding of the object”—while stressing that literally, “the achievements of reflective judgment—which comprises both aesthetic and teleological judgment—are in no way foundational for or anterior to those of cognitive judgment.”30 In Kant’s initial descriptions of what it is like to make aesthetic reflective judgments (§§1–2), we can see that aesthetic reflective judgments resemble object perceptions over and against fact perceptions, and serve a similar psychological function: To apprehend a regular, purposive building with one’s cognitive power . . . is very different from being conscious of this presentation with a sensation of liking. Here the presentation is referred only to the subject, namely to his feeling of life, under the name feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and this forms the basis of a very special power of discriminating and judging [Beurteilung]. (CJ 204) Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace I see before me beautiful. I might reply that I am not fond of things of that sort, made merely to be gaped at. Or I might reply like that Iroquois sachem who said that he liked nothing better in Paris than the eatinghouses. I might even go on, as Rousseau would, to rebuke the vanity of the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I might, finally, quite easily convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited island with no hope of ever again coming among people, and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a mere wish, I would not even take that much trouble for it if I already had a sufficiently comfortable hut. The questioner may grant all this and approve of it; but it is not to the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking, no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of the presentation. (204–205) When we understand human beings’ tendency to resist the coercion of value carried by the recognition of “the existence of the object,” we may 30. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 27, 4.

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understand more easily what Kant’s example wants to abstract. In Kant’s fiction an interlocutor asks whether the palace is beautiful, and Kant sidesteps the question, talking instead about how he doesn’t need it or disapproves politically of its existence. The examples of point-missing responses (from the philistine, the Iroquois, and Rousseau—it’s all quite a joke, these juxtapositions) are there to indicate that people refuse to make aesthetic judgments when they either don’t really understand what they are or insist on speaking morally or instrumentally, like museum-goers who can’t like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ because it displays urine. The whole incident seems inverted, however, like a dream, and this inversion deflects the articulation of dissatisfaction. The going assumption of the narrative is that Kant cannot stand the palace. A more likely scenario than the one we are given, in which Kant plays the role of a person who evades his own aesthetic judgment, would be that Kant would be aware of his nonaesthetic reactions to the palace—that it bothers him; that he disapproves of what it stands for; that he feels oppressed by its very existence and wishes it weren’t there—and would avoid articulating his inconvenient and perhaps controversial objection to its existence by saying that it is or isn’t beautiful, that is, by deflecting his objection into a nonconceptual relation to the palace: into aesthetic reflection, where one cannot be blamed for one’s likes and dislikes, for they are not likes and dislikes of anything or anyone; where, far from being at fault, one can’t even be criticized for feeling that everyone else should feel the same way. Instead, Kant provides a narrative in which observers flee from aesthetic judgment into instrumental or moral reason, hence obscuring the deflective powers of the aesthetic. As an exposition of the psychological motives for the aesthetic, such a reading of §§1–2 finds some justice in views of aesthetics as escape from reality (while acknowledging how escapeworthy a piece of reality may be). Its nonmoralistic point, however, is that by defining aesthetic experience by way of reflection, Kant joins the resistance to fact perception: he sidesteps the objective value carried by fact perception and recognition of exigency and does what readers of the First Critique historically tend to do: he lingers in object perception. This pleasure [of aesthetic judgment] is also not practical in any way . . . Yet it does have a causality in it, namely, to keep the state of the

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presentation itself, and [to keep] the cognitive powers engaged without any further aim. We linger [weilen] in our contemplation of the beautiful. (222; translation modified) Given the coercion of our every waking moment as conceptual beings, why would we not try to draw out the reprieve of reflection? Aesthetic reflective judgment selects from experiences of phenomenality in order to provide positive images for the conviction—over and against the apologetic, haunted demeanor of the phenomenophile— that the desire for relief from the coercion of fact perception is universally valid. The pleasures cherished by phenomenophiles for their very irrelevance are excluded; only the second kind of my three types of phenomenophilic technique, the foregrounding of object perception while one is engaged with Erscheinung, may be aesthetic. What is gained and lost when we compare the aberrant appeal of looking away to the rightful claim of beauty we may share? One passage that affords a comparison involves an example Kant gives of the distinction between beauty and charm (Reiz). In the “General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic,” Kant contrasts “beauties” to “beautiful views” whose “distance prevents us from recognizing them distinctly”31 or to the “changing shapes of the flames in a fireplace or of a rippling brook.” According to Kant, “neither of these are beauties, but they still charm the imagination because they sustain its free play” (243–244). Usually Kant discriminates charm from beauty by the sensory basis on which we judge it, which places charming things among the merely agreeable objects of taste; and his favorite example of charm is the delight of color (which associates charm with spectra) (224–225, 297, 302, 347). Although charm is sensory for Kant, however, sensory delight doesn’t prevent an object from triggering an aesthetic reflective judgment (objects per se are not beautiful or unbeautiful); aesthetic judgments are not characterized by their objects but by the internal harmony of the faculties when

31. As we saw in the example of the risen moon, distance can function as though it were a phenomenophilic manipulation of appearance such as squinting: one can cultivate effects of distance. The classic text is Hazlitt’s “Why Distant Objects Please” [1821], in Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1982), 148–160.

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imagination takes the lead. Reflection on charming things through which the mind perceives “the regular play of the impressions (and hence the form in the connection of different presentations)” can be aesthetic (224), so it isn’t automatically clear why the experience of the rippling brook is not aesthetic. The example of “beautiful views” and “changing shapes” therefore introduces a structural distinction between these objects and objects of aesthetic reflective judgments. Kant explains that “in beautiful views of objects, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in that area, as on the occasion they provide for it to engage in fiction [dichten], i.e., on the actual fantasies with which the mind entertains itself as it is continually being aroused by the diversity that strikes the eye” (243). If we mix fantasy with perception, our confused pleasure may be unable to lead to a harmony in the mind. The evanescence of Kant’s examples—the “changing” flames and “rippling” water—suggest that these experiences are too brief and contingent to universalize. Inspiring free play but not “free lawfulness” (240) or “regular play” (224), they are among the traditional instances of phenomenality, blissfully and fleetingly transmorphic. Working backward from Kant’s insistence that aesthetic judgments must be thinkably shareable, we can hypothesize that rippling water is not a beauty because it conveys no impression that someone else must like it in just the way we do. Even if we were to reflect on the formal elements of our experience of “beautiful views” and “changing shapes,” at least some of these reflections would be subaesthetic—not beautiful, not sublime (although in their wildness they could be contrasted interestingly to the sublime as well as to the beautiful). In The Idea of Form, Gasché argues with great originality that aesthetic judgments discover “the minimal conditions of cognizability” (9); beautiful views, changing shapes, and “mixed colors” (CJ 225) don’t meet those minimal conditions.32 The contrast between beauty and charm thus supports Gasché’s contention that aesthetic judgment is defined by the fact 32. Because purity involves form, “all simple colors, insofar as they are pure, are considered beautiful; mixed colors do not enjoy this privilege, precisely because, since they are not simple, we lack a standard for judging whether we should call them pure or impure” (CJ 224–225). The discourse of phenomenality is obsessed with variegated color—for example, the mixed colors of Coleridge’s “Fire screen inscribed with the nitrate & muriate of Cobalt” (N 3547).

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that in it, a judgment that could be “reduced to concepts” is not reduced to concepts (Idea of Form, 56). Beautiful views could never be reduced to concepts (at least not with eighteenth-century technology). Again, the implication is that aesthetic reflective judgments are object perceptions—or, more precisely, reflections on object perceptions—that don’t become fact perceptions: “As long as the judgment remains aesthetically reflective, the indispensable transcendental possibility of cognition in general does not turn into the possibility of an actual act of determined cognition” (ibid.). The emphasis of the distinction between aesthetic reflective judgments and charming perceptions, then, falls on the imaginable shareability of the former, over and against the not even conceivable normativity of the latter. This conclusion is in tension but not in contradiction with the poststructuralist conclusion that aspects of the sublime destabilize the aesthetic, with the effect that the Third Critique opens up rather than closes Kant’s system. Portions of Kant’s descriptions of sublimity, and especially poststructuralist interpretations thereof, do work in sympathy with the proto- or antiaesthetic of phenomenophilia, as we can only now understand, even as the Third Critique attempts to envision a robust normative aesthetics. A good way to show this sympathy is by turning to Paul de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” which takes up a matter close to the concerns of looking away: the role within the Third Critique of Kant’s idea of “Augenschein,” the sublime form of nonconceptual perception “that is how things are to the eye . . . and not to the mind.”33 First, a summary of de Man’s point of view. De Man’s famous example of Augenschein is the expanse of sky or sea that Kant asks his readers to “view . . . as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye,” because “only under this presentation can we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment attributes” (CJ

Kant’s own feelings about color went into his clothes: “late in his life Kant preferred mottled [meliert] colors,” but in his thirties he was a fashion plate and liked extravagant ones, believing that “the colors of one’s dress should follow the flowers” (Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants [1804], in Immanuel Kant: Ein Lebensbild nach Darstellungen der Zeitgenossen Borowski, Jachmann, Wasianski, ed. Hermann Schwarz [Halle: Hugo Peter, 1907], quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 115). 33. “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 70–90, p. 82.

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270, translation modified, cited in “Phenomenality,” 80). As de Man points out, Augenschein supposedly exemplifies the aesthetic because it is purely nonteleological and nonconceptual. According to Kant, it’s “the poets”— the “romantic poets” and their eighteenth-century precursors, de Man adds (81)—who know how to see like this. Augenschein is a problem for the Third Critique because it stands in direct contradiction to all preceding definitions and analyses of the sublime given in section 24 on until this point in section 29. Still, in the condensed definition that appears in the same chapter the stress falls on the sublime as a concrete representation of ideas (Darstellung von Ideen). . . . And there has been so much emphasis, from the start, on the fact that the sublime does not reside in the natural object but in the mind of man (Gemütsbestimmungen) that the burden of the argument, much rather than emphasizing the purely inward, noumenal nature of the sublime, becomes the need to account for the fact that it nevertheless occurs as an outward, phenomenal manifestation. Can this in any way be reconciled with the radical materiality of sublime vision suddenly introduced, as if it were an afterthought, at this point in the argument? How is one to reconcile the concrete representation of ideas with pure ocular vision, Darstellung von Ideen with Augenschein? (83) De Man contrasts Augenschein with the conclusion of the aesthetic, when it’s open to the mind to contemplate aesthetic experience as representation. That conclusion is to be achieved through the self-“sacrifice” of imagination after the “ocular vision” of the sublime, he explains. The imagination sacrifices an experience of play, associated with “natural freedom,” to the tranquility of reason: The free, empirical reaction of the imagination, when confronted with the power and might of nature, is to indulge, to enjoy the terror of this very magnitude. Taming this delectable, because imaginary, terror . . . and preferring to it the tranquil satisfaction of superiority, is to submit the imagination to the power of reason. . . . the imagination

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achieves tranquility, it submits to reason, achieves the highest degree of freedom by freely sacrificing its natural freedom to the higher freedom of reason. (86) For de Man, imagination’s intervention seems to be argued by reference to mental laws but takes place through the figurative “story of an exchange” (87). He doubts that this story can really be connected with the ocular vision he decides to call—for lack of a better word, he claims—“material” (82), and that Kant has substituted for the phenomenality “based on an adequacy of the mind to its physical object” that had previously been the hallmark of aesthetic experience (88). Now, Augenschein is object perception on a sublime scale: the not yet conceptual, nonteleological perception of something like the sea or sky. The identity of Augenschein with object perception is especially clear in de Man’s adduction of a smaller-scale example from Kant’s Logic, of “a wild man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the use” (quoted on 81). “The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly like the savage,” de Man remarks; “he does not see prior to dwelling, but merely sees” (ibid.). The poet doesn’t see the fact perception of the sky, that is, that it is the lower portion of the atmosphere around the earth; he sees, for a moment, something blue-gray that appears to arch over him in a domelike shape. On the sublime scale, one’s first reaction to such a mere appearance is “shocked, but pleasurable surprise,” which modulates almost instantaneously into the desire “to indulge, to enjoy” the sensation (85). A better word than “material”—“the only word that comes to mind” for de Man (82)—would be the phrase with which eighteenth-century philosophers would have described it, “merely empirical.” As we’ve seen, the sensation, and the freedom associated with it, do not last long. The sensation fades, the concept dominates; the imagination gives up its self-indulgence and returns to reason. It cognizes and hence consents minimally to the sky. Is this an account of how the imagination reconciles itself freely to reason—namely, through the fact that the imagination’s capacity to linger in object perception naturally expires—or of how the imagination must be at odds with its own desires, which subside unreconciled, so that Augenschein remains pre- or antiaesthetic? In my terms, there is minimal

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consent, thin consent, in objective liking for the sky, and the aesthetic has not necessarily yet occurred. If we decide, with de Man, that in the passages about Augenschein Kant presents the fading of imagination’s fondness for object perception as aesthetic freedom, then I would agree with de Man that the Third Critique fails to be persuasive here. Yet the reader does not need the passages on Augenschein to be difficult for Kant to integrate in order to have something within Kant to oppose to aesthetic harmony—nor does de Man ever say that’s so—since that work is also done by minimal acceptance in the First Critique and by objective liking in the Third. It is even done by aesthetic reflective judgments themselves, which provide a basis, as we’ve seen, for comparing the experience of the wild man who encounters the house with the phenomenophile poet who arranges to encounter a startling reflection in the lake. The case for object perception as opposed to aesthetic perception is made most strongly of all, however, by charming perceptions (Reizen), those aspects of phenomenality that are excluded from the aesthetic and fall back into mere sensory gratification. As gratifications of taste, they concern no one but oneself.34 According to Kant, all sensory tastes that one “bases on a private feeling” are merely “agreeable,” so that one says of such a taste, “It is agreeable to me” (CJ 212; see also 238): if we suppose that our liking for the object consists entirely in the object’s gratifying us through charm or emotion, then we also must not require anyone else to assent to an aesthetic judgment that we make: for about that sort of liking each person rightly consults only his private sense. But, if that is so, then all censure of taste will also cease, unless the example that other people give through the contingent harmony among their judgments were turned into a command that we approve. At such a principle, however, we would presumably balk, appealing to our natural right to subject to our own sense, not to that of

34. For this, judgments of taste have long been preferred to aesthetic judgments by the person philosophy calls “the skeptic.” See Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s discussion of taste and judgment in Hume and Kant in Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 54–72.

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others, any judgment that rests on the direct feeling of our own wellbeing. (278) Kant’s argument is a bit circular: when objects concern “entirely” one’s own well-being, they cannot be required to be shared. That doesn’t sound like a completely bad thing. As soon as Kant introduces the comparison between the beautiful and the agreeable in §7, the double edge of the agreeable stands out. Kant writes of the perceiver of sensory taste, “many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that” (212). On the one hand, what matters only to me lacks significance—I cannot expect anyone else to find it as enjoyable as I do, so if I want company, I’m in trouble. But on the other, to the extent that I don’t want to have to share my experience, I’m in luck: the object is not doing anything but gratifying me, only me; and (freedom of freedoms) no one cares! Further, if my peculiar taste fails to meet a social norm, I can rest assured that I have a “natural right” to like it anyway, and not to prefer what someone else enjoys (for although we can’t expect other people to share our tastes, we do compare them [213]), because we have a right to “subject to our own sense, not to that of others, any judgment that rests on the direct feeling of our own well-being.” The advantages of private pleasure are risked, and their complements acknowledged, when we graduate from sense to aesthetic judgment. Other people occupy our aesthetic world from the beginning—from before the beginning. It’s notable, though, that Kant depicts the aesthetic as a realm in which we have done all we need to do by way of value judgment and can mentally “require” the same from everybody else. Even though logically, aesthetic requirements are reciprocal (other people are justified in their feelings), the demand of aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique tends to be exemplified in a presumption one makes about others and not a presumption that others make regarding oneself. Aesthetic judgment generally occurs in the first-person active voice. As described in the Third Critique, the aesthetic isn’t a realm of obligation, but one in which we get to know what it’s like to make mental demands on others’ feelings—demands about which we may be mistaken, but for which we need not apologize. J. M. Bernstein makes an eloquent case for the utopian yearning of Kant’s “common sense,” the basis for aesthetic agreement that we presup-

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pose. What’s more, he understands common sense as a reaction to the objective strictures of the First Critique, in which what is sense-perceptible gets reduced through transcendental legislation to its lowest common denominator, namely, what accords with the dictates of categorial causality and physical theory so understood. . . . To now conceive of a world in which determinate, subsumptive judgment predominates over common sense is to conceive of a world in which the interest in knowledge has come to mean an interest in what things are apart from any other interests; and where, therefore, what provides the commonness of the world, its shareability, are the sense-perceptible properties of ordinary objects in their (reductively) determinate relations to one another. . . . From the perspective of reflective judgment the attainment of such a world looks like a loss; a loss of commonness and solidarity. Or better, it images a common world without solidarity. Things and persons are meaningless, without value, in terms o[f] what can be said about them “objectively,” perceptually, through the deliverances of the senses. In such a world, our world, judgments of beauty are memorial: in making aesthetic judgments we judge things “as if” from the perspective of our lost common sense, a common sense that may never have existed.35 Bernstein captures the way that the First Critique bases the “shareability” of the world in invariance rather than in solidarity. Because I have been focusing on objective value, I do not find that “things and persons are meaningless, without value, in terms o[f] what can be said about them ‘objectively’”; but I do find them to hold a value that is almost empty except for the fact that we are required to acknowledge it through a conclusion of reason that carries a minimal objective liking or respect, and at which each person has to arrive independently. And I can completely understand 35. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Penn State UP, 1992), 60.

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why readers of the First Critique, including Kant, would want to add to that minimal liking, or substitute for it, something more affirmative—also something that, to put it more negatively, might express our resistance to the coercion of the “lowest common denominator[s]” of the given world. Bernstein describes the dream of common sense as the figure of an attunement we never have to try to achieve: “common sense is the communicability of feeling, and not the demand for such” (The Fate of Art, 61). The aesthetic project, in Bernstein’s narrative, looks within itself for the wishful memory of a time and place “where, perhaps . . . nothing is beautiful that is not also holy or good or true” (59). Other portions of the Third Critique, however, are written with reference not to such a time but to civilization as we know it, in which the character of existing relations explains why “we have an ‘interest’ in producing judgments that are disconnected from what anyone desires, or thinks beautiful or holy or good” (58). For Bernstein, to say that aesthetic reflective judgments replace that interest with the presupposition of common sense is to say that the trace of what ought to be informs the aesthetic reflective judgments we actually experience—mostly in the negative, in the cancellation of interest. Bernstein’s reading of common sense reminds us why we mind the coercion of fact perception so much; fact perception, as the application of concepts to object perception, is epistemic, but society moralizes epistemology, makes its requirements into social obligations, and therefore makes object perception seem like a reprieve from society’s attempts to appropriate the world’s givenness to itself. If perception needs “correcting” by “another tribunal, equal to or higher than it,” as Kolakowski proposes, and this tribunal turns out to be “human communication,”36 then tarrying in object perception marks the appeal from the normative biases of human communication to a realm that Kolakowski finds beneath consideration because it “ha[s] no practical meaning, and [is] thus excluded from our communication process” (Metaphysical Horror, 13). In this line of thought, object perception evokes versions of the aesthetic which are protopolitical, and in which the presupposition of common sense only holds the place of a com-

36. Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, ed. Agnieszka Kolakowska, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 68.

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munity in which human communication is altogether different—even excluded—from what it is now. But if that’s so, the all but neutral vision of the First Critique also contributes heavily to the proto-political, to the point where I want to ask not whether the Third Critique sufficiently repairs a deficiency in the First, but whether there is any deficiency at all; whether the impression of deficiency is not created by later works, in which Kant attributes weaknesses to the First Critique in terms that are not quite its own. To appreciate the aesthetic achievements of the First Critique we need to look again at objective liking, and how, although it may happen in a flash, it contains the enigmatic depths of Kantian subjectivity. The conceptualization of empirical experience between object perception and fact perception and the critical passage by which we arrive at a conclusion of reason regarding our relation to nature as a whole both carry and are carried by objective value, but the central tenet of critical philosophy is that these value-producing processes must occur in subjective space and time. The subjective ratification of objective liking bridges fact to value in miniature. Minimalist rather than meaningless, objective liking is the place where the discovery of reality is first performed (an insight recovered by the artistic movement of minimalism). The moment of objective liking is pivotal and frightening, but also lighter than we imagine it to be from the perspective of deep, community-supposing, subjective liking—in other words, from the perspective that the Third Critique has institutionalized. If the Third Critique bears dimly in its memory the trace of a light value, on which we agree naturally and independently, not because we have made each other agree; a value that is based in the internal harmonies of reflection, which harmonies can be discerned in the processes as well as in the conclusions of cognition, then is the Third Critique trying to remember—the First Critique? Supposing that objective liking conditions subjective liking, however, still leaves untouched the whole question of what we desire and like enthusiastically—the questions of practical reason and aesthetic judgment. Viewed in light of fact value, The Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason would stand to the Critique of Pure Reason as Coleridge’s spectres stand to phenomenal experience, except that Kant phrases inner laws in the imperative. While the First Critique deals with fact perceptions as

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objective values, the moral writings deal with inner laws as fact perceptions—that is, as perceptions of psychic facts, which exist only in and as value. As Coleridge notices, appearances are more or less temporally and spatially limited and the value obligations they prescribe are also always limited, up to the obligation incurred by the most durable external facts. Psychic facts and inner moral laws, however, are empirically unlimited and outrageously pressing. It’s this asymmetry of intensity between external and internal fact perceptions that gives the impression of a shocking gulf between the sensible and the supersensible, as critics have noted.37 The “supersensible” inner world does not wait for empirical support before it legislates, nor is it daunted by empirical bounds; in its domain “the concept of nature determines nothing,” as Kant writes in the Introduction to the Third Critique (CJ 195). Implicitly, Kant’s sojourn in the intensity of inner law creates, dialectically, a desire to develop—or, I would argue, recover—a nonmoral form of value in the Critique of Judgment. It’s easy to agree with Kant that it would be good to have a model for free pleasure, an affect that could pave the way for the “desiring power” that, Kant asserts toward the end of the Third Critique, alone gives purpose to the “existence of the world” (443). Among systems that propose such a model, the Critique of Judgment utterly outshines its rivals. The Third Critique is by far the most ambitiously legitimating and the most astoundingly refined, while the phenomenophile anti- or protoaesthetic of looking away is perhaps the least organized, the least ambitious, and the most errant. We can still ask, though, which furnishes the more appealing image of freedom.

37. Guyer comments that “by 1790, Kant had come to feel that there was a gulf to be bridged between nature and freedom” because he no longer believes that moral perfection can lie in reason alone without “the development of feelings compatible with and conducive to those intentions that are dictated by pure practical reason alone” (Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993], 30).

3 No Right: Phenomenality and Self-Denial in Nietzsche One must . . . dispute our right to a distinction between a world in itself and a phenomenal world. No shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance. —Nietzsche, The Will to Power §786, §567

Coleridge seems to wish he could live by the First Critique but winds up living a Lockean nightmare; Nietzsche’s direct attacks on what he perceives as Kant’s weakness and negativity lead him to an even more selfpunishing “strength.” Nietzsche’s interpretation of Kant takes place within the domesticating movement of nineteenth-century Kant scholarship, which, I would argue, is hampered by its inability to let go of versions of fact/value moralization that are inconsistent with Kant’s philosophy.1 Nietzsche views “the movement back to Kant” of his time quite clearly as “want[ing] to regain a right to the old ideals and the old enthusiasm—for that reason an epistemology that ‘sets boundaries,’ which means that it permits one to posit as one may see fit a beyond of reason” (WP §95; KSA

1. Nietszche holds Kant responsible for his nineteenth-century reception, claiming that Kant “assert[s] the existence of a whole of things of which we know nothing whatever” “precisely because there is advantage in not being able to know anything of them” (WP §571; KSA 12.582).

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12.443, my italics) and to “create . . . a right to affirm certain things as irrefutable” (WP §251: KSA 13.417). But Nietzsche too remains committed to kinds of fact/value conflation that Kant’s project is meant to defuse. Chief among these is a breathless enthusiasm for “affirmation” that is alive and well in Nietzsche scholarship today. Nietzsche misses Kant’s minimalist satisfaction with the phenomenal world as the only one because he continues to assume that phenomenality must fail to satisfy, and indeed that the entire notion of replete phenomenality is incoherent. Because Nietzsche’s repudiation of phenomenality is so global—including even use of the word “appearance”—he generates an unusually violent model of the tension between phenomenophilia and acceptance of the given. Further, Nietzsche often imagines the tendency to think with or without phenomenality to be a matter of constitutional weakness or strength, taking effeminacy and masculinity to measure degrees of capacity for affirmation and so to be themselves part of a moralized fact/value maximalism. While Kant’s fact/value minimalism allows him to rest in his queerness at the expense of acting on it, Nietzsche’s commitment to affirmative being requires him to think of himself as participating actively in a totality that causes him suffering. Nietzsche writes as though it were simply obvious that metaphysics is driven by dissatisfaction with the given—a dissatisfaction Nietzsche interprets hyperbolically as hatred. There seems never to have been a time when he did not hold this belief, although in The Birth of Tragedy, especially, his contempt for metaphysics’ disavowal of reality (Wirklichkeit) is qualified by his grasp of the reasons one would want to avoid it. This very Nietzschean sentiment, hatred of the haters of reality, outlasts the changing meanings of “reality” across his texts. In The Birth of Tragedy reality includes a primordial unity by which one is legitimately horrified; in later works it refers more consistently to a not necessarily tragic world of ordinary appearance (Erscheinung). We ought to find this startling: Nietzsche’s conviction that there is something wrong with dissatisfaction with reality is more important to him than what reality is. What Nietzsche abhors in metaphysics is not only its dishonest (as he sees it) presentation of wish constructions as truths. While he sees dissatisfaction as the core emotion of metaphysics, the one that motivates its production of convenient beliefs, the problem is not merely that that dissatisfaction makes one vulner-

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able to wishful fantasies: dissatisfaction is a problem in itself, even when one remains rational and open. For Nietzsche, to think of appearance at all is to play at attenuating exigency and, to that extent, to suspend an affirmation that he believes is compulsory. That such thought can be only play that doesn’t really threaten reality testing seems to Nietzsche at different times either to make it more palatable or to make it seem infuriatingly irresponsible, like substituting recreation for work. Nietzsche perceives that the phenomenality-dissatisfaction association is a recurrent feature of the history of Western philosophy, and understands too its exacerbation after Kant’s First Critique. In certain texts, especially The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science, Nietzsche adopts a lenient tone toward a therapeutics of appearance—phenomenophilia as a compromise between objection and acceptance. In the late works, Nietzsche spends less time crediting the psychological benefits of looking away and more time disparaging it as a pathetic form of self-medication. What changes is not his assumption that phenomenophilia implies criticism of the given world, but his assessment of how much “right [Recht],” as he always calls it, we have to that criticism—to both its negative content and the act of expressing it. What Nietzsche calls “the right to a phenomenal world” flickers on and off in his writing and vanishes in the late fragments. As Nietzsche’s view of reality grows more reasonable—shifting its stress from hidden depth in The Birth of Tragedy to pragmatic appearances and material forces—his hostility toward dissatisfaction with it grows more vehement, and culminates in his idea of the eternal return as a passionate affirmation of totality. Nietzsche’s hatred of the haters of reality was, it’s no secret, a selfhatred. The entire purpose of the concept of appearance, Nietzsche believes, is to offer a holiday to judgment, and Nietzsche could never grant himself such a holiday for long. He was no Coleridgean procrastinator; he saw deferral as timidity and drifting. At the same time, acceptance of the world “as is” could look to him like giving up on possibility. For Nietzsche as for so many figures in the discourse of phenomenality, the desire to discover alternative forms of experience is a queer desire, one that can inspire both self-development and longing for a new self that is no longer queer. (Nietzsche recognizes this bivalence when he observes that “nihilism” can signal either creativity or despair [WP §111].) Nietzsche’s seduction by evolution—he loved the thought that things impossible in one’s own life-

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time might not be impossible forever—shows his restless discomfort with the world and the human being “as is.” Relaxing with regard to his own character was beyond him. “Be natural!” he exclaims, mimicking cliché advice. “But how, if one happens to be ‘unnatural’?” (WP §66; KSA 12.574). Lack of self-acceptance made Nietzsche disgusted with the passive sensibility of the First Critique—“staying-at-home à la Kant” (WP §444). He could not bear to think that significant self-transformations might not still lie ahead, that he might not be capable of mustering more resources, by creating them if necessary, and therefore of achieving greater things. Yet all the while, he believed he had no right to feelings of dissatisfaction that he could not justify philosophically and that he assumed needed justification. Among the greater things he hoped to achieve were greater renunciations, including sexual ones. Wanting to be equal to the inhuman world and all it imposes (including necessity and dissatisfaction), yet unwilling to tolerate in himself traits that he finds degrading, Nietzsche finally abjures dissatisfaction, and with it phenomenality. Instead, he hopes that affirming totality through the eternal return will settle the conflict, as if nothing less than endorsing absolutely everything could justify the inclusion of his own limitations in the package.2 Psychologically, his forced affirmation is an unhappy ending—it comes off not as self-acceptance, but as the installation of a self with no license to rest, no vocabulary for its own hardship. Nietzsche’s embrace of necessity ends up being as maximal as Kant’s acceptance of it is minimal. With the notion of active participation in a necessary totality, Nietzsche places the greatest imaginable burden on the self.3 Blanchot cannot resist adding the biographical association: And then he collapsed, although he knows it’s magical thinking to do so. Blanchot proposes that “the affirmation of the Eternal Return testifies to the shattering of a mind already ill . . . because of the vertigo of thought that seizes Nietzsche when it declares itself to him.”4 Nietzsche’s neurological illness must in some form have 2. For more zero-sum logic, see “On Redemption,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1966), II:§20. 3. Thus the eternal return is the ultimate enactment of the superegoic injunction to enjoyment defended by Hegel, Lacan, and ÒiÓek: you must not only recognize totality, but participate actively in it and endorse it forever. 4. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation [1969], trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), 272. The pages titled “Affirmation and the passion of

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preceded his late reflections, and the two events occupy exclusive registers, without cause and effect. But I agree with Blanchot that it isn’t surprising that, having subscribed to an exigency so vast and hence so coercive in its demand for value as the eternal return, Nietzsche in his illness began referring to himself as “the Crucified One” (Infinite Conversation, 276). As this began to happen, Nietzsche was also writing harshly about recourse to phenomenality, which he had previously described as one of the best ways of tolerating suffering without denying its content. Is the phenomenality of the world, what Nietzsche called “the appearance of appearance [Schein des Scheins],” one of the main ameliorations of experience? If so, giving up the idea of appearance might have been Nietzsche’s biggest sacrifice. At any rate, in Nietzsche’s story the right to a phenomenal world disappears along with one’s right to be dissatisfied with the world.

1 . g e n e a l og y o f ph en o men ali t y The Birth of Tragedy states bluntly that the basis for phenomenality is “suffering [Urschmerzes]”—the structural suffering of the human being even in the absence of contingent griefs. I’ll have something to say momentarily about the difference between “suffering” and dissatisfaction, but first it’s worth noting how explicit The Birth of Tragedy is about the naturalism of suffering. In this text it is no mystery that experience is difficult to tolerate, nor why: “the Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence [Schrecken und Entsetzlichkeiten des Daseins]” (BT 42; KSA 1.35). For those who need to ask what terror and horror, Nietzsche spells it out: overwhelming dismay [ungeheure Misstrauen] in the face of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira enthroned inexorably over all knowledge [allen Erkenntnissen], the vulture of the great lover of mankind, Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Oedipus, the family curse of the Atridae which drove Orestes to matricide. (BT 42; KSA 1.35)

negative thought” (202–211) reach far into the concerns of this project, and need more consideration than I can give here.

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Nietzsche invokes a global distress that does not have to reach its conclusion in matricide in order to be terrible. It applies to “all knowledge,” to “nature” broadly understood, to the “wise” as well as the hapless. His phrase “the terror and horror of existence” conveys the naturalism of his position. This thorough acknowledgment of baseline mental suffering is the support of Nietzsche’s sometime indulgence of phenomenophilia. The Birth of Tragedy asserts that suffering—what we would probably call “trauma”—precedes and justifies the therapeutic use of phenomenality, and, further, that suffering is inherent in living.5 In The Birth of Tragedy, mere phenomenality (Schein) is opposed to primal unity as relief from it. Once both symptom and drug are in place, they may produce looping effects, but there’s no doubt that the symptom comes first. The “substratum [Untergrund]” or “truth” (BT 45, 46; KSA 1.39) of natural (not just Greek) life is “suffering . . . the sole ground of the world [ewigen Urschmerzes, des einzigen Grundes der Welt]” (BT 45; KSA 1.39) and “nature’s excess [Uebermaass] in pleasure, grief, and knowledge” (BT 46; KSA 1.40–41).6 What Nietzsche depicts looks in Freudian terms like a trauma more basic than pleasure or pain: the trauma of quantitative intensity. Nietzsche describes such trauma as the proto-experience of unity. Individuation, in comparison, is an “Apollinian” process aligned with illusion (Schein) and projected light (BT 35–36; KSA 1.27–28), hence with defense. In the jargon of The Birth of Tragedy, the notion of the trauma 5. For a brief survey of the figure of therapeutics in Nietzsche, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche [1980], trans. Richard L. Collier, Jr. (London: Athlone, 2000), 172–182. 6. In both of two cases in which Nietzsche seems to state that “individuation” is “the primal cause of evil” (BT 74; KSA 1.620), the individuation thesis is actually being attributed to someone else. In the first, “it is intimated” by the tragedies “that we are . . . to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself [wobei angedeutet wird . . . dass wir also den Zustand der Individuation als den Quell und Urgrund alles Leidens, als etwas an sich Verwerfliches, zu betrachten hätten]” (BT 73; KSA 1.620, my italics). The second example follows close on the first and is still not explicitly endorsed by Nietzsche: “this view of things already provides us with all the elements of a profound and pessimistic view of the world, together with . . . the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil [in den angeführten Anschauungen haben wir bereits alle Bestandtheile einer tiefsinnigen und pessimistischen Weltbetrachtung . . . und zugleich damit . . . die Betrachtung der Individuation als des Urgrunds des Uebels]” (BT 74; KSA 1.620, my italics).

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of eros emerges within “primal unity”: “at the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss [sehnende Klagelaut über einen unersetzlichen Verlust]” (BT 40; KSA 1.33). Nietzsche’s famous utterance, “the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion [die entzückende Vision, den lustvollen Schein], for its continuous redemption” (BT 45; KSA 1.38), suggests that Schein is a necessary supplement to the preceding unity.7 Although “Schein” means “illusion” in the sense of “deception” as well as “mere appearance,” Nietzsche reinforces its visual dimension with allusions to visual phenomena, including theater and painting. (As here, where “Schein” follows closely the phrase “rapturous vision,” words like “Schein” in German and “vision” in English of course associate deceptiveness and visuality.) Ten pages later Nietzsche repeats that the “pain” of primal unity precedes appearance: “music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena” (BT 55; KSA 1.51). Distress within unity, again, provokes appearance on a diagonal. This sequence, “pain → phenomena,” with its implication of cause and effect, potentially justifies the invention of phenomenality. The oddity of The Birth of Tragedy is that all of the suffering is, in a way, no problem. In Nietzsche’s imaginary primordial world, one can suffer without minding the suffering; dissatisfaction is minding, and for Nietzsche it is only this metafeeling that something is wrong with suffering that is really wrong. The difference between suffering and dissatisfaction corresponds to the difference between appearance and what Nietzsche calls the “appearance of appearance.” While appearance is inevitable, the appearance of appearance occurs, consciously or unconsciously, through reflexive framing. The appearance of appearance may be understood as the apprehension of phenomenality as such, and the difference between “appearance” and “appearance of appearance” sets in the shade the distinc7. The implication for the trauma of eros is that intensity of stimulus paves the way for the division you/me. My first inkling that you are here would be my accurate feeling that there is too much here for me, that is, more than I can account for from my knowledge of myself. What seems to be an excessive quantity of presence reflects an inadequately developed sense of where one person ends and another begins.

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tion between Erscheinung and Schein. For Nietzsche, the serious problems of self-indulgence and self-denial arise with the metaperceptions and metaemotions of the Apollinian mode. In contrast, the Dionysian poet in The Birth of Tragedy exhibits suffering without dissatisfaction and hence a kind of appearance without the “appearance of appearance.” That the Dionysian poet is closer to music than to the image indicates his immersion in a tragic experience that others rightly dread. Although even the Dionysian artist uses Apollinian appearance, he does so without losing immediacy. When Archilochus, “the first Greek lyrist,” falls asleep after a Dionysian revel, “Apollo approaches and touches him with the laurel. Then the Dionysian-musical enchantment of the sleeper seems to emit image sparks [Bilderfunken], lyrical poems, which in their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs” (BT 50; KSA 1.44). Similarly, in folk song “the continuously generating melody scatters image sparks all around” (BT 53; KSA 1.49). Even here defense operates, in other words, but the Dionysian poet doesn’t use phenomenality any more than animals use forgetfulness in Nietzsche’s “Use and Abuse of History for Life.” What distinguishes the Dionysian image is its being neither inside nor outside the self. The lyric poet experiences images as “his very self” and his empirical life as their creation (BT 50; KSA 1.45): he does not experience the appearances as appearances, and to the same extent fails to experience himself as something distinct.8 In support of this characterization of the poet, Nietzsche cites Schopenhauer’s assertion that “song and the lyrical mood” are epiphenomena of tension in which “willing (the personal interest of the ends) and pure perception of the environment are wonderfully mingled, connections between them are sought and imagined,” and “the subjective mood . . . imparts its own hue

8. Karl Heinz Bohrer asserts that Dionysian experience is always already an aesthetic one of appearance (Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance [1981], trans. Ruth Crowley [New York: Columbia UP, 1994], 119). The next question to ask is whether it is one of the appearance of appearance. Bohrer’s book is one of the few investigations of phenomenality to give significant consideration to the phenomenology of phenomenality, which Bohrer believes depends centrally on the figure of the sudden. Bohrer argues that Nietzsche is a crucial figure in the development of the idea of a replete phenomenality not subordinated to substance or truth, and defines Nietzsche against Kant, Schiller, and Hegel in this respect (113–140).

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to the perceived environment, and vice versa [die subjective Stimmung, die Affection des Willens, theilt der angeschauten Umgebung und diese wiederum jener ihre Farbe im Reflex mit]” (quoted in BT 51; KSA 1.46). According to Nietzsche, Apollinian epic rhapsodists condemn this variegated, “unequal and irregular image world of lyric poetry” (BT 53; KSA 1.49). Over and against Dionysian lyric, lucid dreaming is Nietzsche’s prototype of appearance as appearance, dissatisfaction, and reflexive defense. One explanation of what Nietzsche means by “appearance of appearance” is that, by a Platonic sort of logic, if “empirical reality” in general is “a continuously manifested representation of the primal unity,” then dreams, being representations of empirical reality, like “naive art,” are “mere appearance of mere appearance [Schein des Scheins]” (BT 45; KSA 1.39).9 What matters is that this appearance of appearance appear to the dreamer, since only then can it become a source of insight. Unlike the Dionysian poet, the dreamer has to recognize the dream as such: in our dreams we delight in the immediate understanding of figure [Gestalt]; all forms speak to us; there is nothing unimportant or superfluous. But even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance [die durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres Scheins]: at least this is my experience, and for its frequency—indeed, normality—I could adduce many proofs, including the sayings of the poets. (BT 34; KSA 1.26, translation modified) In reading this passage it can be difficult to get past Nietzsche’s distractingly weird idea that dreams are more intelligible than waking life. He bases that idea, I think, on the point that “there is nothing unimportant or superfluous” in dreams (here we might recall Coleridge’s similar belief that ordinary perceptions are more “promiscuous” than hallucinations). The telling characteristic of the lucid dream, however, is that it creates the effect of Schein by reflexivity alone. As John Sallis remarks, 9. For an example of this interpretation see ibid., 123–127, especially 124, and Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche, 121.

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“because the image appears as image, one is not engaged by it as though it were ‘original,’ as though it had the pressing reality of the things of everyday life. Contemplative distance is thus installed within the Apollinian state. . . . Apollinian images offer a certain interpretation of life.”10 Karl Heinz Bohrer locates Nietzsche’s significance in the history of thought about phenomenality just here, in the fact that he “understood aesthetic appearance in the sense of the rhetorical tradition as the phenomenon of an effect” (Suddenness, 115).11 Because the appearance of appearance is merely attitudinal, the criterion of reflexive phenomenality is so easy to meet—one can have it for the wishing, as Coleridge discovers— that it scatters the Schein effect across empirical reality, making it possible at any time to treat Erscheinung as Schein. For the sensation of Schein has no distinguishing quality but apperceptivity: if it relieves, it’s not by muffling “delight” or “understanding.” A strange and powerful defense, this “ambrosial vapor” that leaves the head clear for experience at its “most intense”—like absinthe, the poets’ favorite alcohol. Nietzsche goes on, “philosophical men . . . even have a presentiment that the reality in which we live and have our being is also mere appearance [Schein], and that another, quite different reality lies beneath it” (BT 34; KSA 1.26). Expanded to waking life, the sensation leaves the content of the philosopher’s reality free from distortion, his affects at full strength, even as it applies fleetingly to “the whole . . . of life”: the whole divine comedy of life, including the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows on a wall [Schattenspiel]—for he lives and suffers with these scenes—and yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion [flüchtige Empfindung des Scheins]. And perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the dangers and terrors of dreams they have occasionally said to themselves in self-encour10. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 28–29. 11. Bohrer argues that by virtue of this understanding Nietzsche “represents a kind of rediscovery, with a different metaphysical justification,” of a phenomenological approach to phenomenality that had been lost since the classical era (115–117); “in Nietzsche’s work . . . the particular conditions of perception gain phenomenological effect” (120). Bohrer’s alignment of the rhetorical and the phenomenological is a significant insight in itself.

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agement, and not without success, “It is a dream! I will dream on!” (BT 35; KSA 1.27) The Gay Science §54 repeats every feature of this passage. Nietzsche returns to it again in The Twilight of the Idols and The Will to Power to stress that, as he phrases it in The Birth of Tragedy with regard to Apollinian illusion, Schein “is one of those illusions which nature so frequently employs to achieve her own ends” (BT 44; KSA 1.37)—that is, that it connives our continuance as biological agents by making it easier for us to go on.12 Freud makes a parallel observation about illusion-feelings in dreams: when the thought “this is only a dream” occurs during a dream, it has the same purpose in view as when the words are pronounced on the stage by la belle Hélène in Offenbach’s comic opera of that name: it is aimed at reducing the importance of what has just been experienced and at making it possible to tolerate what is to follow.13 (SE IV: 526) Again, it’s worth underlining that the sensation of Schein leaves reality testing unaffected. The one who views life as a series of phenomenal scenes “lives and suffers with these scenes—and yet.” And yet what? What is the gain of the effect, if the suffering is included? The suffering is included, but so is the thought that it ought not to be. Nietzsche attributes the philosophical presentiment that the world is Schein paradigmatically to Schopenhauer—Schopenhauer, who opines “that the

12. See also Beyond Good and Evil §3. 13. At this moment of Offenbach’s opera, Hélène sings a love ballad with Paris within a dream. The dream allows the duet to occur, since it’s only a thought, not actual cheating on her husband. It’s possible to argue that Offenbach’s operettas generally use the device Freud notices at this moment: Offenbach places criticisms of the Second Empire within light comedies that allow them to be entertained inside the structures of empire they criticize. For similar thoughts on Offenbach, see Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time [1937], trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (New York: Zone, 2003). Thanks to Robert Wood for this idea and reference. Theodor Reik meditates on Offenbach’s importance for himself and implicitly for Freud in the context of the aspirations of assimilationalist Jewish Vienna in The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music [1953] (New York: Grove, 1960), 181–208.

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world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection” (BT 24).14 Nietzsche’s lucid dreamer declares no such dissatisfaction, and yet the appearance of appearance by itself registers his mental reservations. The effect “reduc[es] the importance” of what appears, as Freud observes, by highlighting instead the fact that it appears. Nietzsche’s interpretation of Raphael’s Transfiguration finds in it a similar “Depotenziren des Scheins zum Schein” (BT 45; KSA 1.39, my italics).15 Sallis comments that “dream images shine in such a way that one takes delight in them, an immediate delight in them simply as forms and figures” (Crossings, 26): putting together the intense pleasurability of appearances as appearances with Freud’s hypothesis that images elude censorship and do not directly negate, we might ask whether the appearance of appearance gets away with its evasion of affirmation because it is beautiful and positively presented. To reconstruct this sequence of associations is to find another reason for the folkloric association between the apparent and the insubstantial. Nietzsche’s faux-historical example of the appearance of appearance is Euripides, whose “epic-Apollinian” mode marks the advent of reflexive phenomenality. The “poet of the dramatized epos” enjoys “calm, unmoved

14. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 2: 573–602. Nietzsche further remarks, “Schopenhauer actually indicates as the criterion of philosophical ability the occasional ability to view men and things as mere phantoms or dream images” (BT 34; KSA 1.26–27). In Nietzsche’s terms, however, Schopenhauer gets the cause and effect of phenomenality and dissatisfaction classically wrong since he assumes that mere appearance needs redemption. On Nietzsche’s debt to and difference from Schopenhauer on this point, see Bohrer, Suddenness, 125. 15. In Nietzsche’s exegesis, the “lower half” of Raphael’s vertically organized transfiguration of Christ, “the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the bewildered, terrified disciples,” allegorizes the “ground” of suffering and “terrible wisdom of Silenus” (BT 45; KSA 1.39). The whole is rendered calm by the way the painting extends the surface beauty of the image of Christ (which is of course actually a product of Raphael’s technique in the first place), even though, it seems to Nietzsche, it’s as though the transfiguration is “invisible” to the people beneath it (BT 45; KSA 1.39). Raphael is as serene about this disparity as Christ is about rising; only Nietzsche is troubled. His choice of this painting also points up the secondary, ameliorative nature of Schein through the figure of the son that personifies it, reinforcing the temporal sequence I mentioned above (first pain, then phenomena).

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contemplation which sees the images before its wide-open eyes” (BT 83; KSA 1.83) instead of merging with them as the Dionysian lyricist does. What distinguishes the Euripidean poet’s experience is his reflexive consciousness that it is appearance. “So extraordinary is the power of the epicApollinian that before our eyes it transforms the most terrible things by the joy in mere appearance and in redemption through mere appearance [so ungemein ist die Gewalt des Episch-Apollinischen, dass es die schreckensvollsten Dinge mit jener Lust am Scheine und der Erlösung durch den Schein vor unseren Augen verzaubert]” (BT 83; KSA 1.84). Here Nietzsche uses “Schein” for appearance that is indistinguishable from Erscheinung. If the things remain “terrible,” how are they transformed and redeemed? Nietzsche explains the appeal of Euripidean phenomenality this way: [the Euripidean poet] lives in these images, and only in them, with joyous satisfaction. He never grows tired of contemplating lovingly even their minutest traits. Even the image of the angry Achilles is only an image to him whose angry expression he enjoys with the dreamer’s pleasure in illusion. Thus, by his mirror of illusion, he is protected against becoming one and fused with his figures. Während der Letztgenannte in diesen Bildern und nur in ihnen mit freudigem Behagen lebt und nicht müde wird, sie bis auf die kleinsten Züge hin liebevoll anzuschauen, während selbst das Bild des zürnenden Achilles für ihn nur ein Bild ist, dessen zürnenden Ausdruck er mit jener Traumlust am Scheine geniesst so dass er, durch diesen Spiegel des Scheines, gegen das Einswerden und Zusammenschmelzen mit seinen Gestalten geschützt ist. (BT 50; KSA 1.44, my italics) The emergency is the need to protect oneself from being “one and fused” with someone very angry: to be “fused” with someone like Achilles would be to be exposed to one’s own aggression, fantasized at Achilles-like levels of omnipotence. Nietzsche writes, not that “Achilles is only an image,” but that “the image of” Achilles “is only an image”—as if the norm were taking an image (Bild) as thing, so that taking an image as an image becomes an achievement. The content of the Euripidean appearance re-

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mains (Achilles is still imagined to be angry); only it’s enjoyed “with the dreamer’s pleasure in illusion.” So, in the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche duly differentiates “‘appearances’ (in the sense assigned to those words by Idealistic philosophers) [‘Erscheinungen’ (im Sinne des idealistischen terminus technicus)]” from “‘deceptions,’ as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art [‘Täuschungen,’ als Schein, Wahn, Irrthum, Ausdeutung, Zurechtmachung, Kunst]” (BT 22–23; KSA 1.18, translation modified); yet he sorts the terms only to rejoin them in “a philosophy that dares to move, to demote morality into the realm of appearance—and not merely among ‘appearances’ . . . but among ‘deceptions,’ as semblance/illusion [eine Philosophie, welche es wagt, die Moral selbst in die Welt der Erscheinung zu setzen, herabzusetzen, und nicht nur unter die ‘Erscheinungen’ . . . sondern unter die ‘Täuschungen,’ als Schein]” (BT 22–23; KSA 1.18, translation modified, my italics). As though Erscheinung were always on the slope to Schein,16 the connotation of illusion never really washes out of the term “appearance,” even though philosophers have tried to purify it by restricting it to a “technical” sense. What is the distinction between Schein and Erscheinung in a passage like this one? But suppose we disregard the character of the hero as it comes to the surface, visibly—after all, it is in the last analysis nothing but a bright image projected on a dark wall, which means appearance [Erscheinung] through and through; suppose we penetrate into the myth that projects itself in these lucid reflections: then we suddenly experience a phenomenon that is just the opposite of a familiar optical phenomenon. When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Soph16. According to Robert Rethy, “that Schein and Erscheinung form a continuum is the sense of the Schopenhauerian use of the ‘veil of Maya’ to characterize the world of experience.” See “Schein in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (New York: Routledge, 1991), 59–87, 61. For an account of Nietzschean Schein that draws it closer to dominant romantic aesthetic values from Goethe to Adorno, see Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 151–196.

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oclean hero—in short, the Apollinian aspect of the mask—are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. Sehen wir aber einmal von dem auf die Oberfläche kommenden und sichtbar werdenden Charakter des Helden ab—der im Grunde nichts mehr ist als das auf eine dunkle Wand geworfene Lichtbild d.h. Erscheinung durch und durch—dringen wir vielmehr in den Mythus ein, der in diesen hellen Spiegelungen sich projicirt, so erleben wir plötzlich ein Phänomen, das ein umgekehrtes Verhältniss zu einem bekannten optischen hat. Wenn wir bei einem kräftigen Versuch, die Sonne in’s Auge zu fassen, uns geblendet abwenden, so haben wir dunkle farbige Flecken gleichsam als Heilmittel vor den Augen: umgekehrt sind jene Lichtbilderscheinungen des sophokleischen Helden, kurz das Apollinische der Maske, nothwendige Erzeugungen eines Blickes in’s Innere und Schreckliche der Natur, gleichsam leuchtende Flecken zur Heilung des von grausiger Nacht versehrten Blickes. (BT 67; KSA 1.65) Instead of “mere appearance,” Nietzsche describes the hero as mere Erscheinung, “nothing but” ordinary, stable appearance considered as projected image. Something of the phenomenological quality of mere phenomenality’s relief—the feeling it gives that something heavy is gone— can be read here. Instead of being like the skin of an object, as in Lucretius, appearance is the impression left when a belief is temporarily lifted away. What dissolves here is the obligation to endorse, or at least try to endorse, fact perception. (The fact at issue here may be psychic, “inside,” fact.) Much as Nietzsche figures “dark-colored spots,” aftereffects of vision, as “cure [Heilmittel],” Erscheinungen considered as appearances of appearance—that is, images that have been recognized as images—seem to be luminous vestiges of “terrors of nature” that are, by being considered vestiges, placed in the past. In a thoughtful analysis of appearance and reality in The Birth of Tragedy, James I. Porter claims that “on Nietzsche’s account, the motivation to heighten appearances, virtually to produce them, is in part psychological, although he does not yet offer a clear model for this motivation, apart

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from what can be read out of the desires of the ‘primordial unity’ (‘a primordial desire for appearance’), or, more proximately and convincingly, out of the desires of the Greeks.”17 Porter overlooks the motivation for phenomenality (the release it brings) because he does not credit Nietzsche’s “distress of fullness”; he thinks “that the primordial unity of being should be the source of a tragic and not a joyous knowledge strains credulity by itself” (52).18 The axiomatic association between unity and joy occludes the trauma of eros investigated by psychoanalysts like Bass. Imagining a joy in unity in fact already attributes to it a tension and possibility of differentiation.19 Taking for granted the joyousness of unity—in a version of fact/value conflation—places one in a poor position to understand the motivation to heighten appearances, which is to suspend fact/ value conflation itself. The value of being, even at best, is a live question for Nietzsche; even the fact that he believes that metaphysicians always underrate it indicates that much. As the phenomenophile—the “nihilist,” in Nietzsche’s language—wonders why the world isn’t already more satisfying (as we’ll see momentarily), the philosopher, echoing him from the opposite side, wants to know why the nihilist is not already satisfied and claims that his dissatisfaction persists without right, in bad faith or incoherence. This pressure, the pressure that Porter is already applying to Nietzsche, gets in the way of noticing that “heightening appearances” is a response, in the form of a compromise, to this very pressure.20 17. The Birth of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 54–55. Porter’s book is absorbing and relevant in its entirety. 18. For eloquent credulity regarding Nietzsche’s reservations about primal unity, see Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism [1986], trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989): “one must play with that from which one is unable to distance oneself” (80). See also 28 and 39. 19. Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 113. 20. My friend Porter feels that doubling appearance through “the appearance of appearance” brings back metaphysics in the form of a “metaphysics of appearances” (Birth of Dionysus, 5). He argues that Nietzsche learns “that metaphysics is a fictional enterprise worthy of being shattered once and for all but also that its resurrection is an inescapable and constitutional need deeply implanted in human nature” (9): “rather than asking whether Nietzsche’s thinking is metaphysical (it obviously is), the more relevant question is whether there is any thinking that is not” (28). It’s doubtful, however, whether positing two layers of appearance entails that the second is a metaphysical level

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2 . stol e n ph en o men ali t y In The Birth of Tragedy phenomenality is so inevitable a defense against suffering that it’s easy to miss Nietzsche’s disapproval of dissatisfaction with suffering. Between The Birth of Tragedy and The Will to Power, Nietzsche insists that the given world is only appearance,21 yet almost equally continually asserts that the rhetoric and cultivation of mere phenomenality imply reservations about the world “as is” which show weakness. This weakness is sometimes figured as constitutional weakness, and thus plays into Nietzsche’s anxiety about the queerness of his body. Within this scheme, the manipulation of the “appearance of appearance” is a furtive act that consoles suffering while avoiding the explicit expression of dissatisfaction with

of reality. Nietzsche’s “Schein des Schein” claims nothing other than appearance out of which a particular appearance comes phenomenologically to attention. Nietzsche’s emphasis on trompe l’oeils seems “rhetorical,” as Bohrer notes (Suddenness, 115–117). Similarly, Ivan Soll argues that after The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche does not appeal to “an experience-transcending reality,” but, rather, that “a closer consideration of our experience” itself shows the falsity of conceptual unities. See “Nietzsche on the Illusions of Everyday Experience,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 7–33, 22. As I mention above in note 11, the rhetorical and experiential often mark differences within rather than between categories. The secondary literature on Nietzsche tends to bypass rhetorical and experiential arguments and hence to decide that Nietzsche reinstates appearance-reality dualism, on the mistaken logic that rhetorical difference within appearance is modeled on classical dualism. In this way it fails to discriminate difference from opposition. See Maudmarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 113–114, and Philip Pothen, Nietzsche and the Fate of Art (Lincolnshire: Ashgate, 2002), 104, 178–180. Rejecting the “appearance of appearance” as he does, it follows that Porter believes that relation to appearance in Nietzsche should be described as a kind of disavowal (Birth of Dionysus, 73)—knowing one thing and acting as though one didn’t know. Porter conflates having a perception or experience with having a belief, and therefore conflates acting in disagreement with a perception or experience with disavowal. The unstated assumption that subjective experience occurs in a mode analogous to affirmation is, from my perspective, part of the metaphysical prejudice against one’s right to a phenomenal world. For instances when such a distinction affects what Porter means by Nietzsche’s “metaphysics,” see Birth of Dionysus, 14, 27–28, 44, 66, 178. 21. For a list of instances see Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind, 2nd ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Lund Humphries, 1935), 341–362.

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suffering. This is also to say that it compromises with possible deviance while deferring a final confrontation with the question of whether Nietzsche finds himself deviant or not. In The Gay Science, especially, Nietzsche takes a conspiratorial tone toward the benefits of trompe l’oeils: What one should learn from artists.—How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters. Was man den Künstlern ablernen soll.—Welche Mittel haben wir, uns die Dinge schön, anziehend, begehrenswerth zu machen, wenn sie es nicht sind? und ich meine, sie sind es an sich niemals! Hier haben wir von den Aerzten Etwas zu lernen, wenn sie zum Beispiel das Bittere verdünnen oder Wein und Zucker in den Mischkrug thun; aber noch mehr von den Künstlern, welche eigentlich fortwährend darauf aus sind, solche Erfindungen und Kunststücke zu machen. Sich von den Dingen entfernen, bis man Vieles von ihnen nicht mehr sieht und Vieles hinzusehen muss, um sie noch zu sehen oder die Dinge um die Ecke und wie in einem Ausschnitte sehen oder sie so stellen, dass sie sich theilweise verstellen und nur perspectivische Durchblicke gestatten oder sie durch gefärbtes Glas oder im Lichte der Abendröthe an-

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schauen oder ihnen eine Oberfläche und Haut geben, welche keine volle Transparenz hat: das Alles sollen wir den Künstlern ablernen und im Uebrigen weiser sein, als sie. Denn bei ihnen hört gewöhnlich diese ihre feine Kraft auf, wo die Kunst aufhört und das Leben beginnt; wir aber wollen die Dichter unseres Lebens sein, und im Kleinsten und Alltäglichsten zuerst.22 “In the smallest, most everyday matters” we are at a remove from tragedy and horror of fusion, and yet the ordinary world could still use some help. Nietzsche confides that “for us” things seem unlovely and undesirable head-on. He assumes that manipulations of perspective make improvements; that the imaginary surpasses the actual; and that elements of the world seem poorly arranged (in need of lighting, cropping, and framing). Like pharmaceutical flavoring techniques, optical management minimizes and conceals the bitter. And although Nietzsche asserts that artists aren’t always wise, the only error he attributes to them is that of failing to persist in their foolishness. Even though artists are “really continually [eigentlich fortwährend]” trying to engineer illusions, he could use even more of them. It is Nietzsche’s conspiratorial tone, however, that sounds the home note of his analyses of phenomenal pharmacology in this period. It suggests that artists work tactfully, almost secretively, so that few will notice what they’re doing. The whole aphorism moves from one mock-whisper to another, from “und ich meine” (“I rather think,” literally “and I mean”) to the carefully partial obscuring of objects and selection of “not fully transparent” surfaces. Unlike the physician’s sugaring of the pill, the artist’s correction of the world must be “subtle.” What is the point of all this discretion? Nietzsche is observing, in part, the modest program of the undeceived understanding at play, which creates “illusion artificially created [künstelten Scheine] in imitation” of deceptive “inferences,” as Kant puts it (CPR A298/B354). Phenomenophilia is soft criticism of the given world; it re22. The Gay Science [1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §299 (KSA 3.538), hereafter GSc. Sarah Kofman uses this passage to argue that “if art is a legitimate paradigm of unconscious activity, that is because it is just a specific instance of it, the one which can present itself as what it is: a cult of the surface” (Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993], 31).

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stricts itself to Schein-effects and spectra-equivalents that alter no substance. Like a recreational drug, it aims to please rather than transform: it feels good, then wears off. In a section of The Gay Science called “Diverse dissatisfaction [Verschiedene Unzufriedenheit],” Nietzsche proposes that the weak and quasi feminine type of the dissatisfied. . . . manifests its weakness and femininity by gladly being deceived occasionally and settling for a little intoxication and effusive enthusiasm, although it can never be satisfied altogether and suffers from the incurability of its dissatisfaction. (GSc §24; KSA 3.398) According to Nietzsche, dissatisfaction of this self-medicating stripe has no hope, and perhaps no desire, to disturb the given order; it subsists in a cycle of temporary easements that perpetuates discomfort.23 Wishing to be discreet, it has no interest in becoming visible, and expresses itself through effeminate micro-actions. Nietzsche sometimes refers to such a complex as “romanticism.” “A romantic” is someone “whose great dissatisfaction with himself [große Mißvergnügen an sich] makes him creative” in that he “looks away” or “back” instead of looking ahead or at himself, on one hand, or shutting the eyes, on the other (WP §844; KSA 12.117). Phenomenal pharmacology becomes a strategy for closeted dissatisfaction. For Nietzsche, the problem of value is always complicated by the guilt that accompanies dissatisfaction. Nietzsche insinuates that even metaphysicians who launch direct attacks on the given world feel obligated to identify reality with value—not only that they do in practice, but that they feel they should, as though the identification were not inevitable.24 Almost no one, it seems, feels comfortable setting a relatively low value on conditions 23. Sartre describes Baudelaire’s patterns of thought in similar language: “If Baudelaire had gone on living his transcendence to the end, it would have led him to challenge Good itself, to move forward to other goals which really would have been his goals. He refused; he stifled the positive impulse; he only wanted to experience it in its negative form of non-satisfaction [insatisfaction] which was like a continual mental reservation. Through suffering the loop was looped, the system made a closed one” (Baudelaire [1946], trans. Martin Turnell [New York: New Directions, 1967], 98). For Baudelaire, as for Coleridge, “insatisfaction” and guilty mental reservation issue in romantic lyrics of diaphaneity. 24. Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer particularly closely here.

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held to be deeply noncontingent. Even Plato, whose project is the construction of a good independent from fact, invents ideal reality so that he can avoid criticizing actuality as reality: Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: the more “Idea,” the more being. He reversed the concept “reality” and said: “What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea,’ the nearer we approach ‘truth.’”—Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognize how astonishing it is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance [Schein] to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes “being,” “causality” and “goodness,” and “truth,” in short everything men value. (WP §572; KSA 12.253, translation modified) Not only does Plato shrink from bestowing the honorific “reality” upon the given world; his cosmology is crafted to disguise his distaste for it, as though he secretly acknowledged that the given world was the real one and felt, like Nietzsche, that his reservations were something shameful. By contrasting the permanent “Idea” and transferring reality to it, Plato accommodates the popular assumption of the fact/value conflation, that reality ought to compel endorsement. In the same stroke, he avoids verbalizing dissatisfaction with reality and gets the power of the fact/value conflation behind his own argument. Nietzsche, for his part, shows what Plato is up to, yet never directly addresses the guilt about criticizing the world that he continually assumes in his analysis of Plato’s veiled criticism. Nietzsche, too, is invested in this guilt and unwilling to perceive it as contingent; indeed, his complaint is basically that Plato does not feel nearly guilty enough. When Nietzsche complains that “the history of philosophy is a secret [heimliches] raging against the preconditions of life, against the value feelings of life, against partisanship in favor of life” (WP §461; KSA 13.318), his indignation diverts attention from the question: why does it have to be a secret? In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s least hysterical book, phenomenophilia is actually recommended, but only because it helps to stave off a more direct

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statement of dissatisfaction. The Gay Science is Nietzsche’s book of convalescence, which allows self-indulgence for a limited time. The convalescence motif develops a series of reflections “sid[ing] with” the body or physis (GSc §39; KSA 3.407) “Against Remorse [Gegen die Reue]” (GSc §41; KSA 3.408), against the suppression of the passions (GSc §47; KSA 3.412), against moralized renunciation and self-control (GSc §§304–305; KSA 3.542–543), etc. Nietzsche being Nietzsche, there is also a defense of “the man of renunciation” (GSc §27; KSA 3.400) and arguments both for Epicurean pleasure in surface (GSc §45, below; KSA 3.411) and against the Epicurean’s self-protectively narrow selection among stimuli (GSc §306; KSA 3.544). Amid this relatively relaxed, temporary environment, Nietzsche combines desires for self-acceptance and self-denial, the desire to express dissatisfaction and his sense that there is something wrong with this feeling: Epicurus.—Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience the character of Epicurus quite differently from perhaps everybody else. Whatever I hear or read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity. I see his eyes gaze upon a wide, white sea, across rocks at the shore that are bathed in sunlight, while large and small animals are playing in this light, as serene and calm as the light and his eyes. Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea. Never before has voluptuousness been so modest. (GSc §45; KSA 3.411) For the New Year.—I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to

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wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yessayer. (GSc §276; KSA 3.521) Nietzsche admires Epicurus for the carefully scaled nature of his desire, content to take pleasure in merely looking—and reassured, as we also saw in the discussion of Kant, that nothing is required but to look. The oxymoron of modest voluptuousness describes Epicurus’s “happiness of eyes,” projected in turn by Nietzsche in his mind’s eye, as he imagines that he sees Epicurus looking and enjoys Epicurus as the Epicurean enjoys the waves.25 Mere looking figures freedom as rest from action—indefinite for Epicurus, temporary for Nietzsche—as well as a lack of obligation to take sexual action, to touch what pleases. Introduced here is the notion of Nietzsche as the closeted queer who’s not, for the moment, under pressure to act on his feelings. If The Birth of Tragedy describes the Dionysian poet who suffers uncritically, The Gay Science describes a suffering in which the leisure activity of phenomenophilia both assumes and discharges the minding. The difficulty of speaking about minding dissolves in the happiness of not having to communicate at all. Being allowed just to look in §45 gives way to looking away in §276 when the imperative of endorsement returns. Nietzsche justifies uttering his “first thought” supposedly by the carnival license that the New Year offers, yet his first thought seems to need no license to be uttered. To the contrary, it is a socially minded resolution; what he wishes to be granted converges with what he wishes he were—an affirmative being—in an attempt to exceed the opposition of self-denial and self-indulgence. (The eternal return will repeat this structure: a wish is supposed to envision a gift, but Nietzsche wishes that he were responsible for everything.) His phrasing the wish as a resolution shows that being “a Yes-sayer” takes effort—saying “yes” contains a hidden negative, the injunction to refrain from accusing the accusers (hating the haters of reality). A little resistance

25. Affinity with fetishism recurs in discussions of mere phenomenality, but again, for the distinction between fetishism and phenomenophilia see Chapter 1, note 36.

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to affirmation remains in his deferring the time when he will become a yes-sayer. Apart from that, though, Nietzsche leaves himself only one escape clause: “looking away,” the diagonal, image-cropping perception that phenomenophiles practice, which is not, at the same time, disavowal, or seeing spectres, or not looking at all. When Nietzsche writes, “I want to proceed as Raphael did and never paint another image of torture” (GSc §313; KSA 3.548), he declares his intention to be a painter of analgesic surfaces. In contrast, when Nietzsche renounces looking away, the issue of endorsement is ominously forced.

3 . th e d i sa p pearan ce o f appearan ce Nietzsche is a complex figure in the philosophical tradition for which dissatisfaction is an incipiently ethical stance. Followers of Kant find such an ethical dissatisfaction in the fact that the mind necessarily elicits ideas of reason, as is modeled by transcendental illusion.26 In the classic statement of Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Man, “it follows from the very nature and character of ethical thought that it can never condescend to accept ‘the given.’”27 “‘Things ought to be different,’ ‘things shall be different’: dissatisfaction would thus be the germ of ethics” (WP §333; KSA 12.299), Nietzsche reflects. Dissatisfaction can be integrated into Nietzsche’s evolutionary project, then, in the form of a drive to growth. At such moments of integration, dissatisfaction becomes acceptable to Nietzsche, as in his late discussions of nihilism. These fragments identify nihilism with dissatisfaction outright, as in WP §111: “dissatisfaction [Unzufriedenheit], nihilism could be a good sign” (KSA 12.450; see also WP §112; KSA 12.468). Nihilism can signal creative desire, much as “the normal dissatisfaction [Unbefriedigung] of our drives . . . is the great stimulus to life” (WP §697;

26. See Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 3–4 and 130ff. Grier points out that the upshot of Kant’s attitude toward the ideas of reason—how productive these unavoidable ideas are supposed to be— remains enigmatic: “although many commentators have attempted to provide an interpretation that makes sense of Kant’s ‘positive’ claims about the role of reason, there continues to be no general agreement on the issue” (4). 27. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944), 228.

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KSA 13.38; see also WP §694; KSA 9.207, and WP §696; KSA 13.37). In comparison, “the belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be” (WP §585; KSA 12.365). I’ve mentioned before the futural side of figures such as Derrida’s spectre of Marx and Hartley Coleridge’s feeling that his most compelling thoughts must someday become things, and will discuss Hegel’s use of similar reasoning in Chapter 4. The problem with dissatisfaction for Nietzsche is not the belief that the world should be different in future, but the belief that it ought already to have been different. This backward-looking complaint—why is the world unsatisfactory? why is it not satisfactory already?—retards invention, he argues, albeit less so than believing that the world is fine “as is.” Nihilism, which “judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist,” wastes one’s time. It remains “intermediary” (WP §585; KSA 12.367) for Nietzsche because it restricts itself to the past and contemplative present and lacks initiative to shape the future. The fact that Nietzsche respects dissatisfaction only when it is already oriented toward productivity, however, means that he does not really respect it. A passage in The Gay Science that credits “criticism” with “evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin” begins and ends, “This is said in favor of criticism,” as though everything else were against it (GSc §307; KSA 3.544). In the late notebooks, working toward The Will to Power, Nietzsche hopes to overcome dissatisfaction in the eternal return. Nietzsche would seem to have a lot of nerve criticizing criticism and dissatisfaction, given his lifetime of critical polemic; by the same logic, however, to take seriously his repudiation of dissatisfaction is to see how deeply self-rejecting and psychologically damaging Nietzschean affirmation is. A series of notebook reflections in 1886–1888 returns to “Kant’s mistakes” (WP §554; KSA 12.135) and sketches Nietzsche’s late position on appearance: the sore spot of Kant’s critical philosophy has gradually become visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction “appearance” and “thing-in-itself”—he had deprived himself of the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected

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as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to a cause of phenomena—in accordance with his conception of causality and its purely intra-phenomenal validity—which conception, on the other hand, already anticipates this distinction, as if the “thing-in-itself” were not only inferred but given. (WP §553; KSA 12.185–186)28 Nietzsche figures Kant’s “mistake” in a perceptual metaphor that reverses The Birth of Tragedy’s projection of the hero as an optical respite from “gruesome night.” In both cases, what is at stake is more Erscheinung than Schein—is, to be exact, Erscheinung treated as a subcategory of Schein. Nietzsche, a literal myopic who suffered from “spots, blur, and watering”29 to the point where he could barely see, casts himself as the dull-eyed observer who has taken a long time to notice that the idea of “appearance” is another illusion. “When one has grasped that the ‘subject’ is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much follows,” he explains. “The ‘thing-in-itself’ also disappears, because this is fundamentally the conception of a ‘subject-in-itself’ . . . The antithesis ‘thing-in-itself’ and ‘appearance’ is untenable; with that, however, the concept ‘appearance’ also disappears” (WP §552; KSA 12.383–384). Nietzsche attacks Erscheinung for conceptual incoherence because he considers it to be structured around the thing-in-itself and unable to survive robustly if its counterpart is weak. As de Man points out in his reading of these passages, “the working hypothesis of polarity becomes soon itself the target of the analysis.”30 Now, throughout the entire discussion Nietzsche leans on the vocabu-

28. It’s often pointed out that Nietzsche’s reading of Kant follows the domesticating movement of nineteenth-century scholarship even as he objects to its motives. He misses Kant’s satisfaction with the phenomenal world as the actual one, the strategies and attitudes of which should have been interesting to him. Kant’s account of minimal satisfaction with the world may actually be the strongest friendly rival of Nietzsche’s own anti-metaphysical project—one whose conclusion differs dramatically from Nietzsche’s while sharing many assumptions. 29. Letter to Franz Overbeck, March 31, 1885, in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 239. Nietzsche had reason to dread fleeting optical phenomena, which for him accompanied physical pain. 30. De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 107.

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lary of “right” (Recht), stating repeatedly that Kant’s version of Erscheinung delivers a false sense of right: “no shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance” (WP §567; KSA 13.371); “what gives us the right to posit, as it were degrees of reality?” (WP §586; KSA 13.352); “one must . . . dispute our right to a distinction between a world in itself and a phenomenal world” (WP §786; KSA 12.490; see also WP §§488, 583). What is this right that Kant falsely bestows—when we speak of appearance, or posit degrees of reality, what do we gain? For Nietzsche, the very concept “appearance” continues to preserve the idea of an alternative to the given world in the face of Kant’s stipulations that there is no other world for us except in thought. It is as though for Nietzsche even such thought, however well understood to be merely intelligible (as Kant likes to put it), evades actuality too much. The “right” that appearance insinuates is a false right of consideration, an illusion of choice in suspension. The disappearance of appearance indexes the disappearance of this illusion of choice: Every center of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode of resistance. The “apparent world,” therefore, is reduced to a specific mode of action on the world, emanating from a center. Now there is no other mode of action whatever; and the “world” is only a word for the totality of these actions. Reality consists precisely in this particular action and reaction of every individual part toward the whole— No shadow of a right remains to speak here of appearance— The specific mode of reacting is the only mode of reacting: we do not know how many and what kinds of other modes there are. But there is no “other,” no “true,” no essential being—for this would be the expression of a world without action and reaction— The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis “world” and “nothing.”— (WP §567; KSA 13.371) Appearance is here opposed to specificity, the exigency of which it obfuscates. Nietzsche is saying the obvious when he points out that each living being has only its “specific mode of action on the world” and “no other

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mode of action whatever,” no access to others’. But he goes on to conclude that as a result, individual experience consists of a couture exigency—a necessity that one be oneself and nothing but oneself—that the notion of appearance somehow fails to register. Kant’s “apparent world” stands in for and obscures the concept of one’s own world as utter necessity, and hence obscures “the antithesis ‘world’ and ‘nothing.’” The implication is that the psychological reprieve provided by the idea of appearance is limited neither to the florid manifestations of Schein nor to a concept of appearance that depends on opposition to some other actually possible alternative. Thinking of the world as appearance, even as replete appearance, is enough to furnish some relief—too much relief for Nietzsche’s taste. As I suggested in my discussion of noumena in Chapter 2, Kant does use noumena to contextualize the given logically, as Nietzsche argues. The goal of the contextualization, though, is to fail definitively to turn up any positive alternative to the given world. The premise of the exercise is that knowing that one has no choice of worlds or cognitive structures is itself something one has to arrive at. In his summary of what Kant should have concluded, Nietzsche largely echoes Kant’s method and conclusion. He underlines the way that appearance may be used to delay the process of critique—potentially deferring acceptance of the given—and the nostalgic effect of the fact that the vocabulary of old-school “appearance and reality” survives the process that should enable us to dispense with it, a trace of the process after the process is over. Even to say “appearance,” Nietzsche implies, is still to deflect, however slightly, the given world’s repleteness. At worst, when appearance loses its rhetorical aspect and functions in a naturalized way, to speak of appearance is to act as though the process were not over.31 Thus Nietzsche pathologizes the artist who “seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowy residue one derives from colors, form, sound, ideas; he believes that the more subtilized, attenuated, transient [verflüchtigt] a thing or a man is, the more valuable he becomes; the less real, the more valuable” (WP §572; KSA

31. Again, recourse to rhetoric here explains fluctuations within appearance that the critical literature has sometimes felt had to be explained metaphysically. Pothen, for example, suggests that aesthetic representation “comes to lose its appearance as appearance through some unspecified access to reality” (Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, 177).

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12.253).32 Although Nietzsche’s objection is to the implication of the concept “appearance,” and not to how objects appear, the moralized stakes do infect his attitudes toward phenomenal experience itself: he becomes a phenomenophobe. In this period one can find Nietzsche classing even “opening one’s eyes to the many small enjoyments” among “the ways of selfnarcotization” (WP §29; KSA 10.660).33 Nietzsche’s confrontation with “the antithesis ‘world’ and ‘nothing’”— the stark antithesis without the diagonal of appearance—I suggest, intensifies the pressure he feels to render a judgment on the given world and hence on himself, since there is nothing to wait for, no excuse to delay further. This responsibility is psychologically unbearable, as we can observe in Nietzsche’s treatment of nihilism. The fragments of 1887–1888 state baldly that the question is how to deal with the difficulty of endorsement. As long as the given world is merely apparent, there remains the politer option of a qualified judgment; that is, it’s possible “to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception.” It’s another thing to “pass sentence” on it as the only reality. Since the value judgment at hand remains the same, it becomes evident that phenomenality was never the cause of the world’s insufficiency, but only a figure for it: But as soon as man finds out how that [“true”] world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to

32. For a first-person example, see Beyond Good and Evil, §296. 33. Kaufmann points out that this title heading was supplied by Peter Gast (WP §29n). Nietzsche did self-narcotize: he took medicines that contained small portions of opium and occasionally used larger doses as well. His December 1882 letter to Lou Salomé and Paul Rée describes having come to a “sensible insight into the state of things . . . after taking a huge dose of opium—in desperation” (Selected Letters, 198). Like Kant, Nietzsche seems to have been anxious about any substance, as if to watch himself closely because there was potentially so much to medicate. The last two passages cited above were written between 1883 and 1888.

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afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it. Sobald aber der Mensch dahinterkommt, wie nur aus psychologischen Bedürfnissen diese Welt gezimmert ist und wie er dazu ganz und gar kein Recht hat, so entsteht die letzte Form des Nihilismus, welche den Unglauben an eine metaphysische Welt in sich schließt, welche sich den Glauben an eine wahre Welt verbietet. Auf diesem Standpunkt giebt man die Realität des Werdens als einzige Realität zu, verbietet sich jede Art Schleichwege zu Hinterwelten und falschen Göttlichkeiten aber erträgt diese Welt nicht, die man schon nicht leugnen will. (WP §12; KSA 13.48) Nietzsche approaches this standpoint with anxiety and identification. According to this fragment, one can experience the world without denying either its reality or its intolerability. Yet Nietzsche also believes on some level that fact is value, which is why he is so worried by the all-there-isness of the given world. And by the logic of fact/value conflation, dissatisfaction with the indisputable is nonexistent. So when Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with the indisputable nonetheless arises, it seems to him to do so against nature, in the face of its own impossibility. It exists without an obvious right to exist. As Nietzsche sees it, then, if one cannot use the language of appearance, one must affirm the given. When the world is phenomenal we have a right to our dissatisfaction because it is only dissatisfaction with the phenomenal world; and when the world loses its phenomenality, it is dissatisfaction with it that takes on the attributes of Schein, although in truth, neither one is any illusion. A third possibility, dissatisfaction with the given world conceived as the only world—the position he calls “nihilistic”—is the one stance Nietzsche cannot bear for long, as he believes he has no right to it: the philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything that is meaningless and in vain. But whence this: there ought not to be? From where does one get this “meaning,” this standard?—At bottom, the nihilist thinks that the sight of such bleak, useless existence makes

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a philosopher feel dissatisfied [unbefriedigend; literally, unsatisfying—RT], bleak, desperate. Such an insight goes against our finer sensibility as philosophers. It amounts to the absurd valuation: to have any right to be, the character of existence would have to give the philosopher pleasure [Vergnügen].— (WP §36; KSA 13.45) Here Nietzsche suddenly shifts dissatisfaction from “all that happens” to the self-criticism of the philosopher in a way that reveals an ontological fantasy, reminiscent of Coleridge’s, of malformed identity. Dissatisfaction with “existence” makes him “feel unsatisfying”—inadequate—as a philosopher, because it runs up against another feature of his sensibility, a kind of inner sense that he has as a philosopher that competes with his dissatisfaction. The thought that “all that happens . . . ought not to be . . . meaningless and in vain” is based on a wish that runs from value (pleasure) to fact; the “finer sensibility” that opposes it is equally deep, for it expresses the other side of the fact/value conflation, and runs from fact to value. An aporia like this one can be a place where a philosopher can rest and wait, as Nietzsche acknowledges when he calls nihilism “a great relaxation [ein großes Gliederstrecken] for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly fighting ugly truths [häßlichen Wahrheiten]” (WP §598; KSA 13.51). Yet at moments like these, Nietzsche soon feels a stirring to fight again and to create. An entry of uncertain date, which may have been written as late as 1888, like many of the passages I’ve been reading, offers an unusually complete consideration of the problems and benefits, or one might say the guilts and rights, of dissatisfaction: Very few are clear as to what the standpoint of desirability, every “thus it should be but is not” or even “thus it should have been,” contains within itself: a condemnation of the total course of things. For in this course nothing exists in isolation; the smallest things bear the weight of it all, upon your little injustice [Unrechte] stands the entire structure of the future, every critique of the smallest thing also condemns the whole. Now, granted that the moral norm, exactly as Kant understood it, has never been completely fulfilled and remains suspended over actuality as a kind of beyond without ever falling into it, then morality completes its judgment concerning the whole, but this still

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permits the question: from where does it derive the right [Recht] to this judgment? How does the part come to sit as judge over the whole?— And if this moral judging and dissatisfaction [Ungenügen] with actuality were in fact, as has been suggested, an inextinguishable instinct [unausrottbarer Instinkt], might this instinct not be one of the inextinguishable stupidities and immodesties of our species [unausrottbaren Dummheiten, auch Unbescheidenheiten unsrer Spezies]?— But in saying this we do what we censure; the standpoint of desirability, of unauthorized playing-the-judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection—it is precisely our concept of “perfection” which is never satisfied. Every drive that desires to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things: what? is the whole perhaps composed of dissatisfied parts, which all have desiderata in their heads? is the “course of things” perhaps precisely this “away from here? Away from actuality!” eternal dissatisfaction itself? is desirability perhaps the driving force itself? is it—deus? (WP §331; KSA 12.316–317) Over the course of his reflection Nietzsche registers the difficulty of locating the objects of dissatisfaction, its absence of purpose or logical justification, its possible status as itself a given part of human equipment, and its possible productivity—and ends with a question about the last point. The question mark would seem to be a fine place to end. Only an infinite future could, in principle, disclose how much dissatisfaction is natural and inevitable and how much isn’t. Nietzsche knows that his dissatisfaction with dissatisfaction, a trait he wishes to conquer in his 1882 New Year’s resolution, displays the sheer persistence that makes it—even it—“part of the character of the course of things.” This is a place where giving up, or just stopping, would be the perfect thing to do: if only Nietzsche could get up the courage to be as tired as Kant.34 He cannot leave the matter there. Instead, he turns the screw again: be34. Or as Epicurus. Nietzsche himself says as much in The Gay Science, the book that came closest to doing so—perhaps temporarily does so: “what is required for that [to know how to live] is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance” (GSc, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 38).

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cause he is sure he has no right to be dissatisfied with inextinguishable dissatisfaction, he exhorts himself against his own meta-dissatisfaction: Absurd and contemptible form of idealism that would not have mediocrity mediocre and, instead of feeling a sense of triumph at a state of exceptionalness, becomes indignant over cowardice, falsity, pettiness, and wretchedness. One should not desire these things to be different! Absurde und verächtliche Art des Idealismus, welche die Mediokrität nicht medioker haben will und, statt an einem Ausnahme-Sein einen Triumph zu fühlen, entrüstet ist über Feigheit, Falschheit, Kleinheit und Miserabiltät. Man soll das nicht anders wollen! (WP §89; KSA 12.494) The implosion of Nietzsche’s contradictory self-exhortation is black comedy, for Nietzsche is really in agony. He is caught fast in the circle formed by the fact/value conflation on the one hand, which requires acceptance of the given, and the persistence, on the model of transcendental illusion, of dissatisfaction with the given, undesirable as it may be, on the other. It is just this dissatisfaction on the metalevel that Nietzsche can least tolerate. Because dissatisfaction with conditions that have been determined to be natural, or so persistent as to count as natural—the position that most nearly describes what Nietzsche actually feels—is the one that he cannot stand, Nietzsche turns to the eternal return to force affirmation of the world “as is.”35 From the perspective of Nietzsche’s analyses of the history of philosophy, the eternal return looks less like a leap of faith than like a fall. Blanchot remarks that the eternal return submits to “the order of things that are not in our power” and attempts to merge Nietzsche’s fantasy of “personal and subjective all-powerfulness” with “the impersonal necessity of ‘being’” (Infinite Conversation, 149). Through the eternal return

35. After tracing Nietzsche’s work with “Schein” over the course of his career, Rethy concludes that the will to power as fact opposes Schein as a “cutting edge cuts the soft flesh to ribbons, announcing a suffering that is beyond all words, beyond all thought, beyond all Schein” (“Schein in Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” 81).

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Nietzsche tries to get beyond the opposition between necessity and intentionalism; Nietzsche’s criteria stress that the will to power is an involuntary force.36 Even if the will to power itself is a fact in the world, however, Nietzsche continues to rely on “consciousness of strength” to endorse this fact (WP §1060; KSA 11.225). I agree with Blanchot that Nietzsche’s characteristic wish for omnipotence “turn[s] around” into the imagined obligation to throw his weight behind “the rock of accomplished fact” (Infinite Conversation, 148) even though it can never register his impact in any way. Defenses of the eternal return have to reckon with the superhuman expenditure its endorsement assumes and Nietzsche’s speculations about what it would take to “endure” it (WP §§1057, 1059, 1060).37 The eternal return is particularly anomalous in light of Nietzsche’s critiques of philosophy’s psychological motives. The excitedly written WP §586, composed in 1888, is especially relevant. Nietzsche considers three alternatives philosophy poses to the world “as is”: The concept “the unknown world” insinuates that this world is “known” to us (is tedious—); the concept “another world” insinuates that the world could be otherwise—abolishes necessity and fate (useless to submit oneself—to adapt oneself—); the concept “the true world” insinuates that this world is untruthful, deceptive, dishonest, inauthentic, inessential—and consequently

36. See Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, trans. J. Harvey Lucretius (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997), 57. 37. In his translator’s introduction to The Gay Science, Kaufmann points out that Nietzsche’s “primary reaction [to the eternal return] is that no idea could be more gruesome. Nevertheless . . . he takes it for ‘the most scientific of all possible hypotheses’ [WP §55; KSA 12.213] and feels that any refusal to accept it because it is such a terrifying notion would be a sign of weakness” (17). Blanchot proposes that Nietzsche “dreads it to the point of fright at the idea that he shall have to bear it; to the point also that, in order not to be alone in bearing up under it, he must free himself from it by seeking to express it” (Infinite Conversation, 272). For an alternative reading of the eternal return, in which Nietzsche hopes that the past and givens can still be altered by future interpretations, see Alexander Nehemas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985), 160ff.

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also not a world adapted to our needs (—inadvisable to adapt oneself to it; better to resist it). * We therefore elude “this” world in three ways: a. by our inquisitiveness—as if the more interesting part were elsewhere; b. by our submission—as though it were not necessary to submit oneself—as if this world were not a necessity of the ultimate rank: c. by our sympathy and respect—as if this world did not deserve them, were impure, were not honest with us— In summa: we have revolted in three ways: we have made an “x” into a critique of the “known world.” (WP §586; KSA 13.351) “Submission” has a strange place in these alternatives a, b, and c. “The concept ‘another world’” supposedly discourages submission and adaptation by siphoning necessity from the given world; yet according to Nietzsche, the defensive action that corresponds to that concept is “submission” to the given world(!). The idea of submission, Nietzsche suggests, understates necessity: “submission” as a practiced attitude, as in some religious ethics, is a voluntarist fantasy: “as though it were not necessary to submit oneself—as if this world were not a necessity of the ultimate rank.” The imperative of eternal return, developing contemporaneously with Nietzsche’s material and nontragic model of reality, raises the stakes of the given, calling upon one to endorse “the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection” (WP §1041; KSA 13.492), on the logic that active participation is the true necessity. Nietzsche fails to deal with the problem that active involuntary participation cannot be assimilated to affirmation unless affirmation is correspondingly thinned as Kant thins it. In the twentieth century, affirmation tends to be treated as a problem exacerbated by history. Suggesting that Nietzsche could not have argued for the eternal return “after Auschwitz,” Giorgio Agamben concludes, What lies before us now is a being beyond acceptance and refusal, beyond the eternal past and the eternal present—an event that returns eternally but that, precisely for this reason, is absolutely, eternally unassumable. Beyond good and evil lies not the innocence of becom-

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ing but, rather, a shame that is not only without guilt but even without time.38 Other trenchant conclusions are reached by post-Auschwitz thinkers such as Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster, for whom such an inhumanity as totality allows no relation whatsoever.39 If totality could bear any relation to partisanship, then we would be as entitled to express dissatisfaction with it as approval; and if it is self-serving and illogical to criticize the world “as is,” as Nietzsche argues, then, by the same reasoning, what’s the logic of affirming a totality that bears no relation to relation? Who or what gains from this endorsement? By pitching his attack on phenomenality so radically, against the very concept of appearance—in other words, by deciding that replete appearance is incoherent—Nietzsche produces a radicalized, and to my mind radically violent, choice between the given and nothing, in which the space for distance from and contemplation of the given is closed. Even as Nietzsche’s evolutionary fantasy can be interpreted as a self-denying battle to improve upon his own queer characteristics, his programmatic affirmation can be interpreted as an annihilation of his self’s difference (both of these efforts eventually being projected beyond his own lifetime). Nietzsche finds himself torn between his desire to be equal to the inhuman world and his equally ferocious unwillingness to relax about psychological traits that he finds degrading. Again, these include sexual traits, as his jokes about having the wrong organs imply. Nietzsche wrote to Franz Overbeck that he felt as though he had “an extra sense organ and a new, terrible source of suffering” (Selected Letters, 206), and argues that the appearance/reality axis is illegitimate by pointing out the absence of an “organ for knowing” reality or for “posit[ing] even this antithesis [between appearance and reality]” (WP §583; KSA 13.280). We might also recall once more his sarcastic exclamation, “Be natural! But how, if one happens to be ‘unnatural’?” (WP §66; KSA 12.574), and his remark that “it would be possible that the true

38. Remnants of Auschwitz [1999], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002), 102–103. 39. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [1980], trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986).

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constitution of things was so hostile to the presuppositions of life, so opposed to them, that we needed appearance in order to be able to live—After all, this is the case in so many situations; e.g., in marriage” (WP §583; KSA 13.280–281)! The violence of affirmation has been underplayed in Nietzsche’s reception because the fact/value conflation enforces the assumption that affirmation is inherently valuable. Similarly, as in the reception of Kant, Nietzsche’s “frequent use of the words Schein, Scheinbarkeit, Illusion and Täuschung, and so on” are taken as implying “that there is some independent world about which we are deceived,” as Philip Pothen writes (Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, 104), rather than referring to rhetorical and phenomenological effects that are available within a world of normal appearance and that allow the navigation and internal differentiation of that world. Commentators tend to agree with Nietzsche that “the very notion of phenomena impedes . . . our attempt to live in the world ‘as it is’ and our philosophical concepts, as descriptions of our world, therefore remain a hindrance to this attempt” (ibid., 152). To agree with Nietzsche here is to assume the imperative to “attempt to live in the world ‘as it is.’” From the same point of view, Pothen develops a contrast between Kant’s disinterested and Nietzsche’s utilitarian aesthetics (WP §804, quoted in ibid., 153), in which Kant’s free liking “represents a denial of the body and a denial of life” (156). Given the coercion of fact/value conflation, anything less than frontal interest looks like “denial” of reality, and an appetite for it is taken as a performative affirmation of life in the given world. Tyler Roberts and Bernard Reginster carry normative affirmation even further, systematizing Nietzsche’s works around the project of affirming suffering in particular.40 Roberts is influenced by Cavell, whom he believes advocates “thinking as thanking” and “immerses us in words, in everyday words, telling us not to try to escape the way they condition us and so deny our humanity” (Contesting Spirit, 119, 120). Reginster notes that Nietzsche 40. Tyler T. Roberts, Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006). Roberts finds precedent for affirming suffering in “a theology of the Cross” that affirms a community of sufferers (182)—a persuasive comparison, but to exactly the material whose terribly problematic psychology an earlier Nietszche exposes.

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accounts for an individual’s ability to affirm his own particular life in terms that make successful affirmation a contingent victory of substance— of “what Nietzsche calls the ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’ of the agent” against “the nature and amount of resistance” that circumstances put up (Affirmation of Life, 267). By this logic, successful affirmation circularly confirms one’s substantial capacity (although failure doesn’t necessarily impugn it). Reginster’s meticulous work thus delivers a triumphal narrative in which “it is no wonder that [Nietzsche] should feel tremendous gratitude for a life that was otherwise marred by illness and loneliness” (267). While Roberts and Reginster may well be correct that Nietzsche wanted to be able to write a narrative of gratitude, their readings repeat Nietzsche’s fantasies of self-hatred and self-mastery rather than taking an analytic distance from them. Dissatisfaction is by definition dissatisfaction with one’s own psyche and body and with that world in relation to which one finds oneself dissatisfying (unbefriedigend) (WP §36; KSA 13.45). The eternal return, however, redoubles the self-denigrating aspect of renouncing the feeling that this friction “ought not to be.” Eve Sedgwick notes that “Nietzsche’s writing is full and overfull of what were just in the process of becoming, for people like Wilde, for their enemies, and for the institutions that regulated and defined them, the most pointed and contested signifiers of precisely a minoritized, taxonomic male homosexual identity,” and links these signifiers to Nietzsche’s “compulsion to isolate some new space of the purely voluntary.”41 Although this “purely voluntary” space could, positively, allow the election of a queer style as “the first modern piece of sexual definition that simply took as nugatory the distinction between relations of identification and relations of desire” (Epistemology of the Closet, 160n34), or in Nietzsche’s words “a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence” (WP §1041; KSA 13.492),42 in Nietzsche’s story the dream of self-development remains troubled by panic about the judgment that fact/value conflation seems to demand. For Nietzsche, affirmation sometimes seems to have the power and the burden

41. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 133, 173. 42. “Perhaps” because “the reading of these two words ‘detested’ and ‘notorious’ is uncertain” (Kaufmann, note to WP §536).

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of making the given world worth affirming.43 Affirmation takes up so much room that there is no room to ask for anything, even a respite from the task of endorsing the given. Otherwise, we might ask, why shouldn’t “the character of existence . . . give the philosopher pleasure”? And, above all, if the character of existence does not please the philosopher, why shouldn’t he feel dissatisfied with it? Because while for Nietzsche dissatisfaction with the world, expressed through the figure of its phenomenality, is a guilty thought, dissatisfaction with a nonphenomenal world is impossible.

43. With regard to the humanness of dissatisfaction in Nietzsche, Peter Poellner observes that ressentiment also depends wholly on interpersonal contexts: “the weakness of ressentiment involves, moreover, a hatred directed specifically at other humans. It is not, I think, part of Nietzsche’s definition of ressentiment that the not-selves which are its objects should necessarily be other human beings. But it is conspicuous that he always presents it as a relation between human beings” (Nietzsche and Metaphysics [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995], 132).

4 Court of Appeal, or, Adorno

With Adorno we arrive at a historicized account of phenomenality and dissatisfaction unavailable earlier, developed as it is from Marx. For Adorno, the critique of fact perception as social artifact is research in the phenomenology of ideology. As such, it suggests a cultural explanation of the motives for phenomenophilia, one echoed in criticism by Fredric Jameson, Mary Poovey, and Jonathan Crary, among others. Adducing Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Jameson remarks in The Political Unconscious that the very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have little enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like. This unused surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize itself into a new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces its own specific objects, new objects that are themselves the result of a process of

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abstraction and reification, such that older concrete unities are now sundered into measurable dimensions on one side, say, and pure color (or the experience of purely abstract color) on the other. . . . a style like Impressionism, which discards even the operative fiction of some interest in the constituted objects of the natural world . . . offers the exercise of perception and the perceptual recombination of sense data as an end in itself.1 Complementarily, Poovey suggests that one reaction to the consolidation of the modern fact is a romantic resistance to “the need to yoke knowledge systems to observed particulars.”2 These readings of romanticism and modernism argue that the social and economic dominance of fact perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provokes a counterreaction in which invisible (Poovey) or autonomously sensory (Jameson) realms take on the character of “compensation for everything reification brings with it” (Jameson, Political Unconscious, 236). Adorno’s work is a part of the reaction Jameson sketches, and he is himself an analyst of its formation. Adorno connects the developments Jameson observes to the ideological legacy of Hegel’s philosophy of history, attending especially to Hegel’s reformulation of what counts as given. To the extent that Hegel’s philosophy is a defense against Kant, Adorno can be seen to enter the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction to fulfill Kantian promises overlooked or dismissed in the nineteenth century. From the perspective of the phenomenality/dissatisfaction association, the most striking feature of Adorno’s writing is its pointed use of “Schein” to refer, for the first time, to fact perception.3 In the twentieth century,

1. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), 229–230. 2. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 327. 3. The English translation of Aesthetic Theory renders “Schein” as “semblance,” underlining the sense of false likeness or fiction; it’s illuminating to preserve the German word, however, because it encompasses not only semblance, but the generalized sense of illusion that is usually linked to mere phenomenality and the radiance that is its acknowledged attraction.

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“the facts that have been advanced as a counterweight to mere illusion have themselves become a sort of cloak and so reinforce the impression of mere illusion [blossen Schein].”4 The uncanny luster of facts absorbed without attention to the conditions that make them appear as they do— fact perception that goes directly to the bloodstream—is the height of Schein.5 Hence Adorno’s special dislike of positivism, which would like to identify data exempt from the need for historical analysis.6 All kinds of perception are historically bounded, but what we have been calling fact perception is most likely to dispense with a qualifying metalanguage and the kinds of mental reservation that it brings. Here we might recall Richard Moran’s idea that the proposition “P” induces belief and commitment more strongly than the proposition “I believe that P.”7 For Moran, this qualifying effect is a reason not to muffle in representations of reflection 4. HF 29; Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), IV 13:45, hereafter NaS. 5. Adorno adds in the same breath that dialectics should not simply consist in “the demonstration that what appears to be a brute fact [ein factum brutum entgegentritt] is in reality something that has become what it is, something conditioned and not an absolute. . . . It would . . . be just as foolish to demand of history that it should concentrate solely on the so-called context, the larger conditioning factor, as it would be for historiography to confine itself to the depiction of mere facts” (HF 20–21, translation modified; NaS 13:32). 6. T. W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). See also, e.g., HF 164 and Introduction to Sociology [1993], ed. Christophe Gödde, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 37. 7. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 85. Moran’s mentor for this point is the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. Adorno complementarily views Sartre’s brand of “commitment” as a celebration of unfreedom in disguise: “the prescribed form of the alternatives through which Sartre wants to prove that freedom cannot be lost [die Unverlierbarkeit von Freiheit] negates freedom” (“Commitment,” Notes to Literature [1974], Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia UP, 1974], 79–81, translation modified); Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 11:413, hereafter GS. Similar remarks in Negative Dialectics stress existentialism’s blurred sense of facticity and “existence”: “existentialism raises the inevitable, the sheer existence of men, to the status of a mentality which the individual is to choose, without his choice [Wahl] being determined by any reason [Bestimmungsgrund der Wahl], and without there really being another choice” (Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1992], 49–52, hereafter ND); GS 6:60.

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facts to which one wants to commit oneself. For Adorno, the fact/value conflation’s coercion of assent to the given is a good reason to maintain awareness of reflection, lest we endorse without noticing it historically conditioned facts that don’t deserve affirmation. In this context, Schein names the “façade of facticity [der sich durchsetzenden Faktizität]” (HF 30; NaS 13:46)—an illusory rhetorical aspect of fact perceptions—that is “bound up” with “the affirmative power [Druck] of society.”8 Adorno’s ideology critique releases conscientious objectors to the world “as is”—the “thinking men and artists [who] have not infrequently described a sense of being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator” (ND 363; GS 6:356). Like realism, ideology critique assumes that the person who tarries in appearance is tacitly critical of fact perception; unlike realism, it validates that criticism, and dismisses any need to apologize for reservations about whether “this could be all” (ND 363; GS 6:356). Any embarrassment should be on the side of facts that have the nerve to present themselves as necessities.9 Protesting a given, then, including protest that takes the form of seeing a fact with mental reservation as Schein, not only is distinguished by Adorno from “denying” fact, but is the opposite of denial. Adorno illustrates this point to his Frankfurt students by recalling “the experience of having his house searched early in the National Socialist regime” (HF 19; NaS 13:30). The house search exceeds the distinction between fact perception and perception of Schein:

8. Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 110, hereafter AT; GS 7:168. 9. Social facts potent enough to be possibly natural are the ones most at issue, which is to say that the question of the natural cannot help being at issue. Kantian critique renders time and space, but not qualitative experiences of time and space, leaving room for the social/natural ambiguity. What should count as a concept and as an intuition are historical, as J. M. Bernstein points out in his analysis of Aesthetic Theory (The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Penn State UP, 1992), 198–200; see also page 166 below); similarly, Adorno insists that “natural beauty” “is at its core historical” (AT 65; GS 7, 102). When Adorno cites approvingly Hegel’s idea that “the consciousness of a people” is “like a necessity; the individual is raised in this atmosphere and knows of nothing else” (ND 327; GS 6:321), his emphasis is on the suitability of necessity as a figure. Later, Adorno will stress that Hegelian necessities are still only quasi necessities.

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the very concept of “fact” ensures that it cannot be insulated from its surrounding environment—just as I could probably not have really experienced that house search if I had not connected it in my mind with the political events of the winter and spring of 1933. If all that happened was that two relatively harmless officials belonging to the old police force had turned up on my doorstep . . . my experience would have been quite different from what it was. . . . A further factor should not be overlooked, if the dialectic is not simply to degenerate into something like a superstition or a trivial pursuit [leeres Spiel]. By referring something back to the conditions that prove immediacy to have been conditioned, you do indeed strike a blow against immediacy, but that immediacy survives nonetheless. For we can speak of mediation only if immediate reality, only if primary experience, survives. (HF 20–21; NaS 13:31–32; see also ND 301) The dissociation between the incident’s malignancy and its “relatively harmless” strictly empirical features, as well as its utter lack of a legitimate rationale, give it illusionistic qualities that are part of its “primary experience.” The illusory core of the incident is one of the main facts about it: not experiencing it as Schein would not make it any more factive, and abstracting its full facticity would not make one’s understanding of the events of 1933 clearer or more complete. To the contrary: a fact like the house search “is both an actuality and at the same time a socially necessary illusion [gesellschaftlich notwendiger Schein]”—as Adorno remarks in a later lecture of “the organic nature” of an ideological society as a whole (HF 118; NaS 13:170; see also ND 327). I agree with Jameson, then, that “virtually the central issue raised by the relationship between the universal and the particular . . . is what Adorno will call positivism (along with its accompanying value, ‘nominalism’),” if one means positivism “in as generalized a cultural and intellectual fashion as possible.”10 Adorno does use the term broadly, and seldom attempts to present positivist philosophers’ views. Rather, “positivism” stands for one pole of fact/value conflation, in which value emanates unidirectionally 10. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 89.

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from a parsimoniously empirical construction of fact. While Jameson emphasizes Adorno’s polemic against positivism, I’ll emphasize equally his polemic against the counterforce that appears parenthetically in Jameson’s comment as “nominalism” and also informs idealism. Adorno knows that everything depends on what counts as a fact, and takes exception to convenient uses of the fact/value conflation in either direction. Positivism locks too much out of the category of fact, yet self-servingly inclusive ontologies can elicit from Adorno statements of which any positivist would be proud. To live up to Adorno’s meticulous analysis of experience, everyone, including the positivist, has to pay more, not less, attention to facts and values alike.11

1 . c r i ti qu e o f fact i ci t y Nineteenth-century social thought from Hegel and Marx to Durkheim returns again and again to the peculiar reality of the social fact. Marx’s pages on commodity fetishism remain the most vivid example of this line of thought for contemporary readers.12 Adorno is haunted by Durkheim’s characterization of the fait social that feels like an impenetrable “thing,”13 and reminds his students that anyone who has had the impression of “‘run[ning] into a brick wall [auf Granit beisst]’” has experienced the violence of the social fact (Introduction to Sociology, 36; see also 50–51, 77; NaS 15:66). As Adorno’s lectures on sociology show, nineteenth-century thought draws his attention to the urgency of this enigma. What is uniquely Adorno’s is his realization that the artwork is the other of the social fact (and hence of the commodity)14 to such a degree that a philosophy

11. It follows that “the strongest argument against a positivist view of society is that, in placing the concept of experience so far in the foreground in the name of ‘empiricism’ or ‘logical empiricism,’ it actually fetters experience” (Introduction to Sociology, 51; NaS 15, 90). 12. Karl Marx, Capital [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:163ff. 13. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method [1912], ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Macmillan, 1982). Durkheim’s account is all the more haunting because it is uncomplaining, written from within the enigma. 14. See AT 236; GS 7:350–351.

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that aims to explain social fact has to be rewritten from the perspective of aesthetics and vice versa. This philosophy and aesthetics—or to be more exact, the hybrid enterprises that replace them—are the complementary projects of Adorno’s late books, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. They constitute between them the dialecticization of the discourses of phenomenality and dissatisfaction. Adorno’s attitude toward fact perception in his late work resembles Hegel’s toward public opinion, that it “is to be respected as well as despised [ebenso geachtet als verachtet].”15 Now, “respect [Achtung]” is the sentiment Kant matches to “objective liking” (CJ 210)—the minimal consent one gives to facts simply by absorbing their existence. As Ferenczi observes, fact recognition is marked by admission to the realm of calculation; however grudgingly, we “reckon with” facts. Public opinion, for example, may hold little insight, and yet the fact that people think something has to be reckoned with. Respecting facticity, objective liking respects precisely the kind of existence that Kantian aesthetics sets aside. We may also count as facts, however, ontologies even more ambiguous than that of public opinion; and there are of course divergent approaches to what ought to count and why. Adorno’s rereading of Hegel belabors a significant difference between Hegel and himself in this regard: Hegel conflates value with fact far more readily, and is generous and inconsistent about what counts as fact—a treacherous combination. This may seem to be a counterintuitive conclusion. Adorno’s contempt for positivism suggests that he himself would like a more capacious approach to fact; since “dialectics is necessarily and permanently concerned with the critique of mere facticity” (HF 19; NaS 13:30), as Adorno points out, and Hegel is none other than the philosopher most responsible for the historicization of facts, one might think that Hegel’s critique of facticity would suit Adorno. And it does, up to a point. Nonetheless, Adorno’s early-sixties thought concludes that Hegel’s critique, unlike his own, enlarges the do15. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 355; Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:485. Adorno is fond of this catchphrase and echoes it in “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” in Hegel: Three Studies [1963], trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT P, 1993), 113, hereafter HTS; HF 93; and Introduction to Sociology, 7.

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main and strengthens the value of social fact, and with it the affirmative power of society. This conclusion instigates Adorno’s long reply to Hegel and Marx in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. It is easier to understand how Hegel can come to be seen as the champion of fact when we recall that a “fact” is not mere existence but existence recognized conceptually, already raised to consciousness. The notion of facticity registers the way in which value in Hegel is attached to history. (As Timothy Bahti argues of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History— in perceptual language—unimportant events “rot away” from historical consciousness; they “vanish like a deceptive appearance.”)16 Between 1957 and 1969 Adorno alludes repeatedly to Hegel’s phrase “the course of the world [der Weltlauf].”17 In History and Freedom Adorno introduces “the course of the world,” among “various turns of phrase” such as “‘the logic of things,’” as a reasonable synonym for world spirit (HF 27, translation modified; NaS 13:42). I’ll return momentarily to this correlation. First, however, let’s note that Adorno identifies the course of the world with world spirit at just this time. In “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1957) Adorno defends Hegel against the complaint that he displays “a complicity [Einverständnis] with the course of the world” (HTS 45; GS 5:290); by History and Freedom, he describes precisely that complicity as a necessary effect of Hegel’s philosophy in acid, psychological, and nearly ad hominem terms (which are then moderated again in the more public utterance of Negative Dialectics; for this reason, I’ll emphasize History and Freedom throughout). In “Aspects” he asserts that Hegel’s philosophy is “essentially negative” and that Hegel “denounced the world, whose theodicy constitutes his program, in its totality as well” (HTS 30; GS 5:275–276); in “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel” (1963), the midpoint of Adorno’s reinterpretation, he still opines that “with incomparable tact, even the later chapters of the Phenomenology refrain from brutally compacting the science of the experience of consciousness and that of human history into one an16. Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 97. 17. Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 401–412. See “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1957), in HTS 45; HF 27, 43, 47, 51, 59–68, 72; ND 318; AT 49.

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other,” rather allowing them to “hover, touching, alongside one another” (HTS 142; GS 5:371). At the outset of History and Freedom, however, Adorno announces that “in Hegel history is regarded immediately as progress in the consciousness of freedom, such that consciousness for Hegel amounts to a realized freedom” (HF 3; NaS 13:9); and the lectures in their entirety argue that, deploying an “affirmative construction of history” (HF 49; NaS 13:73), Hegel “interprets this primacy of the universal, this actual primacy of the concept, as if it meant the world itself were concept, spirit, and therefore ‘good’” (HF 43; NaS 13:65). What emerges through the arc of Adorno’s Hegel-centric works is the thesis that Hegel’s creation of a new kind of facticity—the facticity of those particulars that have a course, that is, of history as the ongoing activity of spirit—expands compulsory affirmation. Adorno locates Hegel in the tradition of fact/value conflation in a remarkable passage of History and Freedom, in his lecture of November 24, 1964. Having just suggested that Hegel’s “hypostatization of reason” can be interpreted as “the hypostatization of mankind as a species . . . that maintains itself as a whole” over individual claims (HF 44; NaS 13:67), Adorno continues: the human race in fact [tatsächlich] can only survive in and through the totality. The only reason why the optimism [Geschichtsoptimismus] of the philosophy of absolute spirit is not a mere mockery is because the essence of all the self-preserving acts that culminate in this supreme concept of reason as absolute self-preservation is after all the means by which humanity has managed to survive and still continues to do so. And it has succeeded in doing so despite all the suffering, the terrible grinding of the machinery and the sacrifices of what Marx would have called the forces and means of production. The infinite weak point of every critical position (and I would like to tell you that I include my own here) is that, when confronted with such criticism, Hegel simply has the more powerful argument. This is because there is no other world than the one in which we live, or at least we have no reliable knowledge of any alternative despite all our radar screens and giant radio telescopes. So that we shall always be told: everything you

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are, everything you have, you owe, we owe to this odious totality, even though we cannot deny that it is an odious and abhorrent totality.18 (HF 47; NaS 13:71–72) By calling the philosophy of spirit a kind of “optimism,” Adorno appends it to the debate set off by the Berlin Academy’s 1755 essay contest “All is right” (discussed in Chapter 2), in which Leibniz and Kant participated. Moreover, he echoes Kant’s outline of the dilemma faced by reason in the First Critique, namely whether and how to go about confirming that one must reconcile oneself to the given world after all “because there is no other world than the one in which we live, or at least we have no reliable knowledge of any.” Adorno doesn’t much like this moment of the First Critique; like most readers, he interprets it in isolation from the passages on transcendental illusion and hears Kant’s acceptance as robust rather than minimal—he finds in it at best the “self-satisfied, manly resignation of a philosophy settling down in the external mundus sensibilis” (ND 73; GS 6:80). Hegel’s rebellion against this passage of the First Critique could be said to drive his entire project, and Adorno agrees strongly that Kant’s conclusions should not be used in the positivist way to persuade humanity to “affix itself to the finite” (ND 383; GS 6:376). Nonetheless, Adorno’s placing Hegel next in line in the chronicle of optimists indicates that he does no better (and since I don’t share Adorno’s reading of the First Critique, to me Hegel’s contribution looks even worse than it does to Adorno—it looks positively regressive). Hegel historicizes Kant’s cognitive understanding of human limitation in order to inject history with exigency, making it seem circumscribing. Since by definition the human species has no other history than the one that has occurred, “it always looks as if human beings and the course of the world that is imposed on them are truly similar in nature, are genuinely identical. . . . as if we had no right to complain about the course of the world that has made people what they are” (HF 72; NaS 13:107). As Kant demonstrates how to identify exigency through critique, Hegel invents a method—Hegelian dialectic—for revealing social facts as effective exigencies, given-substitutes. In the end, 18. See also HF 43, on Hegel’s “realism,” and ND 300–360, especially 303–304, 319–320.

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these effective exigencies press for affirmation even more strongly than natural givens, since history ratifies them in human terms. There’s more to be said about Hegel’s shift from hard-core necessity to “de facto” necessity and his mechanisms for justifying it. For now, let’s observe that when Adorno criticizes Hegel’s “unquestioned parti pris for the prevailing universal” (HF 51; NaS 13:76), the more familiar part of his criticism—that Hegel favors the universal over the particular—occludes his equally important point that the Hegelian universal arranges for itself to be valued because it is prevailing, i.e., as fact. Marx notes that “capital . . . on the basis of its own reality, positions the condition for its realization” in a retrospective operation that converts history into the history of capital. Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that Marx also notices alternative “antecedents” of capital that are “not . . . antecedents established by itself,” antecedents neither naturally nor necessarily connected to capital.19 This second set of antecedents, which Chakrabarty terms Marx’s “History 2,” is, he argues, Marx’s way of showing “that the total universe of pasts that capital encounters is larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital,” and that these pasts “interrupt and punctuate” the history of capital (“Two Histories of Capital,” 64). With a similarly enlarged set of elements in view, Adorno complains that Hegel “give[s] precedence over possibility” to certain facts that are reinforced in a circular way (HF 51; NaS 13:76). Adorno’s texts instate a “court of appeal” for particulars and possibilities on the losing side of history, as I’ll explain in the last part of this section. Adorno’s concern in History and Freedom is to register this complaint in philosophical terms. His phrasing of it involves a complex assertion of methodological bias: Hegel, who sets aside the operative facticity of alternative possibilities—possibilities as things to be reckoned with—extends that facticity to presuppositions that are equally mental entities, to the extent that they are attached to the course of the world. Adorno’s methodological point is argued best in “Skoteinos,” his long

19. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicholas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 459, quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Two Histories of Capital,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 63.

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and brilliant essay on Hegel’s obscurity (“Skoteinos” = dark, opaque). Published in 1963, it precedes the lectures collected in History and Freedom, delivered in the academic year 1964–65. Much of “Skoteinos” attacks the legitimacy of the reconstructed presupposition in dialectics. In Hegel the concept “is turned this way and that” and “breaks up when it insists on itself [geht in die Brüche, sobald er auf sich beharrt],” revealing a nonidentity “inherent” in its meaning (“Skoteinos,” HTS 133, translation modified; GS 5:363). Hegel’s treatment of what is thus exposes dynamism within the copula: “what is, is more than it is [Was ist, ist mehr, als es ist]” (ND 161; GS 6:164; see also “Copula,” ND 100–104).20 “But,” Adorno goes on, the usual conception of the dynamic of Hegel’s thought—that the movement of the concept is nothing but the advance from one to the other by virtue of the inner mediatedness of the former—is one-sided if nothing else. . . . Often, accordingly, the presentation makes a backward leap. What would be new according to the simple schema of triplicity reveals itself to be the concept that formed the starting point for the particular dialectical movement under discussion, modified and under different illumination. (“Skoteinos,” HTS 134–135; GS 5:364–365) Hegel’s texts proceed by culling “starting point[s]” from the shadows of what they are said to have produced—or else introducing new points in the guise of reconstructed starting points. Either way, Adorno argues, Hegel exploits the value of what is: either really or rhetorically. Hegel’s method embodies his rhetorical reliance on fact/value conflation in that the texts move the reader along without exactly arguing. He “can be understood only when the individual analyses are read not as arguments but as descriptions of ‘implied meanings’”; his unwillingness to acknowledge prescription leads him to “[make] fun of theses, calling them ‘dicta’

20. See Derrida’s analysis of the Hegelian “is” in Glas [1974], trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986), especially the relation of the copula to Christian revelation (56–58) and to the ambiguously descriptive or prescriptive status of Hegel’s texts (197–198).

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[‘Spruch’ or sayings—RT]” (ibid., HTS 140, 141; GS 5:370). Although any moment of being in the Hegelian text is transitive, Adorno claims that Hegel does not dynamize the “is” to “add anything to the grammatical concept that forms the subject, as . . . with Kant” (ibid., HTS 133; GS 5:363), but only in the name of a “retroactive force,” modeled on Christian figura, that radiates from what has come to pass to what appears in hindsight to be its antecedents. What is for Hegel is not so much qualified by its transience as it is expanded to encompass existence in a hypothetical past and future. Thus Adorno concludes that there is a “latent positivistic moment contained, for all Hegel’s invectives against narrow-minded reflective thought, in his philosophy’s stubborn insistence on what is” (ibid., HTS 145; GS 5:373).21 The “latent positivistic moment” mirrors the latency of Hegelian fact—a kind of right of the unborn fact to be welcomed, by virtue of consciousness of it, among the living. Hegel’s criteria for what is lead to the question of the status, for Hegel, of thoughts in logical space. The paradigmatic instance for studying this question, in turn, is the ontological argument for God from Anselm and Descartes to Kant. The ontological argument has already appeared in Chapter 1 as a symptom of the compulsory reality of spectres, ideas that seem like things. Remember Hartley Coleridge’s urgent wish: “‘It is not yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always, in here’ (pressing one hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—‘and then it will be—because it is not nothing’” (N 3547). Adorno cites Hegel’s version in Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics, underlining the power of Hegel’s claim that “the moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped” in thought (AT 6, GS 7:16; see also HTS 6). Adorno adduces Hegel’s ontological argument—for Hegel does, in this case, offer an argument—in Aesthetic Theory to introduce the idea that art can manage only “intermittent” closure, not “the fixed circumference of a sphere” (AT 6; GS 7:17). Hegel’s riposte to Kant is productive, Adorno suggests, insofar as it supports “the deepest promise 21. Carl Schmitt notes that in Hegel “what is right will make itself effective, and what should merely be, without actually existing, is not true but only a subjective mastery of life” (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1926], trans. Ellen Kennedy [Cambridge: MIT P, 1985], 57). On Schmitt’s criticism of Hegel’s identification of world history and “the world court [Weltgericht]” (56), see Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 97ff.

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interpretation makes to the mind,” namely “the assurance it gives that what exists is not the ultimate reality [dass das was ist nicht das letzte ist]— or perhaps we should say: what exists is not just what it claims to be” (HF 138, NaS 13:194).22 But Hegel’s extension of facticity to mental entities is no longer productive when it begins to imply that ideas back-projected by history are any more factive than alternative past or future possibilities. Adorno grants possible facticity to thought insofar as Kantian forms themselves must be historical phenomena, “not that ultimate which Kant described” (ND 386; GS 6:379). J. M. Bernstein comments that “the issue, then, is . . . dissolving the understanding’s claim to hegemony over what belongs within the domain of possible experience.”23 Adorno’s suggestion that even the forms of space and time are historical and may produce new versions of experience is, however, careful not to assert the presence of this new experience. Adorno contrasts his own caution to the “too positive” valence Hegel gives to “his theory of the way in which immediacy constantly reasserts itself,” producing the impression of “natural existence” in “the realm of pure reason, pure logic” (HF 136, translation modified; NaS 13:191). I disagree, then, with the upshot of Bernstein’s conclusion that the promise of Adornian art “arises from the belief that if something can materially appear, even in the mode of semblance, it must be possible to imbue it with figures of being,” as is “almost definitive of the ontological proof of God’s existence” (“Why Rescue Semblance?,” 198). Semblances can be “imbue[d] . . . with figures of being,” but figures of being are only figuratively closer to being. The quasi entities between the empirical and the merely intelligible can comment negatively on what is, but cannot suggest that the specific things thought of or appearing are possible.24 22. Adorno takes the same attitude toward Kant’s own reply, so to speak, to the First Critique, namely, the addition of “the construction of immortality” as a necessary postulate of practical reason; Adorno admires its admission of “the intolerability of extant things [Unerträglichkeit der Verzweiflung]” (ND 385; GS 6:378). 23. “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997), 194. 24. “By itself, the logically abstract form of ‘something,’ something that is meant or judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it—indelible for a thinking that would delete it—is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking at all” (ND 34; GS 6:44).

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Hegel can attribute presence to thought because he has already transferred thought to fact, the connector through which being and value travel back and forth, without a proportional adjustment in fact. Hegel’s dynamic “is” and the blur of his moving objects—the Hegelian object is “not firmly delineated as an object [nicht gegenständlich fest umgrenzt ist] but frayed, as it were, at the edges” (“Skoteinos,” HTS 133; GS 5:364)—reflect his infusion of the demand for affirmation into the reconstructed presuppositions and mental entities covered within the vague bounds of the Hegelian fact. With borders as cloudy as Kant’s are crisp, Hegel thus replaces Kant’s minimalist exigency and minimalist obligation with a stream of effective necessities and metalepses that his writing treats as verging on inevitability. The result—and goal—is the creation of asymptotic, virtual fact that, because it has historical process behind it, demands assent even though it doesn’t even exist yet, so evident is the course of things. Etienne Balibar investigates the status of the “effective” through Machiavelli’s enigmatic phrase “la verità effetuale della cosa [the effective truth of the thing],”25 observing that in using the phrase, Machiavelli links his own action in writing The Prince to the power of princes to make things be.26 Balibar explores how in the “rather strange word, ‘effetuale,’ . . . we hear directly the notion ‘in effect,’ but without knowing exactly how to interpret it”: as claiming the performative power to make the truth or, as Claude Lefort interprets Machiavelli, as claiming to gain authority from following the truth of things.27 Therefore, Balibar goes on, “the term ‘effective’ . . . involves a kind of play of words, indeed amphibology.” The debate between Balibar and Lefort recalls the often-noted ambiguity of prescription and description in Hegel’s prose. Adorno frequently calls attention to the way that Hegel’s creation of virtual or effective facts is also an artifact of his writing. Like Machiavelli, Hegel disdains argument as though it were too distant from the source of power. He brings writing closer to action by stressing its capacity to describe and, crucially, to ig25. “La verità effetuale della cosa: Praeter Mathesin,” lecture delivered at UCLA, February 10, 2003. 26. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince [1532], trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 52. 27. Claude Lefort, “Machiavelli and the Verità Effetuale,” in Writing: The Political Test [1992], trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 109–141.

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nore. Rounding off a description into a law in the making—or to put it a different way, evidence for the possibility of a law into a law—is Hegel’s signature rhetorical move, Adorno points out: Without . . . the reality of a class society that stands as the very principle of bourgeois society, there would have been neither the huge population increase that we have seen, nor the growth in transport, nor would there ever have been anything like enough by way of food supplies for the population. It will not have escaped your attention that the starting-point of a critique of this entire way of seeing is the idea (one that Hegel pursued with especial rigor right on into the heart of his Logic) that from the outset reality is given precedence over possibility. And of course it is here that we see that unquestioned parti pris for the prevailing [durchsetzende] universal of which I have already spoken at some length [in Lecture 5 of History and Freedom—R.T.]. To recapitulate, then, the fact is that mankind has survived not just in spite of but because of conflict, which has such weighty consequences for the theory of history because Hegel has inferred from it with a very great semblance of justice [Schein von Recht], a semblance of justice that cannot be dismissed out of hand, that categorically, in terms of the idea, when looked at from above, life can be reproduced only by virtue of conflict. And this has resulted in what might be termed the theodicy of conflict.28 (HF 51–52, translation modified, my italics; NaS 13:76–77)

28. Hegel’s optimism “is not a mere mockery” as long as the species proceeds by virtue of its conflicts as it has done so far (HF 51). What would it take to refute it? Evidence for the non-inevitability of the course of the world might be furnished, on the one hand, by a transformation of the world and “establishment of humanity” (HF 146; NaS 13, 206); a discontinuous messianic model of transformation might provide such an alternative to Hegelian history. Or, on the other hand, Hegel would be refuted as soon as it becomes clear that history isn’t survivable; when that happens, no one will feel up to enjoying the demise of Hegel’s reputation. At times, Adorno considers that the genocide of European Jews and other twentiethcentury disasters do constitute this evidence: “The catastrophe there was not just a disaster predicted by Spengler, but an actual reality, one that makes all talk of progress toward freedom seem ludicrous. The concept of the autonomous human subject is refuted

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Hegel’s performative message is that the nonidentity of world and spirit is perfectly noticeable but doesn’t matter: the difference is simultaneously observed and dismissed. This difference, isomorphic with alternative possibility, lacks the authoritative value that, after Hegel, the course of the world—“the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose [als Ruhe aufgefasst]” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 28)29—alone confers. Adorno observes that Hegel’s commentators have the same tendency to round off the corners when reading Hegel: “the intention is taken for the deed [Tat], and orientation to the general direction of the ideas is taken for their correctness: to follow them through would then be superfluous. Hegel himself is by no means innocent of this inadequate way of proceeding” (“Skoteinos,” HTS 93; GS 5:329). Such writing acts as though one doesn’t have to concern oneself with the distinction between the probable and the inexorable; everybody knows what’s important and what’s going to happen. To Hegel, the course of the world furnishes an authentic “court [Gericht]” (Phenomenology, 27; Werke II:3, 46) because history is such a frictive and critical medium. But Adorno argues that Hegel creates facts of unheard-of vigor by crediting the energy of the process cumulatively to the outcome and “tend[ing] simply to accept that something that has evolved then disappears into what has evolved” (HF 136, translation modified; NaS 13:192). When Adorno writes that Hegel “believes that non-identity . . . should somehow be incorporated into the concept of identity in the course of its elaboration” (HF 65; NaS 13:96), he means that Hegel is not content to leave uncooperative particulars “lying who knows where outside it”

by reality [Realität]. By the same token, if freedom and autonomy still had any substance, Auschwitz could not have happened. And by Auschwitz I mean of course the entire system” (HF 7; NaS 13, 14). 29. Hegel’s point in this passage is that “negative and evanescent [verschwindend]” moments are preserved in the movement of appearance taken as a whole, not “left lying who knows where outside it” (Phenomenology, 28, 27; Werke, II:3, 46). For Adorno’s response, see HF 64–65, discussed below. Benjamin inverts Hegel’s figure of history as a static image of a moving stream in his idea of the dialectical image (“Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 255). Max Horkheimer and Adorno, writing of symbols as cultural sediment, claim that “the dread objectified as a fixed image becomes a sign of the established domination of the privileged” (Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cumming [New York: Continuum, 1993], 16).

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(Phenomenology, 27), but insists on their participation in the process that crushes them. Terry Pinkard, whose history of German philosophy focuses throughout on its handling of normative authority, comments that Kantian exigency modulates in Hegel into “practical” necessity. Facts that compose the course of the world hold authority “by virtue,” in Pinkard’s words, “of the way they have shown themselves to be unavoidable for us.”30 Hegelian necessities are “that which we, as part of a developmental story we must tell about ourselves, come to find that we practically cannot do without” (German Philosophy, 359). But who are “we”? The qualification “practically” indexes the constitutive ambiguity of social fact—the quality that renders it “probably equally valid” to state, as Adorno and Horkheimer do in Dialectic of Englightenment, that society either “is” or “seems to be” under a spell (HF 172–173; NaS 13:241). Ambiguity at the source about whether a social fact must be or seems to be—the undecidability of the possible naturalism of social facts—ought, to Adorno’s mind, to throw the emphasis on what one prefers. He suspects thinkers who love to dwell on inevitability of cheering on the status quo with redundant declarations of its supposedly obvious necessity. This “us” that seems so ready to embrace the going assumption about what is unavoidable has been the target of queer theory’s criticism of social dependence on norms.31 A norm presumed by an event 30. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 359, my italics. 31. Adorno’s impatience with the notion of the natural person, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s, his realization that “the spell cast by the identity principle . . . perverts whatever is different [der verkehrt noch das, was anders ist]” (HF 97; NaS 13, 143), and his conclusion that of all tactics, “reflection on difference would help towards reconciliation” (HF 98; NaS 13, 144) offer serious resources for queer theory. Michael Warner recalls that Adorno “embraced [the] cause” of the nascent gay rights movement in his 1962 essay “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000], 22). There Adorno considers the “abominable” “Paragraph 175” that legally proscribed homosexuality far into the postwar period (Adorno, “Sexual Taboos,” in Critical Models, trans. Henry Pickford [New York: Columbia UP, 1998], 71–88, especially 79–80 [GS 10.2:533–564]). Adorno dedicates “Sexual Taboos” to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a progressive jurist and coeditor of Sexualität und Verbrechen: Beiträge zur Strafrechtsreform (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1963). On the abysmal state of gay rights in postwar Germany, see Robert G. Moeller, “The Homosexual Man Is a ‘Man,’ the Homosexual Woman Is a ‘Woman’: Sex, Society,

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or claim can instead be taken, however, not as a precondition of a state of affairs but as its epiphenomenon—the kind of phenomenon that can be described as “not nothing.” The principle that “even in extremis [im Äussersten] a negated negative is not a positive” (ND 393; GS 6:385) is the spine of Negative Dialectics. Nietzsche would say—in A Genealogy of Morals, for example—that a norm often has force because we read history backward and take metaleptic projections for causes. This element of Nietzsche’s thought contributes to Foucault’s and queer theory’s excavation of norms so as to refuse the way they limit what counts as proceeding.32 As with Pinkard’s equanimity about what is “unavoidable for us,” there is something troubling in the systematization of effective necessities and virtual acceptance in Habermas’s presuppositions of “ideal content” which participants may not aver, but which “all participants must de facto [faktisch] accept.”33 People may accept on another level what they do not avow, but that doesn’t mean that they must accept the idealizations projected by their language. “De facto” acceptance of projected discursive norms follows from taking mental entities as facts that obligate more than Kant’s minimal respect. In Habermas’s statement, loosening what counts as necessity drifts, with the best of intentions, into prescribing to all members of a community tacit affirmations that they neither perceive nor endorse, or even explicitly disclaim. From the perspective of phenomenality and dissatisfaction, the first rule of a discourse community should be that and the Law in Postwar West Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 395–429. 32. Adorno notes that “one cannot move from the logical movement of concepts to existence” (“Skoteinos,” HTS 147; GS 5, 375). He makes this remark while noting that Hegel behaves as though having the concept of the nonidentical gave him a way to imagine the dialectic “to have gone beyond nonidentity” itself (“Skoteinos,” HTS 147; GS 5:375). My point is not that the ontological status of thought entities is easy to resolve, but the opposite: they occupy a gray area of fact and value, and no one can jump over arguments about their status. One of the main uses in contemporary theory of counting norms as encrypted givens is to enforce, with an imperative “must,” tacit assent to a “necessity” that someone explicitly does not endorse; for example, to argue that Derrida really must subscribe to all the concepts that he places “under erasure,” or that queer theory reinscribes the norms it repudiates because it represents them. 33. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy [1992], trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT P, 1998), 16, my italics; Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 31.

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the desirability of communication itself will not be assumed. As long as social reality is suffused with an imperative to communicative reason, there will be great appeal in withdrawing to “always particular, episodic, and only privately accessible, hence consciousness-immanent representations” (Between Facts and Norms, 12). Having learned from Kant that affirmation can be almost fully automated—in Kant, by cognition—Hegel affirms the totality Nietzsche envisions in The Will to Power without going through nearly as much anguish.34 Spirit affirms as well as cognizes, and does so robustly to the extent that the course of the world is progressive. So, Hegel’s optimistic account of necessity has been more popular than Kant’s minimalist one, for reasons anticipated by Kant.35 If Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno all think through the relationship, within affirmation and negation, between automation and intention, between collective and individual psychology, Adorno’s Hegel stands at the apex of the collective automation of affirmation—an affirmation that orchestrates individual participation and legitimates itself by it. Finally, Adorno writes, law formalizes the bias inherent to norms: “the legal norms cut short what is not covered, every specific experience that has not been shaped in advance [präformierte],” and forbids “the admission. . . . of anything quod non est in actis” (ND 309; GS 6:304). Although the value of givenness is supposed to be weaker in Hegel than in the First Critique (since givens in Hegel are historical and in Kant naturalistic and invariant), the reverse is true. Hegel spreads necessity broadly over effective social facticity, and with it the assent it carries; his world offers both less rigorous exigency and an epidemic of dubious authority.

34. A neo-Adornian reading of Nietzsche’s Will to Power might suggest that Nietzsche goes part of the way toward automating the affirmation of the course of the world by deintentionalizing will, but, to his credit, continues to register individual suffering within that process and hence the impossibility of harmonious affirmation. On Nietzsche’s pragmatic desire to follow “the interests of sheer survival” in comparison to Adorno, see Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (New York: Verso, 1995), 24. 35. Kant reflects on the “popularity” of “transcendentally idealizing reason” in CPR A473/B501–A474/B502.

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2 . i l l usi on i n t o t al i llu si o n Launched from within his critique of fact perception, Adorno’s disquisitions on art depict twentieth-century civilization as a field of illusion. A “negative feel for reality [negativen Realitätsgefühls]” reigns, as Adorno reflects of Kafka (AT 19; GS 7:36); normatively neutral fact perception appears in a lurid shade. The reference to Kafka recalls the romantic reading of Kant, in which having fact perceptions without feeling able to endorse them arouses the suspicion that this facticity does not merit the name, that a world of this kind of facticity is absurd and unjustified (“ungereimte” [CPR Bxxvi]). Adorno’s prose renders the tilt of just such a world. As though it were the voice of dissatisfaction with the world “as is,” the Adornian artwork is “unconsciously polemical” toward the “spell” of social fact (AT 5; GS 7:14–15). The artwork is unconsciously polemical because it protests the world “as is” mainly by being in it: What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. (AT 227; GS 7:336–337) In its combination of difference and existence, otherwise known as its “form,” the artwork causes its perceiver to find it remarkable that something like the artwork ever came into the world. Being a “thing that negates the world of things” (AT 119; GS 7:182), the artwork can leverage the fact/value conflation against social fact. If it were not a thing, so the argument goes, it would not make the strongest case for the fact of possibility it introduces. For this reason, perhaps, Adorno remarks that “real denunciation is probably only a capacity of form [Gestaltung]” (AT 230; GS 7:341). Of course, the artwork also does too much, and gives the impression that the possibility it represents has already been actualized. Because

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“artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world. . . . however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation” (AT 1; GS 7:10). So art generates again the kind of problem at issue in the ontological arguments for God: it ought to demonstrate what is thinkable, not that what is thinkable is present through the thought. The impression of actual formal unity that is art’s limit and even goal composes a second-order Schein, a new species of illusory fact perception. The energy of the implosive moment—obsessively repeated in spiral patterns—when Adorno proposes that artworks harbor a self-contradiction the awareness of which is also what they have to contribute, dominates Aesthetic Theory and its commentary.36 The burgeoning secondary literature evaluates the complexity of Adorno’s theory in learned detail; I don’t revise its main conclusions here, but rather sketch Adorno’s affinity with and ultimate difference from phenomenophilia. As you might guess, the difference is already given away by his focus on form. By defining the artwork by its deployment of a notion of form that outperforms fact perception in the game of Schein, Adorno leaves phenomenophilia even further behind than the Third Critique does. In this way he clarifies what is otherwise implicit, that looking away is aesthetic without being artistic. Although artists are always pulling phenomenophilic tricks, as Nietzsche confides, looking away rests content with evanescent perception that cannot be shared, and lets the chance at art go. Someone who channels the 36. Since about 1990, after an initially quite hostile reception, Adorno’s aesthetic theory has found an appreciative academic audience. See Bernstein, The Fate of Art; Jameson, Late Marxism; Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997); Huhn and Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity; Albrecht Wellmer, “Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,” Telos 62 (1984–85): 89–116; and Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge: MIT P, 1991). For a sense of the bitterness of earlier Adorno scholarship, see J. F. Lyotard, “Adorno as the Devil,” trans. Robert Hurley, Telos 19 (1974): 128–137; and Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, “Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s Art of Theory and Practice,” New German Critique 57 (1992): 87–122, an article that surveys and replies to earlier attacks (as does Wellmer). Lyotard complains, among other things, that Adorno is not affirmative: “what can an affirmative politics be, which does not look for support in a representative (a party) of the negative, etc.? That is the question left, abandoned by Adorno” (“Adorno as the Devil,” 137; see also 130).

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memory of merely phenomenal experience into works that may inspire similar experiences in others is already doing something else—such a person, the artist, fulfills a communal function, negotiates a compromise in which the possibility of phenomenophilia becomes a sublimated element. Aesthetic Theory furnishes a nonlinear narrative of this sublimation. At the same time, Adorno’s aesthetics, like Nietzsche’s, glances backward wistfully at mere phenomenality even as it absorbs it into the artistic so that it is no longer mere. Adorno’s identification of Schein with “form in the broadest sense”37 (AT 110; GS 7: 169) recalls the development of essence (Wesen) in Hegel’s Science of Logic: At first, essence shines or shows within itself, or is reflection; secondly, it appears; thirdly, it manifests itself. In its movement, essence posits itself in the following determinations: I. As simple essence, essence in itself, which in its determinations remains within itself II. As emerging into determinate being, or in accordance with its Existence and Appearance III. As essence that is one with its Appearance, as actuality.38 Traditionally, appearance is compared with confirmed existence and so seems pale (and therefore, in the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction, appealingly light). Like Kant, Hegel associates Erscheinung instead with “determinate being” and existence. “If it is said that something is only Appearance,” though, “in the sense that contrasted with it immediate Existence is the truth, then the fact is that Appearance is the higher truth”; for it is “when Existence passes over into Appearance that it ceases to be

37. Adorno’s translator, Hullot-Kentor, underlines the connection: “in that artworks as such remain semblance, conflict between semblance—form in the broadest sense— and expression remains unresolved.” Adorno leaves it implicit, though clear enough: “Weil sie aber doch als Kunstwerke Schein bleiben, ist der Konflikt zwischen diesem, der Form in weitesten Verstande, und dem Ausdruck unausgetragen” (GS 7:169). 38. The Science of Logic [1812], trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanity, 1969), 391; Werke 6:16.

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essenceless” (Logic, 499; Werke, 6:148). When appearance is “only appearance” it is at least higher than mere existence. But Erscheinung is not, as in Kant, replete with form from its very onset, because evanescence can emerge into being in accordance with its existence without being unified with its appearance. Formal repleteness is reserved for “actuality.” So, Hegel’s progressive version of history renders degrees of form, along the lines of the “degrees of reality” that outrage Nietzsche.39 In that hierarchy, appearance figures determination toward actuality, and actuality, in turn, becomes a way of thinking about formal unity: “actuality as itself the immediate form-unity of inner and outer is . . . an actuality as against a possibility” (Logic, 542; Werke, 6:202). Hegel’s account of form supports Adorno’s insistence that the artwork cannot just as well have been anything—that it is more, as well as less, by virtue of not being what it’s not. The “Essence and Appearance” section of Negative Dialectics interprets essence as “that which lies concealed beneath the façade of immediacy, of the supposed facts, and which makes the facts what they are” (ND 167; GS 6:169). At the same time, Adorno again refuses Hegel’s inclination to round off historical tendency into actuality. In Hegel’s account of formal actuality, “real possibility and necessity are. . . . only seemingly different”; their identity “does not have to become but is already presupposed and lies at their base” (Logic, 549; Werke, 6:211). (Typically, Hegel acknowledges that possibility and necessity do seem different on the way to subordinating that apparent difference to the presupposition of their identity.) In Adorno’s version, an artwork’s form includes its gesture of negation (AT 49) but also its self-difference (for example, AT 143–144); its spirit is not identical with its form. Because artworks have the form of not-being other empirical objects, however, what ought to be a promise of unity appears in the guise of a fact perception—the Schein of Hegelian “actuality”: “what they appear to be appears as if it could not be prevaricated [was sie scheinen, so erscheint, dass es nicht gelogen sein kann]” (AT 132; GS 7:199). When Schein becomes the name of the false repleteness of “actuality,” Erscheinung takes the part of the fluid principle that breaks its surface 39. A nonprogressive history would render simply transformation, not degrees of formality.

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from beneath. “Appearance,” “appearing,” and “apparition” are all mobile and astringent in Aesthetic Theory, while Adorno reserves the term “image [Bild]” for efforts to fix appearance’s fluidity. When we apprehend “nature as appearing beauty” (AT 65; GS 7:103), for example, Adorno lends “appearing” the phenomenophilic sense of nonteleological manifestation: “by rejecting the fleetingness of natural beauty, as well as virtually everything nonconceptual, Hegel obtusely makes himself indifferent to the central motif of art, which probes after truth in the evanescent [Entgleitenden] and fragile” (AT 76; GS 7:119). For Adorno, artworks remember nature’s apparitional quality, and summon appearance in strategies of dissonance that contest Schein. A good deal of Aesthetic Theory details these strategies. Following the vacillation between Erscheinung and Schein produces the spiral form I mentioned earlier—a narrative of successive paragraphs that all begin with “but.” Rather than narrating their relation chronologically, we might try to glimpse it in Adorno’s dramatization of Erscheinung’s ability, at its most intense, to burst aesthetic Schein. In that moment their distinction is sharpest, even as both remain aspects of the same selfconflicted force. One such moment occurs in Adorno’s discussion of the “instant of expression [Augenblick des Ausdrucks]” (AT 79; GS 7:123): Artworks become appearances [Erscheinungen], in the pregnant sense of the term—that is, as the appearance of an other—when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone, and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work. This immanent character of being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that of natural beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term muse. Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification. (AT 79; GS 7:123–124) Awareness that the artwork is artificial interrupts aesthetic Schein, as Brecht might hope. The trace of artifice on the work is the secular “after-

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image” of the seeming animation humans used to shudder at in the cultic object. “The shudder is past and yet survives” (AT 80; GS 7:124) in the artwork’s capacity to overwhelm, as the scars of action on it evoke the instant when it became a work, and project as active force the energy the work absorbed. What is unreal is the work’s insinuation of life, an effect inseparable from that of “form,” another way of thinking of the artwork’s illusion of being more than the sum of its materials and labor. Freed from “mythical deception,” the shudder gains a new ground in the autonomy of the artwork that presents it “as something unmollified [Ungemildertes] and unprecedented” (AT 80; GS 7:125). The effect is not even all that transient, and as Adorno continues to describe it, its collaboration with the artwork’s facticity comes through: If the deities of antiquity were said to appear fleetingly [flüchtig erscheinen] at their cult sites, or at least were to have appeared there in the primeval age, this act of appearing became the law of the permanence of artworks, but at the price of the living incarnation of what appears [Leibhaftigkeit des Erchscheinenden]. The artwork as appearance is most closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision [Himmelserscheinung]. Artworks stand tacitly in accord with it as it rises above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions and the world of things. Artworks from which the apparition has been driven out without a trace are nothing more than husks, worse than what merely exists, because they are not even useful. . . . The pregnant moment of their objectivation is the moment that concentrates them as appearance, which is by no means just the expressive elements that are dispersed over the artworks. Artworks surpass the world of things by what is thing-like in them, their artificial objectivation. They become eloquent by the force of their kindling of thing and appearance. They are things whose power it is to appear. (AT 80; GS 7:125) No longer “the living incarnation of what appears,” like an idol, the artwork, appearing only as itself, remains “the appearance of an other” among prosaic objects, more like a “heavenly vision” than Kantian Erscheinung. Appearance, the trace of artifice, explodes aesthetic Schein; put another way, the self-differential momentum of the artwork’s creation

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carries it past its form. “This rupture [Durchbruch] is the instant of apparition” (AT 88; GS 7:137), figuring with almost unbearable freshness the moment of the artwork’s determination and with it, its full blast of negation. Adorno’s language recalls Nietzsche’s would-be identification with Raphael’s Transfiguration: the artwork sides with the vision “as it rises above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions and the world of things.” Reading this, it can be difficult to hang on to the realization that Adorno is writing here not of the peak of Schein but of the peak of Erscheinung: all of this takes place when “the sudden unfolding of appearance disclaims aesthetic Schein” (AT 85, my italics; GS 7:132). Apparition, in other words, isn’t just another illusion. Erscheinung, unlike Schein, is true in a negative mode: the power of showing, showing what is not, when there isn’t anything else yet to show.40 Things are complicated by the circumstance that appearance needs substance to carry it, as fire needs something to burn. Similarly, a minimal, often irregular materiality or hylà supports even spectra—the inside of the eyelid, the film in Coleridge’s fireplace. Although initial illusion is not the only criterion for aesthetic impact, Adorno prefers the larger impact of negation that goes with a fuller illusion of facticity: the more illusion, the bigger the bang when it vanishes. Thus artworks “surpass the world of things by what is thing-like in them,” and the benefit is that their facticity, Schein included, pressures the perceiver to feel and credit their negation of what is, including that very facticity.41 Rupturing Schein, appearance also ruptures itself in a “catastrophic fulfillment [katastrophische Erfüllung]” that takes art with it: The shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance. In them appearance, previously a self-evident a priori of art, dissolves in a catastrophe in which the essence of appear-

40. Compare Derrida’s critical approach to pure monstration or theatrical luster in Mallarmé, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981], 173–286, especially 179, 206. 41. See Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 184, and Jameson, Late Marxism, 180– 181. A parallel philosophical stance appears in Adorno’s suggestion that “we have no power over the [Heideggerian] philosophy of Being if we reject it generally, from the outside, instead of taking it on in its own structure—turning its own force against it” (ND 97; GS 6:104).

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ance is for the first time fully revealed. . . . Even this volatilization of aesthetic transcendence becomes aesthetic, a measure of the degree to which artworks are mythically bound up with their antithesis. In the incineration of appearance, artworks break away in a glare from the empirical world and become the counterfigure of what lives there; art today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse. Closely observed, even tranquil works discharge not so much the pent-up emotions of their makers as the works’ own inwardly antagonistic forces. The result of these forces is bound up with the impossibility of bringing these forces to any equilibrium; their antinomies, like those of knowledge, are unsolvable in the unreconciled world. The instant in which these forces become image [Bild], the instant in which what is interior becomes exterior, the outer husk is exploded: their apparition, which makes them an image, always at the same time destroys them as image. (AT 84–85; GS 7:131–132) Spirit drives form to Schein until it manifests itself in appearance; appearance releases essence, flash-burns its “husk,” and singes the empirical world. Now, Adorno notably identifies the denouement of Schein with the self-negation of art altogether—“art,” not merely the “artwork”: “as a result of its determination as appearance, art bears its own negation embedded in itself as its own telos: the sudden unfolding of appearance disclaims aesthetic Schein” (AT 85; GS 7:132). Albrecht Wellmer calls art’s explosion a “‘setting free’ of forces which in their non-aesthetic use can re-establish a continuum between art and the life-praxis” (“Adorno’s Aesthetic,” 110). Yet Adorno implies more than the reestablishment of art and life when he calls art’s teleology the self-negation of art. If the artwork’s selfdestruction models the self-destruction of the “unreconciled world,” then the latter destruction would also dissolve art altogether. Adorno frees objection to the inevitable from guilt, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter. The sphere of art, however, remains a theater of guilt and thrill for Adorno, as the participant in art eddies in the addiction cycle of negation and Schein. Aesthetic Theory narrates art’s “entanglement in the guilt context of the living [die Schuld des Lebendigen]” (AT 144; GS 7:217) and the “shame” of the perceiver, who, hypnotized by aesthetic

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Schein, implicitly damages “what does not yet exist by taking it for existent” (AT 74; GS 7:115). The secondary literature takes the position that the Adornian artwork’s difficult trajectory is the only way: according to it, art resists turning against itself, and has to turn against itself. Unfolding Adorno’s remark that “irritation with Schein has its locus in the object itself” (AT 101; GS 7:156), Zuidervaart suggests that “the artwork could shed its illusory character if it would rid itself of all likeness to a false reality. For this to happen, society would have to become true” (Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 181). The rhetoric here is that we would all love things to be different—the course of the art world, along with everything else. But the guilt persists, even in the face of the conviction that the artwork must and should fall into Schein. The persistence of Schuld measures the difference between Kantian exigencies and effective exigencies, their different degrees of reality; effective exigencies are not strong enough to dissolve guilt. The guilt and shame that trail aesthetic Schein insinuate that the all but irresistible course of Schein in art is not literally irresistible, that the space between plausibility and inevitability is not closed. Comparison with Kant’s aesthetic or with phenomenophilia makes the axiomatic conceptuality and facticity of the Adornian artwork look less than necessary. This is so because even if we concede that the artwork must lead to Schein, we would still need an argument that artworks must come into being. Adorno defines art by his conceptual notion of form—“art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form” (AT 141; GS 7:213)—using the sort of tautological formulations whose motives he suspects in others. Without form, he writes, nothing would distinguish art from the things it resists through its form. So, Adorno complains that Webern withdraws from conceptuality: when “sonata movements shrink to aphorisms,” Webern “executes [vollstreckt] tensions that originate in the genre. . . . Aesthetics is not obliged, as under the spell of its object, to exorcise concepts [die Begriffe zu eskamotieren],” but rather to free them from false objects and “bring them within the work” (AT 180–181; GS 7:269–270). Art therefore cannot be merely or mainly “involuntary” (AT 69; GS 7:109), nor the unbinding of sounds and colors from context (AT 90; GS 7:140), nor “the grouping of color [Farbkomplex] that is simply factual” (AT 144; GS 7:216). Art must invite interpretation, even if it finally repels

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it; to claim otherwise “would erase the demarcation line of art” (AT 128, translation modified; GS 7:193). Conditional clauses like the one above signal vulnerable points in Adorno’s theory—places where hope runs out,42 in the sense that no choice appears: As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become art—canvas and mere tones—it becomes its own enemy, the direct and false continuation of purposeful rationality. This tendency culminates in the happening. . . . The difference of artworks from the empirical world, their Schein character, is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it. If for the sake of their own concept artworks wanted absolutely to destroy this reference back to the empirical world, they would wipe out their own premise. (AT 103; GS 7:158) This passage moves between two criteria that separate the Adornian from the Kantian artwork: conceptuality and the coercive use of fact perception. Adorno’s “if” phrases make it sound as though art would like to loosen its ties to both criteria, and that the only reason it doesn’t is that if it did it would no longer be art. The assumption that art must not do anything self-destructive, though, belies its teleology in self-negation, as well as the impetus that its teleology offers for thinking beyond givenness. Granted that art consists in conceptual form and, once it comes into being as such, must be torn by the irreconcilable forces Adorno analyzes—its need to destroy its “husk” and have a husk to destroy—why, finally, must art come into being? Adorno famously declares in the first sentence of Aesthetic Theory that art’s “right to exist” is not “self-evident,” yet the assumption seems to be that if art doesn’t come into being, nothing else will step up to the plate; that only form constitutes itself “out of the empirical world and in opposition to it,” while only facticity flexes muscle. Nothing will do the

42. “The mental stages within the human species, and the blind-spots in the individual, are stages where hope petered out [die Hoffnung zum Stillstand kam]” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 258 [GS 3:296]; the last clause is Horkheimer’s phrase, Adorno notes [HF 314n]).

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job as well as the artwork if the task is to turn the fact/value conflation against itself.

3 . c i r c us c olo rs The conviction that that is so leads Adorno to pass over some possibilities. Adorno disagrees with Benjamin’s idea that play (Spiel) may represent an alternative to Schein because it, too, posits a false harmony (AT 100; GS 7:154). Similarly, he claims that “the ineffability of illusion [Illusion] prevents the solution to the antinomy of aesthetic semblance [ästhetischen Scheins] by means of a concept of absolute appearance [absoluter Erscheinung]” (AT 103; GS 7:159). Adorno’s dismissal of brief and relatively amorphous ventures such as “happenings” suggests that merely demurring from duration is insufficient. Like Kant, who requires the aesthetic object to seem to be eligible for conceptuality even as it deflects it, Adorno prefers that the artwork be able to be mistaken for another fact among social facts.43 If the subaesthetic lack of pretense to public presence seems to be too little for Adorno, however, we can also wonder whether it isn’t, rather, too threatening—an alternative to negation that is no longer art, but might be something better, something that overflows art’s “obligation” by “execut[ing]” tensions, as Adorno writes of Webern (AT 180–181; GS 7:269–270), or registers a different kind of resistance to history by looking away from it. It is an embarrassment to history that mere phenomenality touches, then falls away from the threshold of what is, as though facticity were no great prize. Adorno approaches the phenomenophilic element within art whenever he calls artworks “afterimages” (Nachbilder)—literally, spectra. Artworks may be afterimages of various things: they are “for the disenchanted world . . . afterimage[s] of enchantment” (AT 58; GS 7:93); they are “afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere” (AT 4; GS 7:14); of nature’s communicative silence (AT 74; GS 7: 115); and “of the primordial shudder in the age of reificat-

43. This preference sets off criticism of Adorno’s aesthetic narrowness, notably by Peter Bürger in The Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

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ion” (AT 79–80; GS 7:124), as we’ve seen. In phenomenophilia, the afterimage figures the trace of fact perception’s lifted pressure. Adorno can almost crave that weight, when it is that of enchanted nature or the cultic object, or feel its attenuation in the phenomenophilic manner, as relief from the effective reality of the given. Then, Adornian artworks’ influence on what is achieves the rethinking of fact and illusion that Hegelian dialectic could bring about if it were consistent. The “is” in Georg Trakl’s poetry, for instance, “expresses no existential judgment but rather its pale afterimage qualitatively transformed to the point of negation” (AT 123; GS 7:187). The Trakl copula happily fails to trigger the fact/value conflation at full strength. The judgment of the lyric poem is only an afterimage of a judgment. Similarly, the poem’s negation is only the afterimage of a negation. In balance in the pure example of Trakl, the afterimage-like artwork doesn’t so much negate what is as solicit a question of itself—“‘What is it?’” (AT 121; GS 7:184)—that should be asked of the fact perceptions around it. Trakl accomplishes what Hegel does not, a dialectical revision of what is that expands and dilutes it equally without being tied to a progressive history. Leaving aside Adorno’s previous, more Hegelian formulation that “what exists is not just what it claims to be” (HF 138, NaS 13:194), “the assertion [in Trakl] that something is amounts to both more and less and includes the implication that it is not [dass etwas sei, ist darin weniger und mehr, führt mit sich, dass es nicht sei]” (AT 123, translation modified; GS 7:187). The Adornian artwork can scarcely hold this balance in the wind of the fact/value conflation.44 It’s in order to try to do so that Aesthetic Theory incorporates nonconceptual qualities of natural beauty and naive “preartistic” features into the artwork. These elements are homeopathic, the artwork’s attempts to metabolize extra-artistic forces that could obviate it: The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks, though because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration; only Valéry 44. De Man’s theory of the inherent overassertion of position offers one way to understand the difficulty.

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pursued ideas that are at least related. Fireworks are apparition kat‰ ezoxhn [par excellence]: they appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning. The segregation of the aesthetic sphere by means of the complete afunctionality of what is thoroughly ephemeral is no formal definition of aesthetics. It is not through a higher perfection that artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance. They are not only the other of the empirical world: everything in them becomes other. It is this to which the preartistic consciousness of artworks responds most intensely. This consciousness submits to the temptation that first led to art and that mediates between art and the empirical. Although the preartistic dimension becomes poisoned by its exploitation, to the point that artworks must eliminate it, it survives sublimated in them. (AT 81) Prototypisch für die Kunstwerke ist das Phänomen des Feuerwerks, das um seiner Flüchtigkeit willen und als leere Unterhaltung kaum des theoretischen Blicks gewürdigt wurde; einzig Valéry hat Gedankengänge verfolgt, die zumindest in seine Nähe führen. Es ist apparition kat‰ ezoxhn: empirisch Erscheinendes, befreit von der Last der Empirie als einer der Dauer, Himmelszeichen und hergestellt in eins, Menetekel, aufblitzende und vergehende Schrift, die doch nicht ihrer Bedeutung nach sich lesen läßt. Die Absonderung des ästhetischen Bereichs in der vollendeten Zweckferne eines durch und durch Ephemeren bleibt nicht dessen formale Bestimmung. Nicht durch höhere Vollkommenheit scheiden sich die Kunstwerke vom fehlbaren Seienden, sondern gleich dem Feuerwerk dadurch, daß sie aufstrahlend zur ausdrückenden Erscheinung sich aktualisieren. Sie sind nicht allein das Andere der Empirie: alles in ihnen wird ein Anderes. Darauf spricht das vorkünstlerische Bewußtsein an den Kunstwerken am stärksten an. Es willfahrt der Lockung, welche zur Kunst überhaupt erst verführt, vermittelnd zwischen ihr und der Empirie. Während

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die vorkünsterlische Schicht durch ihre Verwertung vergiftet wird, bis die Kunstwerke sie ausmerzen, überlebt sie sublimiert in ihnen. (GS 7:125–126) “Ephemeral through and through,” the firework’s apparitional moment of “becoming actual” is its only moment. Singularly among Adorno’s examples of art, the firework’s difference from other objects suggests “no formal definition of aesthetics,” only a temporal one; it arrives to vanish, and “cannot be read for . . . meaning.” Like spectra, it reveals the “burden of the empirical” by opting for minimal empirical existence. Lighting up the sky, fireworks also bring forward a threatening power to alter the way everything around them looks—magnified, in Adorno’s fantasy of the “writing on the wall [Menetekel],” into a power to lay waste—that remains implicit and private in spectra. Thus the difference between fireworks and spectra, and what makes fireworks an Adornian choice among transient phenomena, is that fireworks are directed to public view. Synthesizing the evanescence celebrated by solitary pleasure in spectra, on the one hand, with communal wishes at once to destroy, to be saved from destruction, and to let be, on the other, fireworks represent the idea of spectra we all can share—a moment of mass rebellion against fact perception. Adorno warns that theatrical luster can return as a “poison”; a mass spectacle like cinema, which lures the “preartistic consciousness” with the wonder of artificial light, is easily exploited for ideological and commercial purposes. But the appeal of fireworks also poisons art in another way; it suggests how much aesthetic desire is fulfilled at art’s margin, in throwaway “preartistic” perceptions. Complements to aesthetic Schein born in form from spirit, fireworks, or another example Adorno entertains, “water fountains of the seventeenth century” (AT 80; GS 7:124), float on nonconceptual sensuous appeal. Adorno’s shorthand for this feature is “circus colors” (AT 81). His phrase “Buntheit des Zirkus” (GS 7:127) actually refers to motley, that is, to the variegated color that Kant excludes from the aesthetic because it is so subconceptual. Adornian artworks assimilate the preartistic as a feature, amid safeguards. So, “Beckett’s plays, as crepuscularly grey as after sunset and the end of the world,” nonetheless “remain true” to circus colors “in that the plays are indeed performed on stage” with costumes and sets, and

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don’t renounce wholly the naive magic of theatrical monstration: “the curtain lifts expectantly even at the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame” (AT 81; GS 7:126–127).45 The artwork is not afterimage, firework, nor even fountain, but something that would like to have their ephemeral radiance, but not quite as much as it would like to have “form.” Looking away makes the opposite tradeoff: it would like to negate fact perception—it stirs with this desire— but does not want to do that as much as it wants to be relieved, if temporarily, of fact perception’s demand and the normative concepts that go with it. So phenomenophilia looks away from fact perception or suspends it in a frame of metaperception. The phenomenophile verifies the first sentence of Aesthetic Theory, that art’s “right to exist” is no given. In order for art to exist in freedom, the phenomenophile has to have a preceding right to linger in the preartistic indefinitely and unconditionally, because only a profound conviction that there is no imperative to art can make artistic reception or creation free social acts. Without looking away, there is no art; and by the same logic, looking away cannot be art. That’s why Adorno begins the book with a disclaimer, and why he discusses “natural beauty” before “art beauty”; but, significant as these gestures are, it’s hard to be persuaded by reading Aesthetic Theory that it really doesn’t matter to Adorno whether art exists or not. The paradox of art is that nothing less (or more) than that is called for.46 The phenomenophile dwells on object perception not only because of mixed feelings about his possible deviance, then, but because he seeks release from even negative assertion, including that of art production. Art tends inherently to affirm, as Adorno notes on the first page of the book. Art production places the artist closer than the phenomenophile to the theologian, Platonist, or naturalist who points to a world better than the

45. “The bow or baton of the conductor—of the orchestra—waiting, depending, like a lifted quill, can also be illuminated by some such suspension or lustre ‘. . . when the curtain is about to rise upon the desert magnificence of autumn The imminent scattering of luminous fingering, which the foliage suspends, mirrors itself, then, in the pit of the readied orchestra’” (Derrida, Dissemination, 180, quoting Stéphane Mallarmé, L’Oeuvre de Mallarmé: Un Coup de dés [Paris: Librairie des Lettres, 1951], 388). 46. Arguably, within the art world this need to divest art of its imperative is best fulfilled by minimalism, which allows the smallest gesture to satisfy the imperative.

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world “as is,” even though art only gestures, like the statues in Last Year at Marienbad, to what isn’t there. Art also has a teleology, if only in its own illuminating destruction.47 In looking away there is neither a perceived right nor an imperative to negation, only an awkward silence suspending negation and affirmation; and no work, only preartistic perception. Below the conceptuality of even the happening (which is fairly rational and intentional in practice), there are experiences and perceptions that never crystallize a form—spectra, or the phenomena Kant excludes from the aesthetic as “charms [Reizen].” These comprise a special variety of natural beauty because, although they figure harmony as Adorno writes images of natural beauty do, they take no public shape and time themselves out. The few moments that one can hold on to the realization that the perception is illusory are, in the case of these phenomena, all that the perceiver needs, since the experience itself is so brief. And because their temporal limits are obvious at first sight, they never really coerce. Their superiority to art is that they cannot be bought and sold. A gallery may pay me for sitting in a room and saying that I’m seeing colors; it would then be paying me for my idea that this could occur and for my self-presentation, but not for my perception itself, which cannot be shared. And this is actually what is happening when galleries exhibit artworks; artworks are not perceptions. The gestures of art and exhibition are our way of compromising with and paying respect to the worthlessness (beyond worth) of perceptions that can never be duplicated or exchanged. There is pathos in Adorno’s sublimation of mere appearance in the 47. Visual artworks may be especially susceptible to Schein because of the semblance (here is a good place to use this word) of totality more strikingly achieved by visual form. The more obviously temporal arts, music and writing, can negate themselves in successive phrases and can activate the perceiver’s awareness that there is no single moment of realization. Visual apprehension gives a stronger illusion of grasp—a quality Lacan mobilizes when he makes the mirror into the emblem of that illusion, and one that Hegel exploits figuratively in the passage of the Phenomenology cited earlier, when he considers history “in a state of repose.” For the same reason, however, visual art furnishes a good counterpoint to the facticity of the world “as is”—that is, to a world that conveys its power less through discourse than through existing. Visual form replies to that world in its own terms. By the same logic, the transient visuality of spectra demurs pointedly from visual aesthetic illusion and social facticity alike.

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artwork, as art’s mementos of the preartistic seem to commemorate an inadmissible desire to be preartistic. Art may recall the early childhood experience of the visual stimulation also encompassed by Kant’s “charms,” a sensory experience more radically unfactive than that of art. Once upon a time we were happy when luminous object perceptions simply appeared: the large colored beads that hang over a crib resemble Anaxagoras’s stars and moon for which alone life is (already) worth living. Memories of some such experience stir in Adorno’s treatment of the preartistic. In comparison to art that “bends under the burdensome weight of the empirical [der lastenden Schwere der Empirie] from which, as art, it steps away” (AT 105, translation modified; GS 7:161), Adorno portrays fountains, “circus colors,” and the like as merely recreational, even as he notes that sensitivity to their allure is necessary for quality aesthetic work. They recall the era of direct stimulation: By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the countertendency to it. The preartistic level of art is at the same time the memento of its anti-cultural character, its suspicion of its antithesis to the empirical world that leaves this world untouched [ihres Argwohns gegen ihre Antithese zur empirischen Welt, welche die empirische Welt unbehelligt läßt]. Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated. (AT 81; GS 7:126) Although an “infantile” state of openness is the only one in which perception—before fact perception—is spontaneously embraced, such a state is vulnerable to exploitation, as Adorno warns in writing of preartistic “poison,” and one might say that the infant’s openness is fated to be exploited. Looking for shelter from exploitation, the Adornian artwork gives up the preartistic magnetism of “unmediated” appearance (sheer Erscheinung)

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and sets out on the long way around to apparition. As it embarks on its travels it carries a little shred of circus color, like a lucky charm.48

4 . c ourt o f appeal Marxism and critical theory enter the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction to answer the question of what it means to object to the world “as is.” Adorno observes that Kant “would say: very well, individual conscience and the course of the world are absolutely incompatible. But then he would add: so much the worse for the course of the world [um so schlimmer für den Weltlauf]” (HF 65; NaS 13:96–97).49 Adorno is a Hegelian and not a Kantian in that he dwells more fully on individuals’ participation in the course of the world, an imbrication that takes place on levels additional to that of judgment. Therefore, Adorno’s objection to the course of the world does not “deny” something like world spirit. Rather, it is based in two responses to Hegel’s system, one that asks Hegel’s use of fact to be consistent in its own terms (Marx’s History 1, à la Chakrabarty) and another that credits the worth of possibilities and particulars excluded from history’s logic (Chakrabarty’s History 2). In the first case, Adorno perceives that Hegel’s system “oscillates between thinking in invariants and unrestrained dialectical thinking” (AT 208; GS 7:309) and handles unevenly presuppositions and possibilities that share similar ontological status. Hegel treats presuppositions read out of what (now) is as more actual than possibilities that have not come to be. Adorno’s turn to possibility, correcting Hegel’s leaning, is based in what he 48. While Adorno’s desire to insure against the illusion of the unmediated is well founded, it’s not clear in his own terms that rejecting play is the right decision: the limited duration and ontic thinness of spectra and “charms” protect the perceiver from aesthetic ideology as well as the autonomous form of the artwork does. 49. It’s a mark of Adorno’s darkening interpretation of Hegel that he here ascribes to Kant words that he used to ascribe to Hegel: “If in the last analysis Hegel’s system makes the transition into untruth by following its own logic, this is a judgment not simply on Hegel, as a self-righteous positivist science would like to think, but rather a judgment on reality [Wirklichkeit]. Hegel’s scornful ‘so much the worse for the facts’ [‘Desto schlimmer für die Tatsachen’] is invoked against him so automatically only because it expresses the dead serious truth about the facts” (“Aspects,” HTS 30–31; GS 5: 276).

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considers to be a more capacious as well as more careful attention to reality than Hegel’s. What “allows reason, and indeed compels and obliges reason, to oppose the superior strength of the course of the world is always the fact that in every situation there is a concrete possibility of doing things differently [der ist stets und in jener Situation der Hinweis auf die konkrete Möglichkeit, es anders zu machen]” (HF 68; NaS 13:100). The fact of possibility, a “concrete possibility of doing things differently,” “present and sufficiently developed” (HF 68; NaS 13:100), is the only thing that constrains Hegel’s attempt to convert a series of events and ideas into a law. Although Adorno would, I think, defend the right to take seriously possibilities that one cannot quantify at all, the alternative possibility he has in mind is often enough strongly indicated, for example by the palpable weakness of existent institutions. Such a possibility is factive enough that, once it enters awareness, it “compels and obliges reason” to reckon with it. This is not to say that the fact that things could be otherwise is as powerful as the fact that they are what they are; only that since possibility is a piece of reality, one cannot dismiss it without proportionally diminishing one’s apprehension of the world “as is.” The fact of possibility should get the same respect as other ontologically similar pieces of reality. Adorno does not, in practice, give as much credit as he should to counterhistories—the almost infinite resource of available facts from disparate places and times that touch Hegelian history without being of it. Unfamiliar pasts and spaces seem to alarm him, so that rumors about them lend his aesthetics the “shudder” of the primitive. When Adorno opines that “any casual glance at the wretched existence of primitive peoples who have survived but still live in Stone Age conditions ought to persuade us to abandon every . . . idealization of primitive society once and for all” (HF 53), his glance is “casual,” for sure—indeed, he has no idea what he’s talking about. Adorno believes, however, in making available both present possibilities and fragments of the past that show historical discontinuity. The second and more idiosyncratic tactic of Adornian objection to the world “as is”—to which I’ll turn in the rest of this section—is Adorno’s defense of the inherent right of the particular and the individual to judge the course of the world by their own perspectives instead of by that of the universal. In Kantian vocabulary, this means that in moving from objective liking to free judgment, I reserve the right to despise what I respect, even

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when the given at issue is the world “as is.” Nietzsche dismisses the idea of such a right with the question: “from where does it derive the right to this judgment? How does the part come to sit as judge over the whole?” (WP §331; KSA 12.316). Adorno takes the position that the right is self-evident and symmetrical to that of universality: it’s necessary in order for there to be anything for universality to work with, but it is also inherent. His unconditional intensity on this point distinguishes him from almost every other philosopher. He elaborates on it in brilliant pages of History and Freedom, zeroing in on the phrase “mit Grund” (with reason, “justifiably”) in Hegel’s statement that the universality that constitutes law “is justifiably regarded as the main enemy by that feeling which reserves the right to do as it pleases, by that conscience which identifies right with subjective conviction” (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 17; Werke 7:20). Adorno captures the false magnanimity of the moment: this “justifiably” has to be taken much more seriously than even Hegel believes. It is characteristic of Hegel’s thinking that he really wants to have it all ways; that he really wants to include everything, even things that simply cannot be reconciled. By this I mean that he adopts the standpoint of the universal; he tends always to claim, ideologically and in a conformist spirit, that the universal is in the right. But equally, almost as an afterthought, he would also like to be credited with wanting fair play for the individual. And he does this with a throwaway remark [einer Partikel], in this case the single adverb “justifiably,” merely in order that the individual should get his just deserts, simply so that it does not look as if anyone is being left out.50 (HF 64–65, my italics; NaS 13:95–96)

50. Adorno liked the point enough to preserve it in Negative Dialectics, but a comparison of the two texts shows why I prefer History and Freedom: “this word of Hegel’s looks like a philosophical slip of the pen. He is blurting out what he denies in the same breath. If the individual conscience actually regarded ‘the real world of that which is right and moral’ [Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 17] as hostile because it does not recognize itself in it, no avowal would serve to gloss this over; for it is the point of Hegelian dialectics that conscience cannot act differently, that it cannot recognize itself in that real moral world. Hegel is thus conceding that the reconciliation whose demonstration comprises his philosophy did not take place” (ND 310; translation modified). The reading in History and Freedom is freer, clearer, more direct, and winds up going further.

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Adorno’s point is not that the universal necessarily does injustice to the individual, but that justice is flawed by dependence on the universal vantage, which cannot represent fully that of each particular at the same time that it represents itself. The universal judges from the perspective of the universal, because it cannot do otherwise. Why should the particular, in turn, not judge from its own perspective? Why should it do the work of the universal, as well as its own work? An aphorism of Minima Moralia, “Golden Gate,” contemplates the rights of the particular and universal as they inform the rights and judgments of love: Someone who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body. He becomes aware that in the innermost blindness of love, that must remain oblivious, lives a demand not to be blinded. He was wronged; from this he deduces a claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what he desires can only be given in freedom. In such distress he who is rebuffed becomes human. Just as love uncompromisingly betrays the general [Allgemeine] to the particular in which alone justice is done to the former, so now the general, as the autonomy of others, turns fatally against it. The very rebuttal through which the general has exerted its influence appears to the individual as exclusion from the general; he who has lost love knows himself deserted by all, and this is why he scorns consolation. In the senselessness of his deprivation he is made to feel the untruth of all merely individual fulfillment. But he thereby awakens to the paradoxical consciousness of generality: of the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved. With his plea, founded on no titles or claims, he appeals to an unknown court, which accords to him as grace what is his own and yet not his own. The secret of justice in love is the sublation of right, to which love mutely points. “So forever / cheated and foolish must love be.”

Hegel may also mean “mit grund” more darkly and brutally, if his intention is to indicate that what the particular fears is about to happen. Thanks to David Lloyd for this idea and other contributions to this chapter.

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Dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten geht etwas auf, so grell wie heftige Schmerzen den eigenen Leib beleuchten. Er erkennt, daß im Innersten der verblendeten Liebe, die nichts davon weiß und nichts wissen darf, die Forderung des Unverblendeten lebt. Ihm geschah unrecht; daraus leitet er den Anspruch des Rechts ab und muß ihn zugleich verwerfen, denn was er wünscht, kann nur aus Freiheit kommen. In solcher Not wird der Verstoßene zum Menschen. Wie Liebe unabdingbar das Allgemeine ans Besondere verrät, in dem allein jenem Ehre widerfährt, so wendet tödlich nun das Allgemeine als Autonomie des Nächsten sich gegen sie. Gerade die Versagung, in der das Allgemeine sich durchsetzte, erscheint dem Individuum als Ausgeschlossensein vom Allgemeinen; der Liebe verlor, weiß von allen sich verlassen, darum verschmäht er den Trost. In der Sinnlosigkeit des Entzuges bekommt er das Unwahre aller bloß individuellen Erfüllung zu spüren. Damit aber erwacht er zum paradoxen Bewußtsein des Allgemeinen: des unveräußerlichen und unklagbaren Menschenrechtes, von der Geliebten geliebt zu werden. Mit seiner auf keinen Titel und Anspruch gegründeten Bitte um Gewährung appelliert er an eine unbekannte Instanz, die aus Gnade ihm zuspricht, was ihm gehört und doch nicht gehört. Das Geheimnis der Gerechtigkeit in der Liebe ist die Aufhebung des Rechts, auf die Liebe mit sprachloser Gebärde deutet. “So muß übervorteilt / Albern doch überall sein die Liebe.”51 The Kantian antagonism of Civilization and Its Discontents, that freedom is constrained by others’ freedom, plays for erotic stakes in this aphorism, written in the language of rights and titles. The slighted lover has suffered an “injustice [unrecht]” in love, but realizes that even from his own particular perspective, he wants the other to be free, since otherwise there would be no possible happiness. It’s an instance in which the individual really does grasp the universal and the particular together—for reasons that are as interested as disinterested—and “reject[s]” his own claim. What makes

51. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [1951], trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), §104; GS 4:185, hereafter MM. The quotation is from Hölderlin, “Tränen,” Selected Verse, ed. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil, 1986).

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Adorno Adorno, however, is that the story doesn’t end there. He neither writes off the loss nor averages it into the communal pool of lovers’ luck (win some, lose some). Rather, losses remain classified as injustices no matter how fair they are. Similarly, physical suffering “tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be” (ND 203; GS 6:203), and death properly remains intolerable because and in spite of its natural inexorability (ND 385; GS 6:378). The original demand to be loved, turned aside by the plaintiff himself, has merit that no rival merits have the power to cancel— that he himself does not have the power to cancel. “The inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved” extends beyond titles. A right based on no reason, it appeals to an “unknown court” that does not operate on the scarcity principles of justice, thus a messianic “Golden Gate” where judgment and plenitude are the same. This court would overturn what is just on the basis of a greater right to universal happiness. “Golden Gate” alludes to the original source of the phrase associated with Hegel, “world history is the world’s court.” “Right” is what “world history, as the world’s court, exercises [Der Weltgeschichte, als dem Weltgerichte, ausübt],” Hegel writes in Elements of The Philosophy of Right (§340). The legal metaphor develops, of course, out of the homology between “process” and “trial” in German (making Kafka, again, an apt respondent to Hegel). The figure recurs in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, in the section entitled “Die Weltgeschichte.”52 In both passages Hegel draws a connection between the spirit of a people (Volksgeister) and the justice of “Weltgerichte”; history’s justice is founded in the spirit of a people, the rightful agent of history. The “Instanz” of “Golden Gate,” in contrast, names the special appeal stage of a trial. In appealing the verdict of the people, “Golden Gate” returns to the source of Hegel’s phrase, Schiller’s poem “Resignation: A Fantasy.” Schiller’s poem functions as a kind of poetic precedent against philosophy, since Hegel’s allusion to the poem does misapply it. Far more Adornian than Hegelian, “Resignation” is the plaint of a narrator who has given up a real love for a delusory hope— based on the promise of an afterlife—and whose justifiable complaint of breach of contract is brushed off with the phrase Hegel selects: “Die Lehre 52. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1830], trans. Gustav Emil Mueller (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), §548; Werke, 10, §548.

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/ ist ewig wie die Welt. Wer glauben kann, entbehre. / Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht [the doctrine / is eternal as the world. Who can believe it, does without. / World history is the world’s court].”53 Like “Golden Gate,” Schiller’s poem insists that losses are by definition never recompensed: “was man von der Minute ausgeschlagen / gibt keine Ewigkeit zurück [what’s lost to the moment / eternity does not give back]” (Werke, 1:169). The Hegelian phrase bears the “resignation” of the title, a resignation recommended to, but not taken up by, the poem’s narrator. Instead he retains the sealed envelope containing his “Vollmachtbrief zum Glücke,” a power of attorney for accomplishing the happiness never delivered. This unopened letter captures well the Adornian fact of possibility—that “unfinished business [dieses Unerledigte]” (Introduction to Sociology, 96; NaS 15:164) that outlives the disregard of history. Far from resigning, the speaker forwards his file to the reader as “phantasie,” in other words, in a form that exceeds the norms that legitimate appeal. Adorno casts himself, then, as the reader who is willing to hear “Resignation’s” appeal—or to read the poem properly. Adorno believes that Kant’s merely intelligible realm in Critique of Practical Reason prefigures such a court of appeal (ND 385; GS 6:378), not in its attitude toward happiness but at least in its introduction of the thought of immortality. In this he follows the reading that the Critique of Practical Reason withdraws, if only in thought, some of the exigency of the First Critique. He reuses the same legal metaphor for Hegel’s rebellion against Kant’s so-called barriers to thought: Hegel argues that Kant “presupposes already that there is a position beyond the realms separated on the Kantian map, that there is a court of last resort [eine dritte Instanz], so to speak” (ND 383; GS 6:375). In both cases the court of appeal surveys the facts and judges independently of their pressure. From it the world “as is” can never coerce endorsement: Nietzsche in the Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for

53. Friedrich Schiller, “Resignation: Eine Phantasie [1786],” in Werke (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1943), 1:167–169. De Man would have said something about Hegel’s seduction by rhyme: the return of the same in rhyme beats the time of the course of the world. . . .

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truth. . . . He refutes the Christian “proof by efficacy [Kraft],” that faith is true because it brings felicity. For “could happiness—or, more technically, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? So far from this, it almost proves the converse, at any rate it gives the strongest grounds for suspecting ‘truth’ whenever feelings of pleasure have had a say in the matter. The proof of pleasure is proof of: pleasure—nothing more; why in the world should true judgments cause more enjoyment than false ones and, in accordance with a preordained harmony, necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their train?” [Nietzsche, Antichrist, §50]. But Nietzsche himself taught amor fati: “thou shalt love thy fate.” This, he says in the Epilogue to The Twilight of the Idols, was his innermost nature. We might well ask whether we have more reason to love what happens to us, to affirm what is, because it is, than to believe true what we hope. Is it not the same false inference that leads from the existence of stubborn facts to their erection as the highest value, as he criticizes in the leap from hope to truth? . . . In the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized. Here, rather than in the opposite, lies the crime of theology that Nietzsche arraigned without ever reaching the final court [zur letzten Instanz]. (MM §61, “Court of Appeal,” translation modified; GS 4:109–110) From the stance of factive illusion and illusory facticity, both sides of the fact/value conflation—“the leap from hope to truth” and the inference from “stubborn facts” to “the highest value”—are equally theological. Only inside the awareness of what Adorno reveals to be the inherently ambiguous zone of social fact do we “wrest” hope “from reality”— Adorno continues, “by negating it,” while I have focused throughout on an alternative tradition of suspension and reservation. Nietzsche and Adorno agree that the very fact that one feels put upon, “like a memory of freedom,” asserts “that we ought by rights to be free” (HF 205; NaS 13:284), but Nietzsche demands a title for the assertion, whereas Adorno finds in discomfort itself a perfectly natural right to want to be comfortable, and in pressure a right to want to be free. As a result, he exceeds the imagination

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of society, which in its bourgeois phase, he notes, “established formal freedom, but had not envisaged [a society] free from every coercion [von jedem Zwang befreiten]” (HF 195, translation modified, my italics; NaS 13:270). Who else has defended the desire for a society free from every coercion? Adorno’s critique of facticity is a platform to support the right to want universal happiness, a wanting that is more contested—because more pointless—than the right to be happy. Visionary as Adorno’s philosophy may be, it is also his attempt to represent more realistically than Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche what is given in the world “as is.”

Postscript

Freud begins Section VI of Civilization and Its Discontents with a confession of superfluity: “In none of my previous works have I had so strong a feeling as now that what I am describing is common knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and, in due course, the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in order to expound things which are, in fact, selfevident [um eigentlich selbstverständliche Dinge zu erzählen].”1 Freud has been describing a faultline in happiness: as its pursuit may impede others’ happiness, the existence of other happiness-seekers constricts one’s own satisfaction even as it makes it possible—obviously. For Freud, this point is singularly obvious—the world’s most gratuitous-feeling, ink-wasting point. Gratuitousness, however, is anything but gratuitous in the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. If discontent is structurally inevitable, then it would seem to be a natural condition that 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE XXI: 117, translation modified; Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1948), XIV: 476.

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it is not the task of therapy to change. Freud notably does not use the language of acceptance; it’s too soon for that, and there is no process of critique that can resolve this question. Rather, he raises a doubt in principle about the position of discontent at the limit of psychoanalysis, dependent as it is on a hypothesis that he can neither accept nor reject. The doubt Freud ponders is similar in consequence to the doubt he has, in the same text, about groups and masses. “In an individual neurosis,” he writes, “we take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal.’ For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere.” The problem is that one can’t psychoanalyze from “elsewhere,” “since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group” (Civilization and Its Discontents, 144). If a group or mass cannot come in for therapy, still less can a civilization. Even though discontent may be built into culture and even into nature, however, it is a strange nature that never feels natural, as Freud observes. The superfluity of writing about discontent reflects and reverses an equally persistent sense of superfluity in discontent itself. Relations to other people, Freud writes, generate “suffering” that “we tend to regard . . . as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere” (77). The metasuffering of resentment implies that there ought not to be suffering (or, on a more banal scale, discomfort): as I’ve suggested, dissatisfaction is minding. Yet, by the same logic, the guilt that attends dissatisfaction and that Freud attacks in his sensation of gratuitousness also implies that it may be important to pause over the awareness of dissatisfaction just where it starts to seem futile. Where does this guilty feeling of taking up too much space and time come from? In Minima Moralia Adorno is on the lookout for “the castration of perception by a court of control” (MM §79); Freud notes that censorship makes “the same objections” even to the most determined mind (such as his own) and cannot be prevented, “only set aside subsequently—by a court of appeal, as it were.”2 To be told what to perceive is to be told what not to look at, and when to cut a look short; it’s 2. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE XV: 115.

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also to be told where to look—to maintain one’s focus on the things that matter. Nietzsche’s remark in The Gay Science, “Looking away shall be my only negation,” hints at an alternative both to the coerced acceptance of the given and to Adorno’s modernist aesthetics of negation. Michael Vahrenwald’s photographs of grasses on Wal-Mart lots inhabit Nietzsche’s hope very simply. Since the Wal-Mart never appears, it’s neither made to condemn itself nor given the honor of being allowed to do so. Nor is its existence denied. What one does see—slopes and patches of greenery to which almost no one pays attention—takes part of its interest from what it’s not, but not all. The viewer’s implicit thought is both “I would prefer not to look at that Wal-Mart” and “I’d prefer to look at this grass.” Stopping short of celebration or transcendence, avoiding any implication of particular depth or spirituality in the perceptual object, Vahrenwald’s photographs find relief in a neutrality that Wal-Mart remains incapable of buying off—in “nature” not as romance but as invariance. The photographs are not, perhaps, phenomenophilic, except for their emphasis on color and their choice of a nearly worthless object to spend time with. They are highly therapeutic in a way common to minimalist art, finding and making available the kind of free space familiar to the child tarrying between the house and the fence, or in the unofficial spaces of the school.3 Still, photography itself can’t be looking away, only influenced by it, since the photograph lasts indefinitely, to be revisited and imagined to be shared. In everyday experience, how long can a look such as the one Vahrenwald depicts last? Juxtaposing Vahrenwald’s representation of looking away to Freud’s discussion of the possibility of therapy for discontent exposes the contrast between the fleeting moments that phenomenophilia steals and the kind of therapeutic time that dissatisfaction may want. Phenomenophilia expires in no more than a few minutes; that seems like a defense, making sure that no one can intrude, but also making sure that the phenomenophile doesn’t take much relief (since he feels he lacks a right to any). Minimalism’s deep vacancy suggests that what the 3. Thanks to Toshi Tomori for this idea.

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Green Slope, Wal-Mart, Davenport, Iowa. Photograph by Michael Vahrenwald, 2005.

phenomenophile needs is time, the long and potentially infinite time it may take to wash away the sense of coercion. As Adorno suggests, we are melancholy and restless during periods of freedom not because we don’t know what to do with freedom, but because there is not yet enough of it (“Spoilsport,” MM §113). A response to the dissatisfaction associated with phenomenophilia, then, would be to allow theoretically infinite time to realize the possibility of experiences that others need not share. “Theoretically” means that this is an attitudinal, not empirical, recommendation, although attitudes have empirical consequences; and it also suggests that this attitude is one that the phenomenophile would try out on himself, the only person for whom one can conceivably have a theoretically infinite tolerance. Although this psychoanalytic value is not necessarily an ethical one, it can be connected (by paradox) to ethics. Winnicott’s essay “Communicating and Not Communicating,” for example, establishes the domain—a domain formed out of dialogue with others—of a “secret self” closed even to intimates, as a con-

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dition for noncoercive relation.4 Something like the secret self is what phenomenophiles feel they have no right to possess, and may be what Cavell imagines the skeptic cannot have. The frustration toward too much interest in phenomenality that often emerges in philosophy reflects both the sense that recession of this kind is an insult to the given world shared with society and the related suspicion that there is no end to it: the person who wants to linger in mere appearance is really always doing it, as Nietzsche says of the artist; he would live there all the time if he did what he wanted. The phenomenophile feels the danger and futility of looking away as well. The fear of the open-ended tension of an endless desire cuts its losses by gravitating to lyric instants that are figured as all one can expect. In this way the hope for freedom surfaces and times out. Freud faces the macrocosmic version of a similar problem in his negative-therapeutic gesture at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents: I should find it understandable if someone were to point out the obligatory nature of the course of human civilization and were to say, for instance, that the tendencies to a restriction of sexual life or to the institution of a humanitarian ideal at the expense of natural selection were developmental trends which cannot be averted or turned aside and to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of nature [my italics]. I know, too, the objection that can be made against this, to the effect that in the history of mankind, trends such as these, which were considered unsurmountable, have often been thrown aside and replaced by other trends. Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers. The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in

4. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities P, 1965), 179–192.

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mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. (145) The “developmental trends” of civilization may or may not be unstoppable, and Freud does not feel up to prophecy on a matter that can only be resolved by continuation to infinity. Instead, he takes up the position outside civilization that he earlier describes as both impossible and necessary for civilization-therapy. In these last two paragraphs, separated by a break from the rest of the book, Freud removes himself from the first-person plural. His “fellow-men” become and remain a “they” in whose predicament he no longer seems to participate: “the fateful question for the human species seems to me to be . . . their cultural development.” From outside “the human species,” Freud stops short of opining that the course of the world is obligatory, that the developmental trends for better and worse of this civilization will have been natural and unalterable. He does not allow the consolations of history or prophecy to take the place of tolerating a present and future question that may last forever. What Freud produces, disturbingly and amusingly, is a figure of the ideal analyst, the one whose theoretically infinite patience is literalized—an analyst who could wait out the acting out of world spirit. No one possesses this patience, least of all the phenomenophile or his interlocutors, and not even very talented analysts like Winnicott. Like many figures in the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction, this is a utopian figure of plenitude, as well as a dystopian one that tries to take the measure of the trouble civilization is in. Bringing this figure back to the critical debate about whether and how to think about impossible projects, though, may help to clarify why, for a reservation that seems both too small and too large to be spoken, an unconditional space is a better idea than the few seconds of tolerance we usually give ourselves.

Bibliography Index

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Index

Abrams, M. H., 55n23 acceptance: of the given, 1–18, 22, 24, 26– 28, 32, 40, 68n36, 71, 141, 171, 200–201; Kant and, 6, 18, 73–76, 79, 87–88, 92, 94–95, 115–116, 117, 162; minimal, 6, 28, 71, 75, 94–95, 107–108, 117, 159, 162; Nietzsche and, 1, 7, 115–117, 135, 137, 141, 146–148 acknowledgment, 2, 5, 70–71 addiction, 25, 52, 57, 82, 85. See also drugs Adorno, T. W., 25, 29, 34, 39, 45, 47, 72, 127n16, 153–198, 200–202; Hegel and, 7–8, 154, 156, 158–172, 175–177, 184, 188, 190–193, 195–196, 198; Kant and, 7–8, 47, 154, 156n9, 159, 162, 165–166, 172–173, 175–176, 183, 186, 188, 190n49, 196, 198; Nietzsche and, 19, 24– 25, 171–172, 172n34, 174–176, 179, 192, 196–198. Works: Aesthetic Theory, 7–8, 154n3, 156n9, 159–160, 165–166, 173– 190; “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” 160, 190; “Commitment,” 155n7; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 169n29, 182n42; Hegel: Three Studies, 159n15, 160–161; History and Freedom, 8, 45n16, 155–157, 159–163, 166, 168–170, 184, 190–192, 192n50, 197–198; Introduction to Sociology, 155, 158, 159n15, 196; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 72; Minima Moralia, 25n33, 193–194, 197, 200; Negative Dialectics, 7– 8, 155n7, 156, 159–160, 162, 164–166, 171–172, 176, 179, 192n50, 195–196; “Positivist Dispute in German Sociol-

ogy,” 155; “Sexual Taboos and Law Today,” 170n31; “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” 159n15, 160, 163–164, 167, 169, 171. See also aesthetic; artwork; perception, preartistic; spell, figure of aesthetic, 6–8, 16, 23, 26–27, 36–37, 43, 49n19, 65, 174–189, 191, 201; Adorno and, 7–8, 154n3, 156n9, 159–160, 165– 166, 173–190; Kant and, 74–75, 95, 98– 113; Nietzsche and, 121n8, 127, 141, 150, 159. See also judgment, aesthetic affirmation, 1, 6, 8, 28, 32, 39, 40n7, 95, 97, 111, 115–117, 125, 130n20, 136–138, 143, 148–152, 156, 161, 163, 167, 171– 172, 174, 174n36, 187–188, 197; in art, 174, 187–188; Cavell and, 69–71; eternal return as, 116–117, 146; idealist, 69, 75; robust, 7, 15, 162, 172; of suffering, 150n40; of totality, 116–117, 149, 172. See also endorsement; society, affirmative power of afterimage, 35–36, 46, 76, 177, 183–184, 187 Agamben, Giorgio, 148 Anaxagoras, 27, 189 animation, 44, 62, 69–70, 178; animism, 45, 50, 70; lyric, 17n22, 45 Apollinian, 119, 121–126, 128 apparition, 30n41, 35, 37, 54, 177–180, 185–186, 189–190 appearance, 1–4, 6–7, 15–16, 16n20, 18–19, 22–23, 26n34, 28n37, 29n40, 30, 36, 38– 40, 44n15, 47, 50–51, 58, 64–66; Adorno

220 appearance (continued) and, 177–180, 183, 185, 188–189; of appearance, 15, 19–21, 40, 65, 118, 120– 123, 125–126, 128–130, 130n20, 141n3; Arendt and, 28; Euripides and, 125; Hegel and, 160, 169n29, 175–176; Kant and, 73–113; mere, 3–4, 7–9, 16, 16n20, 18–21, 36–37, 40, 49, 51, 62–63, 77, 107, 120, 122–123, 125–128, 188, 203; Nietzsche and, 114–116, 118; normal (Erscheinung), 6, 18–22, 28–29, 33, 43, 48–49, 51, 64–66, 76–78, 92, 97, 103, 115, 121, 123, 126–128, 139–140, 175– 179, 183, 185, 189; reality and, 1–2, 7, 10, 14, 34, 38, 84, 128, 130n20, 141n31, 149 Arendt, Hannah, 27–28, 33 Aristotle, 27, 28n36, 58 art production, 46; contrasted with phenomenophilia, 174–175, 181, 184, 187–188, 201–202 artwork, 8, 158, 173–190 “as is,” 6, 116, 130, 147, 156, 173, 188, 191, 196 Auden, W. H., 17n22 Augenschein, 105–108 Auschwitz, 148–149, 169 Austin, J. L., 12, 81n8 Bahti, Timothy, 160 Balibar, Étienne, 167 Banfield, Ann, 28n37 Bass, Alan, 68–69, 129 Bateman, R. Benjamin, 32n45 Bateson, Gregory, 4 Baudelaire, Charles, 24–25, 29, 133 Bauer, Fritz, 170n31 beautiful, 23, 68n36, 99, 100–105, 109–111, 125n15, 131, 135, 156; “beautiful views,” 103–105 beauty, natural, 156n8, 177, 184, 187–188 Beck, Lewis White, 79n6 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 47, 91, 169n29, 183 Berkeley, George, 10, 10n9 Bernstein, J. M., 109–111, 156n9, 166, 174n36 Blanchot, Maurice, 29, 29n40, 117–118, 146–147, 149 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 121, 123, 125n14, 130n20 boundaries, figure of, 6, 82, 84, 93, 114 Cassirer, Ernst, 137 Cassirer, H. W., 82n9

index Cavell, Stanley, 2–5, 10, 17, 25, 69–71, 73, 150, 203 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 163, 190 charm (Reiz), 23, 36, 103–105, 108–109, 188–189, 190 Cheah, Pheng, 30n41 Clark, David, 25n33, 82n10, 83, 85n16 closet, 24–25, 133, 136 Coburn, Kathleen, 56n25 coercion, 3, 5, 17, 25n33, 32, 39, 58, 63, 95, 99, 118, 188, 196, 198, 201–202; of fact perception, 8, 68n36, 74, 97–98, 101, 103, 111, 182; of fact/value conflation, 150, 156; minimal, 97, 110–111, 167, 171, 172 Coleridge, Hartley, 46, 53–54, 62–63, 92, 138, 165 Coleridge, S. T., 5–8, 16–17, 19, 24–27, 29n40, 31, 33, 35–63, 66–67, 69–72, 95– 96, 104, 112–114, 116, 122–123, 133n23, 144, 179; Kant and, 5–6, 26, 36, 47, 56; Wordsworth and, 43–44, 61–63, 65–66. Works: Biographia Literaria, 42n11, 55– 56; “Composed on a Journey Homeward,” 42n11; “Dejection: An Ode,” 36, 66; The Friend, 57, 57n27; “Frost at Midnight,” 26, 45, 50–51; Notebooks, 5, 35, 37, 39, 44n13, 51, 72, 76–77, 96; “Phantom or Fact,” 16, 58; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 66, 69–70; “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” 44; “To William Wordsworth,” 43 color, 4, 44, 44–45n15, 59, 62, 76, 76n4, 103–104, 105n32, 154, 181, 190, 201; variegated, 104, 186 common sense (sensus communis), 109–111 communication, 5, 33n46, 39, 40, 60n30, 69, 71, 111–112, 136, 172, 202 concreteness, 30n41, 68, 70, 106, 154 consent, 15, 82, 107, 159 constraint, 85–88 copula, 164, 184 course of the world (Weltlauf), 160, 162– 163, 168–170, 172, 190–191, 196, 204 court of appeal, figure of, 153, 163, 190, 196–197, 200 Crary, Jonathan, 4, 4n4, 26n35, 153 de Duve, Thierry, 49n19 de Man, Paul, 139, 184, 196. Work: “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 105–108 denial, 69–72, 150, 156; distinguished from objection, 71

index Dennett, Daniel, 20n25 De Quincey, Thomas, 26, 56n25, 73, 77 derealization, 37, 53, 56, 68–70, 95 Derrida, Jacques, 85–86, 94, 164, 171, 179n40, 187n45. Works: Dissemination, 179n40, 187n45; Glas, 164n20; On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 94n25; “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks,” 85–86; Spectres of Marx, 30, 30n41, 63, 138 Descartes, René, 14, 165; Cartesian, 5 deviance, 10, 25, 40, 43, 72, 76–77, 131, 187 Dews, Peter, 172n34 dialectic, 113, 155n5, 157, 159, 162, 164, 171n32, 184, 190, 192n50; transcendental, 80 Dickens, Charles, 32 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 39 Dionysian, 121, 121n8, 122, 126, 136 disavowal, 115, 130n21, 137 discontent (Unbehagen), 10, 14, 24, 34, 194, 199–201, 203 dissatisfaction: connected to phenomenality, 9–10, 14–15, 18–19, 22–30, 33, 38–39, 66, 92–93, 116, 118, 120–122, 125, 125n14, 133–134, 143, 149, 152n43, 159, 171, 175, 201–202; defined as “minding,” 24, 120, 200; with the given, 8, 10, 17, 34, 66, 71, 92, 99, 102, 115, 143–146, 152, 173, 190; hostility to, 17, 24, 34, 38, 115, 117, 129–130, 133–135, 138, 143–146, 149, 152, 200; queerness of, 9, 25, 117, 133, 151, 153–154, 159; transcendental, 30–31, 91, 137, 145–146 dissociation, 37n4, 40 dream, 37, 46–47, 50–54, 56–59, 79, 95, 122–127; lucid, 20, 47, 53, 122–125 drugs, 26, 116, 119, 132–133, 142n33; addiction to, 52, 82, 82n10 Duchamp, Marcel, 26, 49n19 Durkheim, Émile, 158, 158n13 Edelman, Lee, 31–32 effective, 162–163, 165, 171–172, 181, 184; “effective truth,” 167 Ellison, Julie, 40n8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 85n15 endorsement, 32, 51, 71, 74–75, 86, 94, 95, 99, 117n3, 128, 136–137, 142, 147–149, 156, 171, 173, 196. See also affirmation ephemerality, 3, 5, 6, 22–23, 29, 36, 95, 185, 186–187. See also charm (Reiz); transience Epicurus, 135–136, 145

221 error: in judgment, 49, 79–80, 127, 132; in perception, 36, 134. See also optical illusion essence (Wesen), 175–176, 179–180 eternal return, 7, 116–118, 136, 138, 146– 149, 151 Euripides, 125–126 exigency, 2–3, 87–88, 95–97, 102, 116, 118, 140–141, 162, 167, 170, 172, 196 fact: internal, 6, 113; psychic, 3, 13, 30, 37– 38, 51–52, 58, 113, 165; social, 3, 7, 156, 159–160, 162, 170, 172–173, 183, 188n47, 197. See also fact/value problem; object, internal; perception, fact fact/value problem, 5, 10, 12, 12nn12–13, 14–15, 17–18, 20, 33–34, 49, 87, 93, 114– 115, 129, 134, 143–144, 146, 150–151, 156–158, 161, 164, 173, 183–184, 197. See also is-ought question fault (Schuld), 77, 77n5, 78–79, 81, 92–94, 97, 102, 180–181; no fault, 81, 93, 97 Fenves, Peter, 81n9, 85 Ferenczi, Sandor, 12–13, 159 fetishism, 12, 49, 68–69, 136n25; commodity, 37, 158; distinguished from phenomenophilia, 68n36 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 72 film, 27, 43, 65, 186 fireworks, 184–187 form, 57, 59, 89, 104–105, 141, 145n34, 166, 166n24, 173–176, 178–182, 185– 188, 190; illusion and, 175 François, Anne-Lise, 12n13, 32 freedom, 6, 22, 30n41, 39, 45, 47, 55, 74, 76–77, 85, 85n17, 87, 95, 100, 106–109, 113, 113n37, 136, 155, 161, 168n28, 169, 187, 193–194, 197–198, 202–203 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 32–34, 47, 52, 68–70, 119, 124–125. Works: Civilization and Its Discontents, 10, 14, 24, 34, 199–201, 203– 204; “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” 12–13, 92n22; “Negation,” 91–92; “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” 13n15 Gasché, Rodolphe, 21n28, 101, 104 given, 1–12, 12n12, 16n20, 17, 21, 25–26, 29, 40, 46, 52, 54, 68n36, 74–76, 78, 88– 97, 99–100, 102, 115, 137, 139, 145–149, 154, 156, 163, 168, 171–172, 174, 182, 184, 187, 192, 198, 201; defined, 2n2; given world, 1–3, 6, 8, 10, 16, 18n23, 22,

222 given (continued) 24, 32, 34, 75, 88, 92, 97, 111, 116, 130, 132–134, 140–143, 148, 150, 152, 162, 203 Godwin, William, 167n35 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26–27, 95, 127. Work: Theory of Colors, 76 Goffman, Erving, 4 Gothic, 27, 57, 57n27 Grier, Michelle, 80–81, 237n26 Guyer, Paul, 85n17, 97, 113n37 Habermas, Jürgen, 171 Hacking, Ian, 84n13 happiness, 85, 135–136, 194–197, 199 Hazlitt, William, 103n31 Hegel, G. W. F., 29, 117n3, 121n8, 138; Adorno and, 7–8, 154, 156n8, 158–172, 175–177, 184, 188n47, 190–193, 195– 196, 198; copula in, 164–165; historical process in, 8, 154, 167–169; Kant and, 165–167, 172, 175; ontological argument of, 165–167; rhetoric of, 168–169. Works: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 159, 192, 192n50, 195; Encyclopedia, 195; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 160; Phenomenology of Spirit, 160–161; Science of Logic, 175 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 74n3 Hölderlin, Friedrich: “Tränen,” 194, 194n51 homophobia, 25n33, 170n31 homosexuality, 25, 25n33, 82, 82n10, 151, 170n31 Horkheimer, Max, 169n29, 170, 182n42 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 175n37 Hume, David, 10–13, 108n34 Hutchinson, Sara, 58–62 idealism, 30n41, 55, 69, 146, 158 ideality, 22, 56, 59 idealization, 30, 45, 171 ideology, 7, 12, 30n41, 37, 41, 153–154, 156–157, 186, 190, 192 illusion (Schein), 8, 20, 61, 80, 119–121, 127, 141, 143, 146n35, 150, 154n3, 168; aesthetic, 175, 177–183, 186, 188; Erscheinung and, 19, 21–22, 43, 48–49, 65–66, 78, 126–127, 127n16, 132–134, 139, 179; fact perception as, 154–157, 174, 176; form and, 175; reflexivity and, 2–21, 40, 118, 122–125, 130; transcendental, 29–31, 52, 73, 77–82, 137n26,

index 146, 162. See also optical illusion; semblance image, dialectical, 169n29 imagination, 39, 43, 54–55, 57, 63, 79, 85n15, 95, 100, 103–104, 106–107 imperative, 4, 5, 16–17, 22, 30, 32, 39, 49, 112, 136, 150, 171–172; to art, 187n46; categorical, 82; of eternal return, 148; to negation, 188 injustice, 77, 144–145, 193–194 is-ought question, 12, 25. See also fact/value problem Jacobus, Mary, 33n46, 60n30 judgment, 2, 16, 25, 28, 75, 79, 95, 99–101, 108–109, 116, 142, 144–145, 151, 184, 190–193, 195, 197; aesthetic, 16, 23, 49n19, 74–75, 98–105, 108–113; teleological, 101 justice, 85, 85n15, 95, 193–195; illusion of, 168 Kafka, Franz, 20, 173, 195 Kant, Immanuel, 2–4, 7, 20–25, 28–29, 31n42, 32–34, 47, 71, 73–113; Adorno and, 7–8, 47, 154, 156n9, 159, 162, 165– 166, 172–173, 175–176, 183, 186, 188, 190n49, 196, 198; Coleridge and, 5–6, 26, 36, 47, 56; Hegel and, 165–167, 172, 175; Nietzsche and, 7, 114, 117, 121, 132, 136–145, 148, 150. Works: “Attempt at some reflections on optimism,” 86–87; Conflict of the Faculties, 83n12; Critique of Judgment, 6, 8, 23, 74–75, 97–113, 159, 174; Critique of Practical Reason, 112, 196; Critique of Pure Reason, 6–7, 12, 18–19, 27, 31, 33, 73–99, 102, 108, 110–114, 116–117, 162, 166, 172, 196; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 18; Lectures on Ethics, 83n12; Lectures on Logic, 107; Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 79n6; “Three Manuscript Reflections on Optimism,” 86–87. See also aesthetic; appearance, normal (Erscheinung); common sense (sensus communis); fault (Schuld); illusion (Schein); illusion, transcendental; imperative, categorical; judgment; law, inner; liking, objective (Objektive Wohlgefallen); noumena; play, free Kateb, George, 12n13 Kaufmann, Walter, 142n33, 147n37 Keats, John, 16, 31 Kemp Smith, Norman, 97 Kierkegaard, Søren, 25

index Klein, Melanie, 37n4, 68 Kleist, Heinrich von, 25–26, 73, 92–93, 95, 97 Kofman, Sarah, 132n22 Kolakowski, Leszek, 5, 111 Kracauer, Siegfried, 124n13 Kuhn, Thomas, 84n13 Lacan, Jacques, 68n36, 117n3, 188n47 Laplanche, Jean, 56n25 Larson, Kerry, 85n15 law: inner, 6, 112–113; natural, 3, 16, 39, 85, 93; transcendental, 23, 110 Lefort, Claude, 167 legal metaphor, 7, 24, 81n9, 84n15, 195– 196. See also tribunal, figure of Leibniz, G. W., 86–87, 162 liking, objective (Objektive Wohlgefallen), 74–75, 99–100, 107–108, 110, 112, 159, 191 lingering, 15, 18, 33, 40, 46, 102–103, 107, 187, 203 Locke, John, 40, 51, 55; Lockean, 36, 114 Loewald, Hans, 13n14 looking away, 7, 18, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 31, 31n41, 33, 39, 46, 68n36, 71, 96, 98, 103, 105, 113, 116, 174, 183, 203; compared to art, 187–188, 201; phrase in Nietzsche, 133, 136–137 looking awry, 31n41 Lucretius, 128; Lucretian, 18n23, 28n37 Lyotard, Jean-François, 174n36 lyric, 16n20, 22n17, 26, 45, 55, 121–122, 133, 184, 203; lyrical, 95, 121

223 negation, 8, 91, 136, 172, 176, 179–180, 182–184, 188, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–3, 5, 7–10, 20, 26, 28, 29n40, 39, 73, 93, 95, 114–152, 170, 201, 203; Adorno and, 19, 24–25, 171– 172, 172n34, 174–176, 179, 192, 196– 198; Coleridge and, 19, 24–25; Kant and, 19, 24–25, 83, 92, 114–116, 121, 138– 139, 139n28, 140–141. Works: Antichrist, 196–197; Beyond Good and Evil, 124n12, 142n32; Birth of Tragedy, 7, 20, 115–116, 118–128, 130, 136, 139; Gay Science, 116, 124, 131–138, 145, 147n37, 201; Genealogy of Morals, 171; “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 93n24; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 117n2; Twilight of the Idols, 124, 197; Will to Power, 7, 83, 95, 114, 114n1, 115, 117, 124, 130, 133–134, 137–138, 146–151, 172, 192. See also Apollinian; Dionysian; eternal return; looking away; nihilism; primal unity; ressentiment nihilism, 116, 137–138, 142–144; nihilist, 7, 18, 24, 129 nominalism, 49, 84, 157–158 normativity, 2–3, 17–18, 25, 27, 39, 95, 111, 150, 170, 173, 187; normative aesthetics, 98, 105 “not nothing,” 18, 30–31, 62–63, 92, 165, 171 noumena, 88–92, 141; noumenal, 106 Nozick, Robert, 97n27

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 167 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 179n40 Marion, Jean-Luc, 22–23 Marx, Karl, 30, 153, 158, 160–161, 163, 172, 190; Marxism, 190 Mates, Benson, 9–10n8 Mead, Margaret, 4 Mendelssohn, Moses, 83 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 55n24 minding, 24, 33, 71, 120, 136, 200 minimalism, 112, 187n46 Moran, Richard, 20n25, 155, 155n7 Mudge, Bradford K., 57, 57–58n27

object, internal, 37, 51–54, 57, 63. See also fact, internal; fact, psychic objection, 3, 116, 180, 190–191; distinguished from denial, 71 ocular, 76, 106–107 Offenbach, Jacques: La Belle Hélène, 124, 124n13 ontological argument for God, 165–166, 174 optical, 26, 26n35, 80, 81n8, 127, 132, 139 optical illusion, 6, 35–36, 76–77, 80–81, 95 optics, 74n3 optimism, 86–87, 100, 161–162, 168n28 Overbeck, Franz, 139n29

nature, 10, 19, 27–28, 45, 60, 85n15, 106, 113, 118–119, 124, 128, 177, 183–184, 201; questioning of, 9, 14, 38, 117, 143, 200, 203; as a whole, 87, 92–93, 99. See also beauty, natural; law, natural

particular, 8, 100, 154, 169, 172; universal and, 157, 161, 163, 168, 190–194 Pater, Walter, 26 Peacock, Thomas Love, 42n11 Pepper, Thomas, 25n33

224 perception: fact, 2–4, 8, 15–17, 19–22, 27– 28, 33, 39, 63, 68n36, 74–75, 87, 93, 95– 99, 101–103, 105, 107, 111–113, 128, 153–156, 159, 173–174, 176, 182; object, 15–16, 18–21, 27, 98, 101–103, 105, 107– 108, 111–112, 187, 189; preartistic, 184– 189 perversity, 25–26, 40 Pessoa, Fernando, 21, 25 phenomenalism, 10, 10n9 phenomenality, 1, 5, 7, 26, 38, 44n13, 60, 69, 91n21, 93, 96, 98, 103–108, 118, 121n8, 123, 125–126, 145; dissatisfaction and, 9–10, 14–15, 18–19, 22, 24–27, 29, 30, 33–34, 39, 115–117, 119–121, 125n14, 129–130, 141–142, 149, 152– 154, 159, 171, 175, 190, 203–204; of the inner world, 92; mere, 3, 5, 18, 22, 27, 30–31, 72, 119, 128, 130, 136, 154n3, 175, 183 phenomenology, 26n34, 55n24; of ideology, 153; of phenomenality, 10, 121n8 phenomenophile, 7, 18, 22, 24, 28–29, 32– 33, 53, 68n36, 72, 96, 98, 103, 108, 113, 129, 137, 187, 201–204 phenomenophilia, 4, 4n4, 7–8, 17, 21–23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 46, 63, 72, 74, 97–98, 105, 115–116, 119, 132, 134, 135, 153; contrasted with art production, 174–175, 181, 184, 187–188, 201–202; distinguished from fetishism, 68n36 Pinkard, Terry, 170–171 Pippin, Robert, 90, 91n21, 92n23 Plato, 22, 134; Platonic, 18, 122, 187 play, 45, 47, 116, 129n18, 132, 135, 183, 190; free, 85n15, 103–104, 106 Poellner, Peter, 152n43 Poovey, Mary, 153–154 Porter, James I., 128–129, 129–130n20 positivism, 11, 155, 157–159, 190n49 Pothen, Philip, 141n31, 150 primal unity, 119–120, 122, 129n18 queer, 9, 24–25, 25n33, 38, 41, 42, 57, 82n10, 96, 115–116, 130, 136, 149, 151 queer theory, 31–32, 170–171 Rajan, Tillottama, 40n8 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio): Transfiguration, 125, 137, 179 Ray, Man, 43 realism: moral, 12; philosophical, 1–2, 4, 10, 38, 55n24, 70, 71, 83–84, 84n13, 133– 134, 198; political, 156, 162n18

index reality, 1–2, 12–15, 19–21, 29–30, 30n41, 34, 37–38, 47, 49, 62–63, 68–69, 75, 86– 87, 90–96, 100, 102, 115–116, 122–124, 128, 130, 136, 140–143, 148, 150, 169n28, 190–191; appearance and, 1, 2, 10, 34, 38, 83–84, 128, 133–134, 141, 149; of artwork, 173, 177, 181; of capital, 163; degrees of, 86, 100, 134, 140, 176, 181; effective, 181, 184; negation of, 197; satisfaction and, 10; social, 31, 155–158, 160, 166, 168, 172–173; thought and, 66 reality principle, 13, 75, 87 reality testing, 37, 49, 116, 124 reason, critical, 7, 33, 93, 96, 99 reckoning, 13, 159, 163, 191 Reginster, Bernard, 150–151 Reik, Theodor, 124n13 ressentiment, 152n43 Rethy, Robert, 127n16, 146n45 right, 7, 17, 33–34, 63, 81, 83–88, 94, 114– 118, 129–130, 138, 140, 182, 187–188, 190–195, 197–198, 201; fault and, 77–78, 81; lack of, 24, 85, 114, 117, 142–146, 162, 203; natural, 85n15, 108–109, 197; of reason, 84–85n15 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 17n22 Roberts, Tyler, 150–151 romanticism, 4–5, 27, 44, 82n10, 106, 127n16, 133, 154; romantic interpretation of Kant, 65, 74, 97–98, 173 Sallis, John, 122–123, 125 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 133n23, 155n7 satisfaction, 9, 10, 15, 40n7, 84–85, 93–94, 98–100, 126, 199; minimal, 96–97, 115, 139n28 Scarry, Elaine, 16n20 Schiller, Friedrich, 121n8. Work: “Resignation: A Fantasy,” 195–196 Schmitt, Carl, 165n21 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20, 25–26, 73, 121, 124–125, 127n16, 133n24 Schwenger, Peter, 48n17 Searle, John, 11–12 Sebald, W. G.: Austerlitz, 96 Sedgwick, Eve, 25, 82n10, 151 Seel, Martin, 21n27 self-denial, 26, 121, 135–146 semblance, 8, 19, 127, 154, 154n3, 166, 168, 174, 183, 188. See also illusion (Schein) Sextus Empiricus, 9–10, 16 sexuality, 24–25, 57–58, 61–62, 79, 82– 83n12, 116–117, 136n25, 170n31 Shelley, Mary, 57–58n27 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20

225

index Silverman, Kaja, 22 skeptic, portrayal of, 2, 4, 9–10n8, 108n34, 203 skepticism, 10–11, 17–18, 38, 69–71; object, 10, 69–70 Sloterdijk, Peter, 129n18 society, 25, 27, 32, 111, 157, 158n11, 168, 170, 173, 181, 198, 203; affirmative power of, 156, 160; “primitive,” 191. See also fact, social Soll, Ivan, 130n21 spectra, 6, 35–40, 43–49, 51–53, 56n25, 60, 62–63, 65–66, 103, 133, 179, 183; contrasted with art, 186–190; contrasted with spectres, 37, 51; defined, 35; distinguished from fetishes, 68n36 Spectre of the Brocken, 65, 77 spectres: Coleridge and, 6, 31, 38, 44, 51– 53, 58–59, 61, 63, 112, 137, 165; contrasted with spectra, 37, 51; Derrida and, 30, 30n41, 138 spell, figure of, 170, 170n31, 173, 181 Spengler, Oswald, 168n28 Strawson, P. F., 83–84n13 sublime, 104–107 suffering, 24, 52, 115, 118–121, 124–125, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 146n35, 149– 150, 161, 172, 195, 200; metasuffering, 34, 200 suspension of disbelief, 51, 63 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 41, 49 taste, 103–104, 108, 108n34, 109; visual, 26n5 therapeutics, 5, 6, 71, 74, 82, 91, 116, 119, 200–201, 203–204 touch, 54, 56, 56n25, 57–58, 60, 136 Trakl, Georg, 184 transcendental, 29, 31n41, 55–56, 88–89, 91n21, 105, 172n35. See also dialectic, transcendental; illusion, transcendental; law, transcendental transgression, 31–32 transience, 4, 6, 7, 16n20, 23, 26, 45, 55, 76,

95, 98, 141, 165, 178, 186, 188. See also charm (Reiz); ephemerality trauma, 28, 56n25, 94, 119–120, 129 tribunal, figure of, 7, 84n15, 111. See also legal metaphor trompe l’oeil, 1, 40, 130–131 totality, 7, 115–117, 140, 149, 160–162, 172; aesthetic illusion of, 188n47 universal, 29, 191, 195, 198; particular and, 157, 161, 163, 168, 192–193, 194; universalist aesthetics, 98–99, 103 Vahrenwald, Michael, 201 Valéry, Paul, 184–185 value, 2, 14, 31, 75, 109–110, 113, 127, 129, 134, 141–143, 202; minimal, 13, 32, 75, 96, 110–112, 115, 117, 139n28; objective, 96–97, 99, 101–102, 110, 112–113; quasi, 74, 97. See also fact/value problem Villa, Dana, 31n44 visuality, 4, 6, 15, 36, 65, 120, 188n47, 189 voting, figure of, 50–51 Wang, Orrin, 30n41 Warner, Michael, 31, 170n31 Webern, Anton, 181, 183 Wedgwood, Tom, 56n25 Wellmer, Albrecht, 174n36, 180 Wilde, Oscar, 26, 151 Winnicott, D. W., 33n46, 37n4, 91–92, 202, 204 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21n27, 25, 40 Woolf, Virginia, 28, 28n37 Wordsworth, William, 20, 25, 27, 33n46, 39–40, 43–44, 59n28; contrasted with Coleridge, 63, 65–66; Hutchinson and, 60–62. Works: Guide to the Lakes, 64–65; “Peter Bell,” 59; Prelude, 43, 60n30 working through, 13, 33 world spirit, 160, 190, 204 ÒiÓek, Slavoj, 30–31n41, 37n5, 117n3 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 181