The Temptation of Non-Being: Negativity in Aesthetics 1350429996, 9781350429994

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The Temptation of Non-Being

Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy encourages a sustained dialogue between the most important intellectual currents in recent European philosophy—including phenomenology, deconstruction, hermeneutics—and key political theories and concepts, both classical and modern. In doing so, it not only sheds new light on today’s shifting political realities but also explores the previously neglected consequences of the two disciplines. Series editor: Michael Marder Other volumes in the series include: Ethics under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and the Culture Wars, Jason Hannan Politics in the Times of Indignation: The Crisis of Representative Democracy, Daniel Innerarity (translated by Sandra Kingery) Medialogies: Inflationary Media and the Crisis of Reality, David R. Castillo and William Egginton Democracy and Its Others, Jeffrey H. Epstein The Democracy of Knowledge, Daniel Innerarity (translated by Sandra Kingery) The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy of Western Ethical Experience, Mika Ojakangas The Politics of Nihilism, edited by Nitzan Lebovic and Roy Ben-Shai On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Martin Heidegger (edited by Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Michael Marder, translated by Andrew J. Mitchell) Deconstructing Zionism, Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala Heidegger on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Michael Marder and Peter Trawny The Metaphysics of Terror, Rasmus Ugilt The Negative Revolution, Artemy Magun The Voice of Conscience, Mika Ojakangas Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred, Jon Wittrock The Fascism of Ambiguity, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

The Temptation of Non-Being Negativity in Aesthetics Artemy Magun

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Artemy Magun, 2024 Artemy Magun has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Magun, Artemiıˇ, author. Title: The temptation of non-being : negativity in aesthetics / Artemy Magun. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. | Series: Political theory and contemporary philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023043300 (print) | LCCN 2023043301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350429987 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350430020 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350430006 (epub) | ISBN 9781350429994 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Negativity (Philosophy) | Arts, Modern–21st century–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC B828.25 .M34 2024 (print) | LCC B828.25 (ebook) | DDC 149–dc23/eng/20240110 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043300 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043301 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3504-2998-7 ePDF: 978-1-3504-2999-4 eBook: 978-1-3504-3000-6 Series: Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Preface Introduction I Negativity as a Phenomenon II Functions of Negation in Modernism III A Subject and Its Name IV Art or the Beautiful? V Why Art? Digression: A Test VI Defining Beauty and Art VII Negativity in Aesthetics: Recent to Ancient VIII The Modernist Theories of Negativity in Art IX Varieties of Negation 1

vii 1 1 5 13 16 17 20 24 27 33 42

System of Negation 47 Preface 47 I Aesthetic Negation in Itself 52 1 Things That Do Not Exist and Actions That Are Not Carried Out 52 2 The Castration of the Gaze and the Shrouding Effect of the Image 58 3 The Differentiation of the Image and the Self-Negation of Art 72 4 The Figuration and Sublimation of the Symbol 77 5 Negativity and Trance 79 II Aesthetic Negation for Itself 83 6 Laughter and Mockery 83 7 The Negative Content of the Image 93 7.1 Tragedy and Catharsis 93 7.2 Evil and Violence beyond Tragedy 99 8 Negativity Enters the Scene: Void and Aggression 105 9 Explicit Negation: Symbols and Operations of Negativity 111 9.1 Modernism and Emphatic Negation 111 9.2 The Inversion of the Image and the Topsy-Turvy World 119 9.3 Contrariness, Contrast, Contradiction 129 10 Coda 137

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2

3

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Dostoevsky: Tempted by Negativity 1 Negativity in Form and Content 2 Negativity and Revolution 3 Two Temptations

141

Symbolism and Melancholia 1 Introduction 2 Re-evaluating Symbolism 3 Jacek Malczewski’s Melancholia 4 Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia 5 Conclusion

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Andrei Platonov’s Negative Revolution 1 The Problem of the Intellectual Legacy of 1917 2 The Revolution of Modernity 3 Revolutionary Toska and Negativity 4 What Is Toska Searching For? 5 Revolutionary Doubject

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141 146 149

157 162 174 178 183

185 186 193 202 214

Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

233 263 273

Preface This volume is a continuation of my book Negative Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2013) and a part of a series devoted to negativity in dialectics. Negative Revolution offers a dialectical perspective on politics, and this new book is a treatise on negativity in aesthetics. I plan to continue this series further with volumes on negativity in ethics and on dialectics as a method. Art, however, appears in this book as a mirror and an organon that already help elucidate the darker sides of the acts and facts. The book is at the same time about the art as such, and about the modernist moment in particular: we often underestimate the extent to which this moment still lasts, in the high as well as the mass culture, and to which it is full with historical pessimism and moral demonism. Temptation of Non-Being started from the puzzle that I formulated already in the Negative Revolution: why did the utopian breakthrough that happened in the Eastern and Central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s lead to a pessimistic and melancholic expression, in the high as well as in the mass culture? The present book attacks this question through the medium of art. The first version of the book was published in Russian, in 2020 at the European University at Saint-Petersburg Publishing House. The same year, it received a reputed “Andrey Bely” prize for the best nonfiction book. Unlike the Negative Revolution, I originally wrote most of this book in Russian, which possibly benefited the style but complicated the further publication. The English publication would have been impossible without the excellent translators: Jason Cipley, Anastasia Ossipova, and Ruth Averbach. I am now revising and publishing the English, universally accessible, version of the book in a new situation, having left Russia and been shocked by the fratricidal and sororicidal war against Ukraine. At such moment, the destructive instruments of art—for example, the explorations of evil by Dostoevsky, the anti-colonial patriotism of Malczewski, and the testimonies to the artificial famine in the South European parts of the Soviet Union by Platonov—lose their purely academic character and appear, alternatively, as being realistic, as having summoned disasters, or sometimes even as having justified them. The book is highly aware of this risky (tempting) nature of artistic negativity, but it also emphasizes the affirmative and entrancing element that shines through the forces of destruction.

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I owe thanks to those who helped me write and publish this book. These are the institutions: The European University at Saint-Petersburg; journal “Stasis”; Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Kudrin Foundation; Andrew Gagarin Foundation; and the Bard College. And, these are people: Michael Marder contributed to the ideas, then read the book in both languages, and agreed to publish it in his series; Alexander Pogrebnyak and Milena Kondratyeva helped edit the Russian version; Jonathan Becker, Leon Botstein, Kevin Factor, Oleg Kharkhordin, and Alexei Kudrin supported me personally and morally; Robert Bird, Daniil Dondurei (both Robert and Daniil had unfortunately passed away before this book came out), Olga Egorova, Alexander Filippov, Susan Gillespie, Samantha Hill, Ilya Kalinin, Esa Kirkkopelto, Susanna Lindberg, Olga Meerson, Jonathan Platt, Kevin Platt, Yoel Regev, Thomas Schestag, Marina Simakova, Anton Syutkin, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky, and others inspired the ideas developed in this book. Special thanks go to my late teachers, whose ideas often appear in the text: Vladimir Bibikhin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Tatyana Vasilyeva. Last but not least, I thank my family members for their physical, emotional, and intellectual support: Adel Chereshnya, Alisha Magun, Asya Magun, Vladimir Magun, and Margarita Zhamkotchyan.

Introduction

I Negativity as a Phenomenon The points of inspiration for this book were my reader’s and spectator’s experiences with specific artworks. On the one hand, I kept noticing that the source of aesthetic impression is not just the theme or the faithfulness of representation, but the various forms of violation, both of form and of content. On the other hand, I was puzzled by the obsession with violence and depression in today’s culture, in both the mass and the “elite” art production. The two, I thought, had something in common. The more so, since for me biographically both experiences were associated with the moment of the opening of the Soviet culture to the West in the 1980s: the time when my own aesthetic tastes were forming. Modernism, in its strangeness, and suspension of linearity, for me and for many people in USSR, was associated with the free, “Western” culture. But so was the apocalyptic pessimism of mass culture and media which, as I showed in my first book, devoted to political philosophy, contributed to a “Negative revolution” which the post-Soviet Russian culture underwent in the 1990s. The attraction and the ambiguity of negativity, as a common denominator of aesthetic effect, were the reason why I decided to write an aesthetic treatise, modo classico. For the start, I would like to emphasize a few facts. The first one is that a­ rt— the very object of this investigation—matters. It is not difficult to forget art’s importance, especially since, at the first glance, it inhabits the sphere of leisure and entertainment and its content belongs to the fictional and the untrue. At best, we tend to admit that art has a social function of providing us with sentimental education through invented examples. However, when we begin regarding art as a form of ideology and as a realistic reflection of reality, it immediately exceeds its narrow definition that views it as neither science nor a means of suggesting ideas, but only a leisurely activity which exists for the sake of beauty and which, even when effective, pleases “without purpose” (Kant). (It is precisely this

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narrow definition of art that makes chemists, physicists, and university deans wonder from time to time why their budget funds should be shared with the departments of literature and art history.) But consider the enormous place that the aesthetic occupies in our lives—in the form of both mass culture and the so-called highbrow modernist art. It is true that people in their spare time go to the movies and read books for pleasure and usually get to select exactly what to read or watch. Moreover, this choice begins with deciding, whether consciously or unconsciously, between high art and mass culture: the former requires that we exert some spiritual effort even in our spare time, while the latter allows for a more passive contemplation. But choice exists even in a supermarket. It would be naïve to think that aesthetic practice really is an elective, simply because it is not a requirement and because it allows for some hedonistic conscious motivation. On the contrary, in our society of leisure time, aesthetic practice is the institution responsible for sustaining many crucial things: human freedom, human subjectivity, human passivity, bare existence. And it rules over all of this in a rather authoritarian, non-democratic, and severe manner, without however leaving out the obligatory “pleasure.” Pleasure is guaranteed, if only because everything that is seen or read is disavowed as an illusion (the source of that mild relief that we feel when finishing a film or a book) and because it cost us money. A consumer of art is therefore seemingly obligated to feel pleasure or, at least, to measure it with the “judgment of taste.” Curiously enough, this institution, essentially premised on the production of pleasure (Kant again), has been recently developing in a rather “depressive” direction. More and more frequently art conveys unpleasant, negative emotions. This is true of the so-called highbrow art, where “partaking of the negative,” to use Adorno’s expression, became an unalienable aspect of modernism more than a hundred years ago already, as well as for mass culture, which has been growing more violent and/or melancholic right before our eyes. Consider the mass art production of the last twenty years. Harry Potter series introduced into children’s literature and cinema such suspense and horror, which previously were possible only in Steven King’s creations. Hollywood endlessly churns out films about the end of the world, from which humanity is time and time again saved by somber superheroes, willing to take a plunge into a massive bloodbath for its sake. Fashionable detective literature abounds with graphic violence (take, for instance, Jo Nesbø ’s novels). Detectives themselves are often shown as depressed and desperate. The Game of Thrones exponentially amplified the levels of violence of its predecessor The Lord of the Rings and got rid of all the idyllic and humorous moments typical for the genre of fantasy. All of this is taking

Introduction

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place neither during nor in the immediate aftermath of a great war (although, of course, there is never a shortage of real violence in the world). The depressive art is produced, for the most part, in prosperous and peaceful countries. Far more heroes die on screen than in everyday life. All of this has been extensively discussed.1 Hollywood began to exploit graphic violence sometime during the second half of the 1960s—the time of the war in the Vietnam and numerous Black riots on American territory. However, the 1966 annulment of the infamous Hollywood “code” that prohibited violence and sex on screen, together with the economic crisis, and the fact that film studios and ambitious auteurs were searching for radical content that could attract new audiences, played a greater part in this process than violent historical context. Sam Peckinpah in the 1960s and Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian de Palma in the 1970s made a name for themselves by portraying violence in the unprecedentedly direct and neutral manner. Contemporary Hollywood repeats the same tendency, but with less ambition and with greater naturalism colored by exaggerated anxiety. Contemporary art house cinema holds approximately the same position. The works of the brightest and the most talented film directors of the 1990s and 2000s—such as Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke—are set apart from the mass culture not only because of their cinematic style or quality of acting, but, primarily, thanks to the incessant irony that these films direct at the mass culture and cinema in general, and to their unmasking of the spectator who actually enjoys evi. Both directors make incredibly dark works about evil (not even just about violence, but about the undefeatability of evil). Again, the question of where these films are made is worth asking. They were not produced in wartorn countries, they come to us not from Yugoslavia or Rwanda in the aftermath of genocidal massacres, but from the most well-to-do and socially comfortable European states. Their viewers will watch them while seated on soft couches in front of their plasma screens. Many other films which occupy a middle space on the spectrum between Hollywood blockbusters and arthouse cinema are also deeply depressive. They tell us about their protagonists’ prolonged dying and suchlike grim tales. (Take, for instance, the films by Clint Eastwood, Alejandro Iñárritu, Paul Anderson, and others.) In serious literature, authors like James Ballard and Vladimir Sorokin also give us overwhelmingly violent narratives. Of course, evil, violence, and death have always been present in art. They elicit strong emotions and disturb the spectators’ habitual state of comfort, making them tense and sometimes even ecstatic. Early cult and ritual are unthinkable without sacrifice, human or animal, and theater evolves from this source. Apart from their sacrality, evil and violence in art create a counterbalance, an intrigue

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necessary for the renewal of our appreciation for the conventional, gentle, and pleasant reality that is time and time again threatened with annihilation at the hands of mega-villains. However, what is characteristic of modernism as well as contemporary mass art that is now with a slight delay beginning to reproduce modernist mood is that the screen separating us from evil—the sublimation of violence, and redemption of mourning—is becoming increasingly thinner and more permeable. Desublimation, literalization of violence, and hyperbolization of pain are felt more and more strongly. While modernism completely does away with Aristotelian catharsis, mass culture exploits happy endings in an attempt to provoke it, all the while continuing to raise the stakes by piling up bodies and deepening mourning. In mass culture evil is never excoriated completely, instead it is merely chased out or temporarily trapped, which always leaves the possibility for its return and further plot development. The only protection that viewer has left is the fact that all film screenings eventually end and that simply shutting the book or laptop always remains an option. To return to the question of the significance of art as a social institution: the aesthetic of “negativity” played its role in the rise of mass catastrophism of the 1990, and generally to the melancholic mood of late capitalist culture (as described for instance famously by Mark Fisher2). As I mentioned, in the case of Russia, the hyperbolic consciousness of disaster, in the 1990s, worked to discredit the idea of Westernized democracy and of the active engagement of citizens in it. Fear and distrust of global events, which turn from fantasy into an ideology, contribute to civic disengagement, and legitimize it, everywhere in the world. Along with these sad meditations, I am attracted to the tempting character of negativity as something that inherently constitutes the beauty of art. I am referring to the negativity of form, not content, although it is not always easy to separate the two. Art in general and modernism as the higher form of autonomous art of the aesthetic era in particular (in a sense in which even the mass art is autonomous— autonomous from religious, magical, and decorative elements; it constitutes a separate institution) enchant by systematically undermining canonical forms as well as, more radically, their own institutional power. Moreover, they openly flaunt this destructiveness. To shake reality out of its ossified forms, to undermine the everyday world and to raise oneself and one’s audience above it, to uncover a space of freedom—these are some of the obvious goals of the art form’s negativity. However, the main motif here is the affirmation and self-expression of art as an institution of leisure and luxury, its radical separation from the rest of existence, and placing the author along with the reader/viewer into complete emptiness. It is clear that modernism also carries some “positive” intentions, such as naturalism

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in the representation of raw reality (for instance, the flow of consciousness as psychological realism), ornamental decorativeness, imitation of the archaic and classical forms, the free and soaring uninhibited self-expression, complete autonomy of the “pure” art as a sphere of self-referential virtuosity.3 And yet, all of these still engage negativity as their principal organon. Negativity cannot exist as a pure given. One also needs the positive that is being negated and that can never be negated completely. That is why, negativity in art can be thought only within the framework of dynamic dialectics—the dialectics that this book is setting out to describe. Negativity means that we are simultaneously combining a positive figure and its destruction; the entire construction is unconvincing on each separately taken level: art that is negating art is internally self-contradictory. Therefore, in reality we have several stages, or, to use Hegel’s expression, moments of negativity, which I will describe here. The abovementioned negative content of art, which we now find so troubling, is but one of such moments within this system.

II Functions of Negation in Modernism Just how much is modernism really bound with darkness, aggression, and melancholia? Empirically speaking, they do not always go together. Formal experimentation in general began with rather bourgeois and easy-on-the-eye Impressionism, while brooding Symbolism was, for the most part, academic and conservative. The artists of Der Blaue Reiter group, late Kandinsky and Stravinsky—all of them are rather cheerfully Dionysian, than somber. Italian and Russian Futurists were also busy affirming things. The same could be said about the Constructivists as well. Some4 even contrast utopian “modernism” with the hopeless “postmodernism,” which also isn’t entirely correct: the most important modernist figures, like Kafka, Schoenberg, Berg, Picasso, Dix, Ernst, and Beckett grew increasingly dark as they departed from canonical forms and norms. Modern art is saturated with radical negativity motivated by different substantial intentions. 1. Reducing Art to its Simplest Formal and Material Elements This in turn calls for artistic critique of art’s traditional and complicated representational technique that estranges meaning. This is characteristic of Cubism and other abstract art movements from Mondrian to Rothko and Pollock, as well as of the naïve, and the so-called primitive art of Rousseau,  Dubuffet,

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“COBRA” and others; of minimalism (from Vasarely to Judd) and conceptualism (from Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Yves Klein to Broodthaers, Sol Lewitt, and Robert Morris, and from them—to Soviet conceptualists). The pathos of this turn seems to be primarily cognitive and rationalist: to reveal the nucleus, the minimal atomic substance of art, to “reach the essence.” And yet, the critical charge that regards all accepted art as “just art” led the twentieth-century art to an obsessive destruction of all conventions and canons and left an emptiness at the center of the uncovered form. While some artworks of this type are neutral or even hedonistic, more often than not we encounter in such art a sinister anxiety caused by the erasure of image (Rousseau, Dubuffet; in literature—Beckett); a deliberate shocking of the viewer (Duchamp, Lewitt, and Morris; in literature— Sorokin, for example); aggressive political critique (Broodthaers)5; and violent, ritual, theatrical action (Artaud, Abramovic, Viennese Actionism of Nitsch, Muehl, and others). Even the relatively figurative art—for instance, Giacometti’s sculpture—was regarded by its contemporaries as maximally reductive: “Man— and man alone—reduced to a thread—in the ruinous condition, the misery of the world—who looks for himself—starting from nothing.”6 Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning participate in the same tendency of the mid-century art. They continue the reflexive distortion of form that began with Cubism and the parodying of canonical images. However, they do this with a far more conscious and, on the level of content, expressed negative pathos, falling into a particular (and already anticipated by Karl Rosenkranz in the mid-nineteenth century) aesthetic of ugliness.7 2. Spiritualism We often tend to emphasize modernism and the avant-garde’s formal and critical elements, but many artists of the period understood themselves differently. They saw the destruction of form as a kind of disembodiment that only increased art’s spiritual value, making it closer to God, to the absolute, or to the human spirit as such. Their logic was that of negative theology: the distorted imagery refers to a higher order that is unrepresentable. Such is the explicitly mystical selfunderstanding of painters such as Kandinsky, Delaunay, Malevich, Mondrian, or poets such as Kharms and Khlebnikov. Even now, contemporary art’s tendency to be “dark” and cryptic is unconsciously related to the post-religious structure of this seemingly Left-wing institution. 3. Parody and Criticism of the Previous Art Forms as well as of the Aestheticized Mass Culture (kitsch) Cubists, fauvists, in literature—writers affiliated with OBERIU—all of them estrange, degrade, and parody the classical canon. They destroy its forms and apply

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them to inappropriate subject matter: “primitives,” prostitutes. Although parody’s intention has often been to sensitize the viewer to the represented phenomenon and the medium of art (whether it is paint or language), a powerful breakthrough of meaninglessness, negativity, and absurdism inevitably accompanies parodic procedures. It is not accidental that already in the next generation—primarily, in Pop Art and Conceptualism—this charge of negativity produced even more radical forms of irony and parody. Thomas Crow points out, that, among other things, Andy Warhol’s art expresses serious sympathy for Marilyn Monroe and demonstrates the violence of the bourgeois society (violence against the image becomes an expression of violence against people.)8 The said proclivity for parody and attempts to include mass art within the elite high art point to the growing resentment of the latter by the former: the fateful estrangement of high art from its audience finds expression in the hysterical self-identification of Pop Art and other kinds of the so-called postmodern art with mass art. In general, contemporary art’s simultaneous claim to the sublime and the transcendental on the one hand and to self-hatred on the other results in that its form, content, and performative actions become saturated with negativity. And here we have a curious dialectical turn: at the same time that the so-called elite high art mocks existing aesthetic forms, it also relies on the themes of suffering and death to signal its own seriousness (etymologically, serious means something “heavy”)— that is what would set it apart from the mass art. (So, for instance, for a film to be considered “arthouse” today, it must have a sad ending, even though the themes of anxiety and fear are otherwise shared with mass cinema.) Part of the modernist confrontation with mainstream art was the critique of representation (as an overly safe and therefore fake imitation of objective reality) with a more literal, direct mimesis. This rejection of representation eventually led much of “contemporary art” away from decorating flat surfaces and toward a more performative methodology. Art had to become more “real” to “outrealize” realism: often with the help of violence, which allowed the artist to “pierce” through the representative plane more efficiently. Rough, violent imagery first appeared in the paintings and poetic texts of the expressionists, futurists, and surrealists, and then from the 1960s on a genre of violent performances developed involving harm and self-harm. Notably, a disproportionate number of violent performance artists of this period are women: from Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović to Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, and Orlan. All of them, to some degree or other, include self-inflicted violence in their work. Part of the explanation is that women, supposed to be characteristically beautiful, had been frequent objects of representative art, and here we deal with the critique of representation. But the violent artists fulfill yet another function of negative art.

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4. Public Protest It is trivial to say that art may be used for political propaganda, or that social movements try to make their emblematic imagery more appealing. By using shocking, supra-representative means, contemporary art seeks transgression and subversion. The performance of violence, self-inflicted (Yoko Ono) or inflicted by others as a response to the artist’s provocation (Abramović) is a destruction of safe distance, an appeal to alarm, a denunciation of existing violence, and a threat of more violence. There is thus an indeterminacy in many feminist violent performances, between a reenactment of the sentimental image of suffering woman, a moral statement (“this has to stop”), and an emancipatory ecstatic effect of violence which, when measured, is capable of transposing the viewers into a counternormative reality. In a way, by rejecting the familiar representative form and by enacting physical violence, art latently moves toward the archaic function of sacrifice that had originally been “tamed” by mimetic representation.9 5. Reflexivity and Autonomy of Art In the twentieth century, high art largely lost its mass audience and educational value (which were taken on by science, photography, and cinema). The result, as pointed out already by Clement Greenberg, was the new aesthetic autonomy. This function appears as the most innocent and positive out of everything listed above. However, in practice, we see that in most cases autonomy is realized through aggressive erasure of all traces of its own heteronomy, critique of the canon, and formalist destruction of the object (for instance, in the castrating symbolism of Duchamp’s “The Bride Striped Bare by Her Bachelors” or in Buñuel and Dali’s slicing of an eyeball). Aesthetic negativity is today, for the most part, the main characteristic of art as an institution. As such, it speaks less to the human alienation in contemporary society, than to its own traumatic internal split into mass and high (or “contemporary”) arts. Of course, we won’t find any of this in Greenberg, but if we were to trace the trajectory of his thought further, we would arrive at precisely such “psychoanalytic” interpretation of aesthetic negativity as the reaction against the internal splitting of art and the impossibility of art to be contained within a single definition or institution. And this split, in turn, is, of course, brought about by human alienation in the capitalist society or, to be even more precise, by the generally irrational essence of the faux-rationalist order of contemporary society. Irrational split appears less like a split, even, than as a knot, a chiasm, where prosperous bourgeoisie acts and speaks on behalf of people’s vital forces, in the name of plebeian simplicity and truth, realism and

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carnival laughter, while masses are seeking to rest their tired limbs and weary brains by participating in a conventional and repetitive play of signs. 6. Expressivity and the Forces The expressive effect is achieved in the twentieth century either through disruption and destruction of form or through its minimalistic reduction (Cubism, jazz and rock-n-roll, suggestive poetics of Joyce, Marquez, or Morrison). The negativity of content surfaces here seemingly less than in other cases. On the contrary, artwork itself, together with audience, tends to approve and accept the released force. But at the same time, a certain aggression and violent disorientation of the viewer are present even in the least troubled versions of this expressive art (e.g., in Matisse). Historically, we see an evolution from the early expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter to the post-war German Expressionism, which gave us such dark artists as Dix and Beckmann and writers like Broch and Kafka. The psychedelic Márquez is followed by the brutal Vargas Llosa. One gets an impression that a force that has not completely freed itself from material ends up attacking and arguing with it. Sometimes audience decides that this released through art force is demonic and monstrous and agrees to accept such art only on these questionable terms. Demonism serves as a barrier, separating art from its audience, shielding the audience from art’s force. Adorno’s claims that expression is originally negative and that convulsion and disgust are its natural forms of being come from this. The understanding of modernism as an indirect expression of the world’s negativity through abstract and fractured form—posited first by Worringer and then by ­Adorno— also originates in the same place. It is precisely a broken or, on the contrary, excessively rigid form that takes on expressions of anger and horror, which are difficult to convey through the representational means of a painting or a novel. Of course, Adorno’s theory does not describe all of modernism’s diversity, but it is applicable to such authors, for instance, as Picasso, Bacon, Schoenberg, and Kafka. 7. Gloom and Distortion Let’s consider this crucial question of the co-relation between negativity in form and in content. While Adorno sees as art as dark, the so-called new art according to him is particularly somber: The black and grey of recent art, its asceticism against color, is the negative apotheosis of color. < … > But because for art, utopia—the yet-to-exist—is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations a recollection; recollection of

10

The Temptation of Non-Being the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary repatriation of the catastrophe of world history. < … > Art’s methexis in the tenebrous, its negativity, is implicit in its tense relation to permanent catastrophe.10

But it is precisely this art that pleases Adorno: as is well known, he favors Schoenberg, Kafka, and Beckett and dislikes the more Dionysian Stravinsky. Of course, unlike Lukacs and Livshitz, Adorno does not reduce modernist art to mere negativity: to the truly dark expressive “mimesis” modernist art adds reflexive rational “construction” that balances out the negative and helps to express it. However, characteristically, Adorno ascribes negativity not only to high, but also to mass art and the “cultural industry,” which he is very quick to criticize at the same time. Of course, mass art is not completely negative: it is conventional and identitarian. But, Adorno regards Hollywood cartoons as saturated with sadism against the viewer. Moreover, this sadism is in direct proportion to the destruction of form: that’s right, mass culture too can destroy form and goes about that very poorly! But aren’t Kafka and Beckett’s stories also fraught with sadism, mutatis mutandis? A few years ago they [cartoon and stunt films] had solid plots which were resolved only in the whirl of pursuit of the final minutes. In this their procedure resembled that of slapstick comedy. But now the temporal relations have shifted. The opening sequences state a plot motif so that destruction can work on it throughout the action: with the audience in gleeful pursuit the protagonist is tossed about like a scrap of litter. The quantity of organized amusement is converted into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry, its accomplices, monitor the duration atrocity prolonged into a hunt. The jollity dispels the joy supposedly conferred by the sight of an embrace and postpones satisfaction until the day of the pogrom. To the extent that cartoons do more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, the hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs. The enjoyment of the violence done to the film character turns into violence against the spectator; distraction becomes exertion.11

We find a far more simplified, yet at times insightful view of modernist art in Mikhail Lifshitz—a younger friend of Lukacs and later a conservative ideologue

Introduction

11

of Soviet post-Stalinist aesthetics. In his invectives against contemporary art, Livshitz unites formal experiments and pessimistic disposition. Together they form an “integrated rebellion,” directed at shutting down viewer’s or reader’s ability to reflect, through a false refusal to represent. [I]n my eyes, modernism is linked to the darkest psychological facts of our time. Among them are a cult of power, a joy at destruction, a love for brutality, a thirst for a thoughtless life and blind obedience … The brutal demolition of real forms stands for an outburst of blind embittered volition. It is the slave’s revenge, his make-believe liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple pressure valve.12

Lifshitz even cites Berdyaev (strangely for a communist philosopher!) to accuse Picasso of releasing the “the demonic grimaces of the pent spirits of nature.”13 Yes, Cubism is a demonic protest against the kitschy degradation of customary forms that once gave a political and moral shape to human life, a life of passions. The living eye now sees a disgustingly familiar mask; it beholds a boring, grey world that already took shape in the nineteenth century, the world of the petit bourgeois in coat tails, in the face of which an artist’s brush is powerless, to use Herzen’s expression. And now, the artist takes his revenge on such a picture of the world. He does so by creating monstrous deformations of visible things, turning the world into a ruin, a pile of rubble of a fossilized culture; meting out brutal punishment to everything warm, hypocritically beautiful, and hypocritically alive, he exults over this world in his mind. Though the artists themselves may not always be aware of it [italics are mine—A.M.], this is the actual inner meaning of the revolution that the apologists of the new painting consider an art-historical turning point.14

What we have here is not just a retrograde repressive ire, but also a quite valuable generalized perspective. Indeed, Cubism’s penetrating analysis of contemporary world does inevitably include the destructive forces acting in that very world. Indeed, the obverse side of formal freedom is contempt for external reality (if it can even be considered real). And indeed, the consciousness of a passively rebellious bourgeois subject does provide an inert support for the negativity. Lifshitz also views contemporary art’s transition toward “the things themselves” (for instance, to the ready-mades)—something that seemingly repudiates the accusations in abstraction—as an instance of sophisticated and radical negation. After all, such fetishization of things occurs at the cost of their representation, and the latter for Lifshitz is essential for accepting the world and

12

The Temptation of Non-Being

making sense of it. Lifshitz takes a logical step, which later would be popularized by Slavoj Žižek, and argues that the fetishistic worship of material objects (for instance, commodities or bodies) in contemporary culture is not a return to reality, but its exaggerated and distilled negation: negation of a negation does not eliminate negativity, but only multiplies it …15 All of this is correct in and of itself, but of course Lifshitz’ invectives cannot be taken too seriously. He does not think dialectically and does not recognize either the productive role of negativity in transforming reality or the danger of the good gone stale. Neither does he understand the close proximity between negativity uncovered by modernism and the idea of art in general. Finally, it is important that negativity is always relative and can never fulfill its promise of an absolute zero. For that reason, as Adorno demonstrates, the artwork’s material thingness undermines its claims to negativity: Every artwork, and most of all works of absolute negativity, mutely say: non confundar. Artworks would be powerless if they were no more than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing. That by which they transcend longing, however, is the neediness inscribed in a figure in the historically existing. < … > The fact that artworks exist signals the possibility of the non-existing.16

The very being of an artwork contradicts its content and refutes its alibi. One has to say that the criticisms so dear to Lukàcs and Lifshitz are regularly heard from authors who are concerned primarily with political and not aesthetic questions. For instance, among Russian scholars of the 1990s and 2000s, the work of Dina Khapaeva is particularly notable. Her book entitled Gothic Society17 traces contemporary Russian popular aesthetics of horror and gritty naturalism to the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. If we were to disregard the objectively insupportable ascription of the new Gothic aesthetics specifically to Russia, as well as Khapaeva’s explanation that this aesthetic of horror has something to do with the memory of Stalinism, and her general populist pamphleteering tone, many of her observations are quite convincing. It is true that contemporary culture does have its roots in the eighteenth century—and not only in the Romantic aesthetic experiment, but also in the Gothic and, broadly speaking, sentimental attack on the public. Khapaeva’s surprise at the Gothic’s incursion into the liberal order can be explained by the fact that this mass aesthetics arrived to post-Soviet Russia later than to other countries. Soviet censorship has kept the horror at bay, while rejection of the Enlightenment ideals during the 1990s facilitated its spread. And so, aesthetic negativity characteristic to all art in general and to the twentieth-century art in particular (as both an institution and a genre) manifests

Introduction

13

itself in institutional, formal, semantic, and expressive aspects of the artwork. Even if art that comes after the “end” announced by Hegel (the end of its absolute significance, after which it supersedes itself) does not completely self-destruct, it does that on the level of its artworks, vividly expressing its will toward nothingness, placing its objects and their audience into the absolute void. And since complete destruction nevertheless does not fully take place, individual artworks end up resembling tentative fragments, scraps left after an unsuccessful experiment, ghosts, ruins of what art was or could have been. But, moreover, art understood this way becomes a reservoir of negativity, a zoo of aggression for a society which is completely saturated with anxiety, but is at the same time incessantly promoting the cult of Productivity, Hustle, and competitive Success in the public sphere. What can we, the subjects of the new, do with all this? The reader should come to her own conclusions, but it seems that contemporary art nihilism, as all nihilism, attests simultaneously to the crisis of this social and conceptual form and to its extreme ambitions, directed toward the real (and not just artistic) utopia and iconoclastically undermining its own images. What can theory do in this situation? It can survey the terrain and point out the negative forces which feed art’s destructive intentions and which usually remain invisible (we can only see their products). To identify these forces means to make one step further away from despair; for these forces are powerful—that is, they possess their own agency, despite their destructive orientation. Consequently, a subject could possibly if not fully appropriate these forces, then at the very least learn to work with them. And, a proper aesthetic institution would have emerged a practical analog of synthesizing theory. This aesthetic institution would have unified various art forms and different modalities of negativity in their consistent development (I will speak more about this later). More importantly, it would have unified negative (critical and melancholic) and affirmative (Dionysian and forceful) modalities of modernism. This would have brought aesthetic institution closer to its Romantic ideal of Gesamkunstwerk, which in the new situation would have been called on to synthesize—among other things—“mass” and “high” art.

III A Subject and Its Name It is common for books on aesthetics to complain about the very term. I too will not break with this tradition. Hegel, for instance, in his Aesthetics calls this term unfortunate and mentions that others have previously suggested

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The Temptation of Non-Being

“Kallistics”18 as an alternative, but further on, when defining the beautiful as a sensible phenomenon of the absolute, he is compelled to follow precisely the “aesthetic” logic. “Aesthetics” in the Leibnizen and Wolffean style of thinking implies a division between the sensible and the supra-sensible— namely, the ideal and the spiritual. The latter is separate from the sensible and can find expression in it only in some disingenuous, metaphorical form. Today, we can hardly draw on such uncritical distinctions. It is not that we have lost our faith in the ­ideal—quite on the contrary, the ideal is winning—but we do not believe in its pure existence separate from, for example, signs (which also belong to the sphere of the sensible, even if of a condensed manner). For Baumgarten, the author of the term “aesthetics” is premised on the specific telos of sensible cognition, in  “a lower capacities of cognition” [gnoseologia inferior]. But how is this possible if the senses are usually regarded as inferior and subjugated to the reason and the good? It is clear that the aesthetic “sensible” is actually something that is half on its way to the ideal. That is why Baumgarten’s followers, for instance Kant (for whom “aesthetic” refers first of all to pure sensibility and only later comes to refer to the beautiful), make it clearer that what is meant is not the sensible per se, but all that is both rational and distinct while remaining sensible at the same time. Today, on the contrary, we tend to perceive behind the term “aesthetic” an intuition of insufficiency and bewilderment: something emerges in the sensible experience that breaks away from it, that is not subjugated to it, and that references something else outside sensible experience, to which, however, we have no direct access. Already Rousseau and other philosophers of the eighteenth century described the feeling of beauty as je ne sais quoi.19 Or, from an artist’s position, what we have is an intentional pausing before the ideal: for some reason, whenever an artist wants to express a thought, he does not go about doing that directly, but chooses a roundabout way through the sensible and encrypts his material. (Mallarmé20 directly instructed to turn art works into riddles through a particular ellipsis.) Today, the fascination of aesthetic theory with the sphere of the “senses” would have appeared strange (although, Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics still remains faithful to this metaphysical term and is concerned with the “distribution of the sensible”). This fascination was still meaningful in the nineteenth century in the context of Romantic Christian theology, where exalted spirituality was considered “super-sensible” and sensibility appeared as its earthly incarnation. But if we no longer believe in such toying with the transcendent (whether it

Introduction

15

means playing hide-and-seek or cat-and-mouse), then why did “sensibility”21 enter the conversations about art? It reeks of decadent hedonism and moralizing worldview, whether we are dealing with the dubious “aesthetic pleasure” or the posture of sinfulness and transgression. Is it the case that the spiritual has disappeared, but the sensible remains? According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the impossibility of elevating the sensible to the spiritual and, vice versa, the impossibility of incarnating the  supra-sensible brought about today’s crisis of art—the art that has been reduced to the pure existence of the artwork and to its self-questioning: “Why art?” (“Pourquoi l’art?”).22 This is correct, but we should add that this question is possible only under one obvious condition that art already exists. The specific character of contemporary situation is that we possibly no longer have the suprasensible, but we certainly have quite a lot of art: from the classical art of the past to contemporary mass culture that, however clumsily, but participates in the aesthetic field. Moreover, much of what has previously seemed supra-sensible (e.g., images of a Madonna) or sensible of the lowest kind (theater), today has confidently taken its place in the ranks of “art.” And this is why, I argue in this book, today’s art neither soars to the heavenly heights nor incarnates, but only repeats and contests. Repetition and negation or, more broadly, reflection and negativity—these are art’s operations which today in the epoch of the temporary end of high art and, simultaneously, the epoch of the aestheticization are dominating and superseding the old questions about the sensible and the supersensible. On the one hand, we have Mandelstam with his “I want Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus to live once more and I am not satisfied with the historical Ovid, Pushkin, and Catullus,”23 and on the other, Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” or Avdey Ter-Oganyan’s hacking icons with an axe. The question of the sensible and the super-sensible is being replaced with a question of the completion and “fulfillment” of an object or an event: art brings finished things back to the stage of becoming and, vice versa, amplifies the potential of the incomplete things: “Immortalizing the real, < … > Giving flesh to the nonexistent,” to paraphrase Aleksandr Blok.24 But this, in turn, means that the beautiful is split into a physical artwork and the force that it releases in humans: the force of resistance and the force of reproduction. Whether the force that makes an artist reproduce or destroy the real is supersensible or transcendental is not important at the present. Aesthetic zone is defined precisely by the suspension of this question. The force—the unnamable force, released through the repetition and negation of objects and events—is evident. And it clearly provokes a particular affect that we generally tend to

16

The Temptation of Non-Being

regard positively, that we even actively seek, calling the objects which evoke it as “beautiful.”

IV Art or the Beautiful? Perhaps “Kallistics” would have indeed been a better name for the theory of art. But one immediately discovers that after we suspend the term “aesthetics,” the happy union of art and the beautiful falls apart as well. As is well known, Kant was still mostly interested in the latter, while, beginning with German Idealists, aesthetics has become fascinated with the former. If it is the question of the sensible absolute (or of the reality of the ideal, as in Schelling), then it is still possible to see why art is beautiful, and why the beautiful in nature provokes a desire to reproduce it through art. However, if we were to define the beautiful differently, then its connection to art would no longer be evident. The beautiful is a positive quality of a phenomenon (of either art or nature), and as such it is subject to the judgment of taste, which, as Kant has demonstrated so convincingly, is socially significant and, at the same time, groundless, intuitive, and at least partially irrational. In other words, in reality, the beautiful is an axiological or even ethical notion. (Positivists would have described it as “normative.”) With regards to art, yes, it is created not to benefit anyone, but to achieve the effect of the “beautiful”—but can this explain it? Today, art is a social and cultural institution, in which people participate voluntarily. They even subjectively ascribe to it a hedonistic leisurely meaning: you could go to the movies after a day at work or read a book on vacation. You do not get paid to do this (as a laborer), instead you pay for it yourself (as a consumer). However, what exactly one consumes is unclear. Along with what could be really “useful” in art—for instance, a psycho-physical release through laughter or crying, or information about life in other places and epochs—aesthetic event is also pregnant with violence against the characters and audience as well as mourning and fear, which are only barely concealed by the happy ending. In mass art this negativity is masked by realistic motivations, by happy ending, and, in part, by the vulgar sublimation into “romantic” sensibility. As has been noted earlier, Adorno was right to accuse contemporary culture industry of literal sadism against its audience and of expressing this sadism.25 But are works of highbrow art so very different from the products of culture industry? It is

Introduction

17

true that they can elevate spirits and in this sense are endowed with a nearly religious significance. However, at the same time, we systematically discover in them unapologetic depictions of the frightening and the revolting, of that what cannot possibly bring pleasure or entertainment. Even sublimation itself begins to seem to us, the wizened readers of Adorno, rather suspiciously conciliatory and, as a consequence, aligned with mass culture. In our epoch that begun in the end of the nineteenth century, the fashion for the openly horrific and repulsive in art coexists with the disintegration of the aesthetic field into the spheres of high and mass art. Both high and mass art receive their aesthetic significance thanks to the snowballing of mass taste: for an average person, art appears as something relatively compulsory, as a fact of culture with a help of which one gets integrated into the collective being. While evaluating a work of art, we are not only considering the degree of its mastery and subtlety, we are also accepting the power of the Other who is forcing pain and fear upon us, while, in turn, imposing upon this Other the necessity of experiencing pain and fear. And yet, the reason for why people need art, as opposed to just any cultural fact, remains unclear. Art is not comparable to objects created for our convenience, like microwave ovens or telephones. Art is something that is made without any special consideration for human needs. In general, it is not entirely clear, what exactly it is made for. Take, for instance, the pre-historic cave frescos, which were painted where no one was ever supposed to see them. However, at the same time, art has several reasons for existence: at least, one material and one final (to use Aristotle’s classification of causes).

V Why Art? The material reason for art’s existence is mimesis—a tendency for imitation that we also encounter among animals (Aristotle: “For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to engage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his first understanding)”26). In this sense, art exists regardless of whether it is beautiful or not. It can be judged according to the degree of its verisimilitude (the common quotidian approach) or further, according to the effect of recognition in the external material of either oneself or something familiar. Already Aristotle makes recognition (“anagnorisis”) one of the most important moments in drama: a convoluted plot suddenly reveals something

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The Temptation of Non-Being

that has been hidden, although generally suspected. Heroes get to recognize themselves, while the audience recognizes an already familiar myth. Art itself is natural, but this is precisely the reason why to achieve its full effects it requires doubling, even tripling of mimesis. It requires not just imitation or exact representation, but imitation through non-coincidence or through the use of likenesses to create something that has never been seen before. Usually, in the process the imitator begins to imitate herself. Lacan, an heir to the tradition of French Surrealism and to the anthropology of the sacred in the group “College of Sociology,” notes that mimesis has the character of imprinting.27 A child identifies herself by borrowing somebody else’s image. That is the reason why mimesis is narcissistic and why the work of art, while satisfying the narcissism of the author or the actor, also appeals to the viewer’s natural narcissism. Mutual recognition between two characters in a play, the exchange of glances between Madonna and the child, images of doubling or rhyming characters looking at each other and at a viewer at the same time (take, for instance, Pontormo’s Carmignano Visitation28 or Holbein’s classic Ambassadors)29—all of these make art into an externalized organ of the self. Of course, Heidegger tells us that “a Greek temple portrays nothing (stellt nichts da).”30 But it is also clear that by delimiting space its creator imitates the world and that the temple itself repeats and multiplies the original gesture of outlining and asserting (take, for instance, the rhythm of the columns). It is possible that the specifics of the properly “aesthetic” imitation lie in the fact that what gets imitated is not only the appearance or the concrete action, but also the achieved effect or manner of movement. The final cause for art, its accomplished effect, is then also quite evident. Art puts us into a trance. It fascinates, enchants. This is what it was doing while clothed in disguise of the sacred and this is what it continues doing having shaken off its veil. Nietzsche, this prodigal son of the positivistic time, was right to note this when juxtaposing art with the two main forms of altered consciousness: dreams and intoxication (later he would also frequently write about art as a narcotic). The question of the means, by which art puts us into a trance, remains. These means are at least partially natural and even positive (wine, melatonin, tobacco, loud sounds, strong rhythms, and bright colors). But, as we will see, beautiful art is what further amplifies the trance-machinery through negation, through pulling the rug from underneath the feet of the dancers and the drinkers, so to say, and forcing the objects of the external world upon their state. Most of the aesthetic objects around us (ads, fashion and makeup, pop music, Hollywood cinema, and mass art) aim to hypnotize, rather than appeal to our

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19

judgment of taste. Their goal is to put us into ecstatic state by loosening the control of our consciousness. The artist, this so-called “genius,” also enters into a trance and thus unites the origin of his activity (mimesis, contagion) with its purpose (to contaminate others).31 Russian philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin remarks that art (as well as technology) is connected with the so-called “amechania,” that is, with the “entranced peace” of the “enchanted freedom.”32 This constitutes a paradox: the states of the greatest fulfillment, in which we come closest to nature and its self-propelled activity, also afflict us with strange immobility. Even though trance is a very common phenomenon, this state is a foundational framework of art—the main element that constitutes what Serguey Eisenstein described as its “attractions.” The problem of the so-called “cultural industry” lies not in its adherence to attractions, but in that it reduces art solely to attractions. The truly beautiful art, however, allows to transition from experiencing the materiality of an artwork to its distanced contemplation. But what has the beautiful to do with any of it? How can we seriously continue to speak in Kantian terms about the “disinterested beauty” and the “ideal” in a world where human beauty is defined primarily by the extent of people’s sexual attractiveness and where music is so loud that it literally drums on our bodies? Contemporary state of uber-aestheticization leads us to think that connection between art and the beautiful is probably accidental. In the instances when this connection is present, our taste judges whether artwork corresponds to its origin and purpose: the extent to which it is recognizable and to which it either sedates or excites us. An urgently pressing question emerges: what is then the difference between this “bad” art and the “good” art? This brings us back to the idea of divorcing the question of the beautiful from the question of art. Could the beautiful be reduced to the judgment about the extent to which art is adequate to the reasons for its existence, or does it preserve some mysterious, irrational specificity allowing to distinguish “true” art from mass art? And if so, then what else could be found there? Perhaps, this extra quality of the beautiful art is connected to the mimetic doubling, to its reflexive short-circuiting (as when in Hamlet they stage the play called The Mouse Trap with a plot that is at least in part coincides with that of Hamlet itself) and, at the same time, with the disruption of mimesis (this same staging of a play within a play sabotages straightforward mimesis). When it begins to reflex upon itself, mimesis stumbles: without disturbing the overall illusion (that enchanted “trance”), it puts its participants into a peculiar state between seriousness and play that can be supported only by an aesthetic collective with its mysterious “judgment.” To borrow Nietzsche’s citation from Goethe, “Could

20

The Temptation of Non-Being

it be yet another of the merits of the ancients that even subjects of the most intense pathos were merely aesthetic play for them, since in our case truth to nature must be involved if a work of this kind is to be produced?”33 It is assumed (and all German idealists are in agreement about this) that such mode that allows to be conscious of the play without stepping out of it may be given to a person only by the external institution of the republican state, which in Schiller is termed the “aesthetic state.”34 In Russian, “art” is iskusstvo, which refers simultaneously to artisanal mastery (iskushennosti) and taste (vkus) (both words share the same semantic root) with an added connotation of “temptation” (iskus). The root *kus-, Indo-European *geus- relates to tasting.35 “Iskusstvo” means taste in both senses: as a judgment and perception on the one hand and as experience and practice on the other. This is a tasting that absorbs and seduces: iskus, seduction, is not unlike trance, that ultimate effect of art. An artwork, given its loneliness and existential precarity,36 seduces its viewer with its mechanisms of mirroring and by letting feel her own existential solitude. All this leads to the formation of something like negative communication, of separation. But art’s temptation is also a test of the perceiving subject. It is not accidental that Nicholas of Cusa falls back on false etymology and derives the “beautiful” (kalon) from the verb “to call” (kalo).37 This should be understood in the following way: it is not only art that beacons us, like a siren or the shadow of Hamlet’s father, but we too summon things into being through art. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, building on the ideas of Heidegger and Blanchot, maintains that artwork today is an act or an object, the being of which has been brought under question.38 Art is the fragility of existence that is always on the edge of disappearance. Lacoue-Labarthe is correct, but it should be added that such art is concerned not only and not so much with balancing over the abyss of the non-being than with the abyss itself—the abyss of de-intensification, erasure, destruction, and profanation. Such aesthetic activity not only exercises practical skills, but also rehearses the very disappearance (think of the fairy tales about magical hats that render one invisible, of comedies about disguises and failures to recognize each other, or von Trier’s horror films, where in a second a heroine almost literally dissolves and into nature and disappears in it). An artwork tempts its viewer with non-being.

Digression: A Test The open, incomplete character of being and the deliberate revelation of this incompleteness in art take a form of a test. A test has a double meaning of an active

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21

attempt and passive judgment (tasting). However, we are faced with the question of why is it that we regard art as a sphere of testing and experimentation while admiring artworks as complete unsurpassed perfections. Romantics approached fragments and drafts as absolutes;39 however, not everyone agreed with them. (Adorno with his apology of aesthetic embodiment was among the dissenters.) And yet, in reality, a test is a necessary element of artistic perfection. Many artworks use and openly boast their experimental nature and test-character. I have already mentioned The Mouse Trap from Hamlet. It too is presented as a test (and a trial for a king), and, in turn, asserts the experimental character of Hamlet as such. Already in the very beginning Hamlet takes upon himself the risk of conversing with a ghost, despite the fact that his friends warn him about the dangers of such enterprise. This seemingly educational activity—indeed, why should one not listen—is guaranteed to end in catastrophe. Throughout the entire play, Hamlet tests the king because he is not completely sure of his crime. It is Hamlet’s provocative behavior—and not at all the answer to his painful question—that results in the death of nearly all characters in the play. Moreover, in Hamlet almost everyone is testing everyone else and the Mouse Trap, that play within a play, is only one element in the long series of tests and trials. The ghost tests Hamlet. The king and the queen test Hamlet and Ophelia: they arrange their meeting, eavesdrop on their conversation, and thus provoke their breakup, which later leads to Ophelia’s death. It is only then that Hamlet test the king and the queen with his play. Moreover, Shakespeare directly names this crucial effect of the play, when Polonius, this failed follower of Machiavelli, instructs his spy Reynaldo to find out what kind of life Laertes is leading in Paris: LORD POLONIUS Marry, well said; very well said. Look you, sir, Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris; And how, and who, what means, and where they keep, What company, at what expense; and finding By this encompassment and drift of question That they do know my son, come you more nearer Than your particular demands will touch it: Take you, as ‘twere, some distant knowledge of him; As thus, ‘I know his father and his friends, And in part him: ‘ do you mark this, Reynaldo? REYNALDO Ay, very well, my lord. LORD POLONIUS ‘And in part him; but’ you may say ‘not well: But, if ’t be he I mean, he’s very wild; Addicted so and so:’ and there put on him What forgeries you please; marry, none so rank As may dishonour him; take heed of that; But, sir, such

22

The Temptation of Non-Being wanton, wild and usual slips As are companions noted and most known To youth and liberty. REYNALDO As gaming, my lord. LORD POLONIUS Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling, Drabbing: you may go so far. …. REYNALDO But, my good lord,– LORD POLONIUS Wherefore should you do this? REYNALDO Ay, my lord, I would know that. LORD POLONIUS Marry, sir, here’s my drift; And I believe, it is a fetch of wit: You laying these slight sullies on my son, As ‘twere a thing a little soil’d i’ the working, Mark you, Your party in converse, him you would sound, Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes The youth you breathe of guilty, be assured He closes with you in this consequence; ‘Good sir,’ or so, or ‘friend,’ or ‘gentleman, ‘According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country. … He closes thus: ‘I know the gentleman; I saw him yesterday, or t’ other day, Or then, or then; with such, or such; and, as you say, There was a’ gaming; there o’ertook in’s rouse; There falling out at tennis:’ or perchance, ‘I saw him enter such a house of sale,’ Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth. See you now; Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out: So by my former lecture and advice, Shall you my son. You have me, have you not?40

Polonius does follow Reynaldo’s logic and does realize that such testing is dangerous. Just as with inoculation, one could poison and contaminate, while trying to strengthen. By testing Laertes, Polonius runs the risk of ruining his son’s reputation. This episode anticipates further dangerous experiments, like the pre-arranged meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia, Hamlet’s Mouse Trap, and even Polonius’ eavesdropping on the queen’s conversation with Hamlet that leads to his, Polonius’ death. Let’s take Crime and Punishment—another modern masterpiece. I will devote a chapter to Dostoevsky’s treatment of probing below, but here is a preview. Dostoevsky’s novel begins with Raskolnikov trying on, rehearsing the murder of his landlady. The murder, therefore, occurs in the novel twice. The transition

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from a test, a rehearsal to action is of no importance. While walking in circles around the old woman’s house, our protagonist overhears when she is supposed to be home alone. It is at this very moment that his contemplation and testing of an action naturally become a firm decision. He had learnt, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, that at seven o’clock the next day Lizaveta, the old woman’s sister and only companion, would be out, and that meant that at seven o’clock in the evening the old woman would be at home alone. It was only a few steps farther to his lodging. He went in like a man condemned to death. He did not reason about anything, he was quite incapable of reasoning, but he felt with his whole being that his mind and will were no longer free, and that everything was settled quite finally.41

The possibility has become a reality: there was no longer a way back. Suddenly we realize that this mere entertaining of an idea, this rehearsal was already part of the action itself. Still, Raskolnikov began by thinking: “Can I really be capable of that? Am I really serious? No, of course I’m not serious. So I am just amusing myself with fancies, children’s games? Yes, perhaps I am only playing a game.”42 It is obvious that all of this is reflection about the very process of reading: Just like Raskolnikov, whose falling prey to his temptation (Dostoyevsky calls it “an enchantment”) makes the very thought of murder something for which one has to bear responsibility, similarly, the reader too is becoming absorbed into a novel and is told that there is something very serious taking place under the guise of imaginative game. A test through doubling and reflection gives rise to the self-actualizing possibility, to that “absolute” or “idea” (similar to that necessary existing idea of God) that is art from the point of view of modernity (for Hegel, Schelling, and others). Moreover, in Dostoyevsky we find an important subtle play between the fog of enchantment on the one hand and the true beauty (that will “save the world”) on the other. It appears that beauty is understood tragically as a path from obsession becoming reality to sobriety or, to use Lacan’s phrase, as “the crossing of a phantasm.” Avital Ronell in her book The Test Drive43 attempts to construct an ontology of test by appealing mostly to Nietzsche’s philosophy and to the tradition of natural sciences. She does not cite Dostoyevsky and mentions Hamlet only in passing. The aesthetic role of a test—namely the connection that Nietzsche draws between testing and tasting—is also mentioned very briefly.44 Ronell’s book is written in a Derridean tradition and it is rather hard to state with certainty what its argument is, besides stating that tests and testing

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are ubiquitous in contemporary culture. It seems, however, that author approaches a test as a way of demonstrating truth by suspending it, which is close to Derrida’s “iterations” and “promises.” Ronell finds tests appealing, because they reveal the openness of culture and the unpredictability of democracy. But she is also correct to point out the connection between testing and violence, mourning, and melancholy—the anxiety about the loss of external object: The experimental disposition is thus somewhat on the run, whether passing through non-knowledge, and catching the unknowable in the outfield of inquiry, or because something within us compels negation and further negation as a condition of living and affirming.45

I could only agree with Ronell’s definition. However, in contrast with her general tonality, I emphasize here the degree of deception and temptation, which inevitably accompany all tests, making them aesthetic action par excellence. A test is not only a negation and destruction of an object for the sake of its truth, but it is also—in following with Lacan rather than Derrida—an attractive, seductive core of any ideology. A test allows to conceal one’s subversive actions behind the screen of incompleteness and to derive pleasure in the process.

VI Defining Beauty and Art There are many different ways of providing definitions. We already discussed the natural reasons for art, but this did not give us the full understanding of art’s essence, primarily because art is not something natural. Moreover, beauty, to the extent to which it is not intentionally designed, is also not something entirely clear. What is it then? Let’s try to think naively. Following Kant, beauty is both a judgment and an assertion of object’s (or situation’s) being for the sake of itself and not for some external value. Take for instance a beautiful, yet fleeting landscape, an impressive house, or a beautiful person (even if we abstract ourselves from the pleasure that she could give to another person)—all of these are beautiful in themselves, regardless of our purposes or desires. (At times, extreme beauty can even be intimidating and hindering of further communication, stymieing our will to talk and to introduce ourselves.) In itself, this Kantian definition does not arouse many doubts. Moreover, it is connected with an old Neoplatonic tradition that views beauty simply as an attribute of being, perhaps even as its synonym (i.e., as something

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“transcendental”). Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, and many others all wrote about this. However, this definition offers us very little. What is it exactly about being that makes it beautiful? The accent placed on the being “in itself ” and on the non-appropriable qualities of an object is strictly negative. This brings us to the idea that beauty is simply another name for everything that is apophatic (negative) about being and the good. The existence of art with its natural tendency to mimesis leads us to the same thought. If being is already beautiful and self-sufficient, then why should a person imitate beautiful things and actions and why should she split herself in two? Perhaps it is because beauty is mysterious and mimesis is the way of taking hold of it and solving its riddle? This is what Aristotle thinks and explains mimesis with mathesis—the pleasure of knowledge.46 But another explanation is possible as well. Perhaps, the beauty of being stimulates its own propagation. Our world abounds with beautiful bodies at least in part because in the animal kingdom beauty is part of the mechanisms of reproduction. The beauty of things and creatures contains a tendency for expansion, a dynamic resistance against its own finitude, a struggle of the absoluteness of existence against the relativity of its situational being. However, there is an obverse side to this scenario as well. Reproduction undermines the uniqueness of that what already exists; it admits the incompleteness of the latter. In this regard, not all repetition is the same. An object that is reproduced as isolated and self-sufficient begins to resemble a fetish. It obscures the principle of its own repeatability. At the same time, it is not the thing itself that is fetishized, but its initial image or a symbol, for instance—its part. This happens because when negated, when transformed into pure potentiality, a thing or an event (e.g., a trauma), really does become inexorable. On the contrary, mimesis of the beautiful art does not fetishize objects, does not ossify them literally or partially. Instead it attempts to reproduce their dynamic principle (their “form”) and their effect (their emergent eventfulness), while transferring them into different settings and situations. Beautiful art must necessarily create a distance between itself and its object: it can either impart playful lightness to the latter through irony, or “purify” it of its objective character by dramatizing and exaggerating it. Metaphorical transfer and dramatization of relations allow to create a conflict within the thing itself (or a situation) as well as between its content, concrete appearance, and its context. In this manner, the outer shell of an object becomes easily circumscribed and internalized, while its power and essence (initially contained within its imposing mass) separate

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from it and are transferred into its aura. In the graceful and anthropomorphic statues of the Greek gods we witness a clash between their sacral power and their human appearance. This sacral power becomes separate from the body and is instead placed into the idealizing gaze, into a space that surrounds this statue and that is made festive as a result. Greek statues do not literally represent gods, rather they are images of men and women as they appear when seen and blessed by benevolent deities. The same is true for Homeric epithets—they are not [metaphorical] representations of deities and their actions, but are elements of the everyday life regarded through the eyes of the gods. It is in this sense that Heidegger considers temple to be the paradigm of art (Bataille and Lacan substitute temple with a cave). But a temple or a cave can become such art paradigms only after the dialectical inversion of mimesis has already taken place, and a monkey that was imitating things and events has already freed events out of things and learned to dissolve these events in artificial spaces. Next comes the question of the beauty that is different from the one obtained through mimesis—of the construction of something new. This is something that happens primarily through imagination rather than through imitation, although it is combined with the elements of the old and already existing things, which acquire free potentiality as a result. What kind of beauty is the beauty of a new work? Although it is new and unfamiliar, it nevertheless creates a certain space, a world that pulls us in. It is as if such artwork presents things with their own originals, as if replacing things with their ideal models. By doing this, it frees up space for these things as well as for the people looking at them. The opening of this space (and here I am following Heidegger) presupposes its liberation from the objects placed in it. In the result of some negative work, an artwork shifts existing things and frees up the space that they used to occupy, it exposes the structure of their inevitably conflictual and mutually exclusive relations. This freed-up space now can be occupied by other existing and perceiving people. Inner mimesis serves the same purpose: through it an artwork selfreferentially represents itself and its constitutive parts (for example, when in a temple we find images of dedicating this temple to a king, etc.). Inner mimesis asserts an artwork through its self-criticism (“here I am depicting an image in a frame, and here, outside the frame, I am depicting reality itself, then taken into a different frame”). In any case, art affirms a thing by staging this thing’s triumph over itself. Finally, art can also do away with all invention and simply isolate an object and point out something beautiful that already exists to make it visible. Russian formalists write a lot about this47 and so does Heidegger. For this reason, a

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temple—templum, something framed and isolated—is a model for all artworks for him. This, of course, still leaves open the question of the mimetic nature of the isolating gesture itself. (Adorno insisted that such bracketing of the external nature is akin to a spontaneous disgust—it is expressive and conveys the effect of encountering something unwelcome.) And yet, once again, we are faced with the situation when to assert something already existing we get ourselves involved in a thoroughly negative labor of deracinating it and breaking its ties with familiar surroundings and sets of relations. We cannot claim that we reached a satisfactory definition, and it would not have been fair to expect one in a text this brief and that abstract. (The history of aesthetics contains many such definitions.) However, we can ascertain that despite beauty’s initial affirmativeness and attractiveness and the secondary imitative, creative assertiveness of art, we cannot consider the beautiful a simple joy of presence and art—an amplification of reality. Rather, what we are dealing with is a combination of love for things and fear of them, which leads us to separate, circumscribe, and embody them, taking on their power and ways of being in the process. Art simultaneously contains a threat of obsession with words and images, and a deconstruction of fetishism and totemism by their own means.

VII Negativity in Aesthetics: Recent to Ancient We are more or less accustomed to the idea of modernist art (and/or avantgarde) as substantively negative. This art made a bet on the destruction of the present forms, meant to derive, first, a vertiginous sense of disaster, second, the absolute freedom of a creative, virtuoso subject, third, the refreshment of the spectator’s gaze, and fourth, a mystical sense of a transcendent absolute. Here is what Alain Badiou writes in his philosophical compte-rendu of the twentieth century: The [XXth] century experienced itself as artistic negativity, in the sense that one of its themes, anticipated in the nineteenth century by a number of texts (for example, Mallarmé’s «Verse in Crisis”, or further back still, Hegel’s “Aesthetics”) is the end of art, of representation, of the painting and, finally, of the work as such. Behind this theme of the end there obviously lies, once again, the question of what relationship art entertains with the real, or what the real of art is.48

The understanding of Modernism as negativity, developed forcefully in the mid-twentieth century, from opposite angles, by Theodor Adorno and Mikhail

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Lifshitz, was recently reformulated by John Roberts, in his “Revolutionary Time and the Idea of Avant-Garde.”49 Roberts claims that the avant-garde is double-faced: on the one hand (here he cites Niklas Luhmann) the negativity of techniques, art’s “deflational” stretching into “non-art” and “post-art,” “autopoietically” increases art’s autonomy, the more it struggles with the artistic institutions. On the other hand, there is what Roberts calls a “second negation,” in which the contemporary art opens up to the historical world by overcoming its own negativity and carrying a revolutionary promise (or remaining faithful to the revolutionary heritage). This is a very pertinent account, the only limitation being that it (like some other Modernist theories) historicizes the situation and focuses on the connection of avant-garde to capitalism and socialism. There are, however, strong arguments in favor of a broader diagnosis. In his 1994 book, Man without Content, Giorgio Agamben claims that in Modernity, “at the extreme limit of art’s destiny, when all the gods fade in the twilight of art’s laughter, art is only a negation that negates itself, a self-annihilating nothing [“ein Nichtiges, ein sich Vernichtendes].”50 Agamben directly attributes this doctrine to Hegel, namely to Hegel’s depiction of Romantic art and even more narrowly, of irony. “Ein Nichtiges, ein sich Vernichtendes” (a self-annihilating nothing) is Hegel’s own formula a propos of irony. But even Hegel is in a way, a too recent reference. Julia Kristeva was maybe the first to forcefully argue for negativity in the avant-garde—she did so in her 1974 dissertation, “Revolution in Poetic Language,”51 referencing symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse). When Kristeva explains her theory of negativity in art, she refers not only to Hegel but also to Plato, namely to his notion of khora as a sphere of pure negativity: nothing is identifiable there, but the negativity takes the form of a passive receptacle. Kristeva uses the term chora to describe psychologically and semiotically a sphere of partial objects and “drives” (Freud’s name for vague and internalized strivings): [T]he semiotic chora is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him. We shall call this process of charges and stases a negativity to distinguish it from negation, which is the act of a judging subject.52

What is Plato “doing” here? Does he legitimize or delegitimize the theory that is “officially” dedicated to the historical avant-garde?

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Actually, philosophical aesthetics starts with the observation of the uncanny nexus between art and negativity. Here is what Plato writes, after having denounced the deceitfulness of art: —However, we haven’t yet made the greatest accusation against imitation. For the fact that it succeeds in maiming even the decent men, except for a certain rare few, is surely quite terrible. Certainly, if it does indeed do that.—Listen and consider. When even the best of us hear Homer or any other of the tragic poets imitating one of the heroes in mourning and making quite an extended speech with lamentation, or, if you like, singing and beating his breast, you know that we enjoy it and that we give ourselves over to following the imitation; suffering along with the hero in all seriousness, we praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state.—I know it, of course.—But when personal sorrow comes to one of us, you are aware that, on the contrary, we pride ourselves if we are able to keep quiet and bear up, taking this to be the part of a man and what we then praised to be that of a woman.—I do recognize it, he said.—Is that a fine way to praise? I said. We see a man whom we would not condescend, but would rather blush, to resemble, and instead of being disgusted, we enjoy it and praise it?—No, by Zeus, he said, that doesn’t seem reasonable.—Yes, it is, I said, “if you consider it in this way.—In what way?—If you are aware that what is then held down by force in our own misfortunes and has hungered for tears and sufficient lament and satisfaction, since it is by nature such as to desire these things, is that which now gets satisfaction and enjoyment from the poets. What is by nature best in us, because it hasn’t been adequately educated by argument or habit, relaxes its guard over this mournful part because it sees another’s sufferings, and it isn’t shameful for it, if some other man who claims to be good laments out of season, to praise and pity him; rather it believes that it gains the pleasure and wouldn’t permit itself to be deprived of it by despising the whole poem. I suppose that only a certain few men are capable of calculating that the enjoyment of other people’s sufferings has a necessary effect on one’s own. For the pitying part, fed strong on these examples, is not easily held down in one’s own sufferings.—Very true,” he said.53

Here, reflections on art are inseparable from ethical concerns. We are familiar with Plato’s doctrine of negation as of an illusory experience of something alien for us (developed in the “Sophist”). Art, then, first, deceives, and then exploits and exaggerates the non-being that appears as a result of the lying (instead, as Plato himself suggests, of boldly accepting the Alien, in a spirit that could remind one of a Levinas). On the one hand, Plato’s criticism sounds today a bit like the common critiques of mass culture and cultural industry. On the other hand, he seems to

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grasp something generic for art as such, in the sense that something vulgar may exist in any art form. Also, the reference to the sentimentality of mimetic art (as such!) is accompanied by a reference to gender. Art, in its histrionic negativity, emerges as a feminine thing. Since the 1970s, Kristeva also uses khora to describe both the nonlinear poetics of avant-garde and the strangeness of feminine and feminist attitudes to the world.54 Women, in their social and cultural position of symbolic negativity (a “second” sex), are at the same time a site of the “lowered” reality that art has historically been and a site of an affective and mimetic revolt. It is not by chance that negativity in art was so emphasized in the avant-garde and post-avant-garde of the twentieth century, with its predominantly Leftist, politically subversive positions (even though it is only in the post-avant-garde since the 1950s that female and feminist voices really have become distinct and often central). To return to Plato, I must add that the above quoted passage is far from isolated and he is quite consistent in his elaboration of art’s inherent negativity. Plato is interested not only in negativity’s content but also in its form. In the Republic, he discusses painting as a way of deforming reality, as can be seen where he refers to what we now call “perspective”: [T]he same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight’s being misled by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.55

Plato’s disciple Aristotle tried to defend art against his teacher, in all its negativity and sentimentality. In Poetics,56 Aristotle makes two consecutive claims. First, art is not a lie but is an expression of the will to know: including knowledge of a non-being, not just death, but also of potentiality. Second, art first defined as mimetic action (drama) is then downgraded to an expression of negativity in passion, and a communication of it, but in two opposite ways: by suffering on stage, and thus drawing the spectator to its weakness, and by violently imposing fear. Art is both a tortured and a torturing reality, a mixture of lamentation and aggression—both of which launch a contagious mimesis. Passion, responds Aristotle to Plato, is not by definition something reproachable: drama manages to overcome the sentimentality of passion through a mechanism of “catharsis” (purification) that we would today call dialectical. Fear and pity, two opposite passions, while clashing during a tragic

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performance, in the spectators’ minds, do not annihilate but “purify” each other, thus presenting their negativity, and the negativity of the staged action, as something ultimately positive, as a force of the community that survives its own negativity, withstands its contradictions. It is a reflection (in the philosophical sense) of emotional negativity. Importantly, it is itself a reaction on a similar reflection in the tragic act: the affective sublation mirrors a dialectical turn to the contrary in the action, which Aristotle considers to be necessary in a drama and calls “peripety.”57 This inversion again does not just neutralize the contrary tendencies of the narrative through a belief in blind destiny (the character makes a mistake and so deserves the inversion of fortune), but has a “philosophical” significance and allows one to know and admire a human being’s negative potential, without necessarily realizing it. Drama thus plays well with Aristotle’s ontological theory in discovering a separate and distinct reality of the potential and actual (“dynamis” and “energeia”). In antiquity, reflections on negativity in art continued after Plato and Aristotle and saw a comeback, this time with a definite apology of negative methods, in pseudo-Longinus’s first century AD doctrine of the “sublime.” Longinus points at the discrepancies between language and meaning, and recommends the tropes that show the inadequacy of expression: exaggerations, inversions of the logical order (hyperbata), and even the weak and unsuccessful passages.58 The ancient treatment of negativity is obviously not related to capitalism or the futurist revolutions. Instead, it moves toward mostly a hierarchical theory of being (later baptized as “Neo-Platonic”), where the actual experience, and human art, stands in a negative relation with itself by engaging with a transcendent ideal. This theory is dialectical, in the sense that its truths can only be affirmed in a paradoxical form, negativity being the only way to genuinely express totality. Thus, the criticism of sensual experience, and of the art of imitation, is actually, for Plato, an apophatic tool of ascending to the eternal models of things, a dialectic that Aristotle captures more explicitly in his theory of the cathartic sublation by tragedy (for Aristotle, art as a self-criticism of the sensual is just a step in the right direction). The relationship of this situation to avant-garde is self-evident: the new providential dialectic of Hegel and Marx prepared the ground for a new negativism in art: future taking the place of the topos ouranios. To complete this discussion of dialectical negativity in ancient philosophy, I must now once again return to Plato and Aristotle, but here as theorists of logic rather than of art. In his dialogue Parmenides,59 Plato sets himself the tasks of realizing the relationship of forms (meaningful entities) with being, and to understand, in

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the wake of the actual Parmenides, the place and role of the negative in thought. We already saw that he addresses similar issues in the Republic and in the Timaeus. The notions of artistic mimesis and of “chora” are both ways to address negativity as such, but the “Parmenides” gives a more systematic account. Importantly, the argument in Parmenides is presented as an exercise and is thus given in a testing and tempting mode, very appropriate for the subject of the not-quite-negative. Parmenides lists eight or nine hypotheses (depending on how one counts) on how the principles of One and the Other relate to being. The Neoplatonic tradition interpreted these hypotheses not as mere exercises, but as the many levels of conceiving being. If we count to nine, the hypotheses are: 1) The absolute positing of One, with consequences for the One: the Neoplatonic One. 2) The relative positing of one, with consequences for the One: The Neoplatonic Nous. 3) The relative positing of the One in time, the Neoplatonic Soul. 4) The absolute positing of One, with consequences for the Other. 5) The relative positing of One, with consequences for the Other. 6) The relative negation of One, with consequences for the One. 7) The absolute negation of One, with consequences for the One. 8) The relative negation of One, with consequences for the Other (same as the chora). 9) The absolute negation of One, with the consequences for the Other.

What is interesting for us here is the recognition of several different ways of disjuncture between form and being. The One is thinkable as such (the absolute positing), but it cannot exist. It is the divine absolute, not a work of art: but its inexistent mode of being what it is creates a space for the spectral entities such as hypotheses six and eight: form’s disembodied and inexistent shadow, and the material field that is disjointed and in the process of constant dissolution. The accent on the Other makes it clear how an artwork, itself being material, can negatively manifest the ideal through metaphoric allusion. How Plato draws a parallax between the One, existing or non-existing, and the Other is analogous to the way an aesthetic symbol really works: something else is meant metaphorically, but if it is directly addressed the meaning immediately dissolves. In his book Less than Nothing,60 Slavoj Žižek notices the proximity between Plato’s “Parmenides” and the psychoanalytical theories of illusions and fantasies. He rightly emphasizes that in Plato’s dialectic, the question is that of the non-

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existent that has real effects: the Lacanian unconscious. Žižek’s example is that an artistic version of the Holocaust may be more persuasive than a document. He interprets the dialogue through comparing Plato’s “hypotheses” with Lacan’s tripartite understanding of the unconscious: hypothesis one is about the pure symbolic that exceeds the real (S1), hypothesis eight, on matter facing the non-existent One, is about the imaginary illusion (Lacanian semblance), and hypothesis nine, on the consequences for the unthinkable One for matter, is about the impossible “Real” that can only generate hallucinations. My own task in this book is, imitating Plato a little, to construct an aesthetic as the order of irreality: as the order of derealization that would liberate the tumultuous forces of history from thetic capture.

VIII The Modernist Theories of Negativity in Art Hegel famously introduces the notion of “negativity,” to emphasize that negation is not just a subjective logical operation but also an objective active force: force of self-destruction and self-annulment acting in the finite things. In this, he does not differ much from the Neo-Platonists, with their negative theology, except that in their case, the negativity of experience was merely an effect of a superior reality, and in Hegel, as mentioned, it is a momentum of a forward movement. Hegel’s negativity is two-sided: it is from one perspective a source of energy, and from the other, a state of passive “inactuality,” destruction, and loss of meaning. Now, Hegel himself applies this concept to aesthetics. Beauty, for Hegel, is the absolute seen from a sensible perspective. But, it passes through stages the first of which, the symbolic, is characterized by the negativity of its object. Nature withdraws in itself, becomes mysterious, and sends only a negative message: “my meaning is hidden, I am not what I appear.” For symbolic art, as well as for fine art also, it is essential that the meaning to which it undertakes to give shape shall not only (as happens in Indian art) emerge from the first immediate unity with its external existence, a unity still basic there prior to all division and differentiation, but shall also become explicitly free from the immediate sensuous shape. This liberation can only take place in so far as the sensuous and natural is apprehended and envisaged in itself as negative, as what is to be, and has been, superseded. Yet further it is necessary that the negative, coming into appearance as the passing and self-transcendence of the natural, shall be accepted and shaped as the absolute meaning of things in general, as a factor in the Divine.61

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Art dares to separate the spirit with senses, but it does so from inside the sensible, where the properly negative is perceived on the one hand as death, and on the other hand as something internal, mysterious. The Egyptians, amongst the peoples hitherto mentioned, are the properly artistic people. But their works remain mysterious and dumb, mute and motionless, because here spirit itself has still not really found its own inner life and still cannot speak the clear and distinct language of spirit. Spirit’s unsatisfied urge and pressure to bring this wrestling with itself before perception by means of art in so mute a way, to give shape to the inner life, and to attain knowledge of its own inner life, as of inner life in general, only through external cognate shapes, is characteristic of Egypt.62

At the same “symbolic” stage emerges the Kantian “sublime” as an image of in-correspondence between spirit and reality. But, aesthetics cannot be reduced to negation. Art flourishes in the “classical” period, having disclosed its secrets and having achieved a harmony between spirit and the senses. Properly dialectical, paradoxical, is the third, romantic moment of the history of art which, after having synthesized the ideal with reality, disunites them again, having exposed the seriousness of the ideal that surpasses any sensible form. Thus, in the romantic period (which for Hegel equals the entire Modernity) art negates itself and becomes for us a thing of the past. Negativity reemerges at its pure, but it is now subjective, not objective, formal, not substantive: thus, for instance, Modern painting reduces the image to the mere surface, to the almost disembodied plane of the canvass which carries the light, cancels the material in favor of appearance, and is thus spiritualized.63 Similarly, the romantic art reduces a work of art to a fragment or an architectural ruin. Importantly, the twentieth-century general aesthetics returns to Plato’s problematic of negative mimesis. Caillois starts with the idea of mimesis as psychasthenia: depiction of weakness and capture of a weak creature.64 He later continues with specifying intimidation as a separate way and purpose of mimesis. Adorno, relying on early Caillois, also sees mimesis as a passage from fear to intimidation65 (The Dialectic of Enlightenment), and, in Aesthetic Theory, considers the capacity of expressing and embodying negativity (through dissonance, caesura, or estrangement) as a criterion of genuine art. This theory corresponds to the practice of Modernist art which exaggerates and emphasizes the negative form (but not always content) of art. In the practice of both impressionists and expressionists, and in its simple understanding by Russian formalists, Modernist art is first of all a set of “experimental” violations of

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canonical grammar, blockages and caesuras, which aim at the depiction of things themselves, or rather their pure presence (cf Aristotle). Some other Modernists saw the effect of negativity in the reflection of art on itself: due to the destruction of its object, art becomes pure form, or self-sufficient autonomous institution, whether viewed ironically (Dada) or affirmatively (Cubists). As a synthesis of both versions, one could mention a version of art as a delimitation of an area meant to highlight a thing (Mukařovský, Heidegger): negativity is then a framing that renders possible a genuine existential perception of a thing in its pointless nudity. However, many early Modernists viewed negativity, destruction, and violence, not just as a form but as a goal of art, and presented aesthetic taste (which had been already presented by Kant as empty and mystical) as a “Taste for the Nothing” (Baudelaire)66. This is the post-Christian idea of Modernist beauty as abstract pure negativity, a pleasure of the negative process that spiritualizes and disembodies being. This was later corrected by the more determinate and reflexive ideas of the negative content of art, such as polemics, political subversion, and a counter-utopia (Bakhtin and his circle); depiction of the blockages and conflicts of the contemporary society (Adorno), representation of the contemporary world from the point of view of a utopian future (Lucacs). But, the strong French post-war authors Bataille and Sartre remained faithful to their national heritage of symbolism, in viewing destruction and the freely floating “Nothing” as a value in itself. Let me draw on this modernist moment a bit longer with Adorno, whose emphasis on negativity is a part of a dialectical, Hegelianizing aesthetics. Adorno, like Hegel, thinks historically: he places his aesthetics into the context of a deeply pessimistic picture of contemporary society, whose alienation and fragmentation Modernist art can express only by focusing on a “darkened” subject matter, and by taking a somber and mortifying form. [H]orror, Hegel’s principle, which Brecht adopted as his motto, that truth is concrete, can perhaps suffice only for art. < … > The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modem art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.67

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The negativity of art is expressed both as abstraction and as a sensible negative magnitude: To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary production is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color. The ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses of abstraction. It may well be that the current trifling with sound and color effects is a reaction to the impoverishment entailed by the ideal of black[].68

Adorno also links negativity to the notion of the “New” being so crucial for the self-definition of Modernism. Modernism is negative by definition, but this negativity contains a catch: a risk of being stuck, reified in the critical, alldenying position. The experience of the modern says more even though its concept, however qualitative it may be, labors under its own abstractness. Its concept is privative; since its origins it is more the negation of what no longer holds than a positive slogan It does not, however, negate previous artistic practices, as styles have done throughout the ages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle in art.69

Identity thus returns through negation, but the negation equally proceeds by identifying with what it wants to conjure away. There is a futility in negativity, which makes it magical, and obsessive: A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In this image of collapse all the stigmata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. < … > In the image of catastrophe, an image that is not a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential, the magical trace of art’s most distant prehistory reappears under the total spell, as if art wanted to prevent the catastrophe by conjuring up its image.70

Let us note the theme of cipher, a cryptogram, which reminds one of Hegel’s aesthetic negation: for Hegel, in the beginning of history, like at its present stage, we get a symbolism which, by denying the present, sets the puzzles for tomorrow. The negative, in Adorno, is overdetermined. It is motivated by the real horrors like the Nazism, and the desire to forestall them via magical mimicking, and the desire to sustain them, as though exercising one’s force to resist and,

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finally, a desire to overcome all this via the ciphers of the new and untried, to accomplish a negation of negation. History is here a true source of negativity, not in its leap forward but rather in its regressive suspense at the stage of false emancipation: the rational subject has subjugated and objectivated the world. Therefore, the true negativity in art, itself already a negation of (the subject’s) universalized negativity, is expressed objectively, speaks in the place of an object. The conversation about Adorno’s aesthetic would be incomplete if I were not to have touched on his central concept, mimesis. Mimesis is not, per se, explicable through negativity. It is a notion of identification (of things and humans among themselves), but one that is two-layered and ambivalent, and therefore contains a dialectical movement. By performing identity, mimesis at the same time does not achieve it in reality, therefore affirming identity and non-identity (or difference) at one and the same time. Repetition or replay has a prima facie affirmative content, but the resulting doubling and multiplication of identity subverts it. The mimetic negation could thus lead to parody as a structural principle, and produce laughter, but Adorno himself dislikes laughter as an overly subjective emotion, preferring the more objective shock and awe. Thus, in Adorno’s account of modernist art, the identitarian (“constructive”) version of mimesis as representation ends up revealing the prior and more archaic version of mimesis-as-expression, the content of which is negative affect (fear, shock, revulsion) emerging from a human encounter with an alien object. The French philosophy of art in the twentieth century developed in a parallel and independent way to German Hegelian theory (the French philosophers read Heidegger, but not Benjamin or Adorno). Jean-Paul Sartre, from his earlier writings on, emphasized the negative content of art. Speaking of the “imaginary”—in many ways his proxy for art—Sartre uses phenomenological language and mentions its “empty intention.”71 Imagination is contemplation of the “nothing”: because the things it perceives are known not to exist. Given Sartre’s definition of consciousness itself as the nihilating Nothingness, imagination is a way to embody and objectively experience this nothingness, in all its freedom. Fantasy is the element of the unreal, and its internal content is dictated by form. In art, the freedom of subject clashes and fights against the inertia and self-imposition of “being.” However, this does not make Sartre into a proponent of negativistic art. Rather, he points at the ambivalence inherent in the image: it is presence and absence simultaneously. Therefore art, and most importantly literature, is a practice of freedom, in the sense that the both the author and the reader take

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a creative attitude to the things that are already objectively present. By chance or not, this line of argument very much recalls Schelling’s theory of tragedy.72 Furthermore, Sartre says that an artwork, precisely because it is not quite there, constitutes a sort of an appeal, or call, to the freedom of the reader,73 who is supposed to show “generosity” by recreating the facts presented in the artwork. In my language, this can be translated as “temptation.” At the same time, Sartre uses his framework of “being and nothingness” to provide a critical picture of Modern literature. Rather than presenting facts as so many incomplete venues for the reader, realist and modernist novels instead “nihilate” their content from the point of view of a hidden and ungrounded spiritualism. A Modern bourgeois writer’s attitude to the reality he or she is depicting is that of consumption and expenditure. It was a question of denying the world or consuming it. Of denying it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. … Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase.74

In this sense, the surrealist will to “scandal” (i.e., to performance) is a logical consequence of the preceding representational work. Sartre thus shares the idea that modernism is negative; he does not approve it but sees in it an important possibility coming out of the human condition as a negative force. The authors are not to be blamed; they did what they could; among them are some of our greatest and purest writers. … as they were artists, their work covered up a desperate appeal to the freedom of the reader they pretended to despise. It pushed challenge to the limit, even to the point of challenging itself; it gives us a glimpse of a black silence beyond the massacre of words, and, beyond the spirit of seriousness, the bare and empty sky of equivalences; it invites us to emerge into nothingness by destruction of all myths and all scales of value; it discloses to us in man a close and secret relationship with the nothing, instead of the intimate relationship with the divine transcendence.75

To this nihilism, Sartre opposes a practically engaged, committed literature of “concrete universality.” Unlike Adorno, Sartre is rather reserved with regard to experimental modernism. He understands, and practices, art in a more or less representative style. The negativity of consciousness only makes sense as long as it encounters some objects that are transcendent to it. Here is why a writer, according to Sartre, has to depict external things as though they were his/her

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free work. Consciousness thus imposes, through art, its paradoxical power over things, and guides the reader through “the roads of freedom.”76 Another French thinker who widely used the conceptual framework of negativity is Julia Kristeva. I have already mentioned her above as being a strange follower of Plato and at the same time an apologist of the avant-garde. Here I will say a little more of her approach, as she is an important precedent for my analysis. In her Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva claims that at the end of the nineteenth century, literature moved toward a more explicit use of what she calls, from Hegel, “negativity”: a field of negative forces that block, de-route, and mutually detach both the signifiers and the signified. The syntax is ruined. Negativity undermines the “thetic”: the positing function of language that would make it possible to project a meaning onto an external state of affairs, or even simply to make an argument. It also leads to a “stasis,” in stopping the development of an argument or narrative. The result is a blurred, associational linguistic milieu, analogous to the Freudian unconscious, with its “primary processes.” Negativity may be conceived in different forms, but Kristeva focuses on the movement of rejection: a linguistic analogon to psychological repulsion and foreclosure (Freud’s Verwerfung). Rejection produces lacunae (ellipses) and the material excremental residues that haunt the discourse. Kristeva’s examples are two late-nineteenth-century French writers who, on first view, do not have much in common: Stéphane Mallarmé and the Count of Lautréamont. Their strategies are complementary: the former expresses Romantic admiration for the symbols of chaos, but does so in a puzzle-like and nonlinear syntax that culminates in the “Throw of Dice,” in a literally disjointed writing. The latter practices negativity mostly at the level of content, telling a series of transgressive stories that generate disgust in the reader. But the narrative coherence is also destabilized. Kristeva’s analyses are subtle: she finds “rejection” on all levels, from the phonetic (some consonants, in pronouncing which the air barely comes through an obstacle, are icons of rejection), to the reshuffles of elements (also icons of a generalized denial), and the famous ellipses (omissions), particularly of verbs, which characterizes Mallarmé’s writing. In the case of Lautréamont, she notes the instability of subjective pronouns, the abundance of negative particles “ne,” and the transformation of proper names. She even believes that: the substitutions that the name of Dazet [the name of Lautréamont’s friend to whom he addresses the “Songs” – AM] in the second version of the Songs connote an aggressiveness that is also aimed at his mother [because his mother’s

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The Temptation of Non-Being name sounds similar – AM], a privileged pole of transference, in order to reach a normative form of locution.77

It is hard to miss the proximity of this entire theory with Adorno’s: parataxis, the generally negativistic thrust of art that surfaces both at the level of content and form. Adorno, however, takes negativity mostly passively, as a reflex of societal alienation, while Kristeva sees in it a sign of “revolution” and of the emancipation of the unconscious. Adorno’s work was, again, unknown in France at that time, and there is a striking convergence of many motifs between the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism. Kristeva then further develops her theory. In her 1980 book The Black Sun,78 she proposes a modified theory of negativity, which both shows more familiarity with Hegel and reflects the artistic language characteristic of postwar European culture. Now, Kristeva emphasizes negation’s paradoxical weakness: it is powerless to achieve its work, and therefore is in a way negated in turn, thus leading, from another end, to the same disposition of self-related negativity as in the former case of the “chora.” Failed negation leads again to the process of de-structuring a text, ellipses, and of blurring personal pronouns (which in this case also produce “doubles”), but here this does not generate bright imagery, rather a monotonous, weak language of pain and affect. That said, the weakness of language represents an inviting seduction for the reader. Meanwhile, and perhaps for that very reason, the distorted speech sounds strange, unexpected, and above all painful. A difficult seduction drags one into the characters’ or the narrator’s weaknesses, into that nothing, into what is nonsignifiable in an illness with neither tragic crisis nor beauty, a pain from which only tension remains. Stylistic awkwardness would be the discourse of dulled pain. For such silent or precious exaggeration of speech, for its weakness tensed as if on a tightrope above suffering, films come as a substitute.79

Unlike the previous book’s “revolutionary” negativity, the later Kristeva’s “depressive” aesthetic is far more centered on women’s experience. There is something about female subjectivity, says Kristeva, that creates an affective focus, not on “rejection” but on “abjection” as failed rejection: a pre-symbolic force of negative affects and a fascination with the body. Therefore, for Kristeva it is Marguerite Duras who functions as the main contemporary example of passive negativity in literature. Finally, I want to invoke one other theory of aesthetic negativity in the twentieth century: that of the Russian Neoplatonic philosopher Alexey Losev. For Losev, artistic form is the “alogical alterity of sense.”80 It is the site of

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encounter for “logos” with its meaning, with “meon,” non-being. Losev opposes Plato and the German idealist theories of art. The latter conceive it, briefly put, as a reflexive contradiction between two hypostasized orders: the infinite and the finite in Schelling; the ideal and the real in Hegel. But Losev denies the independence of the finite and the real as a separate ypostasis. The artistic in form is the essential equilibrium between the logical and the alogical element. This definition of the artistic form must replace the abstract and metaphysical doctrines of the “ideal,” the “real,” of the “embodiment of the ideal in the real,” etc. Of course, there is much truth in these doctrines, but we need to exclude from them the naturalist metaphysics as well as the formalist and subjectivist idealism, which mortifies the living expression of actuality.81

The alogical is the negative. In his book on ontology, The Ancient Cosmos and Contemporary Science,82 Losev shows that the second “tetractide” (foursome) of Plato’s hypotheses from Parmenides that describes cosmos requires a supplement of expression. Expression, consisting of symbol, rhythm, and symmetry, is what destabilizes the ideal forms by rooting them in the individual “facticity”; it anchors it in existence, by making them shine through. The symbol is ambivalent in that it is both the idea itself and a material object that is different from it. The alterity further transforms into negativity: “The idea destroys itself in the image, so as to affirm itself through this destruction.”83 My own position is closest to Losev’s. In this book, I trace how art traverses levels of lowering down and dissolving reality (reality being understood as our everyday, idealized, and familiarized life). This is important, first of all, to conceive negativity as a secondary, reactive operator. Today, negativity is so pervasive in art, in both form and content, not by force of a coming apocalypse, but because we live an epoch overcrowded with beings, both material and symbolic. Capitalist society organizes things into a system of constant attack and supply, and even if it reproduces scarcity, this scarcity is ultimately privation, it is secondary to the proliferation of needs and desires. Art is a way to rarefy the commodified world, to deactivate it, and to clear the “roads of freedom” through it. Second, in all its functional spectrum from difference onto contradiction, negativity is important for us today because of the characteristic rift between socalled highbrow and mass art. The nineteenth-century Romantics and idealists already perceived this growing split and conceived it at as a disjuncture between the formal and the sensible, or the ideal and the material. Today, the situation has evolved. As the Romantics saw, art and myth were needed, because “the enlightened and unenlightened must shake hands … and philosophy must

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become mythological in order to make philosophy sensual.”84 The problem, though, is not in the sensible as such, but in the “vulgar,” lowered nature of art: it is inherently popular, public, and therefore counter-ritual (in the sense of Bakhtin). Art’s sublimity, its upward negativity, only functions in the view of this lowering, and in dialectical conjuncture with it. A higher virtue that shines through a comedian’s grimaces: here is the contradiction that produces aesthetic effect and demonstrates the irony of our attempts to behave with dignity in our everyday life.

IX Varieties of Negation Plato alludes to a distinction in the understanding of negation, by distinguishing between the absolute and relative negation of the One. He also suggests that a negation is always actually a reference to the Other: a statement that allows us to conceive an incomplete, half-positive negativity, and shows how art (with its allegories and metaphors) intimately belongs to the sphere of the negative. Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, does not agree with Plato’s attempts to explain away negation as a subjective operation and to replace it with difference. But, following Plato’s insights, he develops a logical theory by classifying negation in the following way: the contradiction as the radical and simple negation of a proposition, and the weaker, incomplete forms such as contrariness (an antagonism, like between Republicans and Democrats, who nevertheless coexist in reality), correlation (an even weaker form of opposition, say black and white, or come and go), and privation (a determinate negation, like missing a person who has just left). Contradiction, which is a two-member correlation, should then be further distinguished from abstract negation, or sheer negation: a generic negative statement that intends to annul its content, as opposed to the further varieties that are conscious of the annulment’s failure.85 Hegel, in his Science of Logic,86 adds difference (as a preliminary inarticulate stage of negation) and shows the development of negation from implicit to explicit forms: difference, distinction (which in turn moves toward contrariness), and contradiction. It is also Hegel who shows how negation may redouble into a negation of negation, and thus into a “sublation.” Sublation, “Aufhebung” leaves an opposition neutralized by moving the conflict to another level. Here I introduce another distinction, between 1) the double negation in a negative sense, where negativity is reinforced, and the object neutralized; and 2)

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the double negation in a positive sense, where it emphasizes negativity as such, an active and triumphant force. Linguistic usage further teaches us that all of these negative forms can function either overtly or latently. For example, one thing is a delimited unitary object detached from its context (passive abstract negation), another, the indeterminacy of the object detached of all its determination (a stronger form of the same), and the void, the nothingness, and the fury of destruction (active abstract negation). One thing is a denegation, Freud’s Verneinung (“this is not my mother”87) in which the privation fails and leaves its object in presence, even though in a deactivated form. In poetics, this is a negative metaphor. All other tropes also have the same effect, at the moment when we understand that they are allegories and are not significant per se. Another thing, a, more successful way of privation, is another, active and more successful way of ellipsis: suicide instead of sunset: suicide is denegated, sunset is omitted. In the first case, an object is negated (but stays), in the other, an object is negating (but still send back to what it negates). Both depend on a previously defined sheer negation, which makes the object non-identical to start with. But both embody this negativity and make it tangible, because pure negativity does not exist as such. Contrariness is yet another passive way of emphasizing and reflecting on negativity, for example in an antiphrasis: “I hate you” instead “I love you”, etc. We do not hear a negative expression but in fact it makes up the meaning of the seemingly positive term. Inversion is an active form of contrariness, which names both the negating and the negated member of opposition. It depicts a topsy-turvy, carnivalesque world, beyond the looking glass, where the grotesque inversions (horses rule humans, as in Swift, or eating is secret, going to toilet is public, as in Bunuel) estrange and criticize a customary reality. Let us now list the ways in which an artwork is negative. FORMALLY: 1) It represents things that are not, it has an empty intention (Sartre). 2) In its representation, it uses various allegorical tropes, by ciphering an external thing that it alludes to and thus denying (denegating) everything it says. 3) It delimits what it represents from the rest of the world as though by a border (formalists, and Heidegger). 4) It does a double work of emphasizing a representation in eliminating all the rest (passive negativity), and of denying it as a mere representation (passive privation). One consequence of this is that art can make us view the

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ground qua ground: the historical movement of art from religious scenes to landscape and nature morte. 5) It relies on a mimetic plasticity of its material (human body, imagination, language, paint, clay, stone), which is taken in its indeterminate negativity of a substance without qualities. SUBSTANTIVELY, a work of art has to affect the subject in some form, thus breaking the threshold of his/her indifference. Therefore, the object of representation is in most cases: 1) Suffering and sorrow (passive privation, drawing pity to the entity that suffers) 2) Violence and rage (active privation, scaring and contaminating by negativity) 3) A passage from happiness to suffering and vice versa, or from aggression to suffering and vice versa (active contrariness) 4) The comic, that is, the humiliated and/or discharged, de-activated reality, which produces laughter (the abstract, sheer negativity) 5) Inverted, carnivalesque picture of reality (active contrariness) 6) The void, the nothingness, and the sheer destruction, such as Malevich’s Black square, or John Cage’s 4’33’’ (active abstract negativity). But this can only be a goal, because in fact “the nothing” is irrepresentable: if represented, it would immediately fill its own void as another object. It is unclear where is the chicken and where is the egg: whether the substance allegorizes the formal predicament of art (Adorno, de Man), or the form is chosen to suit the negative force that is the privileged object of art (as a spiritualization and a victory of moral freedom (Schiller), as a therapy for a loss (Freud-Lacan), as critique (Bakhtin-Adorno), as a manual of philanthropy (Lessing), or as pure sadistic enjoyment (Bataille)). What is important to emphasize is that the aesthetic negativity cannot be reduced just to the shocking appearances of violence or to a sense of unease and blockage. The obverse side of the active and explicit appearance of negativity are its passive effects, the main of which (as analyzed by Lacan) is deactivation of being which is made, by art, into the ground of experience (through a process similar to linguistic denegation). In what follows, I will try to introduce an order

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and systematize these and other negative effects, which are characteristic and, in part, constitutive of art. I will now present these and other negative aspects of art in the form of a consecutive reflection: The in-itself: 1) The depiction of the non-existent (simple privation) 2) The ground qua ground, and the de-activation of gaze (a negative negation of negation) 3) Distinction and delimitation (difference: mutual privation) 4) De-formation and dis-orientation (sheer negativity) 5) Sublimation and figuration (a positive negation of negation, elevation into a symbol). The for-itself: 1) Laughter and the comic (an active form of the pure negative) 2) Suffering and violence, the tragic (a passive form of the pure negative) 3) The explicit formal negativity (the active negativity distilled from its objects) 4) The inversions of form and content (correlated contrariness) 5) The explicit antithesis in form and content (contrariness and contradiction). This will now be developed in detail.

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System of Negation

Preface 1. Phenomena That works of art involve negativity does not yet mean that beauty in itself is negative. Negation is by definition a secondary operation, it must relate to something positive; a primary aesthetic phenomenon is somewhere in between positivity and negativity. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Sergey Eisenstein spoke of “attractions”1 that make up the matter of any film: there should be, in the most intricate reflexive narrative, something captivating on the most basic level, like a popular festival, a dance, a feast, a circus performance, a sexual act, or a dream. These are eventful things that the subject experiences in an absolute form and are therefore insensible to the question of existence in time or space. Their potentiality is enough for their reality. Either they are glorious and powerful things that are not just imposing their being but also surpassing it and disorienting the subject. Or, they are events of ecstasy (inebriation, sleep, sexuality, mirror images); or events that contain threats of trauma, anxieties of weakness, and provocations of aggression, which contain a logical contradiction. These phenomena are fascinating, obsessive, entrancing. They exist in a tentative form. They are tests, in the kind I earlier described in the digression on Dostoevsky. As stated in the “Introduction,” these phenomena are also tempting, attracting, seducing: their ontological undecidability is a factor that draws the subject into them, as if to “help” these phenomena. It is difficult to say whether these phenomena are positive or negative, even though retrospectively it is clear that they include negativity within themselves: a negation of their being does not destroy but absolutizes them. They are oversaturated phenomena, in a sense that is similar but not identical to the saturated phenomena in the sense of Jean-Luc Marion: these things are without

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being, or regardless of being, but they can be fetishistically reified, and the saturation may be negative.2 However, these are not aesthetic phenomena per se: aesthetic phenomena require a certain decision, made by a social institution or individual subjects, that we are dealing with something without a purpose, something idle, or most often with a product of imagination or an appeal to imagination. Therefore, there is a properly aesthetic moment where indeterminacy is interpreted in a negative way, and we encounter phenomena that are not, or whose ambivalence is to be treated negatively. This is culture’s way of protecting the subjects from their temptations, by making these temptations public and taking them so to say, on the account of collective subject. Aesthetic intentionality is analogous to the intentionality of temptation, but it reproduces it in a reflexive and negative way. 2. Operations Now it is time to move forward to the question of art’s techniques, or operations. But here, again, though most abundant and interesting, the negative operations are not the first. The first operation, which I would call a pre-aesthetic one, is mimesis, or a force of anthropological reflection. In itself, mimesis is not negative. On the contrary, it repeats, reduplicates and multiplies, and amplifies being: in contrast to the negative picture of beauty familiar to us from Platonism and modernism. Traditionally for Modernity, mimesis was understood as a direct form of representation, such as the first-person insertions into a narrative or a performative playacting. In the twentieth century, authors such Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Theodor Adorno, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe shifted the concept’s meaning toward a visceral expressive reaction that does not necessarily involve figurative similarity. For these authors, mimesis rightly emerges as the primary aesthetic operation: one that is both anthropological (“mimesis is a natural inclination of human beings since childhood,” says Aristotle3) and artistic. Technically speaking, mimesis is repetition (which is even reflected in the onomatopoetic word “mimeo,” where the root is redoubled). A reflection of this repetition is the identification: both in the psychoanalytic meaning of mutual identification and in the sense of self-mimesis as a virtuoso identity. Repetition is in itself a super- and over-affirmation. However, there is a dialectic of mimesis, which drags it at the same time toward reflection and negation. Aristotle uses the ambivalence of mimesis to show how art passes from a brutal negative affect to its sublation in knowledge. Fear and pity,

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which Aristotle claims to be tragic passions, are mimetic passions: they express reactions to the Other’s affect, and spread through contagion. But this reactivity is precisely why they can superimpose one on another and liberate the subject. More recently, Walter Benjamin, who uses his theory of mimesis to account for contemporary art “in the age of its mechanical reproduction,” notes that such universal reproduction destroys the notions of original and copy, thus leading to a “comprehensive liquidation.”4 There is a negativity to mimesis, in which quantity turns into quality, and the multiplication of an entity undermines its individual existence, but forcefully imposes its idea. Adorno, continuing Benjamin’s argument, develops a complex theory of mimesis, which I am not going to cover here in detail. At its core is a dialectical return of negative affect’s “direct” mimesis through the highly developed reflective form of a constructed, representative “mimesis” that it destroys from within.5 In a similar vein, LacoueLabarthe shows that mimesis, being a force of universal identification, subverts and dissolves the reflective structure of truth as divided into subject and predicate.6 Art, as an institution, interprets the mimetic play as an imposture: an actor, in her strong presence, is playing what she is not, with gestures that have a symbolic meaning: they signify something other than they appear. 3. Reflection Reflection is a polysemic word and a complex overdetermined concept. I will use the word in the contemporary sense of “objective reflection”—an operation that repeats or reproduces an object in a way that makes it more meaningful and potentially conscious for itself and for others. Reflection therefore depends on the naturalist notion of mimesis, but adds a formal element: in reflection, not one object, but the entire structure is reproduced, in a way that the reproduction is also somehow part of the same structure. A thing superimposes on itself. Mimesis leads to reflection: it redoubles a thing and makes knowledge possible:7 in itself, if it is self-mimesis, or in the other, if this is a mimesis of the other. Reflection, as Hegel shows, produces negativity; it delimits and derealizes the original thing.8 Therefore, as Aristotle already notes in De Anima,9 knowledge passes through the stage of fantasy, or “imagination” in the language of the German idealists. There is an image as an intermediate step of knowledge: the moment where a thing dissociates itself from its being but does not yet obtain its concept. This is precisely the site of negativity where art dwells. In a constructed artwork, the privileged form of reflection is the mise en abîme: a trope that repeats the entire artwork’s setting within itself, creating a play of mirrors. Perhaps the most famous example of the mise en abîme in

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art is the “mousetrap” scene in Hamlet, where the hero organizes, within the play, another play with a similar plot: a test that is supposed to reveal the main villain’s crime and expose the power of art over reality. I have mentioned above the “testing” mode of aesthetic existence that is at play here. What is important for us here is the play of reality and irreality that accompanies the reflection. The “mousetrap” ironically reminds the spectator of the proceedings’ fictional nature. It thus negates them (“all the world is theater”; nothing is real anymore after the death of the father). But, dialectically, it also creates a false effect of “reality” for the first, larger play, within which a smaller one is “only” theater. We are dealing not with a golden mean but with an oscillation of intense reality and irreality. Lev Vygotsky therefore writes: Shakespeare operates with a double set of conventions stand up against actors, presents one and the same event twice (once as the real event and then as one played by the actors), splits actions in two and with the fictitious part, the second convention, obliterates and conceals the absurdity of the first “real” part.10

The same effect in ancient comedy and Romantic prose is achieved through the introduction of fictional “doubles” of a character. Literature abounds in stories that denounce reality’s illusory nature: art makes everything around look like a fantasy: from Plato to contemporary authors like John Fowles and Viktor Pelevin. In this sense, the reduplication achieves a negative effect, but art itself gets affirmed as a higher reality standing on the verge of its disappearance. The mirror, a natural instrument and a metaphor of reflection par excellence, is an aesthetic attraction, a tempting and fascinating phenomenon. It generates uncanny doubles and drives the viewer into a subjectless element of pure enjoyment by gaze. Therefore, at the moment we consciously try to “reflect” reality, in realist art or naïve epistemology, we actually escape from reality into a narcissistic dreamworld. With its liberating reflection, art thus protects the viewer from a bad eye, from what Sartre calls “impure reflection,” the one that paralyzes and objectifies the subject.11 Art’s reflection is in this sense a reflection of reflection, or even an anti-reflection, a mirror of the mirror, which inverts and sublates the thematic, fixating ego-reflection through its objective aesthetic embodiment. Similarly, today one uses headphones to protect oneself with a screen of enjoyment against a city’s aggressive consumerist milieu. The mirror, as a natural object, optically inverts an object’s orientation in space (right becomes left, and left, right) and generates a system of symmetrical turnovers (am I looking in the mirror, or the mirror looking in me?). There is,

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in the very material mechanism of reflection, a carnivalesque and subversive inversion of reality, a nihilation or liquidation of a subject through pulling it inside the mirror, “behind the looking-glass.” By thus tempting the subject in, through a series of reduplications, art struggles against the “reality principle” and the ego defenses, by generating, in each self-depiction, explosions of pure enjoyment with idle negativity. While reading, watching, or listening we partake in being a spy in a foreign country or in a host of a feast held for a foreign guest. Based on this analysis that shows the entanglement between negativity and reflection in the definition of art, I would like to propose a distinction between the two terms that are often conflated or deemed to be interchangeable: modernism and avant-garde. Here I argue against Clement Greenberg and Jacques Rancière, in agreement with Peter Bürger and Johan Schulte-Lasse.12 These two terms describe similar operations of reflection and negativity that became popular at the end of the nineteenth century. But they describe them from two different and incompatible (parallax-wise) perspectives. I suggest that calling something “modernism,” a type that encompasses literature from Mallarmé to Joyce and painting from the impressionists to the surrealists, is an artwork’s attempt to become an absolute and to absorb its own relationship to society and the reader inside itself. For this purpose, such artwork actively destroys its image and syntax and practices a hyperbolized reflexivity (symbolizing sign, and enunciation, as the main subject of poetry in Mallarmé; the transgression of social norm in Beardsley, Huysmans, and Lautréamont; the psychological “hyperrealism” of Joyce, Woolf, and Proust; the ironic introduction of the acts of writing and reading into the novel, in the same authors, and even more so in Nabokov; the exposition of the non-representative micro-elements of writing and painting in Joyce, and in cubist painting, etc.). All of these operations serve for the book or a canvass to become an absolute or a symbol: “the world exists to become a book,” as Mallarmé famously puts it.13 Art of this kind, developed under the assumption of its autonomy, often fed on mystical ideas and inherited the Romantic idea of art as redemption. But in roughly the same historical period we witness the opposite ideological process, even though it uses similar techniques. Art struggles against its own limits, tries to overcome its autonomy, and claims to exit the frame of art as a delineated institution, into life itself. Such art screams, rattles, jumps from pure art to design or propaganda. It erases the border with life with the help of the techniques often similar to those used by the “modernists”: destruction of form, the explicit negativity of images, ironic reflection on its own being of art, moral provocation, the literalization of image, and psychological hyperrealism. Here one can mention: Nikolay Yevreinov’s

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literal restaging of the October Revolution in 1919, scale 1:1, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “ROST windows,” the literature of fact from Viktor Shklovsky and Sergey Tretyakov, later, French situationism and generally “contemporary art,” which challenges the classical reified form of artwork and bets on performance and the production of interhuman relationships. Everything has to become art, and art itself has to dissolve in reality: in theory this was best formulated by Benjamin in his “Work of Art … ” essay. It is this type of art that I suggest calling “avant-garde.” It is clear from the above that the tendencies of modernism and avantgarde are close in type, even if contrary in intention. Both aspire to enlarge art: “élargisser l’art” is a slogan of the French eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinker Abbé Mercier, made famous by Paul Celan who argues against i­t— against both modernism and avant-garde—and suggests to narrow art back down, to retreat from colonized life.14 This enlargement may serve either to reabsorb the elements of life into the artwork, or to dissolve the artwork by realizing its utopian promise in everyday life. Hence the ambiguity of many gestures: one can interrupt a play and bring the public to the stage; one can make a provocative performance and tempt the police to arrest you, if not execute you; but where is the line beyond which one would not be able to say that these actions are also a part of the artwork that had introjected it? Where is the dividing line between what Benjamin called the “aesthetization of politics” and “politicizing art,”15 between affirming beauty and its subversion? This is the question that is increasingly itself an issue of art (see, for instance, the artwork “Museum Songspiel” by the group Chto Delat16).

I Aesthetic Negation in Itself 1. Things That Do Not Exist and Actions That Are Not Carried Out As mentioned above, aesthetic reality has its own unique nature, a particular type of intentionality. We bracket the question of its existence and, in general, its truth, and we enter a world of alternate possibilities.17 We, so to speak, are dealing with its suspended, pure existence (or non-existence), something akin to temptations (Russian “iskus”’s): the primary, obsessive phenomena that attract attention prior to judgment. But unlike the sheer temptations of life, the suspension of being in art is performed consciously, institutionally, and reflexively. The object is nihilated (in Sartre’s terminology) and switched off. Its non-existence is accepted as a fact, or at least a hypothesis, and this is the condition of its admission into

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the aesthetic world. Any exchange between the aesthetic world and the realm of the pragmatically relevant reality—when, for example, art (whether realist or avant-garde) exceeds the boundaries of its artistic form—plays out only within the chalk circle of non-existence. The intentionality of art is thus characterized by the non-existence of the objects represented within the artistic work. It is the simple non-existence of artistic images and the nothing, which stands in place of the real object to which it is supposed to correspond. Images are posited, but in a sublated, negated form. Signs seem to ventriloquize: “what we signify here, is absent.” We have at the same time both active and passive forms of negation, which combine the features of privative and indeterminate negation. This is all nothing, we do not offer any other alternative, and we do not destroy these objects, because they do not exist in the first place. We do not affirm their existence, but we do not disprove it either. However, it is these particular things that are missing. We have established some specificity from the very beginning here, as well as the double gesture: the simultaneous rejection and evocation of objects. Yet all of this is given in an implicit, latent form of negation through what can be called underpositing: a work of art rarely uses a negative particle to indicate its subject, yet this negation is assumed (although exceptions exist). The present perspective is closest to the psychoanalytic view of art, which traditionally puts an emphasis on fantasy (and not on mimesis, like in classical theory). In the psychological structure, art is responsible for the phenomena that are not: whether they are anticipated, remembered, or displaced to “another stage.” If we look closer at Freud’s fantasy thesis (made programmatic in his short essay “Artists and Fantasizing” [Die Dichter und das Phantasieren, 1908]),18 it is more subtle. Art emerges where society allows the unconscious to surface, in a safe space, like child’s play, screened from a serious gaze. Art’s techniques are then the many ways of ciphering unconscious, transgressive desires. Compare my above discussion of the entrancing “attractions” that are art’s primary material. The argument is, then, not just that art deals with non-existent entities, but that this is a device that makes things and actions appear as though they did not exist. The non-existence, or deactivation, of art objects further creates a more multi-layered structure where a Superego creates a void for safely experiencing the phenomena that are already actively negative and contrary to symbolic norms. Lacan is faithful to Freud when he points out in the “Subversion of the Subject … ” that humans are animals who do not just pretend but “pretend to pretend.”19 This nuance does not, however, affect my main argument: that there is a primary negation at the core of any artistic experience.

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It is possible to discuss the non-existence of images represented in art, as well as the inefficacy of represented actions. The latter is particularly relevant for the performing arts: performance is not so much about reconstructing imaginary reality as it is about the actions performed on stage mockingly, about blocked performatives. If I tell a woman “I love you” on stage, this statement does not have irreversible romantic consequences, although the aura of love may still surround us in a partial, spectral way. If, in a public space, a performer shouts that she hates the government and implores the gods to eradicate its rulers, the very fact of performative aesthetics encloses this statement in quotation marks. However, this is the situation of two performatives, and the second implicit performative, stating “this is not a performative,” may itself be unconvincing. The situational inadequacy of art may be generalized as the under-efficacy of art as such. Art is defined negatively by its lack of efficacy, for example, in the works of Kant. A pleasing object is beautiful when it does not cause the subject to desire to possess it. The sublime causes fright in the subject—but not ­panic— because she is in no real physical danger.20 Overall, the first stage of aesthetic negation has quite positive effects at the level of the negated object: images are suspended in perception precisely because the negation of their referential objects is enough to refute their existence but too weak to refute them substantially. Although direct negation is not involved, the situation is similar to the Freudian concept of abnegation (­German— Verneinung) from the perspective of the object of negation. All subsequent stages of aesthetic negation do not directly deal with objects, things themselves. Instead they deal with the likenesses, images of objects, but only at the level of their ambiguous relationship to the corresponding object. Next, the interiorization of negation begins within the work of art itself, with negation gradually becoming more reflexive and pronounced. But, at each subsequent stage of expression, negation, among other things, keeps implying the following fundamental fact: the suspension of signs and images between being and non-being. This double move of fascination emphasizes the unreality of what is happening, delineates its artistic frame, and simultaneously convokes the things themselves, beyond the images which it thus denounces. What appears on the stage, page, or screen has an ambivalent nature: these images resemble real things and actions, but at the same time they are images of things and actions which do not really exist. If Plato treats aesthetic mimesis as an imitation of empirical objects, which in turn are not entirely real, then Aristotle reinterprets mimesis as a reconstruction of possible things that only seem to be imitated by actors and images (but are in fact projected by them as imaginary

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models for imitation, such as the mythical stories about Oedipus, Bacchus, etc.). In both cases there is an imitation of an imitation. In the twentieth century, Adorno emphasized that a work of art confronts the subject with non-existence: “The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it.”21 Yet the very existence of the work contradicts this unreal content. Gianni Vattimo subtly asserts that the aestheticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a consequence of the derealization of the era: the existence of anything is doubtful, requires proof, and easily lends itself to imitation through the media, and thus the world of objects gives way to the world of images and games: What we call “de-realization” and what we here try to delimit, is actually a series of phenomena that are also called “aestheticization.” The general aestheticization of existence – from the advertisement to the prevalence of the symbolic status  over use value and to the commodification of information, etc. – is actually a culmination of a process that coincides with modernity itself. It is characteristic for modernity that the changes in the aesthetic experience anticipated or at least represented, in emblematic forms, the transformations happening at a more general level of social life.22

There is no explicitly negative expression needed here: the aesthetical is under a negation, which is only in itself, not for itself. But, the explicitly negative expressions and events, of the kind that I describe in the second half of the chapter and that abound in contemporary mass art: violence, passionate scandals, and so on, also produce the effect of derealization. Not necessarily in the sense that violence is hard to imagine, but in the sense that such events effectively function as negative signs that deny the reality of proceedings. This effect of irrealization is to some extent true also for the actual violence: traumas often confer on victims a painful incapacity to fully experience them. Dialectically, the reverse effect is also possible in art. It can convoke the objects from non-existence into existence: after all, the work of art invents and composes objects, and, to the extent that these things really appear (as intentions, experiments, projects, etc.), we are present at the unique conception of something new that rarely occurs in everyday life (excluding child birth and the invention of new technologies). Aesthetic negation is thus reversible, in the sense that the neutralization of an entity by its depiction can be viewed, on the contrary, as an inception of a new utopian entity, at a weak imaginary stage. Yet the aesthetic negation hovers over art, as it belongs to the very structure of art itself. My accent on negation, which is a logical, subject-related category,

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even when it is implicit, emphasizes art as a social institution which—implicitly again—involves a decision. Artistic images, taken without the presupposition of art and aesthetics, would inevitably oscillate between the religious trance and hedonistically consumed attractions. Aesthetic experience depends on the sense of relief and security and on the effort to push away the particularly haunting or shocking images. Because this formal institutional design is not guaranteed, we see how negativity penetrates inside the work of art and constantly replays its primary scene within its texture. The first type of negation-in-itself is initially deprived of all phenomenality— it is completely latent. Yet it is this invisible step that lays the groundwork for the further unfolding of the dialectic. To exist as such, art must express and reinforce this dual function: the evocation of a given object from non-existence and the denunciation of the pretense of the images to represent or signify. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (the Rene Magritte’s caption underneath the picture of a pipe).23 From a logical perspective, this first step of this process is just an abstract, indefinite negation without any concrete effects in the material realm and without reflection of direct expression. This is the negation viewed from the point of view of its consequences for that which is negated or is perceived as already negated (represented objects). It is simple to see that such negation immediately passes into determinate negation, nihil privativum, as soon as it is emphasized in some way: the signs begin to explicitly refer to the absent objects (of which they are literally deprived) and to nullify themselves as inadequate to these corresponding objects. From here the transition to the next stage of negation is already obvious—a negative transformation of the structure and matter of signs. Art, unlike ritual, is both fantastic and fictitious. If we consider art as an image (which, of course, we are not obliged to do, since art can also function as self-sufficient entertainment, but our consideration is valid), then it acquires, according to Sartre, Marion, and several other phenomenologists, negative intentionality.24 This means that the imaginary object of contemplation is nothing. Indeed, the objects depicted in art do not really exist, and even if they do exist (e.g., a scene from nature, a narrative, or a photograph), the pertinent forms of imagination still intertwine them with nothingness. One may argue against Sartre that speech at this level does not constitute/engage with “Nothing” as a particular instance. There is still no reflection of “Nothing”—it emerges only in the act of aesthetic expression at a later stage of reflection. Nevertheless, it is clear that the images generated by art—its representations—appear in a nullified form, in quotation marks, with a question mark. Their negation as existing

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objects, as performed by the subject who inevitably performs a “reality check,” does not lead to their complete annulment, but, to the contrary, makes them ineradicable, like ghosts, as having been already subjected to negation. This incomplete form of negation signifies that aesthetic objects are never unequivocally valuable: it is always possible to see them as empty and meaningless, full of self-parody and false pathos. For this reason, we need a spiral of reflection, which symbolizes the void and makes boredom interesting— the path that not everyone is willing to take. This is why art, according to Kant’s third Critique, possesses universal value, but this value is not guaranteed. Even for the “best” works of art there is the possibility for an apathetic reception or the destruction of pathos through parody.25 This effect is distinctly apparent in Brecht’s theory of acting. It is well known that Brecht taught actors not to directly identify with the characters they were playing, but rather to cultivate a sense of alienation from them. This technique, known as the “distancing effect” (Verfremdung), serves as a negation of the role. The actor in effect plays a double role, alternately occupying the character’s own position as well as the position of the actor playing the character’s role, thereby negating both positions. Consider the example of Lars von Trier’s Brechtian film Dancer in the Dark. Von Trier’s film did not satisfy many critics and educated viewers because the film, in their opinion, turned out to be an overly sentimental tear-jerker, thus leaving viewers with little room for forming their own interpretations. This film, in my opinion, is absolutely outstanding, and the nature of von Trier’s previous filmography excludes the possibility of taking seriously the literal, sentimental interpretation. The sentimental conclusion of the film, as with musical numbers and the series of improbable events that comprise the plot, is parodic. But, in this case, parody and the defamiliarization of the ensuing form of the musical within the film do not weaken the sentimental pathos, but strengthen it, thereby causing a paroxysm. This is pure pathos, not genuine compassion for the poor migrant woman. This is the blueprint for Aristotelian catharsis. The fact that art is directed at the non-existent does not simply remain a fact of its objective insignificance. This is just the first moment and step of its reflexive logic, which unleashes the process of negation within the work itself, at the level of both the sign and the image. The work, first of all, must negate itself and its object, thereby asserting/confirming, recalling, and repeating its own non-existence. Secondly, the work must negate, displace, and invert its own cultural and ritual impact. Religion, like play, is not art: it is based upon the faith in the reality of events and on the supposed magical effect, although it is based

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on invention and symbolism. In becoming art, ritual reveals its stacked cards, but for this it needs to displace the cult effect again and again. Art “switches off ” the ritual and blocks real-world activity. Although Aristotle emphasizes that theatre is drama, literally an act, theater in and of itself does not work. Its goal, on the contrary, is passive endurance (“pathos”), and this is the force, which opposes action and aims at its suspension. The negative effect, suspension, by no means indicates a weakness of art in comparison with religion or its frivolity. On the contrary, negation reinforces the effect in comparison with the cult: helping it to survive for a long time (as Nietzsche’s Apollonian fiction allows one to last in the Dionysian tumult), exposing the artistic sleights of hands and allowing the viewer to access something more, not less, than the sacred object. In this case, art, in comparison with the primitive cult, is real not as a thing, but as a force that leaves distance with regard to its object. In the next section, we will speak in this regard of the “free thing.”

2. The Castration of the Gaze and the Shrouding Effect of the Image In addition to the bracketed suspension of images and the conventionality of signs, the work of art repeats the effect of amplification-through-suspension within the work itself, due to the inverse play of the figure and the ground, by smuggling in new positions under the guise of a self-evident (at least within the work’s internal world) context. This produces a shift in the viewer’s attention, causing key images to be perceived, as though, by the peripheral, more powerful, vision, disappearing from the zone of consciousness. The result of this, according to the dialectical logic of double negation, is the specific effect of reality within the work, which is achieved by expressing the reality of the negative activity itself. All of this is not achieved by the use of explicit negation, but rather by various permutations of syntax and narrative structure. What constitutes negation here? Negation—previously operating at the level of existence—is repeated at the level of the artistic image which is not only suspended in its relation to reality (to positing), but also in relation to the attention or the pre-supposition of the viewer or reader. It is the passive privation of attention, taken from the perspective of the object of inattention, and not its subject. This is achieved not by a simple act of will, but rather by a set of concrete symbolic operations, which involve contrary inversion. This is already a relatively concrete form of negation. What does such a logical construction signify when applied at the level of art? The greater part of twentieth-century aesthetic thought is dedicated to the

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description and apology of art as a non-thematic contemplation, as peripheral vision. Indeed, we are often capable of aesthetic experiences only at the margins of our activity: not when we come to and closely study an already familiar landscape or image, but when something unexpectedly seizes our attention, catching first just the corner of our eye. But how does art transfer this or that image into the ground? For this, it is necessary to “turn off ” our thematic and affirmative perception: to negate, but to do so that the negated object remains expressed and tangible/palpable. From a logical point of view, we are discussing techniques which allow the negation of the sign or image without destroying it and, at the same time, without defining it in relation to another, non-negated sign or symbol. In this manner, negation as such becomes more precisely defined as indeterminate (no alternatives are offered) and passive (existing, but not acting, similar to Kant’s nihil negativum), as negation taken from the perspective of the negated material, be it a sign or image. This negation, as it should be, is powerless to destroy its corresponding object, much like the Freudian concept of abnegation, Verneinung (when, for example, the patient says “this is not my mother,” it means “this is my mother, but I do not recognize her”). We will now briefly enumerate the aesthetic theories concerning this mode of negation. Our first example is that of Walter Benjamin. His works on the flâneur and the mechanical reproducibility of works of art revolve around the aesthetic of the non-thematic gaze. The flâneur passes through the city, seeing every street in passing and at the odd moments that typically escape notice. Film, the newest form of art, trains an “absent-minded” viewer, much in the same way as a building which, by definition, is not intended for direct viewing, but for the frequent but fleeting perception of habit or for the view of the flâneur. Such a sort of passive sensorium is understood in the broadest sense as the effect of mimesis (not only in terms of mechanical reproduction, but in reproduction more generally). The repetition of the sensory experience removes the pathos of the object, its existence and reveals to us its pure thingly substance (“Einmal ist Keinmal,” or “just once doesn’t count”).26 Benjamin, in connection to this, writes that the photograph is a means to grasp the “optical unconscious” (an image which Rosalind Krauss develops in a somewhat different, more libidinally charged sense) understood as a non-thematic ground perception.27 For our purposes, it is important that Benjamin considers such perception as a feature of art in the modern era, the essence of which is destructive and negative. As he writes at the beginning of his essay on the age of mechanical reproduction:

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The Temptation of Non-Being [These new processes of reproduction] lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past—a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity. Both processes are intimately related to the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful agent is film. The social significance of film, even-and especially-in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most apparent in the great historical films. It is assimilating ever more advanced positions in its spread. When Abel Gance fervently proclaimed in 1927, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films …. All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, all the founders of religions, indeed, all religions, … await their celluloid resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gates,” he was inviting the reader, no doubt unawares, to witness a comprehensive liquidation.28

For Benjamin, the visual arts of the new type (following the “liquidation”) resemble architecture, and this parallel is all the more important for the performing arts (theatre, circus, performance) for which the order of representation and the fixed gaze on the screen/stage is much less natural than for the painting or literature. Richard Schechner, a leading scholar of modern theater, correctly asserts that theater in the twentieth century developed toward the concept of “selective inattention” (note that he uses a negative formula for defining background vision). A good performance provides viewers with the opportunity to leave the auditorium, become distracted, and return to the  auditorium. Breaking attention does not weaken the impact of the production, but indeed strengthens its trance-like and enchanting effects. As their attention “wanders” people begin picking up on events and images that would otherwise escape notice or remain only blurry side-visions: movements of spectators, gestures of performers not at the center of the stage, the overall arrangement and dynamics of the space. The performance can be contemplated; the spectator can choose to be in or out, moving her attention up and down a sliding scale of involvement. Selective inattention allows the patterns of the whole to be visible, patterns that otherwise would be burned out of consciousness by a too intense concentration.29 Schechner writes of the Japanese theatrical tradition of Noh that the proper way to ‘watch’ noh is in a hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping. Among the noh audience are many whose eyes are closed, or heavylidded. These experts are ‘paying attention’ by relaxing their consciousness, allowing material to stream upward from their unconscious to meet the sounds/

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images streaming outward from the noh stage. In this state of porous receptive inattention each individual spectator is carried along in noh’s.30

Similar ideas are found in the works of French aestheticians Caillois, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty. The most interesting of these thinkers, at least for our purposes, is Lacan.31 Lacan argues that the function of visual art is neither to show or demonstrate an image nor to draw the eye to itself. Rather, visual art serves as camouflage, protecting against the evil eye (invidia) by transforming both the object and the observer into bright spots among bright spots. The gaze is objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, and it is characteristic for such objects to be located on the periphery of perception. Examples of this include the use of anamorphosis in painting. Consider Holbein’s painting Ambassadors, which includes a hidden skull, only visible when viewing the painting from the side, or the story of the Ancient Greek painter Parrhasius, who painted a curtain so life-like that his rival Zeuxis tried to open it and reveal what lay behind it. Theoretically, Lacan divides the visual datа into images and the sources of light. The image as a whole draws the viewer’s attention, while the sheer light simultaneously attracts and repels it, preventing the viewer from seeing the objects when viewing the painting directly. In the second instance, the visible object of the painting is not just an image, but also a screen that blocks the light. It is important, however, not just that the visible object blocks the light, but that it is perceived as a screen (like the curtain of Parrhasius), causing it to be seen just as an image, deprived of a represented object. A work of art is not merely an image of reality, but a fragment of reality, viewed as an image (and, therefore, suspended and de-potentiated). In a picture, Lacan explains, a peculiar dialectic of the gaze and the eye, of watching and seeing, unfolds. The gaze (attention) distinguishes and fixes the image but loses the object itself. We never quite gaze the object but are watching what we expect to happen to the object or what is behind the object. The gaze is thus the organ of anxiety. This is why Lacan termed it objet petit a. Seeing, on the contrary, perceives objects passively and corporally, but in the background. And when you “deposit” your inflamed, “erect” gaze in the picture, the eye begins to wander over its other parts in the regime of background seeing. In this sense, art draws from the logic of human relations more broadly. Already in the tenth seminar devoted to anxiety, Lacan identifies the phenomenon of the gaze which bears apprehension and anxiety, which appears to us like a blind eye.32 The paradox is that the eye—the organ of sight—appears,

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for the one who is watched, like a screen blocking her vision. Therefore, the gaze is an objet a, a piece of being that remains unmirrored and uncommunicated to the other and, at the same time, alien to the subject herself. We encounter this in art, seeing in the narcissistic enjoyment of the mirror image of the picture (a Madonna, for example) something that catches us by surprise and blocks our outward, subjective “I.” As Lacan writes, To see what is mere illusion being torn away, all it takes is for a stain to be brought into the visual field and you can see where the point of desire is truly tethered … I shall say that a stain is all it takes to function as a beauty spot … but what could be blinder than a spot?33

In the eleventh seminar, Lacan refers to the well-known example of Sartre, in which the gaze of the other is cast upon an individual at an unfortunate moment, transforming her into an object and depriving her of her freedom.34 Lacan clarifies this observation, noting that Sartre’s example contains not two, but three actors: the Other, the subject herself, and what the latter in turn looked at (for example, she was peeking through a keyhole to catch two lovers in the act).35 Strictly speaking, all of this unfolds within the framework of the gaze: the  subject is not simply objectified, but caught unawares in her own visual pleasure, in the process of depersonalization, which Sartre correctly terms as “nothing.” The affect of entrapment—the phenomena of shame and guilt—is absolutely critical in the formation of culture and human subjectivity, although the primary guilt is that we are not the subject completely, and the gaze directed at us does not see us, but instead looks past us. The clandestine seeing and the denouncing gaze clash and layer upon each other. What is traumatic is the loss by the subject of the alibi of the beholder, so she does not simply become and object (as Sartre seems to imply) but is objectified qua subject (or the nothingness). In the same way, Hamlet catches Claudius in the “mousetrap” of the gaze (into which he has himself long been seized by both the ghost and the mother). The very sight of Claudius is what is sought and caught in his viewing of the play within the play. Unlike many others, Lacan realizes that the question of non-thematic perception is connected with the logic of negation. In the language of psychoanalysis, Lacan terms negation as “castration,” emphasizing, following Kant, that behind any simple absence (nihil negativum) there is a fantasy of either a virtual act of deprivation or a mirror opposite of the existing object (nihil privativum). Castration is a determinate, effective negation. Here is what Lacan writes:

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Every organ in the human body performs a variety of functions. The eye, too, fulfills several functions at once. The discrimination function, which is responsible for sharp central vision, occurs within the fovea. Yet something quite different occurs on the remaining retinal surface, which experts incorrectly attribute to scotopic function. The gap in vision is also found in this area of the eye, for it is in this region, which exists to help see in low-light conditions, that provides the best opportunity for distinguishing the effects of light. If you wish to see a star of the fifth or sixth magnitude, you must not look directly at it – this phenomenon is explained by the well-known Arago effect. In order to see such a star, one must look off to the side … In my reference to the unconscious, I am dealing with the relation to the organ. It is not a question of the relation to sexuality, or even to the sex, if it is possible to give any specific reference to this term. It is a question rather of the relation to the phallus, in as much as it is lacking in the real that might be attained in the sexual goal. It is in as much as, at the heart of the experience of the unconscious, we are dealing with that organ – determined in the subject’s experience of organic insufficiency in the castration complex – that we can grasp to what extent the eye is caught up in a similar dialectic.36

“In its relation to desire, reality appears as marginal” (i.e., it is located on the margins of the perceptible world), Lacan adds.37 He says the same thing in his interpretation of the anamorphosis of the skull from Holbein, the symbol of negation as such: All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated – annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi [(-ф)] of castration, which for us, centers the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives. But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture. This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear.38

In this way, painting castrates the eye or, more specifically, the gaze undergoes castration. According to Lacan, the gaze inserts itself (se dépose) into the image, thereby relieving the eye and granting it the opportunity to see: to enjoy the

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lighting and the contours of the object in the visual field. The same thing, approximately, occurs with the “phallus,” the castration of which is a condition of the desire and material relations of the subject. Without such moments of weakness and infirmity, without the accompanying panic, and without the demonic force which is imagined to be responsible for such moments, the individual cannot become a proper subject and enter into a relationship with the object. I would add to this idea of Lacan’s that, in general, the modern painting is based on perspective, literally a way of “looking through.” The painting constitutes a sort of “window” (Leon Batista Alberti) in that one looks “through” it and not “at” it. The painting therefore loses its golden, purely luminous components which characterize the pre-Renaissance painting. Here, in contrast to Parrhasius, there are, as a rule, objective images, and this objectivity is achieved through the use of reflection: the painting contains both the focal point (in the distance) and the realistic images, which are intersected by the gaze mid-way to the focal point. Very often, the painting contains an image of a window or a door, which, together with all of the other elements, may be looked “at” or looked “through.” Lacan’s other works on aesthetics are primarily devoted to literature and drama. If we take his well-known reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, then, for all the obscurity of Lacan’s interpretation and for all the differences between literary and visual materials, the common thread will be the same.39 Antigone is the focus of attention in Sophocles’ tragedy and the object which blinds the viewer with her beauty and allows all the remaining features (emotions, for example) to function mechanically and unconsciously (for instance, the choir, which is analogous here to the background of a painting). Antigone captivates the subject with the unbearable brilliance that emanates from her, as a result of which desire falls into the trap—a trap embodied in the zone of radiance and brilliance: Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire. This line of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes at the very moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the center of tragedy, since it is the fascinating image of Antigone herself. We know very well that over and beyond the dialogue, over and beyond the question of family and country, over and beyond the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor.40

Antigone’s beauty stems from her position at, and even beyond, the border of two types of death, symbolic and physical. Lacan compares Antigone with

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the heroines of Sade, who suffer but do not die, as though symbolizing the indestructibility of being. It turns out that Antigone is so beautiful that she is already in a certain  sense dead or “castrated.” Once exposed to negation, Antigone becomes almost “nothing” or at least comes to dwell at the very edge of nothingness. She thereby affixes attention back onto herself as she balances on the edge of the abyss. This anguished gaze is driven by a forbidden desire. In this sense, the focal point of the work is not the subject, with whom we could identify, but rather an object (of maternal desire) akin to the Freudian concept of the fetish.41 According to Freud, the “shine” (Ger.—Glanz) is a glance that ends at the last possible moment so as not to look at the forbidden or (even) impossible sacral object. Such an understanding of fetishism promotes an aesthetics that would be contrary to the Formalists’ “defamiliarization”: the one which would immerse the viewer within the work of art. The Lacanian objet a is the (further) development of the Freudian understanding of fetish: it is the cause and sustenance of desire but does not constitute the purpose of desire. The purpose can be anything that remains or surrounds the subject, around the glowing center of the work of art. In the case of Antigone, it is not clear, however, what exactly remains in the peripheral view around the hypnotic heroine. Lacan, however, indicates that “what occurs concerns subsidence, the piling up of different layers of the presence of the hero in time. That’s what remains undetermined: in the collapse of the house of cards represented by tragedy, one thing may subside before another, and what one finds at the end when one turns the whole thing around may appear in different ways.”42 In the case of tragedy, in fact, we can see with our peripheral vision a sort of carnivalesque destruction which appears here as something between Kant’s “free play,” Nietzsche “Dionysianism” (which frames the Apollonian image in a completely orthodox way), and the Freudian game of fort-da (requiring rejection as a step toward appropriation). Negation as the castration of the image leads to the boundaries of the ensuing moments of aesthetic negation, where destruction itself becomes the goal. But, for now, this drive remains essentially unconscious. One aspect of Lacan’s thought process here is not clear: why he opposes his reading of Antigone to Hegel’s, which Lacan terms the theory of the “conflict of discourses.”43 Undoubtedly, the negativity of Antigone goes beyond antagonism, burning herself—but who said that one excludes the other? The significance of the dialectical approach to negativity is precisely that it unfolds on several levels, and the contrary opposition, a negation reflected into its own object, is one of them; whether it is the higher or lower level depends on the point of view. Antigone confronts Creon as the unwritten law confronts the written one, as the

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truth of the individual confronts the universal truth, as the night’s moonlight confronts the day’s sunlight. And it is in this wrestling/combative intertwining, where the night meets and is caught by the day, where the night is caught unawares by the daytime, that the negative as such, the melancholy-depressive side of the negation as its passive result (in contrast to the active aggression that is used by both sides in the fight) emerges in the figure of Antigone. Lacan, who was not a professional art historian, uncovers the vein of artistic creativity through an atypical route, but his aesthetic views are confirmed by the works of many contemporary artists and critics. Take, for example, the case of Lars von Trier: I have a theory that any film must be bound to the central field of view, otherwise everything becomes uninteresting. If you do something that looks unusual or appears on the periphery of the frame, you must at least leave some of film’s traditional techniques unchanged.44

It seems improbable that von Trier is familiar with Lacan’s aesthetics, but he nonetheless reproduces it almost word-for-word and makes its aesthetic implications clear. The double capturing of the eye and gaze signifies that the departure of art into pure abstraction, characteristic of high modernism, turned out to be a dead end, not in the sense of excessive radicalism, but in the sense of its inability to achieve a desired aesthetic effect. The disruptive negative effect only works if it coexists with the negated form or convention (a vivid example of this is the work of Francis Bacon, which both destroys the image and parodies the canon). It is possible, of course, to term the corresponding aesthetic “PostModern,” but it also coincides with the intentions of symbolism of the early twentieth century, even before the collapse of Modernist art into pure “zaum’.” Another witness of the non-thematic in art was Roland Barthes, a theorist who analyzed individual works of art more systematically than did Lacan. It should be mentioned that Barthes refers to Lacan’s eleventh seminar in his seminal work on photography Camera Lucida, but he quotes not the section on the gaze but the chapter on luck (Tyche) (i.e., Lacan’s influence is obvious but unconscious).45 Barthes distinguishes two features of photography: studium and punctum. Punctum refers to the insignificant, at first glance, details that are not in the foreground but make the photograph interesting and unique. Studium constitutes the focus and theme of a photograph. It is not quite clear, by the way, why this theory cannot be applied to painting. Similar ideas are found in Barthes’ earlier works on literature, with its “writing degree zero.” There are less radical approaches in aesthetics which emphasize not the “background” as such, but the transition from the figure to the ground and back.

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This Gestalt switch (so well depicted in Antonioni’s film Blow Up) surfaces in the works of Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Rancière, and others. In Rancière’s “aesthetic” regime of art, the previously background, marginal phenomena are suddenly made noticeable and represented. Rosalind Krauss believes that the avant-garde removes the contradiction between ground and the figure and finds the third and fourth members which are neither figure nor ground but are located beyond this opposition.46 Rosalind Krauss explicitly develops her ideas from Lacan’s aesthetic thought. From her perspective, the phenomenon of peripheral vision—Krauss uses Benjamin’s term “optical unconscious”—is best explained on the basis of the logic of negation. Krauss deals with this logic, relying upon the square that she calls the “Klein scheme”. The scheme, or in the mathematic sense, a “group,” of Klein was used extensively in French Structuralist thought, particularly by Levi-Strauss and Lacan, but for the purposes of our philosophical study it should be mentioned that, in fact, we are talking about the square of Aristotle/ Apuleius long known in logic. The idea in both instances is the equivocity of negation: sometimes it means non-X (anything that is not X), and sometimes— the opposite of X (anti-X). Therefore, negation generates not two poles, but four—connected among themselves by horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. Thus, applying this logic to visual perception and Gestalt theory, Krauss draws attention to the fact that the famous opposition of figure-ground does not fully describe the visuality.47 There still exists a non-figure and non-ground that 1) occupies the place of the figure, draws the attention of the eyes, and, at the same time, does not represent a well-delineated form, and 2) an element of the ground that, for a number of reasons, draws attention to itself qua ground and does not pass over to the status of a figure. Both the non-background and non-figure are reflexive figures, introducing a frame, a grid, or a gesture into the plane of the artwork, echoing the very structure of a picture. As Krauss puts it, “The frame-within-a-frame is a way of entering the figure into the pictorial field and simultaneously negating it, since it is inside the space only as an image of its outside, its limits, its frame.”48 So, for example, Max Ernst’s illustration of fingers holding an object attracts attention to the subject only to then redirect it toward the space between objects, the frame of perceptual grasping. The grids and repeated nested circles in the works of Mondrian, Duchamp, and Stella do not leave any figurative images remaining, all while using the most perfect form possible (the square or circle). Krauss also cites the example of Conrad’s novel Typhoon, in which darkness, the negative background of vision, diverges and forms a background for a different, even more negative type of darkness.

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The Temptation of Non-Being The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth—the starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe, revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.49

The most interesting aspect of this passage is precisely that mode of aesthetic perception which preserves the “looking awry” or the “glance in the process of being distracted,” without shifting the object from the background to the foreground and thereby preserving it as an object or situation in the real world.50 The non-ground and non-figure typically arise simultaneously but constitute two interrelated effects of introducing a frame into an image. On the one hand, the non-ground causes us to see the very background itself, its very material and formless substance. On the other hand, the non-figure is a product which deictically indicates its subject (the viewer or author), locating the point of totalization in its very center, in which there is no image. Krauss provides a more concrete outline for the Lacanian pairings of the glance and eye, and the objet a and narcissistic image. She correctly understands that in Lacan’s work both the “gaze” and the “eye” are already themselves results of negation or the removal of conventional figurative sight. Neither one nor the other “sees” in the typical sense of the word, which is to say that they do not (really) see the image. One is blinded by the luminous point of attention, and the other wanders among things, testing but not recognizing them. In her work on Andrei Platonov, the contemporary Russian-American scholar Olga Meerson reached the conclusion that he practiced not formalistic “defamiliarization” (the presentation of phenomena in a new, unexpected context in a surprising manner) but “refamiliarization.”51 Refamiliarization too is a game of sorts between the ground and the figure, but one in which unusual objects and features in the story are described in media res as perfectly ordinary. Platonov even includes a figure of this kind of gaze in his novel Chevengur, the so-called “eunuch of soul” whose castration, just as Lacan describes, signifies the castration of thematic vision.52 At the same time, refamiliarization achieves an effect very similar to that of defamiliarization. Refamiliarization also reveals things but does not separate them from the background, does not produce what Benjamin termed as “shock.” Platonov himself liked the phrase “free thing” which, according to Meerson, describes the result of refamiliarization. Refamiliarization has its own techniques. Meerson refers to the inversion of the logical subject and the predicate (themes and rhemes), the use of adverbial participles, and other techniques of presenting the event as though it has

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already been implied to have occurred. These techniques, of course, are hardly particular to Platonov. Meerson compares his writing to the painting of Brueghel, specifically his paintings Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and The Conversion of Paul.53 In both paintings, Brueghel intentionally places the title scene on the very edge of the frame, where it is reduced by perspective and is difficult for the viewer to notice. As we have discussed earlier, that perspective itself transfers images to the ground, although Brueghel is a radical example of this. Another technique of refamiliarization in Platonov is encoding ideological content with irregularities in the speech of simple people. Thus, the sentence, “Humankind resembles the highest of things and the harmony of schemes,” becomes not just a mistake, but a formula parodying bureaucracy.54 To the examples of Meerson, I would like to add yet another negative technique, that of nominalization. When you transform a common word into a proper name, or use an existing and anchored proper name to name someone else, what is achieved is the sedimentation of meaning into an apparent “object.” For example, Platonov says that a peasant took the name Dostoyevsky, and then continues to call himself, diegetically, “Dostoyevsky,” in spite of the fact that there is normally only one “Dostoevsky” presumed to be universally known. Dostoyevsky, the writer’s name, is thus negated and deactivated, a strange identification of a revolutionary peasant with the great writer, the author depicting the potential of evil in the human heart, used as a matter of fact. A similar play, and even a more radical one, emerges in Toni Morrison’s novel The Songs of Solomon (1977).55 When depicting an African American community in a Northern US town, Morrison uses toponyms like “Not Doctor Street,” or “No Mercy Hospital.” The characters’ proper names are also nominalizations of unusual and often negative meanings, such as “Macon Dead” (baptized so because he was asked who his father was, and the father was dead!), or “Pilate.” The fact that Morrison uses the actual negative particles redoubles the effect of figure made ground. Proper names are implicitly negations, and negated in their turn, so that they create a strange universe of Verneinung: the town exists, but it does so under a sign of negation. Not only does this address African Americans’ alienation in a white world, but it also creates a powerful fictional reality that pulls in the reader. The protest against reality (as in “no mercy”) and a denial of recognition (“not doctor”) combine to constitute a fictional, non-thetic reality. The names are windows into the unconscious, revealing something that the common names fail to reveal. This surplus signification is particularly true of the names of the oppressed, who feel misnamed and lack the language to express themselves, speaking instead, awkwardly, a borrowed language (the case

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of both Platonov’s peasants and Morrison’s African Americans). But even more broadly, any proper names function in a special way, negate language, and turn the linguistic universe into a phantasmagoria. Here is how Morrison motivates the unusual naming in the novel itself, discussing the special relationship of African Americans to their names: [He was] wondering what lay beneath the names. … How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do. Like the street he lived on, recorded as Mains Avenue, but called Not Doctor Street by the Negroes in memory of his grandfather, who was the first colored man of consequence in that city. … He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood Bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness. Macon Dead, Sing Byrd, Crowell Byrd, Pilate, Reba, Hagar, Magdalene, First Corinthians, Milkman, Guitar, Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State (he just stood around and swayed), Small Boy, Sweet, Circe, Moon, Nero, HumptyDumpty, Blue Boy, Scandinavia, Quack-Quack, Jericho, Spoonbread, Ice Man, Dough Belly, Rocky River, Gray Eye, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, Cool Breeze, Muddy Waters, Pinetop, Jelly Roll, Fats, Lead-belly, Bo Diddley, Cat-Iron, Peg-Leg, Son, Shortstuff, Smoky Babe, Funny Papa, Bukka, Pink, Bull Moose, B.B., T-Bone, Black Ace, Lemon, Washboard, Gatemouth, Cleanhead, Tampa Red, Juke Boy, Shine, Staggerlee, Jim the Devil, Fuck-Up, and Dat Nigger.56

Pseudo-Longinus, in his treatise on the sublime, lists in detail various tropes and rhetorical devices that create the effect of the sublime. All of these devices serve to complement and strengthen the natural, but Longinus emphasizes one as being particularly adept at conveying the natural as such. This is “hyperbaton.” I apologize to the reader for this long quotation from this classical work: In the same category we must place hyperbaton. This figure consists in arranging words and thoughts out of the natural sequence, and is, as it were, the truest mark of vehement emotion. Just as people who are really angry or frightened or indignant, or are carried away by jealousy or some other feeling – there are countless emotions, no one can say how many – often put forward one point and then spring off to another with various logical interpolations, and then wheel round again to their original position, while, under the stress

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of their excitement, like a ship, before a veering wind, they lay their words and thoughts on one tack then another, and keep altering the natural order of sequence into innumerable variations – so, too, in the best prose writers the use of hyperbaton allows imitation to approach the effects of nature. For art is only perfect when it looks like nature and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art. Take the speech of Dionysus the Phicaean, in Herodotus. “Our fortunes stand upon a razor’s edge, men of Ionia, whether we be free men of slaves, aye, and runaway slaves. Now, therefore if you are willing to endure hardship, at the moment there is toil for you, but you will be able to overcome your enemies.” Here the natural order was, “O men of Ionia, now is the time for you to endure toil, for our fortunes stand at razor’s edge.” He has transposed “the men of Ionia” and started at once with his fears, as though the terror was so immediate that he could not even address the audience first. He has also inverted the order of ideas … The result is that his words do not seem premeditated but rather wrung from him.”57

First of all, it is striking that the negative affect transmitted by the work leads to a violation of form worthy of a modernist plot. That is, negativity unfolds both at the level of content and at the level of form. And this is not simply an instance of negation or destruction, but an inversion. The primary function of rearrangement is the inversion. The (logical) predicate is placed before the logical subject, with the subject coming later. Why does this result in an effect of naturalness? Precisely because we consider the logical subject to be the most natural element of meaning. The subject typically precedes speech, it is named deictically, and the speech act then develops a new content, a predicate. Here, on the contrary, it is the predicate which is “natural” because it occupies the space of the subject which, when it is finally named, has already been implicitly named and understood by the reader, creating the impression that the work peeks into the reader’s soul and, like a mind reader, predicts the subject in advance. We will further discuss the functions of inversion in art more generally. But here the inversion plays a functional role in the transfer of the figure into the ground, which Longinus associates with the concept of the “sublime.” Dialectical development is characterized by the fact that the preceding stages already presuppose subsequent, more developed stages, as their hidden ground, so that here a correlated opposition (inversion) emerges to create the indefinitely negative effect of “switching off ” images. All of the above-mentioned ways of transferring the image into the ground have an obvious social significance. They make art democratic and beauty unostentatious. They remove the layer of fetishization

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from things and contribute to a sort of perceptual communism, an effect that is explicitly mentioned in the works of  Leftists like Benjamin, Platonov, and Barthes. The logical constitution of the non-thematic is negative. Although one can explain non-thematic vision simply as a separate mode of perception, it is nevertheless clear that it is an incomplete or sublated form of perceptual negation that has been overcome. As Freud demonstrated, negation does not annul its subject completely. Rather, it is as if negation leaves the subject in the realm of the unconscious, as a potentiality and not as actuality. This has the same effect as the Hegelian Aufhebung (“Sublation”), in the event of overcoming of some form of life or logical principle: it is sublated, but it continues to exist in a depotentiated form. Something similar happens with symbols and images in the aesthetic gaze: their binding to the everyday world is sublated, but they acquire a particular kind of indestructible autonomy. Negation constitutes such images in art, while in the realm of everyday perception they can appear, on the contrary, as natural.

3. The Differentiation of the Image and the Self-Negation of Art The effect of reality is also achieved by means opposed to those discussed above: namely, by accentuating the image’s internal differentiation (i.e., difference from itself) due to de-automatization, that is, the violation of the canonical aesthetic form. By criticizing themselves, artistic images achieve a greater degree of persuasiveness by stepping out of their boundaries. This phenomenon is typically termed “defamiliarization” (in Russian, “ostranenie,” the opposite of the “refamilarization” or “ne-ostranenie” that I had discussed above). Again, we see that negating negation produces the effect of reality. Yet in previous instances reality emerges as a hidden subject, whereas here reality erupts from the work as a quality, as strangeness, as a predicate. Unlike previous examples, here there is a purely indefinite form of negation, nihil negativum—which, in the case of difference, is also latent. Differentiation is an unmanifested and unreflected form of negation. Nobody directly says “no.” But formal techniques of this sort bear a clearly negative character, since they only have meaning in relation to that which is already given, a normative form of expression. The negated object is discarded, but nothing comes to take its place, and thus the object itself tears apart from itself. Hence the cognitive illusion, and the existential sense of ecstasy (trance), into which the viewer or reader is carried away.

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The need for an image to express and emphasize its negativity logically leads to this particular stage of negation in art: the violation of artistic form. It is all the same abstract form of negation, and it works exclusively in that material which is negated, without giving any alternative. But it works. It works now not just with the existence of things, but with the very material of signs/symbols, usually with their organization in space and time, their form and structure. Therefore, being abstract in itself, negation leads to concrete, tangible effects at the level of material signs, into which it introduces disorder and deviation. The existing order is broken, linear development is interrupted, and the exact portrait of reality becomes distorted. There is still no reflection of negation here: neither of its independent existence, nor of its transformation into the contrary. In the language of Plato, it is possible to say that this is the negation of the positive, with consequences for the positive and effects for the positive. The self-negation of art reveals the internal differentiation of the depicted object, its distinction from its self. In this sense, negation at this stage distinguishes its subject, animates it, differentiates it from the ground. The work of art, when understood this way, is the inverse of the previous stage of negation where, on the contrary, it switched off the gaze and the ground absorbed the figure. Nevertheless, it is the continuation of the same negative work of art. Art thus suspends the existing and fixed symbolic form, resorting to constant innovations in order to achieve a vivid effect of differentiation and to animate ordinary, everyday experience. A classic example of this is the modernist narrative, which deliberately evades the linear representation of events and rearranges, recombines these events against their default order.58 The Russian Formalists emphasized the importance of this: Tynianov wrote about parody, Bely, Tynianov, and Vygotsky—about the nonlinearity of narrative, Shklovsky— about metaphor as a means of defamiliarization, etc. Shklovsky famously said that a literary, hindered language allows us to “return” things that have been destroyed by habit to their presence: And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art is, then, to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “estranging objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious. … Art is a means of experience the process of creation. The artifact itself is quite important.59

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At the same time, the demonstration of the opaque material of poetry is also valuable: “the word as such,” building toward a linguistic materialism. But why? Concern for the demonstration of the materiality of art belongs more closely to 1950s–60s (the painting of Fontana and Hantaï, Celan’s poetry, Derrida’s theory of writing), but the Russian formalists are more precise in this respect, since they are interested in negativity as such: What constitutes poetry? The fact that the word is felt as a word, and not as a simple presentation of the named object or as an emotional outburst. Words and their structure, their meaning, their external and internal form do not constitute a neutral representation of reality but acquire their own weight and value. Why is all of this necessary? Why is it necessary to emphasize that the sign does not merge with its object? Because, along with the subconscious sense of indistinguishability between the sign and the object (A is A1), a subconscious feeling of their non-indistinguishability is equally necessary (A is not A1); this antinomy is necessary because without contradiction there cannot be any movement of concepts or signs, the relationship between the concept and sign becomes automated, lifeless, and the sensation of reality perishes.60

Yves-Alain Bois interprets Jakobson’s words in the spirit of Greenberg as an affirmation of the autonomy of the language, but Jakobson immediately explains that the telos of laying bare the word lies in demonstrating negativity to be a form of contradiction.61 Negativity (as is known since Heraclitus and Hegel) is a means of feeling and imagining movement, and this movement creates the sensation of “reality.” Adorno, from his later point of view, notes that modernist art established a sort of “canon of prohibitions” (e.g., on “realistic” methods): Artists with extreme sensitivity of taste, such as Stravinsky and Brecht, brushed taste against the grain on the basis of taste; dialectic lay hold of taste and drove it beyond itself, and this certainly is also its truth … As a consequence, art threatens to become allergic to itself; the quintessence of the determinate negation that art exercises is its own negation.62

Alain Badiou, describing the negativity of modernism, interprets it precisely as a product and manifestation of differentiation. Malevich serves as an example of this, especially with his painting, “White on White” (1918): Color and form are eliminated and only a geometrical allusion is retained. This allusion is the support for a minimal difference, the abstract difference of ground and form, and above all, the null difference between white and white, the difference of the Same – what we could call the vanishing of difference … We

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must beware of interpreting White on White as a symbol of the destruction of painting. On the contrary, what we are dealing with is a subtractive assumption (soustraction) … Why is this something other than destruction? Because, instead of treating the real as identity, it is treated right away as a gap.63

Thus, Badiou, following Deleuze, takes the side of Russian Formalists. But in our dialectical exposition, it is clear that it is completely groundless to choose only one interpretation of negativity. Negativity as difference does not replace, but implies all other forms of negativity: as a “switch-off ” (and this occurs with Malevich as well), as destruction (the joy of freedom from objects), and as depiction of “nothingness” (white light, in which everything becomes visible). Indeed, according to the theory of the Formalists, this first self-perception of modernism, the violation of grammar or of the typical conventions of genre structure leads to “de-automatization” and to a fresh view of objects that, on the one hand, exposes their existence and, on the other hand, produces a pure sign or symbol. What is achieved is either the effect of reality or, conversely, its hypnotic suspension. Longinus describes Homer in the following way: Homer … instead of dismissing the danger once and for all, depicts the sailors as being all the time, again and again, with every wave on the brink of death. Moreover, by forcing into an abnormal union prepositions not usually compounded he has tortured his language into conformity with the impending disaster, magnificently figured the disaster by the compression of language, and almost stamped on the diction the precise form of the danger – “swept out from under the jaws of destruction.”64

From this perspective, Modernist experiments at the beginning of the twentieth century—including Suprematism, Cubism, automatic writing of the OBERIU group and Surrealists—are valuable precisely because they destroy and reshuffle, the most basic structures of language and thus reveal both the word itself and its meaning. The Formalist school fetishizes the principles of destruction and violation, although it seems that it sets itself the almost phenomenological goals of reanimating perception and revealing the existence of things themselves. Pavel Medvedev, in the book The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship, pays detailed and critical attention to the “negative,” even “nihilistic” essence of Russian Formalism, because, as he shows, all of the structural effects that are revealed essentially boiled down to a violation of some supposed norm.65 It is not true that such negativity is necessarily something bad (as Medvedev seems to maintain), but he does produce the correct diagnosis.

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Incidentally, if we consider that Bakhtin took part in composing Medvedev’s book, then we must acknowledge that the Bakhtin circle developed an entirely new concept of negativity. In Voloshinov’s Freudianism and in Medvedev’s The Formal Method, both accuse their opponents of a strategy aiming merely to negate the existing canons. Whereas the Formalists simply look for violations of form, the Freudians also expose instances of the deliberate overturning of moral precepts. In both instances, “ideological” analysis becomes an alternative to thoughtless inversion. “Dialogue” from Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is a combination of the ideological effect of art with its negative polemical work: the combination is embodied, as it is known, in a bi-directional and ambivalent, ironic word. But if we consider the late work of Bakhtin, dedicated to Francois Rabelais and the popular art of the Renaissance, we see that he is already engaged in a formal inversion of the relationship of formal culture.66 This inversion is the nucleus of the popular festivities, to which Bakhtin, in the spirit of the ritual school in anthropology, reduces all art together. The movement passes over from simple negation to contrariness as inversion. The Formalists were also concerned with inversions, and it is clear that the inversion also produces the effect of estrangement, but it does this in the second and third turn, being essentially a higher and more reflexive form of negation than the simple violation of the canon. Inversions will be further explored later in this chapter. One vivid example of Formalism’s negative tendency is Vygotsky’s wellknown analysis of Bunin’s short story “Light Breathing.”67 It appears to be a realistic story, but, as Vygotsky explains with reference to the distinction between the plot (siuzhet) and story (fabula), the reshuffling of episodes of the protagonist’s life in a nonlinear sequence creates a compelling rhythmic pattern. It is significant that the analysis is based on the relationship of the plot to the normative narrative, a linear sequence of facts. But Vygotsky, unlike other Formalists, was aware of the constitutive negativity of their method and did not stop at it, moving from the  simple violation of form to the contrary opposition that is behind it. Any negativity functions only by referencing and preserving the negated positive content on which it builds. There is no negation without affirmation. But negation directly aestheticizes its object and tempts the viewer by the force of its inner ambiguity. Negation does not destroy or erase the object but preserves it as an allusion. Being incomplete, it suspends the existence of its object and turns it from a localized fact into a free-floating, non-negateable (for the second time) haunting mirage.

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4. The Figuration and Sublimation of the Symbol An ellipsis lies at the core of all rhetorical figures: direct expression falls and is replaced by its modification.68 The function of the figure seems to resemble the effect of “defamiliarization,” but, in reality, what is at play here is the pure logic of privation and deprivation, not just the logic of transgression and differentiation. On the one hand, metaphor involves the manifestation or sharpened perception of an unexpected side of the object, and on the other, it is accompanied by an ellipsis which sublimates the fallen symbol, granting it the status of higher reality (an effect which corresponds to the affirmative function of art described in the Introduction section, with its play of attention, and the first section of this chapter (“Things That Do Not Exist and Actions That Are Not Carried Out”), with its force of negativity). Ellipsis also directly mirrors the general ontological status of the work of art as deprived of its own objects. It performs and reflects on this negativity, embedding it in the work of art and, in the process, investing it with this metafunction. Ellipsis is the fundamental trope, lying at the core of all other figures. The only exception is simile, which explicitly forces the trope into confrontation with its “literal” referent and, in this way, represents a reflexive form of symbolizing, performing, and dramatizing the trope. Whenever speech circumvents and passes over something in silence, it fails to carry out its communicative and cognitive functions and, instead, carries out other functions, such as play (as in a riddle), ritual or prayer, and ornament (the listing of attributes instead of direct nomination). As in the first case, the entire effect lies in the fact that that which has fallen out or been passed over in silence can nonetheless be guessed and is more or less comprehensible both to author and to the intelligent listener or reader. An example would be Stéphane Mallarmé’s cipher poems like “Victoriously from beautiful suicide having fled …, ” an image which the reader must herself understand to refer to a sunset, though Mallarmé never mentions it by name.69 The effect is deepened by the fact that what is described is a negative phenomenon: the eclipse of the sun vividly enacts a no less vivid eclipse of meaning. Mallarmé also wrote about this from a theoretical standpoint: The Parnassians take the entire thing and show it, but, in this way, they lose the mystery and deprive the reader the sweet joy of believing that she herself is the  one who creates. To name an object is to destroy three quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is given to be guessed little by little: to suggest it, that is the dream.70

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It is also worth recalling the detective fiction that was so popular in the twentieth century. In general, beauty, as Lacan saw it, is a means of bypassing and encircling the void of the “real.”71 The trajectory of this encircling comprises the beautiful grace in which there is always an element of fetishism. In a certain sense, the opposition of the beautiful and the sublime (or grace and dignity, in Schiller’s terms) is false, both empirically and conceptually, because the harmonious refinement of “grace” is constituted precisely through the avoidance of something which embodies the forbidden absolute. Paradigmatic in this respect is Burke’s description of female beauty: Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty?72

It is clear that the subtle attraction of the neckline derives from the fact that it encircles the breasts (the nipples), which are not completely exposed and which constitute a secret and the object of desire (incidentally, in the eighteenth century breasts were almost completely exposed). Thus, this is a case of the beautiful floating freely around the “real,” on which the gaze, neither free nor conscious, is fixed. This corresponds completely with Freud’s concept of fetishism, according to which the final barrier separating us from the feminine mystery and, by extension, from the recognition (or denial) of castration is deified.73 It is interesting to note that the unmistakably present but covered breast is expressed here in negative language which would have fit better with the absence of a phallus in the female genitalia. It is not always the case that metaphor is explicitly privative, that is, refers to something definite. Sometimes we do not know what exactly is replaced or passed over in silence, even though it is clear that something is missing. In this case, what we have is not a simply a figure, but, rather, a symbol. Symbol was a key word in the aesthetics of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: the Romantics (Schelling, Novalis, Görres, Jean Paul) considered it the central aesthetic phenomenon. Schelling saw the symbol as an example of the  paradoxical “indifference” (dialectical unity, Hegel would say) of allegory, which he understands as the signification of the universal by way of the particular, and “schematism,” which he defines as the signification of the particular by way of the universal.74 The symbol unites not just the particular and the universal,

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but two opposing hermeneutic strategies, which together form an intense closed circuit between the particular and the universal and, thereby, are fused in their mutual reference. One cannot say if the bodily event or a clarified meaning is the ultimate truth of a symbolic representation. Hegel, though he believed the symbol had been overcome as an aesthetic form, also provided an excellent analysis of it. The symbol, as opposed to allegory, encloses its meaning within itself as something unuttered or secret. For Hegel, the negative side of aesthetics (in the logical, not the evaluative sense of the “negative”) is concentrated precisely in the symbol: the individual discovers for herself her own finitude and limitedness and expresses this knowledge by means which are inherently inadequate.75 Etymologically, “symbol” means half of a broken coin, that is, the absence of that which should be in place. For this reason, the aesthetics of the symbol must present the thing in its eloquent limitedness and inadequacy, and the appearance of the sensory will be the appearance of negation. However, realizing this principle in practice brought the early Romantics to esoteric mysticism. At the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the symbol underwent a stormy renaissance and was used to define the dominant style of the period: Symbolism. It turned out (at least in my opinion) to be even more interesting and aesthetically productive than the art of Romanticism, while, at the same time, realizing the Romantic program of negatively reflexive aesthetics. This issue will be addressed at greater length below in the discussion of Symbolist works of art. As mentioned, among the forms of symbolic absence are all of the specific tropes (metaphors, metonymies, hyperboles, etc.) in that they do not simply violate the norm (contradiction) but are actually based in a fundamental ellipsis. For example, in the metaphor of Victor Hugo cited by Lacan, the word sheaf is used in place of the name of the character Booz (because Booz is a peasant).76 This is an absence because something concrete is negated, a trope which is reminiscent of a riddle, although, to be sure, ellipsis gives rise to myriads of additional connotative meanings.

5. Negativity and Trance The negative effects of artworks that are depicted above are oriented at images and symbols. But there is a cumulative effect of negativity as such. It does not just modify its meaning but emerges as a reality sui generis which afflicts a reader in her existence here and now. This happens even before the negativity becomes

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conscious—it only becomes perceptible as the impact of a force. Art does not just let the subject experience an illusion or play a game but also disorients her, scatters her attention, hypnotizes, and thus charms her, brings her to state of trance. There is a double negative effect here: nihil negativum as a vertiginous experience of the void and nihil privativum as an experience of a force which pierces through the artwork and its viewer. In the logical sense, the “trance” reveals a latent force behind an apparent absence, a force that actively blocks part of the content. Behind the nihil negativum, there emerges the nihil privativum and further, the nihil contrarium. Behind an ellipsis, there is a mute voice; behind a defamiliarizing inversion, there is the violence of apparent things against those which we do not notice or do not take seriously. For instance, in Shklovsky’s example, quoted above, of a wife stolen away by the force of habit, there is a presumption that the wife, as this particular person, had hitherto been repressed by her semiotic and social role. Her liberation from this form via poetic figuration (for instance, a Cubist reshuffling of her face) is, supposedly, a revolt against convention and a discovery of the human powers that it had kept inactive. Therefore, the result of violation and negation is not only defamiliarization and refamiliarization. Art does not just affect cognition. The shift of form which defines the Modernist aesthetic, particularly in impressionism, expressionism, and Cubism, has a trance-like, hypnotic effect. We can of course discuss impressionism as a naturalist depiction of sensory experience, but effect-wise, their paintings make a stronger impression than the classical ones because, by eroding the form and thus un-focusing perception, they lull the viewer into a narcotic state. The effects are not only Apollonian but also Dionysian. When, in numerous paintings of Soutine, houses are depicted in curvilinear shapes, this is not just an expression of artist’s freedom but an invitation of the viewer into a dance, which even houses cannot resist. The same is true of early Matisse. As Yves-Alain Bois writes, the anti-classical decenteredness of Matisse is aggressive and violent: Both Seville Still Life and Spanish Still Life are difficult to behold—that is, the viewer cannot gaze at their pullulating arabesques and color flashes for too long … these paintings appear to spin before the eye, nothing there ever seems to come to rest. Flowers, fruits, and pots pop up like bubbles that dissolve into their busy, swirling background as quickly as one manages to isolate them. The centrality of the figure is dismantled … Figure and ground constantly annul each other in a crescendo of energies—that is, the very opposition upon which human perception is based is deliberately destabilized—and our vision ends up blurred, blinded by excess.77

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The entire abstractionist tendency of Modernism leads to a trance: starting with Soutine and Matisse and ending with Mondrian who, by the end of his life, proclaimed that art was destruction. He painted his last painting “The Victory of Boogie-Woogie” (a dance!), so that the division of figure and ground vanishes, the viewer’s eyes wander, and the painting itself blends in with the walls of the atelier. The reverse technique works as well: as we will see below, Jacek Malczewski sets his characters to dance by emphatically enclosing them within the frame of the picture. Roman Jacobson, in his article “New Russian Poetry,” draws attention to a similar passage in Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect”: He trembled all over and did not believe his eyes. No, it was the street lamp with its deceitful light showing the semblance of a smile on her face; no, it was his own dreams laughing at him. But it stopped the breath in his breast, everything in him turned into a vague trembling, all his senses were aflame, and everything before him was covered with a sort of mist. The sidewalk rushed under him, carriages with galloping horses seemed motionless, the bridge was stretched out and breaking on its arch, the house stood roof down, the sentry box came tumbling to meet him, and the sentry’s halberd, along with the golden words of a shop sign and its painted scissors, seemed to flash right on his eyelashes. And all this was accomplished by one glance, by one turn of a pretty head.78

Jacobson interprets this as an instance of the “affect” being a false rationalization of a formal linguistic effect, that of the shift. But he is not quite right: the source of the feeling here is the gaze. Gogol anticipates both Sartre and Lacan by describing the un-focusing, hypnotic impact of the gaze of the Other. The passage quoted by Jacobson dictates the wandering movements of the eye and points to a point on which we should fix (“deposit”) our attention, without seeing or being seen. Given that it is the gaze of the reader that reads the words of Gogol, what we have is not at all an external “motivation” of a formal effect, but a reflexive, meta-literary procedure that produces fascination. The seemingly innocent “entertainment” through art actually has a narcotic effect and renders the perception of art a risky temptation: by way of art, the human being becomes vulnerable to the messages conveyed through the aesthetic medium. Art is not just a free thing, it is, as the brothers Strugatsky once put it, also a “predatory thing.”79 Such effects are not really new. Renaissance perspective had already shifted the form, not just for the sake of naturalism: it produced a psychodelic effect (thus, Ucello famously claimed that he preferred “sweet” perspective to sex). Holbein’s famous anamorphosis with a skull in “Ambassadors” ironically reflects on this negativity of perspective and emblematizes it.

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In poetry, unlike prose, a principle of deformation always reigned, a principle of violating syntax for the sake of the meter. The canonical rational meter is here reunited with the negativity of ruinated syntax, which makes poetry much more suggestive and enchanting than prose. Poetry lets us feel the force of the voice going against language. Andrei Bely, a great Russian writer and theorist of the Symbolist movement of the early twentieth century, developed a “dialectic” of rhythm which he, in the spirit of the time, related to Engels’ Anti-Dühring and compared to the dialectical relation of the proletariat to other classes. Poetic form is not an ordinary form but a revolutionary “breaking away from form,” a form that is not form in the way that the proletariat both is and is not a class.80 It is the dialectical result of the contradiction between “meter” (the fixed mathematical rule governing the order of stresses in a sequence of syllables) and the actual structure of linguistic phrase, which together produce “rhythm,” a calculable correlation between the phrase and the meter that it always violates: “I present an abstract scheme of calculation which is reducible to three cases: a coincidence of lines (thesis), a contrast between lines, and an audible relation of coincidence to contrast, or to a group of contrasts (synthesis).”81 The actual rhythm of a poem is not the meter (a frozen rhythm from the past) to which it would roughly correspond, but the very negation of the meter which, being partial, produces its sublation as the poetic effect. Lev Vygotsky develops this notion in support of his dialectic of art: We have long since abandoned the naïve interpretation of rhtythm as meter, or measure. Andrei Bely’s investigations in Russia and Saran’s studies abroad showed that rhythm is a complex artistic structure that corresponds to the contradiction which we conceptualize as the heart of the artistic response … The sum of deviations from the meter defines the rhythm, according to Bely. … It is the same with music, where rhythm is not the beat that can be marked with the foot, but the filling of the measures with unequal and uneven notes which give the impression of complex movement …. We perceive a natural number of stresses in the words, and at the same time, we perceive the norm toward which verse strives but never approaches. The conflict between meter and words— the discrepancy, discord, and contradiction between them – this is rhythm.82

The Latin word for a line of poetry is versus, which literally means a “bending” or a “deviation,” speaks to this understanding of poetic rhythm. It means the same thing as tropare, from which the troubadours’ trobar is derived. The most famous troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, devised a type of stanza which he called cobla dissoluta or a “dissolved stanza.”83 His lyrical self “hoards the air and

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hunts the hare with the ox and swims against the flow.”84 And all this was before Romanticism or the avant-garde, when these devices and declarations were systematically deployed, destroying the syntax and meter and making speech approach the threshold of silence. We will see one such radical breakdown in the fragmentary drafts of Hölderlin, which, like a psychoanalytical séance, suddenly break off, having touched the most important thing. From a logical point of view, it is clear that the trance is not only a negative consequence of turning off one’s attention, but also a release achieved by means of the negation of form, of a certain negative force which seizes both the author and the reader. The work induces and conveys this force, leaving the reader or the viewer to project it retrospectively, to ask what sort of force must have caused all of this. Such a Dionysian interpretation of the negative effects of art is necessary, but at this stage of the dialectic it remains for the most part unconscious, since it’s not recognized as such. Hence, it is no coincidence that it is expressed not in an inversion of form but in its displacement, its violation, its shift. The inversions that do occasionally occur (like the houses on Nevsky Prospekt) enter into a series of abstract negations of a different sort. As we will see later, this all takes place in a different way at the stage of reflexive, concrete negation, where the force is expressed through inversion and attributed to the subject.

II Aesthetic Negation for Itself 6. Laughter and Mockery In France all actors are referred to as “comedians.” Originally, tragedy developed from the satirical drama and was necessarily found alongside the latter and alongside the comedy, which evoked a purifying laughter, as opposed to the catharsis of dark passions. For that matter, laughter too is a negative force. Kant defined it in his third Critique as an affect arising from the “sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”85 Laughter defuses emotion, diminishes and undermines words uttered or actions committed. The same is achieved by comic art. Among the rhetorical tropes there is one unusual one: irony. In the strictest sense, irony involves the utterance of a judgment, which is knowingly incorrect or means the opposite of what it says. In the world of genres, parody plays an analogous role: the elements of a single work of art are displaced, creating a new work, in which the action is transported to a contrasting environment and becomes awkward and imbued with a distinctive character.

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Humor and irony play a constitutive role in art, because they produce a sign, as opposed to a symbol (if a symbol is understood as analogical and iconic and the sign as conventional). The transition from symbol to sign (which, under various names, lies at the foundation of contemporary semiotics beginning with Peirce and Cassirer) is achieved precisely through irony or humor. Multiple repetitions (iterations, citations) of a signified, emotionally charged, typical scene produce a mimetic exaggeration and allow the subject to distance herself from it, to enclose that which is happening in quotation marks. But necessary here is some sort of force of estrangement, a distancing effect: laughter, even “reduced” laughter (Bakhtin), carries out precisely this function, and, in this sense, without it, art, understood as the limitation of the emotional impact and engagement with the mythical scene or as a ritual act, is impossible in principle. We might say that what we have here is a radical, indeterminate negation (although not without the release of real, hidden energies, as in the logic of the trance). As in the case of transgression and differentiation, this negation is directed by the work of art against itself: it is a self-negation or a pure negation. Moreover, it is directed toward the sublation of the pathos and sublimity of meaning. In and of themselves, humor and the comic are not expressed in negations. Their principal effect—a demonstration of unseriousness, the subversion of signification—is in many ways analogous to the effect of “switching off ” or “castrating” the gaze, which we examined earlier. Again, what we have here is Kant’s heightened expectation transformed into nothing; it is like a bursting balloon: the sound gives the impression of a catastrophe, but in reality, it is just a burst balloon. But the difference between comedy and capturing the gaze lies in the fact that, in the case of the comic, the very force that does the “turning off ” comes to the surface and does not only reduce the significance but actively undermines the depicted objects and events, on the levels of both form and content. Laughter or a smile as a mimetic reaction on the mouths of actors and viewers is the first expressive reflex of negativity in art, for here it is not just that the negative is objectively recognized (such is also the case in tragic pity and fear), but that the subject takes negation upon herself. Though terrifying and unpleasant things are enacted in tragedy, it all takes place in sublime form, emphasizing the significance of the events and preserving, thereby, the connection with the ritual, sacrificial meaning of the performance. Thus, as Hegel rightly saw it in The Phenomenology, comedy is not only and not so much the opposite of tragedy as it is its logical continuation: the negation is applied not only to the figurative content but also to the very form and fact of

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that which is taking place (for instance, the fact of the theatrical performance or the process of prose writing). In comedy too there are conflicts between characters, violence is enacted, and fear and pity grow throughout the plot, but the happy ending (which Aristotle regarded as a feature of comedy) shows them to have been inconsequential in retrospect. Hidden behind this positive outcome a negative force remains hidden. It is no coincidence that Marx regarded comic and satirical aesthetics as more politically radical than the sublimely tragic one: its use in real human interactions is directed not only at the physical, but also the symbolic destruction of one’s opponent.86 Henri Bergson put forward the most well-developed theory of laughter in his essay, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, where he famously presented laughter as something mechanical and inert. In this way, he calls attention to the negativity of laughter but analyzes it in terms of its negative content, rather than its negative form. And yet, Bergson’s essay, one of the most important European essays on art, is by no means exhausted by this simple thought. Bergson’s theory of laughter most resembles Schiller’s theory of the tragic, because both project onto art two irreconcilable metaphysical forces (morality and sensibility in the case of Schiller and life and deadly inertia in the case of Bergson). But this struggle causes these antagonistic forces to become mutually entangled, so that the inert and mechanical appears in the form of life and gives expression to it. Georges Bataille read Bergson’s Laughter early in his life, and was “disappointed”87 with the text, but it was this experience that led Bataille to develop an interest in philosophy. It is no coincidence that Bataille ascribed the most important aesthetic and existential significance to laughter. For him, its significance consisted in the radical “sovereign” negation that the individual confronts and takes upon himself in being: “Man is no longer, like the animal, the plaything of Nothingness, but Nothingness is itself his plaything—he ruins himself in it, but illuminates its darkness with his laughter, which he reaches only when intoxicated with the very void which kills him.”88 Bataille brings that negativity, which was present, in latent form, in Bergson’s theory about the mockery of thingness, to the surface, thereby making the transition from nihil privativum to nihil negativum. Laughter for Bataille is not only Nothingness but also its gradations: the individual’s recognition of her inadequacy and incompleteness.89 In his recent and remarkable book, Humans and Laughter, Aleksandr Kozintsev pursues ideas similar to Bataille’s (admittedly, without referencing them), giving a profound philosophical definition of the humorous:

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The Temptation of Non-Being Humor, in its pure form, is nothing less than the self-negation of the subject [my italics A. M.]. It is not that one aspect of the subject argues with another: rather, the subject in its entirely, with all of its thoughts, feelings, and values taken together, argues with itself and, thereby, negates itself.90

What Kozintsev means is that laughter expresses the subject’s refusal to accept the affects that she herself has experienced (pity for the jesters who find themselves in awkward or humiliating situations, moral outrage provoked by the actions of the characters depicted in jokes, etc.). And, in this respect, Kozinstev’s position (which criticizes the moral understanding of laughter advanced, for example, by Bergson and even by Bakhtin) is deeply appealing to me. At the same time, it is difficult to agree with Kozintsev’s related rejection of the connection between laughter and violence and other “real” expressions of negativity.91 Negativity is a multilevel phenomenon, and, even if its ultimate end is innocent nonsense, its means very well may be destructive and violent actions expressing a serious nonacceptance of and desire to subvert the serious. For this reason, in the modern era, humor is rarely encountered in its pure form and is often combined with tragedy (tragicomedy) or even something like horror (black humor), giving rise to a contradictory and unstable combination of seriousness and unseriousness. Another important school of thought in this respect is German Romanticism, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul. Here the nucleus of the comic is associated, first of all, with the Witz, the paradoxical witticism, which, according to Freud, involves the collision of incompatible psychic energies (and in this respect he echoes the Romantics, one hundred years later). In the second place, the comic is attributed to the subject (rather than the object), especially by Jean Paul. Third, the Romantics famously distinguish irony as a privileged form of the comic in art. Irony involves the analysis of everyday things and events from an infinite, ideal perspective which makes any individual thing or event inadequate to itself. The Russian Formalists, like the Romantics, considered irony—and parody in particular—the essence of art as a whole, since it is by means of parody that art exposes its own form and ridicules its own inadequacy in depicting its object (here, the irony’s object is less a concrete thing that is described than a code or form of expression). In Russia, Bakhtin polemicized both with Bergson and the Romantics, blaming both for their excessively negative and subjective interpretations of laughter. Laughter for him is an objective force, an action, part of a celebratory folk ritual, and it is marked by its affirmative and generative, rather than strictly negative character. Laughter is Dionysian and, hence, its destructive energy relates to the transcendence of the collective and the liberation of the collective

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from its moralistic form. However, according to Bakhtin, the very structure of ritual laughter is organized as an inversion (and on this point Bergson would have agreed with Bakhtin: inversion, for him, was one of the three comic operations). We will return to this point later during the discussion of negation and inversion, a more reflexive form of negation, which simultaneously produces lower forms of negativity in art, especially laughter. Bakhtin’s essentially Hegelian idea is that it is precisely through inversion that consciousness of negativity as a positive force is born. In a way, Gilles Deleuze is close to Bakhtin when, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, he develops the Bergsonian distinction between irony and humor, opposing the subjective, idealist conception of irony to the irony of worldly, objective humor.92 All these schools, however, are in agreement that laughter plays a special role in aesthetics and is not simply one type of aesthetic emotion among others; they are united by a sense that there is something specific in it which makes it an essential aspect of any art. The Formalists are particularly clear on this point (especially in relation to parody), despite the fact that they write very little on laughter itself (except, perhaps, as it pertains to the circus). Bergson himself notes that comedy is the form of the aesthetic which “is situated at the borderline between art and life” but, at the same time “is the only one of all the arts that aims at the general.”93 Developing this thought, we might say that the comic is the beginning of art, its origin and, at the same time, the point of its transition from sensory to cognitive understanding, at once the lower and upper boundary of art. In this capacity, laughter gives rise to the negative phenomena which, in our dialectic, occupy a lower position and precede it. It is worth pausing to consider in greater detail the role of laughter in what we referred to above as the “castration” of the gaze, the translation of the figure into the background, and the resulting immersion of the viewer into the work of art. Very few scholars have recognized the extent to which Bergson himself emphasized this function of the comic. After all, Bergson is concerned not only with the inelastic and mechanistic qualities of the funny actions described but also with the absentmindedness of the character types depicted. In this respect, Bergson anticipated Walter Benjamin’s work on mass aesthetics: The comic [aspect of the accidental fall, awkward behavior, etc.] is therefore accidental: it remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is it to penetrate within? … Let us try to picture to ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both senses and intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to see what is no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to say what is no longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to a past and therefore

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The Temptation of Non-Being imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present. This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who will supply it with everything—matter and form, cause and opportunity. Is it then surprising that the absent-minded individual–for this is the character we have just been describing—has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? … Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn … we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of absence of mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the presence of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings. Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind!94

What is funny here is the tendency of such a person to go into trance: Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But this effect gains in intensity when we are able to connect these characteristics with some deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental absentmindedness, as though the soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised by the materiality of a simple action.95

Here material inertia remains in the background; however, in his subsequent meditations, Bergson goes further: “It does not set forth, by means of language, special cases of absentmindedness in man or in events. It lays stress on lapses of attention in language itself. In this case, it is language itself that becomes comic.”96 Thus, Bergson describes the comic effects as bordering on a state of trance. Next, from this basis of absentmindedness there come dreams and visions: If there exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind,—a sane type of madness, one might say. Now, there

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is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.97

In general, it is not entirely evident that absentmindedness is a specifically mechanistic form of behavior. It is more directly related to the subject’s negativity and loss of focus. It is this loss of focus that, in all likelihood, explains the rigidity of the object. Thus, Bergson puts forward a complex, internally divided structure of a latently dialectical, Hegelian variety, in which a solitary and seemingly positive object becomes a fetish and, in the process, reveals its own negativity (its isolation from the rest of the world) and frees itself in the process of the wandering of consciousness. What Bergson describes is not merely the mechanical prostheses of life but also how these prostheses put the individual into an otherworldly, sacramental state by fascinating her, captivating her attention and transforming all other everyday reference points into irrelevant background. The mechanical, here, becomes the symbol of a grace-like aesthetic freedom in the spirit of Schiller or von Kleist. What, after all, is laughter? Laughter is aesthetic immersion viewed from without. But the question remains: is such a view possible without partaking in this hypothetical immersion? The answer, it would seem, is no, and it is for this reason that Bergson offers us this twofold emotion uniting Romantic fascination and the mechanistic aspect of the comic: “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.”98 As Alenka Zupançiç rightly notes, the use of machinery and iron constructions is characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century, when Bergson was beginning his career.99 Here it is worth adding that her observation applies also to Art–Nouveau, a style which was the heir to symbolism and which aimed for a balance between kitsch and sacramental effect. It is here that Bergson’s overarching aesthetic theory is born: There are also comic obsessions that seem to bear a great resemblance to dream obsessions. Who has not had the experience of seeing the same image appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaning in each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common. Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stage or in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged to a dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: it persistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, each time with a different meaning.100

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Thus, the effect of repetition, which is critical in art, has a basis both in obsessive pathology and in the comic. The text, which came out in the same year as Freud’s first psychoanalytic work (The Interpretation of Dreams), is clearly motivated not only by questions of aesthetics but also by questions of abnormal psychology, which Bergson interprets as an obsession with the nonliving.101 Here it is worth recalling what was said above about “temptation” and its obsessive nature. Laughter returns us to the initial transition from the positive to the negative in art. Another aspect of the comic which follows from Bergson’s theory but which he himself does not emphasize is shame. When Bergson’s model is applied not to another person but to oneself, the primary layer of constraint and spasmodic discomfort provoked by the manifestness of being becomes all the more apparent. This is yet another primal aesthetic phenomenon which converts being into negativity. We might add, with a nod to Bakhtin, that both obsessive repetition and shameful (or shameless) exposure are marked also by a mystic, sacramental character. Very often, laughter plays on sacred formulas, the impact of which is made more forceful by virtue of their inelasticity and frequent repetition. Following the tradition of certain contemporary philosophers I will cite the example of a famous Soviet anecdote (a genuinely “popular” one founded in a poor knowledge of English). A Soviet tourist in Amsterdam with bad English memorizes a phrase that he can use in the event of a problem: “I want the Soviet Consul.” He ends up in the Red Light District, and he is approached by a pimp, who persistently tries to convince him to visit one of the local establishments. “Do you want a woman?” he asks him. The tourist shakes his head. “Do you want a man?” He shakes his head. “Do you want a black woman? A black man?” No answer. “So what do you want?” “I want the Soviet Consul.” Then the pimp himself shakes his head and answers: “Possible. But very expensive.” Why is this Russian-English anecdote funny, in spite of the fact that the incorrectness of the original formula gives away the punch line? Because the repetition of this juridical formula in the wrong context gives it meaning of a magic code or a password for disavowing and turning the official world inside out, thus immersing it in the dark, Dionysian elements. Laughter and the element of unmasking (here, of the Consul) unite with the production (by way of a mistake or a slip of the tongue) of an effective symbolic weapon, of speech endowed with a symbolic rigidity, which with multiple repetitions of the anecdote (and anecdotes have a way of being repeated) becomes recognizable and concentrates in itself the entire comic and iconoclastic significance. As Bergson writes,

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For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and that we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of its form. Every one knows how easily the comic spirit exercises its ingenuity on social actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary prize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may be fitted.102

To summarize, it might be said that laughter, as an expression of negativity par excellence (negativity in language always gets paralyzed in the act of assertion), is never present in its purely negative aspect (as described by Kant and Bataille) but, instead, always combines itself with those forms which are being ridiculed. Laughter transforms them, and it does this, first and foremost, through inversion and/or repetition. As we saw in the section on reflection, repetition in the form of mimesis is nothing less than the foundation of art itself. But in this case, it must be repeated more than once, must be quantitatively multiplied. At a certain point the assertion passes over into an act of subversion, while fear and pity pass over into laughter. In the future, these states do not disappear but, rather, move together alongside laughter and in the (negative) form of laughter. For this reason, the paradigm of laughter is not limited to comedy, but, rather, is present in any great work of art at the precise moment when it fascinates us, and when the images are transformed into signs. For example, in Gogol’s “Overcoat,” an ordinary overcoat becomes both an obsessive idea and a poetic symbol. Such is the case in Dostoevsky’s novels when ordinary words are set off in italics (e.g., Raskolnikov’s “rehearsal” in Crime and Punishment) and, thereby, take on the meaning of triggering formulas. We see this in Albert Camus’ Plague, where one of the characters (Grand) who is undergoing a terrible catastrophe constantly writes a single phrase: “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”103 The same may be said of the sublime but “analogical,” quasi-“realistic” image of the Civil War hero “Chapaev,” which is transformed into a sign in the popular Soviet anecdotes and back into the sublime register of the empty name in Viktor Pelevin’s novel, Chapaev and Void. The opposite is true of Symbolist painting, the prose of Vladimir Sorokin, the opera of Wagner, and the films of Lars von Trier, where the realistic, literal, extreme realization of existing cultural expectations or fears gives rise to a sublime cathartic effect at the boundary of laughter, horror, and ecstasy, in which the prime condition for aesthetic experience lies precisely in the combination of all these emotions. For this reason, one of the lessons of laughter as a form of negativity consists in the necessity of any work of art to overcome its

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own genre, its own key, and its own tone. In spite of the somewhat dubious rigor of Aristotle and Schiller, real tragedy must be funny, real comedy must be heartrending, and theater as a whole must not be fully separated from ritual. All this, however, means that aesthetic negativity necessarily leads language and image along the boundary of nonsense. In this respect, we may find a worthy, if unprofessed disciple of Bergson in Jacques Derrida, for whom the meaning of the sign is defined by its transformation into a repeated formula (or iteration) and subsequent loss of its direct, “living” intentional meaning. Only the dead, inert symbol, which bears its meaning like a monument but which, as a consequence, remains open to encountering a new, as-of-yet unknown meaning, is capable of signifying. Laughter, hidden or not, represents an essential element of the “written” sign that has been transformed into a caricature. It is for this reason that many of Derrida’s interpretations give the impression of a comical unmasking of the absurd pronounced with a serious face, and it is for this reason that these unmaskings amplify the meaning of the deconstructed texts, rather than doing away with it. In summary, we may draw the conclusion that, in the process of realizing the first, reflexive act of negation, laughter re-enacts the preceding stations of artistic negation, sharpening, along the way, the edges of each: A. There is reflection in laughter: The repetition of the shocking act and shame experienced upon being caught in it are transformed from a spasmodic convulsion into the public, marketplace laughter, which destroys the significance of the shameful act. B. Laughter evokes the things which don’t exist, and emphasizes the gap between them and being: laughter gives rise to “heightened expectation transformed into nothing.” C. Laughter castrates the gaze and envelops the image, as follows for instance from the absentmindedness and self-absorption of Bergson’s comic. D. Laughter involves differentiation and defamiliarization: the comic effect of any mimetic imitation, the freeing of the action from its automatism. E. Laughter is inseparable from trance: hence the infectiousness of the spasm of laughter and the rituality of the comic formula. F. Laughter relates to figuration and the sublime even if it seems to run counter them: here we have both the sublimity (grandiosity) of Bakhtinian carnival and Freud’s observation that the witticism is based on the effects of ellipsis and sacral taboo.

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7. The Negative Content of the Image 7.1. Tragedy and Catharsis Having given a formal account of negativity, let us move on to its content. Depicted events contain within themselves a negativity. This is especially evident in tragedy, but almost any work of art should contain elements of evil, misfortune, war, violence, injustice, various obstacles, and all that which contradicts and, to the extent that it is embodied in characters and ideas, directly negates generally accepted notions of well-being. Here, on the level of content, the negative form of the work of art as such is imitated and enacted, while the negative effects of the aesthetic form are doubled (or “motivated”). The form of negation itself, here, can be varied, but, as a rule, it develops from an indefinite evil or from the obstacle to the opposition (contrariness), which is enacted in the characters. Usually such content is supplemented by the effects of negation at the level of form which have been described above. When speaking of the negative with regard to content, the term “negation” takes on a different meaning. Whereas, above, we were concerned with the negation of form or the object, here “negativity” implies the subject or viewer’s relation to something: by negative we mean that which the subject rejects, that which incites anger, disgust, or regret. Often, such a moral negation is related to the fact that the subject—a person—identifies herself with someone who is depicted as being killed, destroyed, dismembered, humiliated, etc. That is, apart from the subjective relation there is also an objectively negative act in terms of content. At the beginning of this chapter we looked at the passage in Plato in which he blames art for evoking the negative feeling of pity. In the beginning of Poetics, Aristotle asks why we like to look at imitations of horrible things (of the sort which are shown in tragedies).104 His answer is not very convincing: he thinks that what we like is the act of cognition itself and that it is of no importance whether or not these things are horrible. Extrapolating from this answer, it is worth recalling our initial definition of art as a form of acceptance of evil into the good. Generally speaking, art grants a new sublimated status not only to horrors, but also to neutral things. However, it is precisely the imitation of horrors and suffering that allows aesthetics to assert itself as something independent from the teaching of the good. The fact that the imitation of evil can be beautiful dynamically accentuates the emancipation of aesthetics from ethics, of being from the Good, and truth from positivity.

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Our current concern with the negative images (negative in the double sense of the destructive or damaging, and of what is undesirable for the viewer) is the extended continuation of the Greek and early Modern theme of tragedy. This new type of performance, born in sixth century BC in Athens, made the philosophers wonder why the people take enjoyment from the depiction of suffering and bad luck. With a grain of anachronism, I can say that we deal with an early outburst of “sentimentalism,” and it is precisely in this sense of excess of pathos and pathemata that Plato scolds tragedy and Aristotle defends it. Like in the case of the eighteenth century’s sentimentalism, we deal not just with any passions, but with negative feelings, and like in the eighteenth century, pity plays the central role. Politically, tragedy is associated with the democratic, even peasant, cult of Dionysus, which had recently appeared in Athens, and the tragic genre filled the pre-existing genre of dithyramb, previously an elevated, heroic, and aristocratic form, with a new content suitable for mass entertainment and mostly devoted to the misfortunes of tyrants. Mutatis mutandis this is again similar to the eighteenth-century sentimentalism which was a bourgeois genre directly aimed against the aristocrats. Aristotle famously says: “Tragedy, then, is mimesis of an action that is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections employing the form of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis (purification) of such emotions (toiouton pathematon).”105 This is a curious statement which, from today’s point of view, looks as a formula straight out of Hegelian dialectic, and from the Greek point of view, recalls the archaic, religious logic of “pharmakon,” or of the homeopathic magic. Researchers have mostly followed on this latter association, the more so that in his “Politics,” Aristotle seems to refer to the religious, ceremonial meaning of the “catharsis” of passions.106 But, the idea that a negative experience can only be overcome by applying this same negative experience to itself is very close to Hegel’s “negation of negation,” alias Aufhebung.107 For me here, this reflexive moment in Aristotle is doubly important because it helps the aesthetic form to negate the content. Because the passions are so tense, so negative, they force the spectator, so to say, out of the aesthetic illusion, but there is at the same time something in her that resists this new negativity, too, so that she wants to stay, not to panic, and to see the positive substance of the plot if there is any. There is a rich interpretive tradition of Aristotelian catharsis. I will not attempt to cover it here, but there are high points that I will mention. Lessing, in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” gives tragedy a sentimentalist reading by opposing

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the preceding classicist interpretation by Corneille (who thought that Aristotle wanted to suppress emotions in the viewer).108 Lessing thinks that pity and fear are not two distinct passions, but two in one: pity entails fear, and creates an affective contradiction, which then leads to a certain virtuous balance of extremes (analogous to the balance of extremes in Aristotle’s treatment of virtue, in Nichomachean Ethics). Goethe agrees that there is a balancing but reinterprets it in the spirit of classicism: catharsis, for him, leads to a certain “equalizing” (“Ausgleichung”) of soul.109 Returning to Lessing’s other work, Goethe claims that pity and fear represent complementary affects visible in the figures of the Laocoon sculpture. Both Lessing and Goethe allude to, but do not develop on, the fact that pity and fear mutually oppose and even contradict. But if this is so, then the tragic affect is above all a paradox, where pity and fear first intensify and next cancel each other. This has to do with their negativity. Indeed, if we sympathize with the suffering of another person, we would like to help her, to stop this suffering, or to regret a person who is finished. Instead, the tragedy holds us in an unbearable tension. The fear may apply to the same character, when we only anticipate her misfortunes, but, as Aristotle says in his Rhetoric,110 fear (unlike pity) is primarily a feeling directed at oneself, so it turns the viewer’s attention away from the spectacle, draws her away from identification with the characters, and hence acts on pity, being a meta-affect, a fear of the pity. Lessing says: “fear is compassion referred back to ourselves:”111 which I read to mean, a reflexive pity, pity-of-pity qua negation of negation. We are tempted to leave the theatre or laugh at the actors, to declare the performance as a mere fiction. But, in most cases, “pity,” this stickiness of unresolved negativity, holds us back to the seat. The result of the affective interplay is, most probably, not a pacification but a new neutralized mode of perception, namely that of potentiality. Indeed, further in the Poetics, Aristotle says that tragedy refers to the potential and is thus “more philosophical” than mere history.112 One needs only to connect the dots and say that catharsis is a negation of immediate negation, or even better a negation of the negation of the negation, because there is first suffering, next the refusal of the spectator to stand it anymore, and then, thirdly, a recognition that there was something valuable to the story in spite of its disastrous setting and in spite of the fact that it conveys the fantastic, the things that are not. But what is thus valuable can only be seen as the potential. We remember that Aristotle, in his “Metaphysics,” was the one who “discovered” the potential (dynamis) as a special mode of being. In the context of Plato, to whose “forms” (pure, as opposed to the confused sensible affects) the “catharsis” (“purification”) probably refers,

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and who also realized (in “Parmenides”) that these “forms” led to contradiction when put in practice, and in the light of the Modern philosophy of Kant (for whom “condition of possibility” is the category and the idea), we can conclude that “catharsis” dialectically grounds an aesthetic intentionality as potential intentionality, and that this, in turn, grounds a higher epistemology: opens our mind to the very forms of our world. Hölderlin, in his Kantian interpretation, formulates a similar thought: The presentation of the tragic rests primarily on the tremendous how the god and man mate and how natural force and man’s innermost boundlessly unite in wrath conceiving of itself, [rests] on the boundless union purifying itself through boundless separation.113

Not only the resulting attitude but the very pity and fear are affect of potentiality par excellence. Indeed, as it is too rarely noted, Aristotle introduces them in his poetics of narrative primarily because they are narrative and temporalizing affects: we anticipate with fear and we remember with pity (which can also mean “regret”). In tragedy, these modes are confused and mixed, since we know the plots of tragedies in advance and therefore know that what we anticipate had already taken place, and that what we regret the character having committed (her mistake, “hamartema”), is something that she will keep committing with every new performance, and we ourselves are not immune to it. Therefore, from the empirical potentiality of something that will or will not be actualized, in the moment of “catharsis,” we jump to a transcendental potentiality as such. However, to understand tragedy as potentiality, we cannot stick only with Aristotle’s and Kant’s notion of potentiality. This notion is ambiguous because, as mentioned, it can mean a mere, empty potential, but can mean potentialization. In this respect, yet another German post-Kantian will help us: Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism,114 introduces the notion of “Potency” (Potenz). Potenz in German, potentia in Latin, dynamis in Greek can all mean a mathematical operation of “raising to n-th power.” Schelling builds on this meaning to have Potenz refer to an operation where a function, say perception or understanding, reapplies to itself on another level. This reflection also means more power, because in the first “power” the operation remains bound to its empirical content, and in the second it becomes an operator, an empowering and intensifying force. It is this kind of dynamis-Potenz that tragedy, through its negativity, arouses in spectators. The chorus is an instance that de-naturalizes the spectacle and redoubles the play-acting: what looks like a part of the audience that reflects on action is in fact yet another collective character and object of

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spectacle. Even the text is reflexive: classic tragedies abound in auto-referential formulae that pinpoint the action to the conditions of its performance. For instance, the famous phrase of Tiresias in “Oedipus the Tyrant”: “This day will give you birth and finish you,” which is of course a reference to the day of performance no less as to the temporal unity of narrative action in tragedy. Schelling of the “System … ” himself maintained that tragedy, and, in a broader sense, the aesthetic form, was an organ of “intellectual intuition” itself, that is, of the primary, basic potentialization.115 This, to him, was due to the fact that a tragic hero takes on himself the guilt for something that, he knows, is produced by destiny anyway. Importantly, for Schelling, the potency is here not just subjective, it is a threatening power of cosmic infinity which a subject can only handle through her self-destruction, or her own destructive imagination. But, for our purposes it is important that the hero takes destiny in his own hands, thus actively replaying what he would have otherwise passively succumbed to: fearing and making us (prospectively) fear that which would in principle be only worth of (retrospective) pity/regret. But, in the history of interpretation of catharsis, the one that comes closest to my goals here, and to the theory of aesthetic negativity, belongs not even to Schelling but to Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Schelling as well as of Goethe and Hölderlin. While Lessing and Goethe only notice the contrary oppositions of tragic passions, their relatively negative effects on each other in view of a synthesis, Schiller is the one who notices the absolute negativity (suppression, destruction per se) as an active force that underlies both the passions on stage and the passions of spectators which are of a higher, sublime nature. Schiller starts his essay “On Tragic Art” by posing a general problem of negativity in art: Experience teaches us that painful affections are those which have the most attraction for us, and thus that the pleasure we take in an affection is precisely in an inverse ratio to its nature. It is a phenomenon common to all men, that sad, frightful things, even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible seduction, and that in presence of a scene of desolation and of terror we feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces.116

Why would that be? According to Schiller’s Kantian interpretation of catharsis, the characters in a tragedy enact the struggles between spirit and body, mind and the senses. The viewer uses tragedy in order to triumph over her senses. It is not enough to merely have spirit. The viewer, Schiller says,

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must affirm spirit’s primacy and debase the sensory realm, a necessity which gives rise to violence in art. Moreover, Schiller emphasizes that art acts through the medium of imagination and, for this reason, uses not only violence and suffering, but also fear and anxiety, the schema and the first abstraction of evil. Despite the outright sadism of this conception, it is convincing if we generalize it and say that art puts the subject into a special sublime state by accepting her own negativity and engaging it in the cause of rationality. We will discuss this below in the section on contrariety. To define the negative content of art in more simple, formal terms, we might say that negativity (evil, obstacles, vice) creates intrigue and, thereby, manifests itself as an experimentally created force sent as a test (or “temptation”) of the good. At the same time, tragedy cannot be reduced to the triumph of spirit over matter, and it is unlikely that this is what the Greeks had in mind. Schiller’s interpretation is, in spite of its Modern idiom, still too sacrificial. It applauds the spectacular destruction of bodies in favor of the notion of spirit that bears the  obvious religious connotations. The significance of tragedy’s negativity lies also in its capacity to act as a negation of or fundamental shift in a cult, ritual, or political religions of various types. I mentioned that Aristotle also alludes to this meaning. Clearly, tragedy has a sacrificial content, but in a new aesthetic way, which is both subjective (the viewer reflects on her passions) and objective (we learn something about the structure of the society, with its opposing forces). Tragedy is both less than a sacrifice (because it has a fictional form) and more than a sacrifice (since it does not stop at a temporary relief but points to an irresolvable contradiction). René Girard noted (in defiance of traditional conceptions of beauty as a force pacifying evil) that tragedy, as opposed to the cult ritual from which it emerged, is more and not less negative.117 In his opinion, what tragedy depicts is an orgy of violence which burst free of the framework in which religion had placed it. It should, however, be added that negativity has to do not only with the pessimism of tragedy, but also with diminishing the authority of the cult. The archetypical tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, is concerned primarily with exposing the tyrant and demonstrating how excessive devotion leads to self-destruction. This aspect of tragedy was noted by Hölderlin and before him by Rousseau, who justified Greek tragedy (as opposed to the theater of his day, which he considered elitist and authoritarian) on the basis of the fact that, by using the tragic form to thematize the murder of tyrants, the Greeks celebrated their own liberation from tyranny.118 If there is indeed a sadistic moral authority at play, one can equally say that a revolt against authority, a protest against

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violent elites, is an equally plausible reading. Given the structure of archaic tragedy, the (originally lonely) “exarchon” and the chorus, one can say that the theme—hero and the people, individual and the collective—is the core content of the tragic form. Thus, tragedy and, more generally, negative imagery, performs an operation analogous to humor (not a surprise that tragedy has from its Athenian beginnings been paired with comedy). Aristotle suggests that the tragic frame makes a spectator detach herself from the spectacle, to bracket, so to say, the events on stage. The negative content of tragedies is, then, to speak boldly, a symbol of the negativity of their form. By the latter, I mean the fantastic nature of the events on show and the critical attitude of the subject with regard to the de-mythologized ritual. Negativity in content emphasizes the symbolic nature of the narrated events, helps nullifying them in favor of a higher philosophical meaning (such as the immense but contradictory universe of the possible, or the figure of a free subject, able to ground and de-throne herself with the same sleight of hand).

7.2. Evil and Violence beyond Tragedy This question of the depiction of evil, suffering, and violence arose and, of course, incited polemic at almost every stage in the development of art. In Classical Greece it came in the form of tragedy, while in Rome it was the “sublime” rhetoric of Longinus. Tragedy does not just depict violence and horror, and it does not just convey pathos. It bends and destroys language in order to allow pathos to be conveyed. Such language is highly figurative and expressive. Most vivid and paradigmatic in this respect are Sophocles’ oxymorons—pantoporos aporos, hypsipolis apolis (overcoming everything/stuck with no solution, over the city/citiless)—combinations which emblematically express the collision of the internal contradictions present in tragedy at the level of content.119 In the Middle Ages, artists became fascinated with depicting images of hell and the Last Judgment, developing a bleak style that culminated in the Gothic period (with gargoyles and other monstrous, hellish decorations). Here, however, it was emphasized that evil is not beautiful but ugly (and repugnant), a judgment which produces a paradox in the aesthetic sphere. Thus, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio develops Aristotle’s idea: “the image of the Devil is beautiful when it well represents the turpitude of the Devil and as a consequence of this aspect it (the image) is also repugnant.”120 Noteworthy here is the dialectical contradiction noted by Bonaventure (but not by Aristotle). Also significant in this respect is the famous passage from Bernard of Clairvaux:

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But apart from this in the cloisters … what is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? The fierce lions? The monstrous centaurs? The creatures, part man and part beast? The striped tigers? The fighting soldiers … Good God! If one is not ashamed of the absurdity, why is one not at least troubled at the expense.121

Commentators often note the apparent pleasure and lofty, aestheticized style with which Bernard himself enumerates all of these monsters. This aesthetic grew all-the-more widespread with the advent of the Renaissance but later entered into conflict with the Neoclassical aesthetic, so that the idealized, pious, and slightly erotic paintings of the Italians were found side-by-side with the stormy, northern semi-gothic, semi-carnivalesque art of Bosch and Bruegel. The Baroque style combines bleak themes and triumphant sublimity, whereas the Rococo and the Classicism of the eighteenth century attempted, if not to dispel the horror and pathos, then at least to subjugate them to form and light gracefulness. This same period, however, saw the emergence of the sentimental novel, which both relished violence and humiliation and subjugated them to virtue. With the exception of its offshoot, the Gothic novel, sentimentalism as a genre was not bleak and was even morally uplifting, but, at the same time, sentimental novelists learned to use excessively morbid images and fantasies (for instance, the eating of children, a ubiquitous theme in eighteenth-century English literature) to shock their readers and to pierce their moral defenses. It is from this tradition that the aesthetic of Marquis de Sade (by no means the most somber author in terms of mood) emerged. The genre turned out to be an enduring one and, to this day, continues to define mass culture, as well as much elite culture. For example, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, two of the foremost filmmakers of the 2000s, both strove to expose viewers to maximally unbearable violence in order attract their attention, but also to produce feelings of rejection which lead to the derealization of the image. The bleak quality of the Romanticism of the beginning of the nineteenthcentury (the spleen of Byron, the demonism of Hoffman) remains highly moralistic: evil, it is explained, emerges in a beautiful soul that has been wronged by the world. It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that real demonism, understood as a form of aesthetic immoralism, takes root: the discovery of the opposition between morality and aesthetics was prepared by Kant and announced by Nietzsche. As Umberto Eco writes:

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And while Art detached itself from morality and practical requirements, there arose a growing drive—already present in Romanticism—to conquer for the world of art the most disturbing aspects of life: sickness, transgression, death, darkness, the demoniac and the horrible. The difference lay in the fact that art no longer claimed to portray in order to document and judge. In portraying such aspects, art wanted to redeem them in the light of Beauty and to make them fascinating even as life models.122

Similar relations emerge between the art of the second half of the nineteenth century and religion: As far as concerns the religious phenomenon, religious decadentism embraced only the ritual aspects, preferably if they were ambiguous, while its version of the mystical tradition was morbidly sensual. The aberrant “religiosity” of the decadents took another path again, that of Satanism. Hence not only the excited interest in supernatural phenomena, the rediscovery of magical and occult traditions, a cabalism that had nothing to do with true Jewish tradition, the fanatical attention devoted to the presence of the demoniac in art and in life (Huysmans’ Down There being exemplary in this sense), but also participation in authentic magical practices and the calling up of devils, the celebration of all forms of excess, from sadism to masochism, a taste for the horrible, the appeal to Vice, the magnetic attraction of perverse, disquieting or cruel people: an aesthetics of Evil.123

The Expressionism of the beginning of the twentieth century (as opposed to the more elevating traditions such as cubism, der Blaue Reiter, etc.) continues this tradition, without particular mysticism but with pretenses to realism. After this moment, sentimentality, the Gothic detective novel, and the satanic charm of the “psycho” passed over, for the most part, into mass art forms (where, of course, they are accompanied by the poorly constructed alibi of the happy ending). If we consider the more “authentic” modern art of the second half of the twentieth century, it, as a whole, returned to a moral–ethical position and/or political consciousness of “relational art” and, if it does depict ritual violence, it is only as a moral problem. Such is the case in the famous 2006 performance of Janez Janša (born Emil Hrvatin), in which he reconstructed the 1969 performance, “Pupilija pa pa Pupilo na Pupilcki,” by a Slovenian art group directed by Dušan Jovanovič, with modificaitons: viewers were encouraged to vote for or against the murder of a chicken and, in one of the versions, even invited to perform the act themselves.124 Although, as we will see below, the presence of a contradiction between form and content is a general rule, art often expresses the negative on the levels of

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form, content, and real meaning, at the same time. Is such cases it is perceived as “realistic.” That is to say that the constructive elements of the shift, displacement, wounding, and aggression can be understood as direct signs corresponding to world-historical processes. The celebratory events enacted in works of art are in fact catastrophes. The characters who appear in them are either martyrs or sadistic villains. The irony that shifts the form of the work is a melancholic mockery of the vanity of existence. Such literalization of constructive moments can be laughed at. But art can also be used for social criticism and to articulate catastrophes that come to pass, accentuating the senselessness of suffering (analogous to the senselessly impractical nature of art) and the aesthetic motivations of real historical villains and victims. As is well known, when Picasso painted Guernica, he explained the motivation behind the modernist devices that he established earlier to have been the horrors of war, but it is always possible to interpret the space of any modernist work of art retrospectively as a map of the consequences of either catastrophe or exceedingly wild celebration. In the modern world, everyday life is aestheticized through and through. That is to say that it is light and interesting but, at the same time, always shocking and marked by a hint of ironic melancholy. It is for this reason that the distinction between content and the constructive aspects of art loses its meaning entirely. One of the functions of the depiction of violence and suffering lies precisely in both calling attention to and reducing the significance of one’s object, in putting it in quotation marks: after all, it will be debased or destroyed before our eyes anyway. To summarize, these are the functions of the depiction of evil and all that is bad in art: A. The expression of the fictitiousness and powerlessness of art. B. The expression of and motivation for the destruction of form, the critique of official optimism. C. The expression of and motivation for the passivity of viewers in aesthetic contemplation, the symbolic suppression of their resistance. D. Realism, the depiction of unconcealed and unsightly reality announcing its rights (Rancière). E. Shock, penetration into the viewer’s soul, training for the reception of everyday unpleasantries (Benjamin). F. Debasement, the devaluation of the sensory, and the appeal to the viewer’s moral self (the logic of the sublime).

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Understood thus, the negative content of art, especially modernist art, constitutes its most potent and indispensable component, but not its only one. At the same time, it is precisely this component, which, more than any other, carries the force of negation so dangerous both to society and to art as such. The power of von Trier’s analysis in Dogville is illustrative in this respect. Creative labor, presented as a freely given gift, is exploited. The teacher of “good,” wishing to test his fellow citizens, subjects his female student to hell. The logic of the moral test (temptation) hints at the logic of art and condemns it for performing dangerous experiments on people. The final scene of total destruction carries inside it a paradoxical joy that is produced by the justice which has been achieved. However, Jacques Rancière is also right when he, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, unites this ambitious film with Clint Eastwood’s less significant Mystic River in what he calls the “ethical turn.”125 According to Rancière, both von Trier and Eastwood depict the problem of modernity in a purely moralistic key. Instead of a conflict with the bourgeoisie, as was the case with Grace’s prototype, Brecht’s Joan of the Stockyards, von Trier’s protagonist only encounters simple human cruelty, which is revealed through the temptation of grace. This second force cannot be made sense of: it is just negativity or evil, even if “good” is guilty in its activation. The comparison with Eastwood is not entirely convincing, since the negative hero there is not held morally responsible. In Mystic River, it is childhood trauma which is to blame for everything, evil as such, a message contrary to that of von Trier, who emphasizes personal responsibility. We may argue with Rancière regarding such nuances, but there can be no doubt that the constant depiction of evil in von Trier’s films has a moral character intended to turn the subject against the director and against art itself. The moral reprehensibility of art, which is allegorically depicted in von Trier’s films, is present also in the work of another “ethical” director: Haneke. As I see it, the problem is not so much specific to von Trier as it is a general issue in ultra-pessmistic and violent art. As Benjamin said of the right-wing German writers of the 1920s, who were also rather bleak, they “complied with the desires of the bourgeoisie, which longed for the decline of the West, the way a schoolboy longs for a ink blot in place of his wrong answer. They spread decline, preached decline wherever they went.”126 This is to say that destruction and panic at the level of a work’s plot can hide a certain unconvincing quality in its conception, the inability to create or think through the possibility of another world or life. Similar tendencies may be observed in the Soviet and post-Soviet case. I have already mentioned that Soviet non-conformist artists in the 1980s struggled

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against the official optimism of the party-state, each in their own way. For example, Vladimir Sorokin gained notoriety for his ironic, conventionalized, and intense depiction of evil. He constructed his short stories and novels in the following way: first they would begin with a conventional, Socialist Realist plot, but then these would give way to scenes in the spirit of horror films. For example, a group of friends is listening to songs by the popular Soviet singer-songwriter, Vladimir Vysotsky, around the campfire, but, as it turns out, they are really using the songs to lure (tempt) backpackers to their camp so they can eat them. In the process, both the formal verisimilitude (realism) and the optimistic, humanistic expectations implied by the original form disappear. Haneke would later do something similar in Funny Games, but more seriously and without Sorokin’s trademark stiob (a distinctive ironic aesthetic defined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak as the “ironic treatment of ideological symbols, a uniquely latesocialist cultural phenomenon” which involved an “overidentification with the ideological symbols exposed to such treatment”).127 At this point in the history of the USSR such art was very radical, and Sorokin was appreciated primarily by the Soviet intelligentsia and literary critics throughout the world. But what was the meaning of this subversive act, apart from the obvious critique of mainstream culture? Was this the pure destructiveness of the absurd? It is unlikely. Unfortunately, this device seems to be motivated more by a moralistic pathos, which says “You were taking pleasure in ordinary literature? How dare you? Do you see now what it leads to?” It is not only the Socialist Realist cliché, but also the scene of horror which must be defended against this treatment: otherwise, horror is deployed only for the sake of delimitating the boundary of the impossible for the subject and placing her in a moral position. This diagnosis (which I personally made for myself upon first reading Sorokin) has been completely confirmed by Sorokin’s later, more conventional prose from the 2000s, especially Day of the Oprichnik and Sugar Kremlin. Here all the cards are laid on the table: he lets the reader take full pleasure in the perversity of power, but only on the condition of the complete moral condemnation of this phenomenon, which remains unsaveable. Clearly, von Trier is more complicated and contradictory, but he too is obsessed by “evil,” exposes the viewer, and takes pleasure in this evil and in its sadistic inclinations. This is true of Breaking the Waves, where the bells that accept the sacrifice of Bess express the unconscious relation of the viewer to her sacrifice and to any sacrifice, to say nothing of Antichrist, where the viewer is forced to watch the death of a child through his mother’s eyes (!). The viewer, forced to confront the “Real” of fantasy, is then told, “Stop! No, don’t touch

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that! It’s hot!” This emotion, as in the case of Sorokin, spreads to the aesthetic world of fantasy. Making the viewer complicit in the violence on screen is an old device used in violent film since the days of Sam Peckinpah. But here it is made reflexive, and the question of the guilt of the character (read: the viewer) for her passive contemplation is discussed within the film. In any case, such violence is presented everywhere not only as an attraction or as “reality,” but also as a marker of that which is unacceptable to the subject. Here rhetoric and hysterics (“don’t watch my films!”), the “ink blot” on the page, take the place of the dispassionate appreciation and the creation of new possibilities. Might it not be that all these new Protestants and iconoclasts want to force the human being out of the aesthetic paradise so that they can stay there alone? This is a paradoxical conclusion, since we are speaking primarily of iconoclasts, hooligans, and so on, while, at the same time, it is entirely possible that what the bleak, Gothic tone of these modern-day fantasies reflects is a specifically Protestant spirit. It is possible that it is no accident that French and Italian cinema remains different, while in Russia the brutally moralistic culture of the West has been reinterpreted in the spirit of its own national tradition of melancholy (as with Aleksandr Sokurov, Aleksei Balabanov, and Andrei Zviagintsev) to spite the great Soviet art of the past, which, successfully absorbed and softened this melancholy in what I would describe as a very Italian spirit. To conclude, in and of itself, the negative content of art is neither socially or aesthetically self-sufficient nor automatically valid. At the very least, it is necessary to uncover that second force described by Rancière: the presentation of pain and misfortune not as an expression of guilt, but as a meeting or collision between two or more real forces, both on the level of form and on the level of content.

8. Negativity Enters the Scene: Void and Aggression Up until this point we have regarded negation as something that is expressed primarily by positive means. However, at a certain point it comes to the surface explicitly at the level of form and becomes reflexive, either in the depiction of void or in the aggressive depiction of destruction. In terms of logic, this is another instance of simple, indeterminate negation, but this time it is taken for itself or with consequences for negation. Here we may observe nothing less than reflection on everything which has come before: the naming of the effects of violation, rearrangement, and inattention, the recognition of the force that moves them, admittedly, for the time being, only

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in the purely negative, non-personal form. Here, at last, pure nihil negativum, “nothingness,” negation as such enters the stage. It was already at work in laughter and sadness, but now it is named or shown. But this “nothingness” too comes in two forms, passive and active, that is, acts either as a negative result or as an active force. 1. Passive Negation Let us return to Renaissance painting. Leonardo de Vinci directly formulates and realizes negativity as a principle of new painting and as a form of what, from his point of view, was a higher art: Nothingness has a surface in common with a thing and the thing has a surface in common with nothingness, and the surface of a thing is not a part of this thing. It follows that the surface of nothingness is not part of this nothingness; it must needs be therefore that a mere surface is the common boundary of two things that are in contact … Therefore a surface is the common boundary of two bodies which are not continuous, and does not form part of either one or the other for if the surface formed part of it, it would have divisible bulk, whereas however it is not divisible and nothingness divides these bodies the one from the other.128

This directly concerns painting, since, according to Leonardo, it spreads on the surface of bodies and makes the fictional image, the “nothingness” appear in relief. Nothingness, however, not only has the character of the malleable matter of illusions but also possesses a higher ontological status: In the presence of time nothingness dwells between the past and the future and possesses nothing of the present; and in the presence of nature it finds its associates among things impossible, whence for this reason it is said that it has no existence. For where nothingness existed there would be vacuum. Amid the immensity of the things about us the existence of nothingness holds the first place, and its function extends over the things that have no existence, and its essence dwells in respect of time between past and future, and possesses nothing of the present.129

All this is realized by Leonardo in his paintings using the technique of sfumato, which destroys the boundaries of things in the painting and thereby creates the effect of the visibility of empty space, making bodies radiate light and, on the whole, creating an atmosphere of tender, all-penetrating love (in combination with a certain haughtiness of the figures and a melancholic remoteness of the landscape). As can be seen from his texts, Leonardo was a Neo-Platonic mystic and, what is more, a radical one, closer to the negative theology of Eckhart than to Nicholas of Cusa’s “minimum” (which bears the traits of a compromise with

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being). It is no coincidence that Heidegger chooses Leonardo to confirm his late theory of radical negativity as a spatially realized nothingness. It is precisely art, according to Heidegger, that has privileged access to emptiness.130 For Leonardo, the nothingness of the boundaries of the body, echoing the nothingness of the surface of the canvas, is not only the minimum and not simply emptiness. It is also the destructive greatness of God and his angels interrupting things, causing them to be dissolved in their sunset tenderness toward the absolute. Moreover, the fuzziness of the outlines, imitating unfocused vision, translates the outlines of the body into “background” perception, so that we see what is most important—the non-representational aura of being— with our peripheral vision. Maria Chernysheva indicates that it is precisely at this point, at the peak of the High Renaissance, that painting begins to aspire toward disembodiment and non-representationalism to a degree that brings to mind impressionism and, thus, the modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.131 Incidentally, Hegel himself regarded Renaissance painting as a Romantic art of the spirit because of the vanishingly thin extension of the surface of the canvass.132 In art the characters’ suffering is depicted, and the viewers’ pity is evoked. Frailty and weakness characterize many of the characters and actors, and representation itself often endures the same suffering and, even within strong works of art, becomes weak and begins to collapse, while the signs lie at the verge of disappearance (“the sign=0,” as Hölderlin describes tragic silence).133 The caesura, as will be shown below in the chapter on Hölderlin, leads, in part, to the fragmentation and increased meaninglessness of the sign. This is why the work of negativity leads not only to the uplifting of the spirit, but also to art’s loss of meaning, or at least of one or the other representational meaning. The caesura, like any expression of negativity in art, can be understood in two ways: in Adorno’s view, as a moment of mimetic expression itself possessing aesthetic value (dissonance, a gesture of rejection, a spasm) and, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, as the result of hesitation, a crisis of meaning, which need not necessarily be clearly embodied. Usually both have their place: negativity has a tendency to slip away, to draw attention away from itself, and, for this reason, it cannot be firmly embodied and expressed without the symbol losing part of its negativity. But Adorno is right that the work of art that has come into being does not fully interpret all of its own signs and images, but, rather, dramatizes their incompatibility, forces them to come into opposition with each other (more on this below).

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Another pure form of embodied negation is the direct subtraction of the signs, a device which strips the frame of the work bare while transporting the aesthetic activity into the viewer. This, for instance, is how modern European music works, and it does not take an avant-garde gesture like John Cage’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence to achieve this effect. As Mikhail Arkadiev, a leading Russian expert in classical music, writes: If we are to think seriously about the meaning of the duration of notes (or sound) and its articulation from Bach to Scriabin (this lineage can be further traced to Shostakovich or Schnittke), it would be logical to come to the following conclusion: the note, signifying a real sound, is always a linear relation (I am not currently speaking about vertical ones) between the part that sounds and the part that does not, even when the latter is reduced to zero … For example, the duration of sound in a note played tenuto (for instance, a quarter or half note) is equal to one, and the duration of the internal pause is equal to zero. Then we can gradually reduce the duration of the note from portamento to molto staccatissimo, when the sound is maximally short (close to zero) and the majority of the note (precisely this very note, this notational symbol) is made up of this acoustic pause, internal to the note … Scriabin used this distinctive aspect of notational composition in an exceptionally daring and, we might say, avant-garde way in his seventh sonata. Astonishingly, in the first beat of the measure, the duration of the note, marked by a stem without a notehead, turns out to be zero, but its intonational function as the end of the dotted motif is fully preserved. The effect can be understood and heard only while keeping in mind a slight internal pulse … That Scriabin consciously conceived of and thought through this effect can be confirmed by the fact that Scriabin repeats this musical and graphic idea five times, always when the theme marked by the French word étincelant, that is, the theme of “flashing” or “sparks,” or fulgurant (“like lightning) appears. This sixteenth-note on the weak beat, which does not sound but is completely real in the musical sense, is precisely how Scriabin achieves his stunning embodiment of the image of the virtual “elementary” particle of his mystical cosmic Flame.134

According to Arkadiev, what we are concerned with here is not complete nothingness in the sense of nihil negativum, but, rather, a sort of minimum of sound, a differential particle in the spirit of Leibniz, which manifests itself by destroying the usual sound. In the same way, Engels was right in noting that something that is infinitely small in size in the mathematical sense represents an embodiment of nothingness through the negation of a negation.135

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The phenomenon of modernist art in the twentieth century (as we have already seen above with reference to Adorno) is, in part, related to the process of the self-destruction of the work of art. In the transition from image to the nonrepresentational play of form and color and the ornamental ultra-Impressionism and Cubist abstraction in Monet, Rimbaud, Cézanne, Verlaine, Whistler, Mallarmé, and, later, Picasso and Malevich, we may discern a Kantian formalism or notion of pure genius, but we may also discern the negative work of a new iconoclasm, which subjugates the viewer to itself with the powerful energy of the disembodiment of the world. And yet, historically, this explosion turned out to be a risky one, for very quickly it led to the illusion of the exhaustion of the aesthetic form as such and to the realization of Hegel’s prophecies about the end of art (at least as he originally articulated it). Negativity has a tendency toward destruction. From the frailty of aesthetic images ontologically located at the brink of nothingness emerge the “fear and pity” of the viewers of tragedy in Aristotle. This passively experienced force of destruction and subversion is apparent both in ritual and in art, but in art it is directed against ritual and has a profanatory function (pitiful kings, priests shaking from fear, weeping gods). René Girard considered tragedy, as opposed to the ritual of propitiatory sacrifice from which he derives it, not an attempt at moderation, but a boundless orgy of violence, which the ritual attempts to avoid through “homeopathic” means.136 The passive infectiousness of violence and its connection with mimesis proceed, in the logical sense, from the infectiousness of the negative function, which, by definition, cannot be finalized and leads to the constant crossing out of that which has already been repudiated. Negativity is not an innocent thing. Though its operation may be interesting or fascinating, at the same time, the result of this activity is that it is left balanced precariously at the brink of nothingness. Hegel liked to remind his readers of this fact: negativity does not hold its sublime promise, but, rather, devolves into a limp loss of pathos or simply disgust (when we have overdone it with the negation). He writes about this both in his theory of revolution and in his Aesthetics: For the purely negative is in itself dull and flat and therefore either leaves us empty or else repels us … The gruesome and unlucky, the harshness of power, the pitilessness of predominance, may be held together and endured by the imagination if they are elevated and carried by an intrinsically worthy greatness of character and aim; but evil as such, envy, cowardice, and baseness are and

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remain purely repugnant … But evil is in general inherently cold and worthless, because nothing comes of it except what is purely negative, just destruction and misfortune, whereas genuine art should give us a view of an inner harmony … The great poets and artists of antiquity therefore do not give us the spectacle of wickedness and depravity. Shakespeare, on the other hand, in Lear, for example, brings evil before us in its entire dreadfulness. Lear in old age divides his kingdom between his daughters and, in doing so, is so mad as to trust the false and flattering words [of Goneril and Regan] and to misjudge the speechless and loyal Cordelia. This is already madness and craziness.137

Here Hegel echoes Aristotle and asserts that the presentation of the purely negative event gives birth to a moral and not an aesthetic reaction in the viewer.138 Negation itself is instantaneously negated again and, for this reason, does not create feelings of any duration. Adorno, however, is not entirely in agreement with the classics: he believes that even at the foundation of morality there lies an impulsive affect of disgust, which is marked by a mimetic and, thus, aesthetic, expressive character. To convey this expressivity of disgust in an engaging form is a true accomplishment, one achieved, for instance, by Kafka. 2. Activity No less conspicuous is the active negativity of art: its aggressiveness. Bright color and paint, loud, rhythmic music, the “shock” impact of certain scenes, their violent content: all this attacks the spectator and even the chance bystander and cannot leave her indifferent. The gargoyles on the roofs of Gothic cathedrals do not just depict the lower level of the universe but openly scare the observer, chase her out of her everyday routine through the use of what Eisenstein called the “attraction.” In the painting of Jacek Malczewski, which I will treat in detail below, the rebels tear through the picture in the direction of the spectator, aiming their sharp spears at her. Modern art, particularly in its expressionist and surrealist versions, shocks the spectator and tempts her, holds her on the hook of the ugly (the slicing of the eye in Un Chien Andalou, the transformation of a human into a bug in Kafka, etc.). The same aggressive impact, often unconscious and hidden behind a screen of “attractiveness,” characterizes everyday beauty beyond the field of art: bright jewelry, festive fireworks (which metaphorically deploy the attractions of war), and numerous other technologies meant to amplify one’s presence and to pierce the protective barriers of other people. These other people defend themselves from such excessively aesthetic environments by improving their barriers, which are themselves of an aesthetic nature: for instance, loud music in headphones or videogames played on gadgets.

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As previously discussed, philosophers since Plato have criticized the obsessive sentimentalism of art. In modern times, this sentimentalism has reached its pinnacle. The fact that we live in an aesthetic world, surrounded by aggressive images which aim to put us out of temper, is not a matter of our taste but the result of the will to affect which may be discerned in most contemporary institutions. Apart from the regular depiction of violence and the fear invoked by disasters, loud sound, and bright light (as noted above, Adorno sees such effects of the culture industry as a sadistic humiliation of the public under the guise of “entertainment”), aggression can express itself via reflection. A picture that steps out of its frame (for instance, through the doubling of the image) may be an ironic way of leading the spectator inside the work, but it may also be intended to jump out and hit the spectator on the head. It was Modernist art and the art of the avant-garde that made the heretofore latent aggressiveness of the aesthetic act evident. This applies to the aggressive lines and colors of the Fauves and the Futurists as well as to the action and performance-based art which originated in the explicitly destructive and iconoclastic Dada movement.139 The negativity of Modernism goes further than mere aggressivity and has to do with the conceptual thematization of negation, a problem which deserves a more detailed treatment.

9. Explicit Negation: Symbols and Operations of Negativity 9.1. Modernism and Emphatic Negation As mentioned above, the expression of aesthetic negativity became explicit in twentieth-century Modernism. Of course, this is a generalization that cannot apply to the entire Modernist period. Moreover, a negation can never be complete, so there were also affirmative messages and tasks involved (such as the expansion of sensual perception emphasized by Rancière), but this general negative orientation is incontestable. Beyond the violation and destruction of the canonic standards and shapes, we can speak of 1) the depiction and signification of the void (of nothingness, non-being, and muteness) and 2) the presentation and playing-out of the destructive forces inherent in art. Here we should first mention Malevich, who did not just paint the famous “Black Square” and “White on White, ” but who also called the former a “zerodegree of form” and “zero-degree of painting.” He and Tatlin first exhibited their new art at the 1915 exhibition with a telling title, “0, 10” (zero-ten). In World as Objectlessness, Malevich gives an elaborate explanation of his method: he opposes the world of objectified utility to the true, objectless nature of being.

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His argument is thus close enough to the traditional Neo-Platonic doctrine: the objectless is negative for us, but in itself it is the only entity that truly exists: “I am setting at the square of world ceremonies the white world as a suprematist objectlessness, the triumph of liberated Nothingness.”140 After Malevich, many others went searching for the zero-degree: the second half of the century saw the emergence of a multitude of reflexive variations on the theme of destroying art or reducing it to its minimum, for instance, the “Canvas” by Jasper Johns (1956), the cut of canvas by Lucio Fontana (Spatial Concept “Waiting,” 1960), the “Erased de Kooning Drawing” by Robert Rauschenberg (1953), etc. Overall, this “zero-degree” of art has several simultaneous meanings: A. The criticism of all preceding art and of art as such, iconoclasm (Fontana, Rauschenberg). Here I would draw attention to the polemical but not merely negative intention of the zero-degree (Malevich made his “Black Square” originally for the play “Victory over the Sun,” as an antiEnlightenment symbol). B. The expression of the sublime and transcendent—a pure, true feeling, the joy of overcoming not just realism but reality itself (Kandinsky, Malevich). C. The endeavor to discover art as such, a minimal unit of art: reductionism (in literature, Beckett, Celan, and later conceptualist writing with its lists of objects; in plastic arts: cubism, with Jean Metzinger as its prophet of “primordial white unity,” and later the minimalists like Yves Klein or Jasper Johns). D. The reduction of art to the opaque materiality of its media (canvas, paint, words, sounds), and to their free play (meaning attributed to Modernism by Greenberg and most obvious again in the art from after the Second World War). E. By the same logic, the reduction of art, not to the representatum but to the representamen, to the act of making art and to its “exposition value,” to its environment, to the museum (Duchamps, pop-art, and conceptual art from Kosuth to Haacke). F. The manifestation of the end of art because of its exhaustion (thus, Malevich saw “suprematism” as the last artistic movement and the end of painting). In all the diversity of these functions, there is nevertheless a ubiquitous negativity at work: sometimes it works as a reduction or a step backward, sometimes as destruction, and sometimes as a polemical expression. Modernism has not only demonstrated the nothing and the opaque screen of art, but also, and to an equally strong degree, a will to destruction. We are

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familiar with the appeals to destruction in Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” and with their realization, for instance, in a performance that involved Marinetti himself smashing a car. The attitude of Dada was similar: “There is great destructive work to be done.”141 In cubism, negativity could have been latent for some time and could be seen merely as a defamiliarizing tool, but, gradually, the aggression that was contained in the very modernist form started to come to the surface. In the work of the expressionists like Dix and in that of Picasso himself, the membra disjecta, first an analytical tool of l’art pour l’art, comes to be seen as aggression and violence against the body. Picasso called his artworks “sums of destructions” as opposed to older art, which he regarded as a “sum of additions.”142 The disorientation of spectator in early Matisse and late Mondrian also has a deliberately aggressive thrust.143 After the Second World War, art’s basis in negative forces becomes explicit. This had to do with the shock from the catastrophe which has been witnessed, with the crisis of utopian hope for communism, and with the invention of the atomic bomb. But apart from such realistic motivations, art also annulled the taboos previously imposed on the enjoyment associated with destruction.144 Among the artists who still made use of the canvas, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, and Yves Klein were all particularly concerned with the destruction of image. Fautrier, who depicted the victims (“hostages”) of war in a manner that might be described as a radicalized Modernism, noted: “A painting is something that can only destroy itself, and must destroy itself in order to reinvent.”145 Klein, who did not motivate his images realistically, conceived of the negativity of art in another, even more radical way: “We live in the century [of the nuclear bomb— AM] when everything material and physical can disappear at any moment, hence our need of maximal abstraction.”146 The bomb, or the threat thereof, thus serves as a vehicle of abstraction and spiritualization: here, Malevich’s critical ascent to the “zero-degree” turns objective and takes on an empirical foundation. Art becomes an apocalyptic vision, a protocol of the world’s destruction. As for the so-called “contemporary” art, performative or situationist, which emerged in the 1950–60s, rituals of destruction were central to its aesthetic from the start. These rituals were provocatively aimed at revealing the destructive drives of the audience members (the moral meaning) and at reflecting the real destruction of the world in the course of its “modernization.” One might, for instance, recall Yoko Ono’s performance “Cut Piece,” during which audience members had to cut pieces from her clothes, or the self-collapsing assemblages of Jean Tinguely: “Homage to New York” and “the Sorceress.” Also worth mentioning are the “Fire Paintings” by Yves Klein where he burned a canvass

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but left out wet areas in the shapes of bodies. Most known in this context are the works of Gustav Metzger, a German Jewish artist who escaped from the Nazis to the United States during his youth. In his series “Acid on Nylon,” the dissolution of nylon with acid creates ephemeral figures of grace: as opposed to conventional theological and aesthetic stereotypes, destruction itself becomes the demiurge.147 Today, this method has been successfully used by Elana Herzog, an artist who makes art by tearing fabrics apart. In 1964, Metzger, together with the poet John Sharkey, organized a symposium in London called “Destruction in Art.” Most key artists of the period took part: Yoko Ono, Rafael Ortiz, John Latham, Barry Flanahan, and the Viennese actionists Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl. Today, in the 2000–20s, at a time of increased terrorist activity, we observe a new interest in the destructive functions of art, now mostly in the form of fiction and in the genre of video. Now, it is less a reenactment of destruction, but rather a reflection upon art as such and a critique of pop culture, with an obviously comic element. Thus, in the film by Khristian Jankowski, 16mm Mystery, it appears that a film like the one being shown destroys a high-rise building. As Kerry Brougher comments, “culture not just could not change the world to the better but possibly became a reason of its demise.”148 Similar effects were once attributed to “fascist” art by Walter Benjamin. I would also mention Joe Sola’s “a short film about looking,” in which a looking game between two artists leads to a “real” explosion of their heads and artworks, with Tarantino-like shock-effect.149 These destructive tendencies have been an object of criticism and discussion, and I am indebted to the 2013 exhibition at the Hirschhorn Museum, “Damage Control” (curated by Kerry Brougher). We see more generally today how the connection of art to destruction becomes more than a reflection upon a destruction really taking place and more than mere enjoyment from sacrifices, but involves a potentially critical moment. The representation of the annihilating force of art, of a nihilist aestheticism characterizing modernity, also alludes at the chance to use this art back against the nihilist entertainment culture, for a symbolic but sensible counter-strike. This situation sends us back to the early predecessors of art: sacrifices, gifts to gods, and apocalyptic rituals. There is here, arguably, a danger of art’s conversion to religion, a transformation of image into all-powerful hallucinations. However, the destruction and negation which are part of religious rituals are precisely the elements that subvert and desecrate them: the negative practices shift the destructive pathos to art itself, producing a self-destructive and selfcritical image. This said, the great monotheist religions have also turned to selfcriticism, and contemporary art will not have an easy time liberating itself from

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the dangers of the sacred (understood either as an extraordinary event or as bureaucratic routinization). In modern literature, processes in many ways parallel those in the visual arts. Along with the destruction and reduction of form, the question, for many writers, concerns the verbal expression of negativity, of their protest against the old repressive forms of writing. Maire Jaanus Kurrik rightly argues that the literature of the entire modern period, particularly the novel, is characterized by the ubiquity and primacy of linguistic negation, and that this negation is the expression of the dislocated modern subjectivity.150 How can one say “no” without repeating the mistake of Freud’s patient who betrayed his true thoughts in insisting “This is not my mother”?151 In Modernist literature, the need to negate increasingly shifts from content to form, which it half-destroys. Amidst all of the richness of twentieth-century literature, there are probably two writers who are most explicitly “negative”: Celan and Beckett. It is not by chance that they coincide in time with the negative art of Fautrier, Metzger, and Rauschenberg. Beckett returns to the notion of “naught” throughout his work. His last major text, “Worstward Ho,” is an encyclopedia of negative expressions, which are added to each other without a visible order, be it logical or narrative.152 Celan, a renowned virtuoso of neologisms and paronyms, widely used negative prefixes like un-, ver-, and ent—for word-building purposes, announced a search for a Gegenwort or “counter-word” (Beckett once used the German word, Unwort, in a letter), and, like Beckett, played with the ambiguity of the word “nothing” as a pronoun and a substantive.153 He once replaced the word Gedicht, “poem,” with das Genicht, a portmanteau made out of Gedicht and Nicht (“no”) which alludes to a condensation of negativity that results in a poem. In Celan, this negativity is most significantly associated with the criticism of poetry and art as such, within poetry. The task of poetry consists, for him, in parrying the obsessive formulae of language, to counter the sublime rhetoric which hides in itself orders and obedience to orders (this is similar to Porshnev’s aesthetics, of which Celan was obviously not aware). This task is already clear in the early Todesfuge, in which the sublime poetic motif of Death as the “Master from Germany” is juxtaposed, self-critically and self-destructively, with the image of a concert played by the inmates in a camp, an image which is an allegory for the very poem in which it is constructed.154 It is not by chance that Celan used another poem, the voice of another person, Ivan Gaull, in this poem, and it is not by chance that he was so bitter at having been accused of plagiarism on this occasion. All of Celan’s subsequent work, which becomes increasingly

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original and inimitable, is constructed as the struggle with the word of the Other, especially with the poetic, elevated word. Celan’s famous reference to Büchner’s Lucile in his “Meridian” speech (written on the occasion of his having won the Georg Büchner Prize) follows the same paradigm. Celan quotes the ending of Büchner’s Danton’s Death, in which Lucile Desmoulins, desperate after her husband Camille has been arrested and sentenced to death, walks out into the street and screams “Long live the King,” after which she too is, naturally, arrested. This phrase of Lucile is, according to Celan, a symbol of poetic speech as such. Why? He does not explain, but I would draw attention to the fact that the phrase is a citation from authoritative ideological speech and, like the “Meister aus Deutschland,” mentions the master and his signifier. “Long live the King” is a political and theological formula of acclamation. Like the language of the hymn, it is a radical type of poetry which dissolves meaning in the very form of address.155 Modern poetry like Celan’s specializes, so to speak, in hymns to no one, hymns with no addressee (the King was already dead by the time Lucile wished him a long life). Büchner’s Lucile cites not only the constituent ritual of monarchy, but also a practice which actually existed during the terror among the wives of monarchists. Büchner did not make this up: wives did publicly scream “Long Live the King” if they wanted to share their husbands’ fate (however, in Büchner’s paradoxical case, Lucile was a revolutionary’s wife). In his play, Büchner cites the real history of the French Revolution. The text is filled with exact and paraphrased quotations from revolutionary documents. Büchner is a citational and documentary writer.156 Similarly, his Lenz is a story that adds the narrator’s words to the words from Lenz’s literary works. The appeal to Büchner in Celan’s speech, then, is more than a tribute to the prize’s eponym: he feels a deep affinity for both writers’ obsession with the speech of the Other. It is in this process of parrying a sublime discourse that Celan creates new constellations of signs, in a new, uncertain mode of utterance, through a negative but productive process that Celan compares to weathering and etching (wegbeizen). One of Celan’s poems from the mature period literally dies out, as though lulling the reader to sleep and moving the destroyed words into the position of ellipsis or an allusion, figures which, as we already know, are always latent in figurative, aesthetic speech: Keine Sandkunst [a sand art is here the negative art of weathering—AM] mehr, keine Sandbuch, keine Meister [Note this ‘Meister’ from the Todesfuge—AM] … Tiefimschnee [Three words melted together in the snow—AM], Iefimnee, I-i-e.157

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Knowing Celan’s concern with a distant “interlocutor” from the future (an image which he borrows from Mandelstam), one can evoke, by analogy, a classic scene from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in which Kitty and Levin exchange two long rows of seemingly meaningless letters, W y e b d I m t o n; T l c n a o; T y m f a f w, and miraculously understand each other.158 The issue of eroded language involves a form of deep tele-communication with a partner from the past or from the future. Negation leads to interiorization. But such ruins of language also become pure signs in their sublime materiality and muteness. At the threshold of its disappearance, art shines bright in its purity. I-i-e is not an abstraction in the spirit of Futurist zaum, but the motivated result of the destruction and recombination of signs in everyday speech. Another poem of Celan’s, which is dedicated to Hölderlin, ends with the apparently nonexistent word, “Pallaksch, pallaksch.”159 According to Hölderlin’s friend Georg Schwab, the poet used this word during his madness to mean both “yes” and “no.” This word is thus a negation of “no” itself, a negation of a negation or an epokhe of sorts. It highlights both the utopian neutrality of language “beyond good and evil,” which would justify the free play of free, half-signifying signifiers, and a demonic reversibility: “yes” may mean “no,” affirmation may mean negation, as in the aforementioned case of Lucile’s “Long live the King.” At the same time, “pallaksch” sounds like glossolalia, like the result of the destruction of meaning in language, similar to the practices of “Dada.” In his recent articles, Shane Weller connects the poetics of both Celan and Beckett with a certain skepticism vis-à-vis language. Both, he maintains, look for ways to overcome the conventionality and opaqueness of everyday language, both destroy this language and search for “counter-words” that would overcome the limitations of language by pointing to its limits. Weller also observes in both writers a reflection on the impotence of negation. Thus, Celan often combines a negated statement with the act of its negation: “wir wußten, // wir wußten nicht, wir // waren da und nicht dort” (Soviel Gestirne); “Ich schwamm für uns beide. Ich schwamm nicht” (“Flimmerbaum”).160 Again, we are dealing both with the subversion of language and with the promise of an absolute word like “Pallaksch.” Beckett, in his “Worstward Ho,” repeats his “no” many times, but his “no” does not cancel out what he says but points, rather, to its reduction and erosion. There is less, there is worse, but there is no nothing in the strict sense of the word: “No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground”; “With leastening words say least best worse. For want of better worse. Unlessenable least best worse”; “All gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught.”161 Negation, being a form of motion, is sufficient for the purpose of moving forward at any

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price. In “Nohow on,” on is a literal inversion, a mirror-image of no. “Worstward Ho” takes negation and distributes it into various categories according to their negative magnitudes: less, worse, back, vague, left, knelt, etc. Nothingness, zero, evil, weakness, and blindness unite and appear as the combined forces of the obverse and not just as an inert powerlessness. Still, these forces are not entirely substantial, because their negativity is negative with regard to themselves. Beckett, with his wide erudition, alludes to a formula of the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who, in one of his fragments, uses the nonexistent word den, the second syllable of the word meden, “nothing,” “no one.”162 In Greek, there are the words me (“no”) and hen (“one”), but when they are united into one word, the connective consonant “d” had to be inserted. Therefore, when we now remove me and try to undo the negative meaning of the word, we are left not with “one” but with a den, a non-word, which allows Democritus to designate a non-negateable atom of being. In Texts for Nothing, Beckett writes: “How can I go on, I shouldn’t have begun, no, I had to begin. Someone said, perhaps the same. What possessed you to come? I could have stayed in my den, snug and dry. My den, I’ll describe it, no, I can’t.”163 This, again, means that a complete negation is impossible and that everything including negation is subject to the finitude of failure. Den is an esoteric word which stands between negation and position, resembling in this respect Celan’s/Höldelin’s “Pallaksch.” But Beckett, unlike Celan, brings all of the meanings of negation together by turning the unattainable “Nothing” into a negative absolute: its reduction accomplishes a negative work in relation to being, good, and truth. That is, Beckett is a classical Platonist who proceeds from the Idea of Good, while Celan is a Neo-Platonist, for whom negation, or, alternatively, the ultra-negation which absorbs affirmation, is not the inverse of being but higher being itself. Werner Hamacher, in his oft-cited article “A Second of Inversion,” points out that, in Celan, it is not just negativity that is in operation, but also a sudden inversion.164 I will discuss Hamacher’s argument below in more detail, but here it is enough to note that, for him, inversion bears the task of abstract negation and does not introduce any additional gain in meaning. For him, this is a nondialectical inversion which only reinforces negation. Hamacher knows well that inversion as such is a dialectical operation that often produces a subjectivizing effect. The subject can use the reversibility of events to take them upon herself, to master the rhythm of its oscillation, like Freud’s grandson with his Fort/Da play. But, in Celan, Hamacher argues, inversion just leads to the negative self-destruction of language and to its mystical opening toward transcendence:

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Engaged neither semantically nor asemantically, the lacuna holds open the space between negation and the negated, holds it open for their relation and at the same time for the possibility of their non-relation. … In the pause stands nothing, and not Nothing. In the second of the vacuum, the inversion … is interrupted and held back.165 [N]othingness appears only in a form which is broken by the pause, as a counter-nothing (Aber-Nichts), a non-nothing and a double-nothing, as the vacancy and the withholding of its linguistic presentation.166

Thus, in Hamacher’s approach, the telos of Celan’s negations is a certain absolute negativity which does not withstand naming, reflection, and undermines its own expression. This negativity coincides with the material meaningless of words. As Celan notes at the end of “Meridian,” it is as if his figures (tropes) are crossed out (tropes … durchkreuzendes): these are “counterfigures” whose literal sense is affirmed and metaphorical sense denied.167 Convincing as this interpretation is, negation is thus reduced to the mystical nature of being and takes on a theological aspect. Though negativity is named and thematized, it is understood as alterity or even absolute negativity. But this is only one stage or moment of negation. Hamacher’s Celan would be analogous, in painting, with Malevich, or at least with Fontana (a canvas cut/a word cut). However, his inversions might carry a more dialectical meaning.

9.2. The Inversion of the Image and the Topsy-Turvy World Negation, which is originally latent, abstract, and indeterminate, has an innate tendency toward renewed expression and reflection. The negation of a negation does not annul the latter but reinforces it. Reflexivity increases on a scale from a simple negation to privation and contrariness. Therefore, a reflexive work of art does not just displace or shift, but often directly inverts the canonical form from the bottom up. This effect has been described by Bakhtin as the “carnivalesque,” but there are elements of it in more conventional comic tropes and genres such as irony and parody. The simple displacement of form leads to the inversion of meaning. Carnival, with its inverting negation, incorporates and uses the more basic privative negation: the religious meaning that is inverted and subverted in carnival stays implicit in it and shines through it. But the inversion creates a new quality because it gives rise to a force of negation (nihil privativum in Kant’s sense) which had heretofore only been smoldering in the work of art. The dialectical method allows us to uncover a positive reality behind the apparent negation: it is power and its substrate, free subjectivity. Behind the seemingly passive imitation an act of temptation may be discerned. Inversion brings this latent force to light, makes it a part of the work of art itself. But, the world thus

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inverted stays one-sided, asymmetrical. Religion is desecrated, and secular art triumphs. We do not yet have the collision of two equally noble forces, as in the case of the aesthetic contradiction. Aristotle, as we saw, distinguished four kinds of negative relation: mere negation or contradiction, privation, contrary opposition, and correlation. What we today, after Hegel, call contraries are closer, in Aristotle, not to the contraries per se, but to correlatives: day/night, part/totality, etc. For Hegel, “contraries” were inversions not of terms but of relations (e.g., Feuerbach’s formula: it is not that humans are copies of God, but that God is a copy of humans). It is this operation that matters most in art: the overturning of structure, a reduplication and inversion of relations. Such overturning does not destroy its object but reenacts destruction and repulsion, becoming thus an indispensable moment in the discovery and fulfillment of a negation. Negation is the projected annihilation of its object. Or, in other words, the reflexive contrary opposition is a schema of negation. Art actively uses this schema for its own negative purposes. An example may be found in Josef Brodsky’s famous poem, “The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn.”168 In this poem, a bird falls up into the sky (as opposed to falling to the ground as everyone, birds included, usually does). The result is a paradox and an oxymoron, which allow the poet, first of all, to emblematize the high tension and danger of poetic creativity, and, second, to include the reader in the event described in the poem using a sort of inverted perspective. An object would ordinarily fall down toward us, but if we are looking at the events from God’s or an angel’s perspective, from inside the poem, then the bird’s vertiginous rise would, for us, seem like a fall. Inversion is a vehicle for capturing the reader inside the work of art. Consciously or not, Brodsky echoes the German tradition here. Hölderlin once wrote in a theoretical text devoted to different types of poetic inspiration: “One can fall not only into the deep but also into a height.”169 As we will see, Celan’s poetic was also built on this principle, and, in “Meridian,” he defines art via an image of reverse statement, antiphrasis. How do we explain this obsession of art with anti-imagery? Boris Porshnev, one of the greatest Soviet thinkers, created a general doctrine of language as a system of quasi-hypnotic suggestion and of symbolic resistance to this suggestion. In his unpublished manuscripts from the 1940s, as well as in his published book On the Origins of Human History (1974), Porshnev proposed two very different versions of a negative aesthetics.170 The early version states that art is a ritual procedure that uses special images not to stimulate but, on the contrary, to inhibit fantasies and mimetic impulses that posed a danger to early

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humans. In the human head, Porshnev claimed, images swarm which distract the individual from reality or engage her unnecessarily in the teleological worlds of others. The work of art was created in order to block this spontaneous imagination using its own means. “Thus, the beautiful is just the delimitation of the ugly, it is the little that remains after the suppression and repression of the “ugly” (which, according to Porshnev, originally refers to the mimetic as such), because it cannot be suppressed or repressed except by opposing one piece of the ugly imaginary to itself.171 “Again, this is quite similar to Celan and his Gegenwort. Porshnev observes that great art is always art against art, that it always has a serious anti-aesthetic and iconoclastic thrust. Anti-mimetic anxiety, of which some accuse philosophers since Plato, is in fact the very essence of art as opposed to everyday mimetic behavior. In his later work, written during the 1960s and 1970s, Porshnev changes his mind. Now he describes art as a weak expression of resistance, originally on the part of the oppressed early humans who were ruled according to a system of symbolic taboos. The primary gesture of art, says Porshnev here, is touching a forbidden object (he cites palm imprints on cave walls). So, the suggestive vision of anti-images is still present but now, in the 1960s, is understood as a sort of leftist resistance to the official culture, the one that supposedly tried to suppress imagination and thus played the disciplinary role that the early Porshnev ascribed to art in general. As I have mentioned, Werner Hamacher, in his “Second of Inversion,” notes Celan’s attraction to inverted images, for instance, the inverted parables in his early Gegenlicht: “The cross was nailed to Christ;” “It got lighter, not because the lamp would shine brighter but because the darkness pulled itself inside.”172 But Hamacher, seeing this, denies the connection to Hegel. For instance, Celan quotes Büchner’s “Lenz” and comments “but the only thing that bothered him, was that he could not walk on his head.” Hamacher rightly notes that this is a reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where the revolutionary subject was standing on his head. Celan, as Hamacher notes, points at the riskiness and precarity of such a position: If language is nothing more than the articulation of the withdrawal of the world, then, no longer capable of designating it as an object, it becomes itself a figure of the plunge. If it is unable to stand the world on the head of its poetic presentation, if it is instead nothing more than the cut and step of a ceaseless passing away, then it is itself drawn into the movement of upending, and it becomes the vertiginous whirl of disfiguration, in which nothing can any longer mean what it says.173

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On the question of vertigo, Hamacher echoes Lacoue-Labarthe. The latter, in his Poetry as experience, shows how Celan undermines the subject, puts her into the condition of vertigo, dis-orientation and “atopy.”174 But, Lacoue-Labarthe also points out that the question of the subject—“Who is a human?”—is central to Celan’s poetics.175 Lacoue-Labarthe includes this as an example of his more general conception of the weak, vulnerable, desistent, mimetic subject. To all of this I would add that an inversion is a reinforced, hyperbolic, and, at the same time, effectuated negation. It is through inversion that Celan manages to convey a sense of muteness and of the interruption of sense. However, as opposed to mere interruption, inversion is a negation that has a force and (pace Hamacher) allows the subject to master herself: not in the sense of the simple subjugation of the world to her will, but rather in the sense in which a human being can deal with her own finitude via the symbolic appropriation of a lack. The “vertiginous vortex” means that the negation of linguistic meaning brings to the fore the force that had generated it. The inversion as a symbol of (incomplete) reversibility endows the subject not just with a Dionysian ecstasy, but also with a feeling of power. There is one more turn in Celan’s poetics, which he actualizes in both the Todesfuge and in “Meridian.” In the Death Fugue, we encounter a sublime image of death as “master” or lord, which simultaneously endows the poem with a solemn pathos and makes the reader shudder from her own sublime feeling: this “Master” kills people in the most barbaric way, and his essence is purely negative. Death as master is a paraphrase from Hegel, who shows, in the revolution chapter of Phenomenology, how this sublime but empty figure wears itself out, and death becomes banal, like cutting a head of cabbage. Celan’s poem speaks of a concert played by Nazi concentration camp prisoners for their guards. It is a nauseating and ironic critique of art as a form of fatal seduction and temptation. The poet plays on a dissonance or, one might say, on a double bind, by making sublimation and repulsion clash, but not in the sense that our moral feeling should defeat aesthetic enjoyment and refute art as such. On the contrary, Celan does not stop writing poems and considers art to be an important practice of mourning, while the sublimity of the Fugue is not just repulsive but also adequate to its subject, if not the lyrical one (the death of the author’s family) then at least the epic one: the genocide of a people. The same is true of Lucile’s “counterword”: as we remember, she says “Long live the King” in order to be arrested and executed like her husband. She thus speaks out against the terror, and her words sound, ironically, like a revolutionary slogan. It is not hard to see the same motif as in the Fugue: a sublime authoritarian

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symbol becomes, in the poet’s mouth, a revolutionary manifesto. In his poem “Mandorla” (“almond” and “nimbus”), Celan writes: “In der Mandel—was steht in der Mandel? // Das Nichts … Im Nichts—wer steht da?—der König. // Er steht und steht.”176 Standing twice, the king stands no longer: he drifts in the void of his sacral halo, becoming a name without a referent. Feeding on the despot’s energy and maneuvering like a Judo wrestler, art nourishes the forces of freedom. The same function operates in Hölderlin’s “pallaksch, pallaksch”: inversions and non-signifying names suspend meaning, as it were, between “yes” and “no.” Inversion does not just suspend meaning but reveals forces. As a writer, Celan is not an abstractionist (as may be argued of Beckett) but a surrealist. He is engaged in a combinatorial art and creates bright images from the existing atoms of meaning by splitting these atoms. Recombination liberates elements from their fixed structures and sets the hidden forces that had held them together free in a way similar to a nuclear explosion. From this reshuffling there emerges not a void, but so many utopian anti-worlds and counter-rituals, and inside them, an abyssal vertigo which accompanies a lullaby, a dreamy meditation, or a syncopated dance (like the one in the Fugue). “The world is gone, I must carry you”: pace Hamacher, these words of Celan’s point to the subject who, by the law of inversion, has to step over into the ground that was supposed to carry her.177 This is not a sovereign, transcendental subject, but—and here I agree with Lacoue-Labarthe—a subject deprived of a ground and of anything else but force, a subject akin to Büchner’s Lenz, who, according to Celan, walks on his head and “has heaven as an abyss beneath him.”178 In both cases, the poem is reconceived as a dance, even a dance with some acrobatic elements (the dancer stands on his head while holding a partner in the air with his feet, etc.). In Celan, the inverted images referred to the historical disaster of Germany. To the same effect, the cooperation between Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno during the Second World War depicted a negative work of art in Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus.” There, the protagonist uses formal inversion to generate expressive negativity: a melancholia. Thus, the cantata that he writes “takes back the Ninth symphony” through its “formal negation”: a structural imitation of Beethoven’s music that turns jubilation into lament in each sequence.179 Inversion is central to art, and not just to modern art, for a reason. I have already mentioned Longinus’ trope of “hyperbaton,” inversion in the logic of presentation, of the subject–predicate relationship. Sometimes a text reflects on this effect and renders it explicit in a chiasmus. For example, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Chiasmus is a reflexive

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hyperbaton, which loses some of its rhetorical force but gains in clarity and polemical thrust. Hyperbaton is to chiasmus what symbol is to comparison. It is not by chance that chiasmus is both a rhetorical and a psychophysiological term. The latter was used, famously, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for his phenomenological theory of perception and visual art. In this theory, consciousness does not “reflect” the “external” world but is interwoven with it by a knot, a chiasmus, the paradigm of which is the experience of self-touching (a hand touches a hand, and we do not know which one is active and which one passive). Speaking in terms of German idealism, there is here an objective reflection which grounds the subjective reflection. It is easy to see that the mechanism of hyperbaton as described by Longinus (a lure that captures the reader and puts her inside the text) also corresponds to what Merleau-Ponty describes as perceptive chiasmus. Inversion, hyperbaton, chiasmus: all these forms of expression represent the determinate forms of negation (contraries, pros ti, the nihil privativum), but they are at the same time forms of reflection, whether we understand reflection as a doubling that generates knowledge or as an embodiment of the subject in an object. The fact that a mirror produces an inverted image is not an accident but an expression of a fundamental dialectical law, according to which reflection implies and uses inversion. Art does not only shift but also displaces its forms. It does not merely re-enact the non-existence of its objects. It also overturns being and creates “anti-worlds” (as Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky once named a series of poems). This, for art, is an essential, defining practice, which characterizes its relationship to its origin, the cult ritual (in our time, we may find a distant analogon of ritual in bureaucratic ceremony). Again, it is most importantly revealed in modern and Modernist art. Bakhtin attributes inversion to the modern novel, but his compatriot and contemporary, Mikhail Lifshits, saw it more narrowly as embodied in twentiethcentury Modernism. He writes that Modernism was not just a negation of the art of the past, but, as its direct opposite, a negative magnitude of “minus a” in relation to the “a” of “classical” art (obvious examples are the cubist portraits of the underside of things, the ready-mades and blasphemous anti-icons of popart). Modernism consciously inverts the norms of art and culture, and Lifshitz despises it for being nothing more than an “integrated revolt.”180 Lifshitz is perceptive, but he is wrong in rejecting Modernist negativity, because he does not see what Bakhtin does. Being partly integrated, the Modernist anti-worlds allowed artists to imagine utopias and derived an uncanny energy from the act

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of turning the canon inside-out and biting into its flesh as opposed to merely overturning it. Andrei Platonov, who was a friend of Lifshitz in the 1930s (both writing for the same journal Literary Critic), was also an ardent practitioner of aesthetic inversions, which, for him, were symbols of the revolutionary event. His famous image of the “foundation pit” is a Tower of Babel turned upside-down. In the novel Chevengur, the same logic is explicitly spelled out in his image of death as a prototype of art: Contemplating the lake through the years, the fisherman thought always about the same thing, about the interest of death … After a year the fisherman couldn’t stand it any more and threw himself into the lake from his boat, after tying his feet with a rope so that he wouldn’t accidentally float. In secret he didn’t even believe in death. The important thing was that he wanted to look at what was there—perhaps it was much more interesting than living in a village or on the shores of a lake. He saw death as another province, located under the heavens as if at the bottom of cool water, and it attracted him. Some of the muzhiks that the fisherman talked with about his intention to live awhile with death and return tried to talk him out of it, but others agreed with him. “What the hell, Mitry Ivanich, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Try it, then come back and tell us.” Dmitry Ivanich tried—they dragged him from the lake after three days and buried him near the fence of the village graveyard.181

As mentioned above, Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian thinker inspired by both Symbolism and Marxism, who, like Celan, was a theorist of Modernist negativity, noticed that inversions of reality, ubiquitous in novelistic prose, are closely related to the ritualistic and mimetic underside of literature: the element that he called “carnivalesque.” It would seem to a layman that a novel is just a text, a material thing with signs written on it, a subject of long, monotonous decoding. But in fact, for Bakhtin, it is an abbreviated protocol of a festive event. It is a festival of inversions and metamorphoses, which is defined by a revolutionary democratic impulse. The eventfulness of the text plays out here, but it plays out in a negative form. How universal is this case? It is the ideal type at the very least, if we remember that art always has a recreational, idle nature. It is something that one practices in one’s own free time, and, thus, it depends on the temporal framework of the holiday, which stands out from the everyday (such idleness is the topic of one of the chapters of this book). One also notices the non-artistic beauty of the free moment the pause which then defines the temporality of the experience of art:

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Like a caesura yawns this day; Since morning there have been peace and arduous longueurs, oxen in pastures, and a golden languor out of a reed extracts a whole note’s riches.182

But if art is a feast, then it is a feast to which you are not invited. Everyone went to a party and you stayed at home, alone with your jealous mind, with your keyhole of imagination. This invisible barrier that makes art, even if it is owned, fundamentally inaccessible is what separates the artwork from cult ritual. I suggest that Bakhtin’s description of the carnivalesque should be read as a paradigmatic description of the very essence of art, following Rousseau’s equation of authentic, unspoiled art with the village festival.183 This is true not just for performative art but also for the intimate, individualistic genre that is literature. For Bakhtin, carnival is an anti-ritual, a procedure that mocks the existing official ceremonies. Art exists as such as a secondary, dependent phenomenon, but it is in this negative role that it endows humanity, Bakhtin says, with freedom, openness, and universality. During the Renaissance, which Bakhtin, following the late-Romantic aestheticism of the nineteenth century, celebrates and mythologizes as a pinnacle of Western art, art fulfilled the role of reflecting the world in the cognitive sense of the word: These special functions become even more obvious in the light of the problem that all Renaissance literature was trying to solve, namely, to find forms that would make possible and would justify the most extreme freedom and frankness of thought and speech. The exterior, so to say, censored right and the interior right were undivided. Frankness was understood, of course, not in a narrowly subjective sense as “sincerity,” the “soul’s truth,” or “intimacy.” The Renaissance concept of frankness was far more serious; it meant a completely loud, marketplace frankness that concerned everyone. Thought and speech had to be placed under such conditions that the world could expose its other side: the side that was hidden, that nobody talked about, that did not fit the words and forms of prevailing philosophy. America was still to be discovered, the Antipodes reached, the Western hemisphere explored, and the question arose: “What is under our feet?” Thought and word were searching for a new reality beyond the visible horizon of official philosophy. Often enough words and thoughts were turned around in order to discover what they were actually hiding, what was that other side. The aim was to find a position permitting a look at the other side of established values, so that new bearings could be taken.184

Bakhtin explicitly describes the logic of carnival as “dialectical” in opposition to formal logic185 and analyses the logical significance of imagery.

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In Rabelais’ system of images a highly important role is played by negation in time and space expressed in forms of the contrary, the backside, the lower stratum, the inside out, and the topsy-turvy. We have already given a sufficient number of these examples. As a matter of fact, the negative pole in this timespace play is not removed from the positive pole. This is not an abstract, absolute negation that clearly cuts off the object from the rest of the world. The timespace negation does not make such a division; it considers the phenomenon in its becoming, in its movement from the negative to the positive pole. It does not deal with an abstract concept (for this is no logical negation), it actually offers a description of the world’s metamorphoses, its remodeling, its transfer from the old to the new, from the past to the future. It is the world passing through the phase of death on the way to birth. This is not understood by those who see in such images a bare, purely negative satire of definite, strictly limited contemporary manifestations. It would be more correct (though not quite accurate) to say that these images are oriented toward the entire scope of the contemporary world, toward the present as such, and that they represent this present in the sequence of the past giving birth to the future, or in the past’s pregnant death … Side by side with the time-space form of negation we see a related form constructing the positive image by means of the negation of certain manifestations. This is a process similar to the opposite, inside-out logic but in a more abstract form, without the clear time-space exchange. Carnival celebrates the destruction of the old and the birth of the new world—the new year, the new spring, the new kingdom. The old world that has been destroyed is offered together with the new world and is represented with it as the dying part of the dual body. This is why in carnivalesque images there is so much turnabout, so many opposite faces and intentionally upset proportions.186

Bakhtin notes, seemingly in passing, that Rabelais’ operation “can be defined as an inverted transubstantiation: the transformation of blood into wine, of the dismembered body into bread, of the passion into a banquet.”187 That is, carnival is an anti-Christianity (not so far from Nietzsche’s Antichrist), which derives its structure and force from Christianity. Bakhtin is thinking dialectically and considers the function and structure of art to be primarily negative: not in the sense of abstract or pure negation (nihil negativum) and not in the sense of merely violating order, but in the sense of an act of effective, determinate, and substantial negation/inversion. We see united here the determinateness of negation, the existence of a second pole of opposition (negation as something more than a mere lack), and negativity’s explicit reflection. In this kind of negativity, there emerges a supplementary effect

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that allows art as a counter-ritual to express world freedom and to open its public to the creation of the new. So, paradoxically, cult, religion, and, in particular, Christianity come to their highest triumph in their aesthetic self-subversion, as they transform, in the aforementioned ritual of anti-transubstantiation, into a cult or religion of being itself. In spite of Bakhtin’s perceptive distinction, in the quoted passage, between the contradicting and contrary senses of negation (“absolute” negation and “relative” negation), it is also clear that the two are tightly linked, and that, once having engaged in the negative work, joyous as it initially is, art may prove unable to fully avoid the pure and unilateral negativity of non-being. Carnival denounces beings, and it is not surprising that, as Bakhtin admits, the melancholic aesthetic of the eighteenth century (for instance, the “gloomy world” of Swift’s satire, of Swift who, like Rabelais and not long after him, depicted giants, but not titans) and then the sentimental aesthetic of the eighteenth century grew out of it.188 Neither is it surprising that the curse, the basis of carnival aesthetics, degenerates “today” into “bare cynicism and insult.”189 Thus, Platonov, who, like Bakhtin, writes a lot about a popular festivals and uses the carnival aesthetic of low materialism (machines running on feces instead of gas, etc.) and who depicts an inverted liturgy in the Foundation Pit, interprets the same procedures that Rabelais uses and Bakhtin emphasizes, in a melancholic and tragic key.190 Platonov presents a world that is decidedly prosaic and even neutralized through a gaze into a utopian future. The revealing exposure of being does not only bring it to light but also exposes it to shame and eventually leads to its humiliation. Bakhtin is right, however, in saying that art and art theory have as their task to explicate the often unconscious ritual of world-negation that we all practice, and to reveal the fateful, festive element that hides underneath it: the “carnivalesque fire.” It is in this regard that we have to add a very important corrective note to Bakhtin’s interpretation and self-interpretation. Following in the footsteps of the English “ritual school” and justly perceiving in the modern novel an unconscious trace of the “popular element,” Bakhtin goes too far and does not reflect on the underside of this process: Rabelais’ transformation of the festival into a novel, a literary genre. It is obvious that such a transformation does not come without a trace. Literature involves an interiorization of the festival and hence, its determinate negation. Given the fact that carnival is in itself a negative form of ritual, a novel comes out as a negation of a negation. Therefore, Bakhtin is right when he criticizes the entire history of literature after Rabelais for its despondency, melancholia, negativism, etc. But this criticism means

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that Rabelais is a threshold of exteriorization of ritual into literature and, thus, that melancholia has already begun to develop in his work (for instance, in the unattainable utopia of the Thélème Abbey).191 The negation of a negation, here, means not a “synthesis” à la diamat, but two distinct phases: —First, a reinforcement of negation in its pure and frozen form. Hence a melancholic and prosaic tone, but also the violence of hyperbole which seems to jump out, as it were, from the microcosm of language and literature (Gargantua and Pantagruel are presented not just as grotesque but also, characteristically for the Renaissance, as all-powerful super-human titans). —Second, a self-stoppage of negation and, thus, an embodiment of negativity in a positive object: a literary work as a set of letters and a cultural monument. Here is Hegel’s Aufhebung, or Er-Innerung: both serve as interruptions and abbreviations of negativity.

Bakhtin writes of the Romantic grotesque that, “unlike the medieval and Renaissance grotesque, which was directly related to folk culture and thus belonged to all the people, [it] acquired a private ‘chamber’ character. It became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation.”192 But does not any act of reading (at least of silent reading, which only becomes the norm in the modern era) itself imply such detachment? In this light, we see the same method applied in Bakhtin’s earlier work on Dostoyevsky. There, literature is also derived from a public practice: dialogue. But, it is clear that Dostoevsky’s “dialogism” is much more interesting than most real-life conversations, for instance, a parliamentary deliberation. “I” and “you” are mixed and squeezed together to such a degree that the actual speaker cannot be determined. This “ambidirectedness” of the word proceeds from its condensation in a literary work (written, in Dostoevsky’s case, incredibly quickly under pressure from his editors). Therefore, Bakhtin’s sound idea about the organic, popular element of all art must be complemented with another, no-lesscorrect idea of the fateful concentration of this element in the narrow frame of the artwork. Can such a force, particularly an antagonistic, revolutionary force, really exist without a machine to preserve it? In other words, can a revolutionary event exist without the subjective effort of being faithful to it?

9.3. Contrariness, Contrast, Contradiction Negation does not only displace, turn off, or invert an image but also reflects and expresses the fundamental internal contradiction of the work, its inner tension. A work, by imitating nothingness, by presenting non-being as if it was and by

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tempting the reader or viewer with evil, represents an embodied or spritualized paradox, paradoxon empsykhon, and this paradoxicality is artistically expressed. It is not just the contradiction of an image with itself (which leads to a violation of form), but also a contradiction between sign and image, image and content, content and meaning. This contradiction further unfolds into contrariness. In literature, as we will see in the section on Lev Vygotsky and Theodor Adorno, beautiful women are depicted with a naturalistic realism, fables teach vices but declare a positive moral at the end, lyrical genres are used for civic statements, short stories describe horrible catastrophes in a free, light-footed plot, first lovers are cold, and criminals and prostitutes virtuous. This is not a correlated contrary in Aristotle’s sense, but pure contrariness, a polarity, where not just one but both poles are present, but which is not yet fully reflected and which only gradually recognizes itself as an untenable contradiction. So there is a ­circle— contradiction, contrariness, contradiction—in which the first contradiction (Hegel called it not contradiction, but “difference”) expresses itself as a latent inner tension in a play of contraries and ends up recognizing itself as an explicit logical contradiction: an incompatibility. Contraries clash, and then there is a victory of one tendency, or to an “affective explosion” (Vygotsky). The dialectic of negativity arrives at its negative finale. Let us now trace two forms in which contraries clash in the artwork, namely: between form and content and (within the content) between the theme and its imaginary portrayal. 1. Form and Content As I mentioned, Aristotle and the subsequent logical tradition considered contrariety to be the strongest and most complete form of negation: a negation within one genus or the greatest degree of differentiation inside this genus. A negation is transformed into an acute stand-off, wherein a positive force emerges out of the object of negation, which had seemed to be passive (to be a merely false statement or a non-entity). In this sense, the difference consists not in the negative expression itself, but in its interpretation. What appears, at first, to be a mere effect of violation or ellipsis, which would produce a highlight or, inversely, a state of indistinction (as analyzed above), is revealed, upon closer analysis, to be a clash of forces, each of which carries its own content. Sometimes, this clash of forces happens only at the level of content, for example, when feudal and bourgeois moralities collide in the nineteenthcentury works of Walter Scott or Alexander Ostrovsky. On the more abstract level of form, during the Middle Ages, evil and monstrosity were thought to belong in the artwork for the sake of achieving a contrasted foreshadowing of

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good: the good affirmed itself at the evil’s expense. Thus, for instance, Johannes Scotus Eriugena claimed: For any thing that is considered deformed in itself as a part of a whole, not only becomes beautiful in the totality, because it is well ordered, but is also a cause of Beauty in general; thus wisdom is illuminated by the relation with foolishness, knowledge by comparison with ignorance, which is merely imperfection and wanting, life by death, light by the opposition of the shadows, worthy things by the lack of praise for them; and, to be brief, all virtues not only win praise [by comparison with] the opposite vices but without this comparison they would not be worthy of praise.193

Thus, the beautiful (or the aesthetic) uses ugliness and evil for the justification and testing of the good, which produces the impression that the good, in and of itself, is not particularly convincing. But most interestingly, there are contradictions between content and form (itself the frozen content of the past), which can culminate in contrary oppositions. Therefore, a violation of form may be regarded not simply as an expressive effect, but as the result of an active force of negation. To understand this means to practice a dialectical theory of art. In the twentieth century, this theory was developed in significant ways by two great Hegelians, Lev Vygotsky and Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s theory is well known. A work of art exists in a force field of societal contradictions, and it expresses these contradictions by making form and content clash. Thus, in his “Speech on Lyric and Society,” Adorno shows how, in the lyrical verse of Mörike and George, an intimate personal content (love) is inserted into a publicly relevant high form, civic and apathetic in Mörike, feudalaristocratic in George, at the level of tonality and language.194 In the process, the violently bounded and limited character of the falsely idyllic bourgeois private sphere comes to the surface. Adorno’s later Aesthetic Theory develops this argument into a full-fledged dialectic of “expression” and “construction.” It is not exactly form and content that clash, but the rational and harmonious structure on one hand and the emotional pathos that characterizes an artwork as a communicative gesture on the other. This dialectic, as Adorno presents it, is defined by the classic pattern of opposites coinciding in a synthesis. For instance, in Baudelaire and Kafka, a classical, traditional, and balanced form of presentation contrasts with the shocking nature of the image (the symbolist paradigm), and as a result the very structure, in its cold, stubborn rationality, becomes expressive on its own.

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Vygotsky’s theory of art, which he mostly developed in his youth, is less familiar to the English reader even though it was translated in 1971.195 His views on art were also dialectical, and they are in many ways reminiscent of the later work of Adorno. Vygotsky placed aesthetic effect at the intersection of structure and affect. From Vygotsky’s point of view, any artwork contained an “affective contradiction” which opposed the form or a ritualized element of content with the content itself. Even though Vygotsky uses “contradiction” (protivorechie), strictly speaking, what he has in mind is contrary oppositions, a clash of antithetical meanings. They coexist, and this means that they are compatible for a while, in spite of the tension: therefore, they are contraries, polarities, not logically excluding contradictions. The young Vygotsky, much influenced by the Formalists, emphasized the key role played by poetic structure. But what the Formalists, who aimed to highlight “difference,” usually treated as a “shift,” as the “de-automatization” of perception, takes on a different, more dynamic (force-like) nature in Vygotsky’s interpretation. Let us take his aforementioned analysis of Ivan Bunin’s short story “Light Breathing.”196 On the one hand, Vygotsky’ virtuosic structural analysis of the story, based on the distinction between plot and fabula, follows the footsteps of the Russian Formalists. The achievement of the Formalists, like that of their disciples, the French Structuralists, was not merely “formal.” They recognized the multi-layered nature of form: the world depicted in an artwork (i.e., what the work pretends to mimic but what, in reality, is itself a mimetic product) belongs to its signifying constructions, exists immanently to the form. Following the lead of Andrei Bely and his work on the verse form (considered above), Vygotsky shows that the plot (the trajectory of an irreal event) does not correspond linearly to the fixed fabula (story) of an artwork. But, this does not mean that the fabula is to be dismissed. Vygotsky draws a graph with a correlation of occurrences in the plot and in the fabula. The result is a rhythmic figure, almost a dance track, and Vygotsky even checks the effect of the reading of this story on the rhythm of the breathing of the readers (!). So far, his analysis is similar to that of the Formalists: a deviation from the norm, a displacement of signs leads to an aesthetic effect. But the thrust of Vygotsky’s explanation lies elsewhere. His idea is that Bunin used this juxtaposition of two different temporalities for more substantive reasons. Bunin chose as his theme the event of the death of an attractive young girl, an event that is not just sad but traumatic, hard to reconcile oneself with. What Bunin’s story does is oppose the gravity of the topic and of the fabula to the graceful narration. Thus, alongside the abstract, indeterminate negativity described by the Formalists as a tool of

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highlighting by deforming, is a determinate, reflexive negativity involving the contradiction of (affective) forces. Vygotsky’s other example is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is not, the Formalists claimed, that Hamlet was just a narrative function and which delayed the action for the sole purpose of extending the duration of the play. Rather, Shakespeare intentionally devises a plot (Hamlet does not kill the king) that contradicts the fabula (Hamlet kills the king). He also chooses a character, strong and active, who contradicts the plot (in which the king does not die until the very end). The result is a complex play of forces which, at the end, culminates in a synthesis. Hamlet kills the king almost accidentally: the regicide is achieved through the medium of non-killing. Of course, this analysis remains formal and aestheticist. It appears as if the artwork was only aiming at creating catharsis in the reader and at teaching her to resolve her emotional contradictions.197 I would complement Vygotsky’s analysis with an additional point made in his own key. Hamlet, a naturally active person, falls into an aesthetic situation due to the appearance of the Ghost. The Ghost paralyzes Hamlet, because we, along with the characters, are not sure that the Ghost really exists. Hamlet is obsessive in his ambiguous negativity “between the two deaths.” In the same way, the aesthetic situation of the tragedy paralyzes the action, which is indicated by the genre itself. Hamlet’s hypnotic condition corresponds to the hypnosis of the drama itself: the plot starts deep in the night and keeps returning to the question of dreaming. At one point in the action, Hamlet himself stages a play, and in this play the character is poisoned through his ears: a transparent allusion to the effect of art itself, which is akin to the poisonous dream and to temptation. Hamlet, who is associated with the actors’ trade, is stung with the poison of art. His staging of the play resembles Raskolnikov’s “rehearsals”: either it denounces or provokes the  king or it penetrates into his dreams. In either case, in all its aesthetic irreality  and figurality, the “Mousetrap” basically guarantees the massacre to follow. In our context, what is important is that the aesthetic logic of fascination corresponds here to the logical dialectic of negativity. It is precisely because the Ghost’s story about his murder at his brother’s hands is so terrible and shocking that it does not allow for immediate trust. This is how the operator of negation works: what seems wrong to us should not have existed, while engaging in a struggle against this wrong would, on the contrary, amount to a recognition of its validity and existence. Therefore, faced with evil, one always hesitates between an active, militant negation and ignoring the crime as Hamlet originally did. Therefore, for a while, Hamlet’s rage is combined with his unwillingness to

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believe in the conspiracy theory, resulting in his decision to test it. The depiction of diabolical evil produces an additional effect of irreality in the spectator, making her dizzy, even if the events of the play were supposed to be unreal to start with. Thus, Hamlet is not the tragedy of an intellectual (as Goethe thought it to be) but the tragedy of an artist who is plagued not so much by doubts but, rather, by his own casting around between leisure and agency, between the nonbeing and the new-being of his creations: “to be or not to be.” In this reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the contradiction between content and form is motivated at the levels of both content and form. Vygotsky acknowledges this interpretation in his own way, not in the Formalist Psychology of Art, but in his earlier essay dedicated specifically to Hamlet. In general, this youthful text is marked by an immoderately symbolist, sacramental intonation, but its central intuition is correct. The plot of Hamlet is defined by his vertiginous experience of suspending reality: He is close to actors, he likes actors who play kings, wandering knights, sighing lovers. His ghostly intelligence is akin to their spectrality, to their representability (predstavliaemost’), to the fact that they exist at the edge of two worlds: reality and fiction. The very symbolism of the stage, the impulses of the actor are close to him … Sadness constantly holds him at the edge of life, and he does not know whether to be or not to be.198

In his early aesthetic texts, Vygotsky understands the effect of art, conventionally, to be catharsis: a mutual annulment of accumulated affective contradictions. Along with the clashing principles of form and content come the associated affects. But Vygotsky notes that this catharsis is not quite symmetrical. It does not end in nothing (otherwise this would have been a comedy, not a tragedy). Vygotsky calls this the “law of the destruction of content by form” and meticulously quotes Schiller’s theory of the tragic, which I have already discussed in this book: “The contrast discovered by us in the structure of artistic form and that of artistic content is the basis of cathartic action active in the aesthetic response. Schiller puts it like this: ‘The secret of a master is to destroy the content by form.’”199 In an equal fight, form suppresses content and affirms itself at the expense of its content, while choosing, on purpose, a stronger adversary. In a similar way, Lacan later taught that the signifier suppressed its signified, and that this conflict produced the inner tension of any sign. 2. A Theme and an Image Contraries in art also abound at the level of content. Such are antiphrases and paradoxes. Andrei Platonov explained the heartbreakingly tragic content

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of his novel, Foundation Pit, by arguing that it was his “excessive anxiety for something beloved,” for the future of the first socialist generation, which drove his pen.200 Platonov was of course familiar with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, in which the German author compared the vivid images of the Olympic Gods in Greek art with the after-images which remain after the glance into the abyss (significant in this comparison is an inversion: in reality, optical images are light and afterimages unlike the Olympic Gods, dim).201 Nietzsche’s work presents an answer to the paradox of why the Ancient Greeks, with their harmonious and balanced culture, turned to the re-enactment of disaster of which the tragedy consists. Nietzsche inverts the question: the Greeks were gloomy and pessimistic, and they invented Homer’s and Praxiteles’ gods as a contrast to their own worldview. Tragedy, then, is actually more literally expressive of their actual affects than the therapeutic art of the epic. Developing this idea of Nietzsche’s, we can pose the deeper question: is it not a general tendency that art elaborates “afterimages” in the zones of experience where the person lives passively and which, therefore, require an active working-through or some practice of countering or parrying. The point is not so much that gods are images of suffering, but that both the happiness of the gods and the passions of heroes allow the subject to handle the intensity of both failures and victories. Freud famously describes this mechanism with respect to his grandson’s play: throwing a reel away, fort, allows the child to actively relate to his mother’s death, which is otherwise beyond his control.202 So the real dialectic plays out between activity and passivity, and one can play around with the “plus” and “minus” signs. One can sometimes work through a trauma by reenacting disasters, and sometimes, by inventing a consoling fantasy world. But (pace Aristotle, who identified activity and good), excessive activity, as in the case of the current accumulation of power and work in Western society, also gives rise to a compensatory catastrophism and sentimentalism of mass culture. Kant had sensed this already in his theory of sublime: Bold, overhanging, as it were, threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist [widerstehen] into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for

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resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness [Allgewalt] of nature.203

Here, among other things, what is described is the capacity of humans to parry the facts of sensible experience with the help of a latent force. Humans’ external impressions and active deeds are paralleled by the quiet work of the “secret art” of imagination, as Kant named it. Through it, a force or, rather, the feeling of force is formed. This force is akin to the negative force which the early Kant had described as nihil privativum, proving the reality of negativity as opposed to the mere impression of lack.204 As far as our interest in the resistance to nature is concerned, the sublime appears as the obverse of experience. Mass violence and disaster in contemporary Hollywood films function in the same way. They are the aesthetically neutralized instances of sacrificial magic or, we might say, aesthetic “insurance”: the apocalyptic fantasy signifies (via an antiphrasis) and conjures up the precariously preserved prosperity and security of the nation. The socio-political consequences of this aesthetic of actively working through passive experience have already been convincingly demonstrated by Schiller in his above-mentioned theory of grace and dignity. Schiller thought that human beauty was the result of a harmonious interaction of a person’s will with the “sensual” element of her body and behavior.205 In fact, both grace and dignity are the results of a conflict between will and sensibility. In the first case, a fragile peace reigns: grace freely accepts and acts out what nature offers to it anyway. In the second case, there is an ongoing war without victors: dignity preserves pride and high self-esteem in spite of bodily suffering or other passive behavior. Schiller undertakes a classicist counter-critique of the then fashionable sentimentalism: sensibility is there, it is even overabundant, but it risks overwhelming the subject and suppressing its will (even if it is joyful). Therefore, one has to parry it by ascribing to oneself the injections of affect received, in reality, from without or by actively countering them from the standpoint of a sublime fidelity to the good. The problem is not that the sentimental subject looks bad because she has been humiliated, but that she risks being erased as a subject. Schiller requires grace both from the nice-looking woman and from the virtuous ruler, and he expects dignity both from the proud man and, more narrowly, from the law-abiding bourgeois citizen. He pretends not to notice that the woman’s grace is the result of her subordinate role in the society and attributes her virtue to her natural receptivity. But grace also figures as the virtue of the powerful noble. It is clear from our contemporary standpoint that both of these aesthetic positions belong not just to those who rule, but also to

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those who obey. What Schiller is describing, without realizing it, is the reality of the modern subject as a freely unfree individual: the one who is put into hard legal and moral limits, who needs to obey, abide, and speak nicely to others, and who, nonetheless, enjoys a formal and consciously recognized freedom. The aesthetic subject wavers somewhere between the roles of the liberal master and the beautifully stoic slave: otherwise, why would she need aesthetics at all?

10. Coda So how does this polymorphic and ubiquitous negativity help us to understand art and the beautiful? Is art—which sacrifices beings, negates life, preaches pessimism, overturns the world with its shadowy, demonic side, gazes into the abyss of nothingness—negative through and through? There is something to this characterization. There are authors who thought more or less along these lines, for instance, the eternal French antagonists of the mid-twentieth century: Sartre and Bataille. Does the imaginary build on the intentional destruction of the world and present things by subtracting their being (Sartre)? Is art meaningless? Does it senselessly waste the overflowing excess of being (Bataille)? This univocal understanding of art is hardly convincing. Where is the triumphant spirit of life-affirmation, the assertion of a thing in its sovereign uniqueness with which we usually associate beauty even in our everyday lives? Where is the justification of the joy that touches us? Does it really stem only from the sadistic destruction of sensuality? By contrast, the German aesthetic thought of the twentieth century, with all its interest in nothingness and negativity (Heidegger, Adorno), is united in understanding art as presenting to us the greatness of the thing or the object (even if these things and objects put themselves into question). Art both affirms and negates, and not only in the sense that negation clears the way for affirmation (as Shklovsky, for instance, thought). Negation is somehow autonomous in its beauty, otherwise, why this reverse encoding of the existent, why this sadistic hecatomb of the Oedipal tragedy, where no one comes out intact? Why the annihilating and nihilist tone of Aristophanes’ comedy? Even if something is affirmed there (as Nietzsche still maintained), it is a vague abstraction of will. Sacrifice and mourning form a matrix for many genres of art, especially the theater. The trajectory of avoiding linearity in form produces its own line: the line of negativity, for example, what Heidegger praises as the figure of crossing-out.206

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But art also affirms. A portrait of Napoleon affirms and eternalizes Napoleon (as well as his horse, Marengo). The landscape eternalizes an ephemeral impression and overwhelms our eyes with the awe-inspiring greatness of nature. Even architecture, which famously does not represent anything other than itself, stellt nichts da, forms a void and affirms not just this void manifest positively as space, but also the crowd that creates itself in it, a second body. But the entity that is being affirmed cannot be conceived as a separately existing object. Actually, nothing can be conceived in such a way. A being is a bundle of relations. It becomes a separate object only as a work of art or in a machine. The beauty or nature—for instance, of an “inhumanly” beautiful  seascape at sunset—seems to be purposefully addressed, but not addressed to us. It is as if it were addressed to an absent, exotic onlooker. It is often the case that interesting stories from our life, curious anecdotes that we later recount to friends, seem to happen to someone else: this is the source of their aesthetic quality. We search for a subject who could fit in this story, which seems to fall out of our ordinary life, because it appears to have been specially invented for someone else. Many tourists have probably noticed how the architecture of many cities, their mountainous relief of second nature, does not correspond to the physiognomy or moods of the city’s current population or even contrast with it. This is what art does: with its right hand, it knocks the observer out of being by placing the surrounding things under the sign of negation, by leading them out of the everyday into a sacred space of contemplation (con-templatio), by destroying and disarticulating them, and, finally, by hiding them and their images from view, like ancient rock paintings on the walls of caves which no one has ever seen. With its left hand, art leads the spectator inside the work of art, inside the object by rendering her visible and depriving her of the alibi of being a free-floating consciousness. The classical example is the Greek tragedy, in which action is separated from the viewer by a virtual spectator, the chorus, and in which the ubiquitous irony allows this viewer to recognize herself in the hero, for instance, in Oedipus, who, in turn, is transformed, in the course of the play, from subject into object of knowledge. The same effect is achieved in baroque painting, where, for instance, Velasquez makes the painter visible in “The Meninas.” In the same way, modern urban architecture places the spectator in a position in which she is fully enveloped and transformed into a part of the landscape (for instance, a person standing at the Palace Bridge in downtown St. Petersburg). Likewise, the modernist novel purposefully uses procedures of identification to capture the reader inside the action. A canonical example is Proust’s novel, which starts with the hero’s awakening to a strange world and,

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thereby, makes the reader “awaken” to the novel’s universe. In the latter case, the mechanism which captures the reader is a chiasmus, a crossover, in which the reader’s gaze at the artwork smoothly passes over into the gaze of the artwork at the reader. The awakening of the hero invites the reader to daydream. This inversion of the relation, a reflected contrariness, is the real-life activity of negation. Art is negative as long as it breaks the thing out of its environment, introduces it into a new context, turns it inside-out, and makes cavities in it, which are to be filled by the observers’ gazes. Thus, art throws a shadow on the subject, fascinates and suppresses her, transforming her, in all of her contemplating subjectivity, into a contemplated object. These negative devices make art affirmative by using all these inversions and displacements to form an absolute (to use the language of Schelling and Hegel). Art is absolute in the sense that it internalizes, invaginates, so to speak, all of its external relations, transforming them from an open being into a real thing or a real subject (which is the same thing). By way of a provisional conclusion, I will defer to Alain Badiou’s notion that it is the great work of art—and not its eternal impostors, its author, and audience—that becomes the real subject of action and representation.

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Dostoevsky: Tempted by Negativity

I Negativity in Form and Content It is not to be debated that Dostoevsky, in his mature period, was a political conservative and a counterrevolutionary. However, it is no less evident that he took a special interest in the revolutionary politics which, for him, in the context of the mid-nineteenth-century Russia where he was writing, appeared as a tendency to terror and destruction. Dostoevsky repeatedly describes revolutionary socialism in negative terms, as a spirit of negation and nihilism.1 Dostoevsky is attracted to the paradigm of a nihilist revolutionary, and many of his characters bear the traits of such: not only Stavrogin and Verkhovensky from the Demons but also the individual criminals or grudging intellectuals, in his novels, outline a political program in which atheism, personal messianism, and the categorical rejection of the current order all play a role. Freud famously attributes to him a fantasy of parricide2, a paradigm of private revolution if there is one, even though Dostoevsky is far from “recommending” this crime or even consciously avowing his desire. What interests me here is the parallel between this negativistic politics and the negativity as a mode of literature itself, which Dostoevsky both widely practices and reflects upon. Art, particularly literature, is negative in two main ways. It depicts what is lacking in reality thus presenting a counterweight to the experiential reality. But it also denies what it depicts. This has to do with a special linguistic mode and a particular intentionality of literature. Sartre understood this intentionality as negative, pointing that an image is constituted by a negative intentional act3, and Blanchot, his contemporary and interlocutor, pointed at how the literary “writing” was destructive of language, of its own content, and how this general condition was particularly evident in the “negative” movements of modernism.

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As its own negation, literature as never signified a mere denunciation of art or the artist as mystification and deception … Literature is not only illegitimate, it is also null, and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity, it can constitute an extraordinary force, a marvelous force. To make literature become the exposure of this emptiness inside, to make it up completely to its nothingness, realize its own unreality – this is one of the tasks undertaken by surrealism.4

Blanchot further points out the proximity between literature and revolution, notably the French Revolution as an outburst of irrational terror. His epitome of a writer is, strangely, Marquis de Sade: the writer who not just fantasizes and distorts the everyday reality by violating its taboos, but performs on the level of content (extreme violence) the negativity inherent in the artistic form. Revolutionary action is in every respect analogous to action as embodied in literature: the passage from nothing to everything, the affirmation of the absolute as event and of every event as absolute. … [Sade] sees himself in the revolution. … He is … negation itself: his oeuvre is nothing but the work of negation, his experience the action of a furious negation, driven to blood, denying other people, denying God, denying nature, and, within this circle in which it runs endlessly, freeing in itself as absolute sovereignty.5

This negative, demonic tendency is generic for literature, even though it surfaces in the most radical writers and periods, such as the romantics and the modernists. Modernism is famous for violating canons of all sorts, criticizing establishment, and imposing, for the most part, a dark melancholic mood. But this is, again, an explicit enactment of a negative potential always present in art but previously latent or exercised mildly, without a dramatic clash with the nonartistic, “serious” world. It is the clash between art and the “positive” being that makes its negative tendencies turn into contrary opposition with culture. Hegel, anticipating Modernism within Romanticism, famously advanced a notion of “negativity” as a real force of negation as such, which supposedly stands behind the human linguistic denials as well as behind the intellectual conceptualizations and historical transgressions. However, in Hegel, negativity itself ultimately comes up to something affirmative—the argument that was later contested by the young Hegelians like Marx and Bakunin, as well as the representatives of “critical theory” in the twentieth century. But, already in Dostoevsky, himself a pre-Modernist or a post-Romantic who was largely exposed in his youth to the ideas of Hegelian school, the art of negating reaches a high degree of elaboration, and it is in this way that author of Demons is akin to the revolutionary tradition. Dostoevsky (like Bakunin whom he depicts as Stavrogin) is a writer of destruction, not in the sense that he would physically

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destroy anything or call for destruction, but in the sense that he puts the contemporary world under the sign of negation, so that “everything is possible,” everything is reversible, and the flesh suffers from the invisible bar that crosses it out. At the level of content, Dostoevsky’s works abound with the pictures of graphic violence aiming at compassion, as well as of subjective suffering. He was rightly called a “cruel talent,”6 and “diagnosed” with masochism, sadism, or both, by Mikhaylovsky, Merezhkovsky, Zweig, Freud, and many others. Negative operation is also at work in the ubiquitous motif of humiliation. This is not just a sentimental motif, and not just a theme of desire for recognition, which is common for most great novels of the nineteenth century. It is from the symbolic destruction of a character that the latter desire grows. A humiliated character does not quite exist: this is literalized in the episode from the Notes from the Underground where the protagonist remains unnoticed and non-greeted during his walk on Nevsky Prospect. He is being “humiliated and tormented,” “treated like a fly,” and an officer he keeps encounter treats all common people as “empty space.”7 This physical reduction to a fly is an embodiment of incomplete negation, a physical correlate of a logical operation, which is attributed to the officer who does not notice the narrator at all. Humiliation makes the characters into objects of compassion, thus engaging the reader, but it also crosses them out from full-scale symbolic being, thus spectralizing them, diminishing them in existence, thus emphasizing their fictional, suspended half-existent way of being. All of this contributes to the prosaization and democratization of the narrative,8 to the desublimation of the epic tone otherwise inherent in the novel as a genre. A humiliated person loses its social defenses and is open up, by her humiliation, for compassion and existential conversation. Yet another function of a character humiliatingly ignored by external observers (like the underground man on Nevsky prospect) is a metaphor of a reader who is present at the novel’s scene without being seen there: a humiliated being feels pain but approaches in the degree of being to the alibi of this hidden God who is the reader. Aesthetic effect is achieved through sublimation as well as through humiliation (and indeed this is what the Latin word literally means: sub limine). Rosalinda Krauss9 describes how it happens in painting, but similar processes work in literature. The play of background and figure helps immersing the reader into a narrative by naturalizing fictional objects as elements of inconspicuous environment, and inversely, by producing action out of what has already been inside the reader’s consciousness.

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Dostoevsky, like generally the symbolist style which he anticipates,10 stands in this sense between the classicism and the avant-garde: figures are not yet dissolved in a background, attention is not yet free-floating, and at the same time we are not usually witnessing brutal perceptive shocks. What we rather see is the drama of an object that is about to lose attention to itself. If this is not quite clear in Raskolnikov and Underground man, this culminates in Brothers Karamazov: here, the hidden protagonist, Smerdyakov, is the most humiliated of the humiliated characters, who is for the most part withdrawn from the reader’s sight at all.11 Another crucial theme of Dostoevsky is the evil: the moral negativity. Many of his characters commit unmistakenly evil deeds. But, characters like the second Golyadkin, Stavrogin, Verkhovensky are not mere mistaken criminals: they are endowed with demonic features. Devil himself makes an appearance in “Brothers Karamazov.” Ewan Fernie has recently shown how Dostoevsky creates a demonic image of Pyotr Verkhhovensky by using the linguistic negatives and contradictory, self-retractable characteristics.12 He also draws attention to the use by Dostoevsky of classical theological formulations: his devil says almost literally “I am not what I am,” using a phrase familiar from Yago and (now) from Sartre.13 Stavrogin is not only a person who exploits women and provokes men to kill: he is also a melancholic, indifferent person for whom all action is reversible, like for God before creation. So, evil emerges as a part of the formal strategy of presenting the world under the sign of negation, of denying and ridiculing what is being observed and said. Fernie associates this “demonic decreation”14 with the condition of Modernity and with the practice of literature itself. Simona Forti, in a recent book,15 also notes that for Dostoevsky, evil consists for a human, in stepping into God’s position and undoing the being in order to re-create it. She explicitly attributes this to the influence of Schelling, direct or indirect, through the Hegelian circle of Belinsky (in which Dostoevsky socialized in his youth). Both Fernie and Forti follow in the footsteps of Sergey Bulgakov who noted the role of negation in the image of Stavrogin as a would-be god already in 191416. At the level of form, the main modes of negative operation are 1) irony, grotesque, and parody; 2) the differential emphasis of all sorts which allows to estrange, defamiliarize the events; 3) the suspended reality of narration, where the reader hesitates between the objective or subjective (hallucinatory) nature of events; and 4) the presentation of fictional facts as background (not figure), which produces an aesthetic effect of naturalization. They are all to be found in Dostoevsky.

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Thus, the Poor Folk is a parody displacement of a sentimental letter novel. The Stepanchikovo Village, Notes from the Underground, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man present the proud existential subjectivity of an intellectual in the caricature form. The technique of doubles or parallel characters (Golyadkins, Karamazov brothers) serves the effect of contrast and underlines their differential qualities. Numerous episodes from the mature novels are represented in a suspended way, such as Rogozhin’s attempt to murder Myshkin with a knife or Karamazov’s dialogue with the devil. The fourth effect is, in Dostoevsky’s case, mostly achieved through modal means: the shocking ideas and events are “alleviated” in this or that way: they are filtered through the direct speech of the characters, active fictional narrators, put in doubt or tentatively advanced. It is this tentative mode that I will address further below as a special case that has a political and ethical meaning. Dostoevsky does not just use negative operations: he also reflects upon them The character of his early novel is called “Netochka Nezvvanova”: a transparent pun that endows the heroine with the name “The No,” or “The unwelcome No.” She is a “No” not because she is a rebellious nihilist and not just because she represents one of the many humiliated and insulted sentimental characters of Dostoevsky, but mainly because she represents the power of fantasy: the connection to that-which-is-not. The novel depicts the site of her phantasy, the mysterious “red house.” In the “White Nights,” the narrator gives an entire theory of fantasy as an art of non-being, the medium of both generating and dissolving the dusk-time ghostly images. Fantasy is easy to conceive out of nothing, but living with it ultimately leaves the “dreamer” with nothing of the nothing: Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret—nothing, not a single thing … because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all dreaming and no more!17

Later, the writer, who had turned conservative, sees a subversive element in this negative intentionality that characterizes art. Thus, his attitude to negation and to art becomes ambivalent. Dostoevsky cherishes the high classical beauty of Schiller and Pushkin. But he is wary of the seduction, “prelest’”18 which would lead one to replace God by a naturalistic picture. Such fantasies, like that of Raskolnikov or Shigalev, are often derided. Negation is above all a symbol, and this symbol is problematic, since it affirms a content and denies it at the same time, by being added to the words

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that have a denotative force. In philosophy, from Parmenides to Hegel, the role of this symbol, and the precise form of its operation, had been much discussed.19 Hegel famously proposed a new speculative operator, the “Aufhebung”, or sublation, which would embody the paradox, be simultaneously denying a concept in its validity and upholding it as a subordinate “moment” while “lifting” the discussion to a new level with other positive categories. It is notable in this context that Dostoevsky was so proud of having introduced into the Russian literary language the word “stushevatsya,” to slowly and subtly disappear, a word used of the proud and humiliated characters who would literally “efface themselves” and disappear from everyone’s attention into background, thus normalizing their existence for the other characters and for the reader. Mr. Goliadkin shuddered and winced from some unaccountable and at the same time most disagreeable feeling. He looked around mechanically; it occurred to him to slip away from trouble somehow, underhandedly, sideways, quietly, just to up and efface himself, that is, to make as though he could not care less, as though it had nothing to do with him.20

Dostoevsky explains the etymology of this word by the operation in technical drawing, where the drawing ink (tush’) creates a continuous transition between a black line and the white blank space.21 But, the root clearly brings to mind the root “tush”: “to quench,” to put down the fire: a violent negative operation that today reminds of a psychoanalytic “castration.” Dostoevsky thus creates his own Aufhebung: an operation that destroys symbolically but not physically and thus endows a character with a spectral existence proper of aesthetic objects. The scenes of “stushevanie” reenact the emergence of such objects within the literary world in a sort of mise en abîme. In what follows, I will address a particular instance of negative modality in Dostoevsky: the variety of tests, experiments, probes, and, wider, temptations. I will show that, for Dostoevsky, these are privileged modes of novelistic existence but also the modes of subversive, terroristic and, at times, demonic agency. But, previously, I owe a digression on the modality of revolutionary politics in the contemporary world.

II Negativity and Revolution Already in Dostoevsky times and increasingly today, subversive political activity of social movements rarely proceeds through a forceful armed overthrow of

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government. This would be extremely difficult to achieve. Normally, the political contestation proceeds though demonstrations, rallies, and marches in the public space, which aim not only to persuade the government to take action, but also, in extreme cases, to provoke the government to violent action, so that it exposes its illegitimate character and loses popular support, which would in turn lead to a mass mobilization and mass uprising, armed or “non-violent.” We have witnessed such scenario playing out successfully in the so-called “color revolutions” of the 2000s, in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Ukrainian “revolution of dignity” from 2014, but more often, the government successfully dissolves the protesters. Thus, there is almost inevitably a provocation involved, and the deceptive masking of the revolutionary activity by a “non-violent” “demonstration.” Hannah Arendt once defined power as a potentiality of “acting in concert,” the sheer latent force of the multitude that stands behind the actions of government. On this understanding (common for the pre-Modern and early Modern political theory), popular power is contingent on the capacity for eventual uprising. “Democracy,” even if today this notion is used metaphorically for a mixed government, has always been a regime of provocation and demonic alibi: the government provokes the people for “participation,” the people test the government by demonstration and verbal critique, while “the place of power remains empty” (Claude Lefort22), and each branch of government pretends not ruling while it actually does. Democracy is a regime of political negativity, in the sense that the absolute authority remains dethroned, in the sense that the previously obscure masses can at any time rise against the regime, but also in the sense that the rank or status is taken with a grain of salt, subject to equalization and to the law of numbers. Nancy Ruttenburg in her Dostoyevsky’s Democracy shows how the symbolic reduction (of prisoners) and the humility of prince Myshkin both contribute to a democratic spirit, the mood of equal footing on which the characters stand, among themselves and with the reader. It is also worth noting that the present-day social movements increasingly advance the agenda of recognition and “dignity,” together or often above the more materialistic claims. Dignity is particularly fit for the model of fearless standstill of the weaker but numerous citizens against the armed police. But Dostoevsky is important here as he shows the dialectic of recognition and humiliation: his heroes’ search for self-aggrandizement only works against the background of the fundamental experience of humiliation, of themselves and of others around. Similarly, today, the discussion is not only about the recognition, but about lightening up the obscure social milieus that are “counted for nothing” by the dominant bureaucratic classifications.23

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Revolutions by definition involve an element of provocation. John Locke called revolution “an appeal to heaven”24 (Dostoevsky would probably contend that it was an appeal to Devil, but the structure is the same). An elite can organize a coup d’etat, or a demonstration, but a modern revolution starts when such a coup or demonstration escalates “on their own,” grows in numbers, and when we can say that revolution was enacted by the “people” itself. Often, demonstrations or strikes, being implicit threats, provoke authorities to commit acts of repressive violence, and this in turn evokes a mass indignation and revolt. Today, even more than in eighteenth or nineteenth century, revolutions start from a minor provocation (such as a Facebook post or a Tweet) and depend on spontaneous escalation. Revolutions, if victorious, build not just a negative world but an anti-world, a topsy-turvy, carnivalesque world, which liberates from symbolic aggression, de-fetishizes, and gives power to the humiliated. But, this often happens at the price of a negativistic, depressive turn of social mood25. Revolution is therefore an aesthetic, politico-aesthetic phenomenon that has to insist on a degree of non-being and on a danger of the demonic, as on a necessary condition of democracy and public sphere. Unsurprisingly, contemporary “actionist” art, this time sympathetic to the revolutionary cause unlike Dostoevsky, uses provocation, including the provocation of police, as a privileged medium.26 The “transgressive” and “actionist” art probes the limits both of art as such and of public tolerance. Viennese actionists (Günter Grus, Otto Mühl) defecated on stage, the Russian artist Alexander Brener sprayed paint on Malevich’s picture in a museum, the French artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into Duchamp’s pissoir, and many other examples. In recent Russian performance art by “Voina” and Petr Pawlensky, the police arresting the performers become a part of the show, thus revealing the meaning of artwork a successful provocation27. A number of artists use provocation in a form of “subversive affirmation,” to make the viewers complicit in the morally or politically abhorrent event: one can mention Zbigniew Libera’s “Lego Concentration Camp” (1996),28 Christoph Schlingensief ’s “Please Love Austria” reality show,29 Arthur Zmiewski’s “Repetition” experiment (2005),30 Renzo Martens’ “Enjoy Poverty” project (2008-),31 and many others. Art reacts to politics and participates in it through the means that are congruent with it. This negativistic actionism inherits the broader negativistic agenda of Modernism, originally aimed at the destruction of aesthetic genres and canons and proceeding through scandals and transgressions even while engaging in mere painting. Sergey Bulgakov, in the aforementioned essay on Dostoevsky, draws a parallel between the latter’s aesthetic universe and the early

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cubist work by Picasso that emerged in Russia just at that time. He perceptively notices that Picasso’s abstraction and destruction of form has a latent negative, demonic content. Thus, we deal today with an aesthetic politics of testing: testing the borders of the possible, testing the tolerance of the government, of the audience, of one’s own radicality. Such politics depends, explicitly or not, on a radical negative operation, the self-negating or self-nihilating (Sartre) which would precede a civic stance or an ideological formulation. Therefore, in a “democracy of demonstrations” that provides, today, for legitimacy, we deal with an aesthetic, nihilistic, or demonic sphere. There is a demonic negativity inherent in a democracy, where government and society both provoke each other to attain attention.

III Two Temptations In this section, I further develop the general intuition, expressed in the Introduction to this book, that testing, or probing, somehow belongs to the very core of artistic experience. In itself, a probe does not appear to be purely negative: it is rather an open question, a hypothesis that retrospectively attains a negative or a positive value. However, when considered phenomenologically or linguistically, a probe is an action developing in a negative mode, since the actor performs it as though it was not yet a definitive act. Such probe corresponds to the essential phenomenological mode of negativity that Sartre described under the rubric of “mauvaise foi,” “bad faith.” Sartre gives an example of a woman on a date who allows a man to take her hand but pretends that nothing special is going on: [S]he refuses to apprehend this desire for what it is; se does not even give it a name … But then suppose he takes her hand. … [T]he young woman leaves her hand there but she does not notice that she is leaving it … She permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is.32

You do something consciously, but then you disavow it and pretend that you are not doing it yet. Think of political activists who occupy a street and stand there, leaving it to the police to interpret this act as a beginning of an uprising. In authoritarian countries like Russia, this is even more evident: if a rally is banned, protesters often assemble under the guise of a “walk” or a “meeting with a deputy.” It is in this precise case that Dostoyevsky’s characters often commit their transgressive deeds. Most classical is the case of Raskolnikov, who, in the opening sequence of Crime and Punishment, undertakes a probe or “experiment” (“proba”)

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of the future murder by taking a walk to the house of the old pawnbroker and noting the details necessary for planning the crime. I quoted this in the preface, but here we go again: Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything.33

Dostoevsky shows that by making this probe, Raskolnikov is already immersed into his crime: the decision comes to him, not fully consciously, but by being driven into a whirl of action without confessing this to himself. In spite of the monologues in which he jeered at his own impotence and indecision [poddraznivaiuschie monologi], he had involuntarily come to regard this “hideous” dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he still did not realize this himself. He was positively going now for a “rehearsal” of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more and more violent.34

This is a case of a temptation or a seduction, “iskushenie”: a condition that Dostoevsky, being a gambler, knew well, and commented upon in different contexts, such as the temptation of Christ by the devil (which the Grand Inquisitor succumbed to) or the sexual temptation by Grushen’ka and other dangerous women. This reality under the sign of negation reminds us of Dostoevsky’s personal experience, re-narrated in the Idiot, where his execution, which he believed he was about to experience, turned out to be a mock execution. Not a probe exactly, but a test of endurance, which Dostoevsky took as an experience of a real non-reality, opening a space between a play and actuality that probably reinforced his propensity to vivid anxious fantasies. In the case of literature, the probing and the “bad faith” attain an additional value, because the nihilation of experience happens in the context where this experience as such is fictional, potential. The effect of negation is thus dialectical: through depicting negative consciousness art seduces the reader to trust the narrative. Via a negation of negation, fiction affirms its own reality qua fiction. This is an Aufhebung, but of a special kind, where fantasy is reaffirmed as a neutralized, de-activated truth. Which is not at all to say, particularly in the case of Dostoevsky, that the criticism of self-deception passes in vain: literature is itself a mimetic response to the social facts and an allegory with a moral lesson. Its violent, sentimental content is a pledge not to stay forever in an aesthetic position but jump toward the actual life of the world. In the case of Stavrogin, Dostoevsky explicitly associates probing with devillike evil:

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I’ve tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, “in order to know myself.” This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life. In front of your very eyes I endured a slap from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage publicly. But what to apply my strength to—that I have never seen, nor do I see it now, despite your encouragements in Switzerland, which I believed. I am as capable now as ever before of wishing to do a good deed, and I take pleasure in that; along with it, I wish for evil and also feel pleasure. But both the one and the other, as always, are too shallow, and are never very much. My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide. … One can argue endlessly about everything, but what poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation. Everything is always shallow and listless.35

Because Stavrogin is only testing and probing, he does not become resolute enough, he lacks the lack and negates even his own negation, thus forever remaining in a condition of ghostly suspension. Here is the essential characteristic of evil, devil, and linguistic negation: negativity makes them do what they do half-heartedly, constantly contradict themselves and disavow their doings, and thus makes the demonic figures, paradoxically, weak in their very force, in their desire to keep it only potential. Here we deal with a negation of negation whose meaning is somewhat different from the effect of sublimation and leaving behind that was proposed by Hegel. The ambivalence of negation as an operator makes indeterminate the outcome of its doubling up. Here, in our analysis, the negation of negation reinforces negativity rather than annul it, aspiring, through constant repetition, to attain the negativity at its pure: the spectral indestructible force of doubt and contestation for which the original positive objects are merely exempla and playthings. In a sense, but not quite, this corresponds to the treatment of double negativity by Adorno and Žižek as a “negative dialectic.”36 In Dostoevsky’s “A Writer’s Diary,” probing becomes telescoped to the scale of the human condition as such (anticipating Nietzsche with his “failed animal”): What if the human race has been placed on the earth as some sort of brazen experiment, simply in order to find out whether such creatures are going to survive here or not? The sad pain of this thought lies mainly in the fact that once again no one is to blame; no one conducted the experiment; there is no one we can curse; it all happened simply due to the dead Laws of Nature, which I absolutely cannot comprehend and with which my consciousness is utterly unable to agree.37

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Similarly, the Grand Inquisitor declares the humans “the feeble rebels, the unfinished, trial creatures created in mockery.”38 Note the association between rebellion and probing: the negators are doomed to weakness, the tempters are destined to tentativeness. And this is a good thing. However, as Fernie notes quoting Jean-Luc Marion, “The inexistence of devil is his existence,”39 the very spectrality and tentativeness of evil tendencies give them their strange attraction. Sergey Bulgakov observes that “temptation” and “provocation” are a modus operandi of Dostoevsky’s demonic creatures, and that, through an irrealization, it does not just negates but inverts the religious ritual into a “negative mystery.” He [Stavrogin] was for both [Shatov and Kirillov] a tempter; he seduced them by a spectral truth and a spectral good.40 Notable is the obsessive character of an “idea,” or we would say, “fantasy,” which is not yet a decision or a plan, but which on its own, in the case of a certain self-indulgence, can lead to a crime. Notably, the content of the fantasy is negative as well as its mode of representation; it is usually a murder, a destructive subversion, an act of terror. Dostoevsky recognizes the inherency of such fantasy to human condition, but he also points to the danger of “testing,” and to a need for a more responsible attitude to one’s fantasies, stemming from a decision associated with faith. Testing is, in general, a common attitude of Modern culture as based on experience and experiment. This feature is inseparable from the more general negativity as a mood of the Modern age. Both lead to a certain potentialization of experience, which often lacks a completion, a decisive choice: a theme central for the critique of Modernity by Kierkegaard and by many twentieth century’s existentialists. Avital Ronell writes in her aforementioned book covering the Modern “test drive” (even though, unlike Dostoevsky, she is sympathetic, not critical, toward it): [T]he test at once affirms and deprives the world of confidence; it belongs to a specific sequence of forces that not so much annihilates as it disqualifies. This force constitutes an often invisible border in the land of negation. Still, in one of its forms the test manifests the luxury of destruction.41

In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky reflects directly upon this paradigmatic situation of testing/tempting, as he describes a story of two friends, one of whom first seduced the other to hide the eucharist during the service and, in a second step, to fantasize about committing a blasphemous, Christ-offending act. The tempter thinks the most dreadful acts are too ordinary. He invents some unthinkable sin, unprecedented and inconceivable, and his choice reveals the

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People’s whole outlook on life. Inconceivable? Yet the very fact that he had decided on this, specifically, shows that he had perhaps been considering it already. This fanciful notion had crept into his soul long ago, perhaps even in his childhood; he was struck by the horror of it, yet also found it agonizingly delightful. … Of course, he did not conceive this with the intent of carrying it out himself, “and indeed, he would perhaps never have dared do it on his own. … [W]e must suppose that … when challenging his victim to this “brazen act,” he was challenging himself as well. … to make a mockery of something the People hold so sacred, and thus to break one’s links with the whole land; to destroy oneself forever through negation and pride solely for the sake of one moment of triumph-why the Russian Mephistopheles could invent nothing more daring! The prospect of such an extreme of passion, the prospect of such dark and complex sensations within the soul of a common, simple man is astounding!”

But, there remains for Dostoevsky the question of the “Mephistopheles” motivation: is this a passionate evil, or a cold “scientific” experiment? Note also that the tempter did not reveal the whole secret to his victim: when he left the church he did not know what he was to do with the Eucharist until the very moment his tempter ordered him to get the gun. So many days of such mystical uncertainty again testify to this sinner’s terrible obstinacy. On the other hand, our village Mephistopheles reveals himself as a fine psychologist. This is why I would like to know: what if he really and truly is a village nihilist, a homegrown cynic and thinker, an unbeliever who decided on such a contest with haughty mockery on his face, who did not suffer and tremble with his victim, as I suggest in this sketch, but who followed his victim’s trembling and writhing with cold curiosity, solely out of a need to see someone else suffer, to see another man humiliated-who knows, perhaps even for the sake of scientific enquiry?42

The scene, as Dostoevsky notes, is a simple man replica of the Faustian temptation by a devil. The “devil,” however, is himself a character with a psychology, who, in this case, tempted his fried by his own fantasy, which he never entertained to commit himself. The responsibility for the crime is thus distributed between the two, and both can claim partial innocence. There is an ideological responsibility. We now see that this is a common pattern in Dostoevsky’s novels. In the “Demons,” Stepan Trofimovich and Stavrogin both create an ideological platform for the terrorist Petr Verkhovensky, but neither is directly responsible for the murderous acts the latter commits (but even he claims that his associates acted without his order). The Stavrogin-Verkhovensky link is supposed to represent the real-life relationship of Bakunin, with his Hegelian apology of negativity, and Nechaev, who put his ideas to the test. In

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the “Brothers Karamazov,” Ivan, the arch-tester of the novel and also “the rebel,” tempts Smerdiakov into a murder by spelling out the idea of it in his presence, and providing an excuse. In the light of the recent Schellingian interpretations of Dostoevsky (McLachlan,43 Fernie, Forti), the probing and testing correspond to the moment of “de-creation”: the tester assumes a position of God before creation and potentializes reality, as though it had not yet existed. It must be added—Fernie, again, sees this well—that this position of potentiality is the very standpoint of art itself, particularly literature. So, the ethical questioning of the demonism by Dostoevsky primarily applies to himself, and to the role of fantasy as a nonbeing of being and a being of non-being. The moment you start writing a novel, suddenly “everything is possible,” you inevitably test and tempt the reader by your repulsive fantasies, and thus give rise to the demonic forces akin to the “spirit of destruction” that would animate a revolutionary. Today’s consumer society, with its ubiquitous advertising media, and with its terrorist tendency in both mass culture and politics,44 is essentially the society of provocation and temptation (“buy a test version free for one month”). However, the parallel with the contemporary reality also shows us the other side of “testing.” On the one hand, we deal with a reality that presents itself as a mere play, remains unnoticed because negated, crossed out. On the other hand, there is a rule of positivist “fact.” Media bombard us with information, often of “terroristic” kind, which tests us in a way opposite to Raskolnikov’s experiment, by undermining our faith, not just in God, but in the Good. This reverses the picture: before an idea of a parricide, of a nihilist revolution, or of a murder, becomes an experiment, it is given to us by culture as a mere content, in the form of a fact happening to someone else. Even before an idea is ascribed reality or absence, it is already pre-posited as such, and this is the root of obsession. This is the meaning of Ivan Karamazov’s theodicy stories about suffering children, the stories he “copied down from newspapers and stories,”45 with which he tests and “tortures” his brother Alyosha and in response to which he “returns his ticket” to God’s Kingdom. This is also a temptation, although of a different sort, a temptation by the positivity and totality of the world against which then destruction only appears as a correct response. A terrorist provocateur tries to literalize the fantasy of the Other, thus acting symmetrically to the tempter, to  the art of seductive provocator, so that the result is shock and vulnerable action. There is still an openness in this provocation, but it is aimed at the Other, seeking to make him/her react in a pre-determined, violent way.

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The two forms of probing form a couple, which in the psychoanalytic terms could be described as the one of an obsessional and an hysteric: the one for whom negativity, negated being, becomes a mode of life, and the one who uses positivity, facts, objects in the negative sense (like Lacan’s object a, a materiality that fulfills a purely negative, disturbing action). The first, demonic probing, prefigures a future action roughly as it is, while the second, a provocation, often evokes a contrary response, a confrontation against the one who is provoking. In both cases, the testing act puts itself under the sign of negation, directly or through the response it elicits in the Other. The content, the thematic substance of this act, is usually negative in its turn (in Dostoevsky this is usually acts of violence or blasphemy). Thus, the structure is really the form of a materially negative act that goes from denying to positing and back. Ivan, and Dostoevsky, follows the laws of sentimental genre when searching and providing the most horrible examples thinkable. The goal is to shock the reader and gain her attention, while at the same time mobilizing her moral sympathy in a fight of society for injustice. The reader is provoked to act, even though she cannot act: this raises the emotional stakes and draws the reader into the text through the sense of guilt. The facticity or at least vividness is important for this sort of futile temptation. But Dostoevsky’s Ivan is not only shocking by facts, he is also a tempter of Smerdyakov through hypothetical, probing messages. He embodies both contrary strategies as though tempting himself and answering himself. It is clear from the above that Dostoyevsky does not depict demons as a mere danger for positive being. Positive being is fact, but Dostoevsky shows how through this, the positivity may acquire a negative form, so that facts become ghostly provocations. Through probing, Dostoyevsky transforms their shocking effects in order to overcome their obsessional nature. “Demonic decreation,” as Fernie calls it, may be terrible, but it is also a tool of resisting the “facts,” of fighting against the terrorizing empiricism. When Ivan sadistically bombards Alesha with his horror stories, Ivan says: “‘I don’t understand anything and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact … ’ ‘Why are you testing me?’ Alyosha exclaimed with a rueful strain.”46 So if Ivan’s fallacy is to denounce God and Being based on several acts of evil, then the task of anti-sentimentalist literature is to reinterpret facts as probes and to escape their spell by putting them back into the context of a movement,

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and to understand them. Negativity is a revolt against positivity, for the sake of a higher rationality. In politics, the temptation of the second sort is equivalent, not to revolutionary but to terrorist strategies. A terrorist act, by serving as an instance of pure evil, does not erase reality but, on the contrary, realizes a fantasy and refutes the moral order based on progress. Such terrorism is operated not just by the clandestine fighters but also by the media that spread their message. It is against the “information bomb”47 that the previously mentioned demonic potentialization and de-creation actually serve as desirable antidotes. By narrating a crime, of which he read in a newspaper, from the point of view of a criminal, Dostoevsky deprives this crime from its demonic hold, even by analyzing its demonic roots. Philosophically speaking, however, the message remains the same in response to both temptations: one needs an exercise in crossing the border between possibility and reality, both ways. In conclusion, it can be said that Dostoevsky does not really have a univocal moral critique of potentiality and of the “test drive.” He also sees the virtues of potentialization in response to the positivistic blackmail of fact qua example. His novels play out at the intersection of the two types of temptation and provocation. They are theories and panoramas of socio-political life as a game of tests and temptations. Moreover, they are tests and provocations themselves, but not in the sense that they would push the reader into a pre-determined moral position, but in the sense that they test out an idea within literature and theory, without putting it into practice, but in demonstrating that the infinite dwelling within a fiction makes one demonic. The advantage of literature over simple experiment is that, through narration, it can depict not just ideas, but also their realizations, not only provocations, but also the response to them, still within an ideal or tentative universe. Because the world of ideas and images is negative, it is predisposed to crime and ultimately, to disaster, so that the tragic fiction, being unsafe to dwell in, ousts one into the real life such as politics: without a clear plan but with a better understanding of our aesthetic politics or political aesthetics.

3

Symbolism and Melancholia

I Introduction Negativity in art is familiar to us from modernism and postmodernism, but is not exclusive to our times. It is typical to all art in general (as a self-overcoming of religion), especially in its sublime and tragic forms. Still, we have known periods of classicism and academism, during which art abided by a set of rules and adhered to “realistic” mimesis. During these periods, negativity was subjugated by idealization. Soviet art from the 1930s to the 1980s went through one such period. And it is in contrast with such art that the contemporary Russian aesthetic of negativity stands out with particular intensity. Turn-of-thecentury European modernism, on the other hand, was from the very beginning characterized by rebellion against all canons and by a deliberate attack on form and mimetic resemblance. It was colored by shock, horror, and sorrow. This negativity was noted and analyzed—albeit from two different critical positions— by Theodor Adorno in West Germany and Mikhail Lifshitz in the USSR. Adorno regarded modernist negativity as an objective expression of the  alienated subject, as a remainder of a non-identical experience1, while Lifshitz saw it as a nihilistic “integrated rebellion.”2 Both positions can be reconciled if we consider negation in recent art not as nihilistic destruction and sentimental shock, but as a correlation of reality with its ideal, in the process of which the terms could at times switch their meanings in an unfree society: time and time again, Ideal appears in its demonic form and incarnations of angelic light bring suffering on the exhausted flesh. Still, it is precisely from negativity that beauty springs (and not the sublime as in the mainstream of avant-garde art). This art, which exists in-between classicism and nihilism, has been historically referred to as symbolism. It is this art that I turn to below in more detail. This chapter was previously published as: “Illuminated by Darkness. Two Symbolist Masterpieces.” Stasis, vol. 6. No. 2, 222–53.

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The notion of “negativity” was first introduced by Hegel to be later picked up by twentieth-century philosophers, specifically by members of the Frankfurt School. I have discussed negativity above in this book, yet it is worth emphasizing that behind it stands an entire philosophy, that is, thinking about the totality and materiality of the negative effort that might otherwise appear as a trivial logical operation. The fact that the subject negates the immediate data of experience to distinguish an object is due to the presence of a strange supernatural force. This force does not stop at differentiating objects, but strives further—to the limit of destruction, homicide, and evil that it later abandons, thanks only to the reflexive gesture of the “negation of the negation.” In other words, in negativity logical and ethical negations are intrinsically linked. Already in 1805–6, in his Jena Lectures Hegel writes that the subject (“Spirit”) “complements” this “being-in-itself ” with the for-itself, with negativity […]. “It takes its first self as an object, i.e., the image, Being as mine, as negated.”3 Particular being is negated, it becomes an image and only in this capacity enters into the negative interior space of a person: It is stored in the Spirit’s treasury, in its Night […] The human being is this Night, this empty nothing […] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us.4

This fragment simultaneously contains logic, ethical emotion of horror, and aesthetic theory of image based on a fashionable-at-the-time Romantic model (especially that of Novalis), which, however, already anticipates the NeoRomantic symbolist aesthetic. Night in Hegel’s passage is an image that is also a symbol. I will discuss this further once I address Hegel’s theory of symbolic art. It is not accidental5 that the next wave of aestheticism in European culture (third after Renaissance and Romanticism) was characterized by decay and decadence and ended up claiming the latter description as its title. Exuberant artistic imagination—stimulated by the electric new energy of life, by the loosening of official control over practices that were earlier considered sinful, improper, or impractical, and by the economy of consumption and advertisement—began to sharply contradict the rational spirit of technological progress. All this found reflection in the “negative” self-consciousness of the early proto-modernism, which experienced itself as “decadence.” “Impressionism,” “Symbolism,” and, of course, “decadence”—these names were first introduced pejoratively by these

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movement’s critics. It is symptomatic and interesting that they were all eventually accepted (not without some irony) by the artists themselves. Although both “symbolism” and “decadence” were used interchangeably in reference to the same artists and writers, the name “symbolism” appeared to have more positive connotations. And yet, as I will demonstrate further, the melancholic tone associated with the decadents was not entirely overcome in symbolism, especially in symbolist painting, where it was literally embodied in the darkened and contrast-filled coloration. Symbol itself was primarily conceptualized negatively. For instance, Stéphane Mallarmé drew on the Hegelian theory of a symbol as standing in a negative relation to the sign. In Russia, Nikolai Minsky set forth a highly influential negative theory of the symbol. Combining Neo-Kantianism and Neoplatonism, Minsky proposed a concept of a “meon” (“the non-existent”) as a transcendental form, to which one could ascend only through negation. “All of life, all of the world is enveloped by a mysterious atmosphere of meons. […] Art in itself does not guide us to meons, but it creates symbols of different stages of development” and therefore “should lead to its own negation.”6 This negation, however, is only relative—it exists only for us. Within themselves these ideas-meons are quite positive. The distinction between symbolist self-consciousness and that of the decadents is contained in this distinction. Whether or not it held in practice remains an open question. The rise of the avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century has undoubtedly entailed, among other things, a break with the “decadent” themes of symbolism: its pessimism, its auratism, and its commitment to “story.” This break, however, was not a decisive one. Kazimir Malevich, Velimir Khlebnikov, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Daniil Kharms, and Piet Mondrian—all paid their tribute to mysticism. In that regard, they were not that different from the turn-of-the-century symbolists.7 Symbolism is closely related to the art of modernism. Symbolists were the first to make a step toward anti-naturalism, partial abstraction, fantastic plots, and expressivity. As mentioned above in Chapter 1, pp. 51-52, I am inclined to separate the notions of modernism and the avant-garde. Symbolism could be seen already as modernism but not yet the avant-garde. It is possible to make several interesting connections between the late nineteenth century and the present era. As I will show further, a series of contemporary cultural phenomena, for example, the cinema of Lars von Trier and popular sci-fi, make direct references to the symbolist epoch. Birgit Beumers8 draws a parallel between fin-de-siècle Russia and the postcommunist Russia of the 1990s. She holds that both periods were marked by their overt nihilism and

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confusion, which gave rise to decadent culture. A close consideration of these two epochs and cultures, however, reveals more differences than similarities between them. Today we can confidently claim that the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was exceptionally meaningful for European art. A radically new understanding of art emerged and with it new schools, styles, genres, and countless masterpieces that set the course for the rest of twentieth-century culture. It is important that the neither the chronology of the fin de siècle nor that of modernism was linear. In the 1910s and 1920s a shift or, rather, a leap takes place from decadence and symbolism to the more daring revolutionaryminded avant-garde (which includes cubism and futurism). We also have a parallel development of German expressionism that flows smoothly out of symbolism and becomes a continuation of its program; it takes on symbolism’s decadent mood as well, adding to it an element of shock. We also see the development of French surrealism—a style that is considerably more hedonistic and optimistic in spirit, but that is closely tied to symbolism by their shared aesthetic of the fantastical and the neoclassical. Russia in the 1920s witnessed not only a development of revolutionary constructivism and suprematism, but also a blossoming of high modernism that inherited symbolism’s main traits: figurativity, idealism, and virtuosity (we can name the literary writing of Osip Mandelshtam and Andrei Platonov as examples of such high modernist works). Late-nineteenth-century modernism was characterized by aestheticism and a religious attitude to art. Modernism is saturated with eschatological mood and this mood inspires it to destroy artistic form. Orientation toward deformation allows not only to set a melancholic tone, but also to create an effect of a trance, to hypnotize the viewer into feeling herself transported to another reality. The line between nineteenth and twentieth centuries demarcated a break between two different branching cultural paradigms. Symbolism, which emerged as a dominant genre in this transitional period, combines formal experimentation with figurative naturalism, or even classicism. Its contemporaries, primarily in Britain, tended to view symbolism as a protest movement, since it insisted on the freedom of imagination and the deformation of “realistic” proportions.9 And yet, its intention was the opposite of that of impressionism, which from the very beginning placed its bets on non-ideological aestheticism. Rejection of figurativeness and playing with forms of expression in symbolism were meant to accentuate the viewer’s sensuality and to encourage her to re-evaluate habitual forms. Contemporary theories of modernism—for instance, that of Jacques Rancière—begin precisely with this sensualist model of art.10 However,

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symbolism is rather a modernist movement that follows a different trajectory. A disruption of form here is conceptualized as a collision with an object that remains elusive and foreclosed in its intensity, as a chance encounter in a “thoughtfully ordered disorder”11 with an object that embodies the Ideal. By rejecting the canon, symbolism becomes conscious of the incompleteness of all negation and frankly presents the audience with a shocking event (for instance, with a story of a murder or disgrace), as well as with a figure of a person astounded by this event (think of Edvard Munch’s screaming hero). Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg12 is quite a characteristic work in this regard. It is constructed around the expectation of a bomb’s explosion and it itself blows up the usual literary form, but in such a way that, like a half-destroyed city, this form still remains habitable. One could wander around it as one would around a labyrinth. In a sense, Bely seems to be a more honest writer than James Joyce, whose writing has a similar form. In Joyce’s novel13 (unlike in the Odyssey), there is no other catastrophe besides the catastrophe of language, and even it may go unnoticed, obscured by the impressionistic ideology of the stream of consciousness “as it is.” When Walter Benjamin, in his apocalyptic ode to the avant-garde, rallies against aura as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,”14 he is opposing twentieth-century avant-garde movements that developed out of impressionism (cubism, futurism, and constructivism) to the more objectively minded symbolism, which, however, is also more passéist. At the same time, Benjamin’s own late philosophy of history (“to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn”)15 and his analysis of the art nouveau style in his Arcades Project, on the contrary, gravitate toward the auratic and symbolist sense of time. Politically speaking, symbolism (just as Romanticism one hundred years earlier) was a deeply ambivalent phenomenon. In France it was seen as a rather conservative, archaistic, and academic style. In Great Britain, on the other hand, against the backdrop of rational and pragmatic culture, symbolism looked radical and oppositional. In early twentieth-century Russia, most of the symbolist authors sympathized with the revolution and adhered to leftist, anarchist, and (less frequently) socialist positions (which often coexisted with religiosity). Russian symbolism was in direct connection with revolution, in particular with the revolution of 1917. Symbolist writers such as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, and Andrey Bely, their “heirs” such as Boris Pilniak and Platonov, and even Alexander Bogdanov of the Red Star; painters such as Kuzma PetrovVodkin, early Pavel Filonov, and Marc Chagall—all responded to revolution with enthusiasm. They hastened to glorify its wild and mystical energy:  tempests,

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snow-storms, society gods and goddesses, Neo-Renaissance geniuses, etc. At the same time, Bolsheviks (and history itself) initially sided with more rational and futuristic art that is more correct to associate with the avant-garde (Aleksei Gastev, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Malevich, and others) than with modernism or symbolism. Symbolist perception of an event tends to be apocalyptic. It is not accidental that Bely in his Petersburg inscribes an act of anarchist terror into apocalyptic, rather than optimistic revolutionary narrative. The novel is all intoxication with the raging revolutionary elements, but the overall feeling that it leaves is that of being at the edge. One can be critical of such a romantic and archaic view of the Revolution that was a progressive and secularizing phenomenon. The fact that Socialist Realism and Soviet hagiography would later come to borrow symbolist themes does not help symbolism’s case. And yet, authentic symbolism is not about sugarcoated nostalgia. It is a dissonant consonance of an event. Symbolism played its role in that it forced the most forward-looking of Russian culture to check itself against the standard of revolutionary heroic negativity (think, for instance, of the melancholic tone of the film Chapaev, of such novels as The White Guard, The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago [which were White in spirit, but written and read in the USSR], and the philosophical works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov, and Boris Porshnev). In what follows, I will give the brief philosophical characteristics of symbolism and will then offer a detailed analysis of two important symbolist artworks: one created on the edge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the other—of the twentieth and twenty-first.

II Re-evaluating Symbolism In following the aesthetic theory of Alain Badiou,16 I am taking aesthetic movements and their self-nomination seriously. Badiou describes artistic movements and groups (but not individual artists) as “artistic configurations” and regards them as the main units of art.17 These eventual constellations are organized in series but are not united by any abstract category. In the case of symbolism, such aesthetic configuration centers around the notion of a symbol, but a symbol about which it is hard to determine what exactly it symbolizes. This fits well with the non-categorical unity of the symbolist movement, especially the unity between painting and literature. They are drawn together around the word “symbol,” and that is already significant.

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Symbolism was severely criticized by the generation of the 1920s.18 Today it is often viewed as something that stands dangerously close to kitsch and esoteric mysticism. And if in literature, Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud are still considered classics (despite their association with symbolism), such painters as Gustave Moreau, Ferdinand Khnopff, and Arnold Böcklin have “drifted off ” into the background and are relegated to some interval between impressionism and the avant-garde (sometimes they get grouped together as the “postimpressionists”), while Paul Gauguin and early Pablo Picasso are hailed as solitary geniuses who somehow defied all movements. During the Soviet era, Russian symbolist writers such as Blok and Briusov managed to keep their place at the center of the literary canon (possibly, thanks to their aesthetic proximity to Socialist Realism);19 however, they have since conceded to the avant-gardists (the futurists, the OBERIU writers, and a proto-surrealist Platonov) and the neoclassical Acmeists. Meanwhile, it is quite common to misidentify painters: whereas we still group Mikhail Vrubel and Valentin Serov with the symbolists, painters such as Petrov-Vodkin and Chagall are usually left out, even though their alliance with symbolism is unquestionable. Such suppression is unjust, for it is symbolism that provided the very foundation for future avant-garde and mass cultures. It combined serious intellectual content with a look that made it appealing to mass audiences, all the while keeping open a possibility of making a coherent political s­ tatement— something that could not be said about abstract or cubist art. Symbolism developed in an atmosphere of esotericism and mysticism, which captivated the intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This has discredited it in the eyes of the twentieth-century avant-gardists and leftists, who have traded magic for political praxis, and soured it for liberals supporting formalist art. Today, exalted spirituality that uses art for the creation of new alternatives to Christian religions is also met with resistance. However, religious feelings often gave rise to vivid images, which remained long after faith and piety ceased to occupy us. In symbolism, moreover, religiosity is accompanied by a feeling that “gods have died” and angels have fallen. The latter suspicion is sobering for it guides us back to the world of inspired, yet quite earthly (and for that reason, somewhat melancholic) characters. As Badiou has recently argued in his discussion of Richard Wagner, we must preserve mystical symbolism’s insistence on ceremony.20 Art will not restore our faith in God, but it will teach us how to be faithful to life’s process and to the symbolic rituals that constitute collectivity and preserve meaning despite the absence of transcendental referent.

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Nineteenth-century mysticism was in many regards a realization of the crisis of symbolic form in the absence of socially accepted sacral realities: the dissolution of this form would have meant a disintegration of social ties. However, even in our post-secular time, it is impossible to maintain symbolic form unchanged. As a consequence, it falls to art to reinvent the cult anew—just as it had been suggested by symbolists as well as by several contemporary artists (we could think of ritual performances by Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Marina Abramović, Viennese Actionists, and, even closer to our time—Christoph Schlingensief).21 The name “symbolism” was not a very fitting one. It didn’t take on right away. As I have mentioned, “symbolism” gained its name from its critics. Émile Zola used the term ironically in 1876 to describe a painting by Gustave Moreau.22 Jean Moréas’s Symbolist Manifesto followed only ten years later. In this text, the young French-Greek poet suggests the term “symbolism” to replace an even less friendly “decadence.” From the 1890s “symbolism” becomes a commonly accepted term, even though the art movement that it designated would still occasionally be referred to as “idealism” or “idéisme.” To the vague style of the impressionists and the murky palette of realists, symbolism opposed the clean lines and saturation that were evocative of the Renaissance and classicism. G. Albert Aurier, a symbolist poet and critic, distinguishes five traits of symbolist painting: idealism, symbolism (expression of ideas through forms), syntheticism (uniting multiple means and forms), subjectivism, and decorativeness.23 And while Aurier emphasizes ideas, Maurice Denis focuses on subjective experience and emotions.24 Both are, however, pointing out the necessary “deformation” of the object. Many symbolists (Sâr Péladan and his circle) turn to esoteric hermetic teachings. Most symbolist models first appeared in France; however, eventually symbolist theory and artistic style would spread across Europe and North America. One of the places where symbolism gained particular popularity was francophone Belgium. An entire constellation of fascinating symbolist artists came out of Poland. Stanisław Przybyszewski, the leader of the “Young Poland” movement, espoused mystical ideas that were close to those of Péladan’s—he not only proclaimed himself beyond good and evil, but also cultivated Satanism! Zenon Przemyski, an editor of the Chimera journal, the movement’s central mouthpiece, would later follow Moréas and Aurier in defining symbol simply as “living analogy.”25 Symbolism was also actively developing in Scandinavia. This region had its own mystical idealists (Johannes Jørgensen in Denmark), and its own paeans of suffering and illness (Munch, Knut Hamsun). Particularly

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characteristic of Scandinavian symbolism is the work of Henrik Ibsen—an earlier author, who applied symbolist idealistic logic to the interpretation of the naturalistic, everyday life of a bourgeois family (which had destructive consequences for the dramatic form as well as the family). Despite its apparent assertiveness, “symbolism” is an ambivalent name: after all, it was first used as a critical description of a style that was too divorced from reality (and nature). Negativity, implicitly present in this title was later positively appropriated by the movement itself. “Symbolism” was understood by its founding fathers as a movement that was sublime and assertive, despite its anti-naturalism and tendency for objective and subjective “deformation.”26 Although the word “symbol” does not contain any overt negative connotations, the rhetorical negativity pointed out historical negativity: a rejection of realism meant a dissatisfaction with reality and/or alienation from it. A rejection of mimesis was only partial. It presupposed a unity between the negated (as if extinguished) nature and its ideal. Most theoreticians of symbolism point out a double movement: from the sensual to the ideal and back. To quote Sharon Hirsh, symbolism was an art that would express an antinatural and, in fact, psychological state of existence, but that would also, at least for the next decade, continue to rely on recognizable images from nature as its means of expression. The symbolist artist therefore worked a constant balancing act. To create art that was without reference to nature would have demanded total abstraction, a means of expression that was simply unattainable (and for the most part unthinkable) for artists of the 1880s and 1890s. On the other hand, to create an art in which the images were too recognizable, or came too close to actual “nature,” would have negated the true, inner message of the Symbolist.27

Symbolists are clearly espousing this dialectic of the material and the ideal from the German Romantics and the idealists of the early nineteenth century. What do we mean when we speak of symbols? The first thing that most people tend to associate with symbolism is a slightly moldy mysticism or some secret coded image that requires significant erudition to decipher it. However, codes and allegories are more characteristic of the Renaissance than symbolism— think, for instance, of Albrecht Dürer or Hans Holbein. Symbolists borrow their key concept—already as a “ready-made”—from German Romantics.28 Johann Goethe and Friedrich Schelling who invented the concept of a symbol at approximately the same time opposed symbol to allegory and used it to designate a particular non-mimetic art, which does not serve to represent external nature

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but is self-sufficient and that generates a new reality as such. Goethe defines symbolism as that “where the particular represents the general, not as a dream and shadow, but as a live and immediate revelation of the unfathomable.”29 Schelling, meanwhile, offers a more complex definition of symbol as something in which the movement from the general to the particular and from the particular to the general coincide.30 Both authors point out the balance that exists between idea and sensibility. The balance between the two is a central theme not only for the theory of the symbolic, but for the whole of Romantic aesthetics overall. Jean Moréas’s understanding of the symbolic—when he writes that “symbolic poetry seeks to clothe the Idea in a perceptible form that nevertheless will not be the ultimate goal in itself, but, which, even as it serves to express the Idea, remains subject to it”31—completely coincides with that of Goethe. Symbolists were moving very much in the wake of Romantic theory. However, in painting— with regards to both technique and method—they manage to offer something radically new. The Romantic painting often conjures some hazy aura (Caspar Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner). Meanwhile, the symbolists of the late nineteenth century assumed a rather realistic approach to representing life with the sharpest and clearest of lines. At times, life in symbolist art appears as adorned and brightly lit; at others it is mysterious, somber, and inhabited by mythological and fantastical creatures. The latter are sometimes painted in a naturalistic manner (e.g., the saints on the Pre-Raphaelite canvases are robust peasant girls; Jacek Malczewski meticulously details his harpy’s armpit hair, Gustav Klimt does the same in his female portraits—all of that is very typical for the movement). But sometimes fantastical beings are represented as disembodied luminous stains. The faces of these creatures are idealized, inspired (with either angelic or demonic passion), and, more often than not, shrouded with sorrow. Symbolist painting is saturated with eroticism, which is strengthened by its combination of pornographic naturalism with the idealization of a landscape/face or demoniacal narcissistic desire. Many symbolists would prepare their canvases with special textured grounds, so that the heterogeneous materiality of their surfaces would be all the more noticeable behind the ephemeral forms.32 Reinhold Heller justly explains this effect by the “dialectics” between the material and the abstractly ideal, so characteristic of symbolism.33 The way the Symbolists work with color is quite special: they use highly contrasting colors that often look unnatural and include a dark component. Gaugin, the father-founder of the French symbolism in painting, instructed his disciple Paul Sérusier: “How do you see that tree? […] Is it really green? Then put

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it down in green—the most beautiful green in your palette—and that shadow is rather blue? Don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.”34 We see that this particular method is not just distinct, but even contrary to Impressionism with its continuous palette. Symbolists stand out among the artists of their time thanks to their obsession with the fantastical and the pervasive melancholic mood of their artworks. Even though movement’s founders strove to distance themselves from the decadents, they ended up espousing, almost despite themselves, the eroticism and spleen of the latter. Despite “officially” renouncing decadent hedonism in favor of idealism and mysticism, symbolist art remained profoundly melancholic. The fact that the symbolists did not fully overcome decadence sets them apart from the Romantics, from whom they borrowed most of their theoretical positions. What we are dealing with here is a polarization of the symbolic and a sense of world-hierarchy. For many symbolists (Gustave Moreau, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde), ideal beauty needs evil to overcome nature. Hermetically minded symbolists such as Péladan followed the Neo-Platonic doctrine, founded on the dialectic of body and soul. Ascending to God and Spirit paradoxically requires humans to self-destruct: this is the origin of the satanic motifs in symbolism and the dark ways in which the Spirit reveals itself in nature. Held against the eternal light, all sense-perception begins to appear sinister—as a “night of the world.” Among earlier Romantic and idealist authors, it is Hegel who was most attentive to negativity. As I mentioned earlier, the symbolists absorbed the Romantics’ idealist theory of the symbolic. Thanks to existing translations, they had access to the works of Goethe and Hegel. For instance, Mallarmé has reportedly either read Hegel or knew of Hegel’s works.35 Symbol for Hegel is a sensuous object that does not coincide with itself and is therefore incomprehensible, negative, and is denied its proper meaning.36 However, thanks to this very negativity, it does not get dissolved in the idea, but acquires a certain material density thanks to its very obscurity. Mallarmé thinks along very similar lines when he emphasizes the negativity and opaqueness of words. (Take, for instance, his miniature “La Pénultième.”)37 The esoteric word-symbol plays with both the semantics—nul, nothingness, zero—and the feeling of the approaching end of the world or century. According to Hegel’s Aesthetics, symbolic art (primarily, Egyptian and Hebrew) is an art that does not know what it is expressing.38 Negativity, because of its lack, uses “symbols” as undeciphered, mysterious images, which do not coincide with themselves and do not have a clear meaning. Even in instances when allegorical correspondences could be established, symbols in symbolic art

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remain undeciphered (or only partially deciphered). This is the reason behind the popularity of Egyptian, biblical, and fantastic themes. Egypt for Hegel is the country of symbols, the country which sets itself the spiritual task of the self-deciphering of the spirit, without actually attaining to the decipherment … Egyptians, amongst the peoples hitherto mentioned, are the properly artistic people. But their works remain mysterious and dumb, mute and motionless, because here spirit itself has still not really found its own inner life …39

For the Romantics and symbolists alike, a symbol contained a high concentration of esoteric elements—this put it dangerously close to the sphere of elite, secret knowledge that could be deciphered and attained only by the initiated few. However, the distinction between allegory and symbol was never quite clear to most symbolists, and many of them believed in various gnostic codes. A more sober, technical notion of symbol for the symbolist and post-symbolist tradition of Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, and Eugenio Montale has been offered in our time by Umberto Eco: “Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily have not been there, and one wonders why it is there.”40 Therefore, “the symbolic mode exists at that point where we finally will have lost the desire to decode at any cost.”41 If we recall the theme of the “interlocutor” among such dark twentiethcentury visionaries as Osip Mandelshtam and Paul Celan—it will bring us back to the heart of the symbolist problematic. If the image is obscure or coded, it does not mean that it is a purely formal one. It is just that its meaning is lagging behind and is in need of further discussion and analysis in the future. Symbolist painting is characterized by plots and thematicity. Symbolists writers also do not hesitate to portray ideas-as-such. In the words of PierreLouis Mathieu, What the Symbolist writers and artists indeed had in common was the fact that, by means of words, forms, colors, they sought to communicate to the reader or viewer a personal message of a spiritual, moral, or even religious nature. The Impressionists and Naturalists, on the other hand, had contented themselves with merely reproducing the physical world.42

This is a programmatic, ideological art—a fact that contributed to its relative suppression from history. As Philippe Jullian noted already back in 1971, “When dealing with the painting of the period from 1880 to 1910, the experts mention a score of artists, from Seurat to Matisse, without ever saying what they owed to masters who are ridiculed because they attached importance to ideas.”43 And when symbolist artists do succeed in attracting the attention of a mass audience,

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then we tend to see Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin—the less complex and most “realist” representatives of their generation of symbolists, and even they are more often than not grouped with the so-called postimpressionists (a euphemism that was invented in the 1910s). Natural attractions of a slightly chthonic kind occupy a prominent place among symbolist subject matter: Symbolists frequently exploit sinister sexuality, rituals, violence, and sickness. The dark side of life is aestheticized. Michael Gibson, author of one of the more synthetic texts on symbolism, believes that symbolism is defined by a negative disposition of the mind. He lists the attributes of the “depressive climate” so typical for many symbolist works: “The season most often referred to is autumn; the favored hour, dusk (or night); the dominant element, water (rain, the canals); the reigning heavenly body, the moon; the state of mind, sorrow and ennui; the sexual climate, disillusionment and impotence; the mood, weariness and anticipation of death; the social situation, solitude”.44 While melancholia is also found in other aesthetic movements, Gibson believes that for symbolism it is an essential and crucial element. It needs to be added that negativity, which in symbolism is present on the level of themes and content, in modernism and in the twentieth-century avant-garde comes in on the level of form, while the range of themes and motifs widens and becomes more varied. Expressionism tends to reproduce symbolist melancholia, but cubism, Fauvism, suprematism, and, at times, even surrealism tend to be more positive and optimistic. In modernist literature, however, negative tone remains the dominant one and the continuity with symbolism remains unbroken. (For instance, the symbolist aesthetic of somber philosophical fantastic fiction quite naturally flows into Franz Kafka’s prose, Eliot’s poetry, and even Jean-Paul Sartre’s literary texts.) We should now consider symbolist art’s negative plots (according to Hegel’s logic of negativity, the symbolic in these plots is akin to a pyramid erected over a grave). These are the theme of the demonic, the symbols of temptation, sin, and death (harpies, female sphynxes, etc.). Another common motif is the melancholic, sedate, yet soothing and beaconing mood of a desolate island-adriftin-the-center-of-the night, which is usually conveyed by a saturated blue color. Portraying important characters as darkened silhouettes that serve as screens for the projection of an evening light, is another typical symbolist technique called contre-jour.45 It was not invented by the symbolists but was widely used by them, especially by French and Belgian artists (for instance, Alphonse Osbert, Georges Lacombe, and William Degouve de Nuncques). From a philosophical point of view, what is important here is the inversion of the function of light: it is as if the

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figures are illuminated from the inside by the “black sun” of melancholy. These dark figures create for the viewer an effect of looking at one’s own back, at being included into a painting as the source of an invisible gaze. Such is the aesthetic embodiment of the negative dialectics: inversion of light, dark tones, and melancholic mood allow the symbolists to create images that are simultaneously idealized and sensuous. An angel, growing darker as she falls, is acquiring flesh. The symbolists also use black color to darken other colors or to offset their luminosity. Sometimes figures emerge directly out of a dark stain or grow back into it, creating an ornamental play between the foreground and background (we can see this effect in the works of Klimt and Wojciech Weiss). It is important that the symbolists move toward abstraction, but choose a different route than the impressionists, who insisted on the dissolution of form. The symbolists introduce abstraction through darkening, through elliptical erasure of separate elements. This allows to project a viewer into these dark fields and to convey the fullness of life by contrasting it with the darkness of the night that envelopes it. Images become saturated with intensity to such a degree that they begin to morph and bend—artwork itself becomes a portal onto the sublime, a symbol of a door into a new life. The best example of this is G.F. Watts’s masterpiece The Sower of the Systems.46 In the twentieth century, nothing has approached the saturated intensity of Mallarmé’s sonnets, with the exception of, perhaps, classic rock music where the intense bass sound is analogous to the dark color in symbolist paintings. Instead of the mere expression of subjective feelings, the symbolists strove to find in their art their correlate in nature and in fantasy. The same thing could be said about impressionism, but whereas in impressionism subjective feelings were supposed to be coming from nature, symbolism moves from subject (or from an idea) toward an object. On the one hand, the desire for materiality is stronger in symbolism than it is in impressionism—that is why symbolists often gravitate toward a classical, realist style. A contrast is produced between the clarity of the image and its symbolical ambiguity and negativity. On the other hand, thanks to their symbolism, figures can stand out of their context. The “symbolic” perspective allows a greater freedom with combining images, gradually making them more autonomous. Symbolism actively draws on the fantastical: it inscribes into the world that which is absent from it and what is only imagined. Imagery becomes literal: nominally familiar fears and dreams (angels, demons, hypersexual objects) acquire a physical appearance—as if we were always supposed to imagine them looking that way. This deadpan, hyperbolic literalness sometimes puts symbolism in a dangerous proximity to kitsch.

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It is the palpability of images and the physicality of the symbolic that distinguish symbolists from the impressionists and their experiments, becoming meaningful only in combination with ideal or mystical significance. Materiality here does not correlate to “reality.” It regains its philosophical significance as “matter” or a “meon,” to use the Neo-Platonic term that would later be adopted by Minsky. The sublime meaning thickens and becomes non-transparent among dark matter that is alien to it but very much palpable. In this sense, symbolism is a dialectical synthesis of realism and the fantastic. Such synthesis does not dissolve their antinomy, but rather organizes this tension into a form of dynamic unity. The central aesthetic question in the nineteenth-century Realist and Romantic art was this: If art has a right to exist, then it should enter into life or, on the contrary, absorb reality into its aesthetic sphere. Symbolist art is marked by this question and by the sorrow at the impossibility of following the first route. It takes the second path and constructs a special mechanism that allows art to function as an absolute object. This creates an effect of reality as of a fantasy that came true. In the Russian context, the critique of symbolism by the Acmeists—primarily, by Nikolay Gumiliov and Mandelshtam—is well-known. The Acmeists maintained that symbolism posited an “uncertain,” contingent reality: a rose was shown as giving a nod to a girl, a girl was nodding to a rose, and neither was revealing their individuality. The Acmeists, in turn, were defending neoclassical ideology on the grounds that one had to keep mystical silence about all divine and sacred matters and to only hint at them without including them directly into art. As part of this polemics, in 1912 Mandelshtam articulated a nearly existentialist program in which he emphasized the importance of reality and being-as-such for art: “There is no equality, no rivalry, only a community of co-conspirators united against emptiness and oblivion. One should love the existence of an object more than the object itself and one’s own being over oneself—this is the commandment of Acmeism.”47 The question of what should be considered reality remains. The symbolists were placing their bets on the higher reality of the ideal, on the realiora. However, a disembodied idea cannot lay claim to reality. Already in 1904, Korney Chukovsky in his response to Przybyszewski, the leader of the Polish symbolist movement, brilliantly commented on the negative attitude to reality that characterized symbolist art: There are such moments in art’s life when it seems to have grown tired of creating. It appears to no longer have the force to shape a coherent and unified sense of life with colorful images. It then starts to scrape at these images, searching for something absolute, impermeable, and timeless, something that it itself used

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to clothe in beautiful forms. […] All of them are searching for the tragedy of the collective soul, the tragedy of something that mysteriously dwells under the temporary masks. […] In their efforts to find it, they rob reality of its luster, strip it of time and space, from contingency, from itself, from its warmth and blood—from everything … And the tragedy of such art lies in the fact that these accidents, these colors, this diversity are exactly what it is searching for. Accidents point to the greatest consistency; the external contains everything inner. […] But they go on searching among the abstractions—that is why contemporary art no longer creates joy, but only suffering …48

Anxiety brought on by such a taking leave of reality was thematized by symbolism itself. This anxiety pointed at a regrettable illusory quality of the images produced by art and aimed at projecting them back. Blok’s self-critical Puppet Show deals with the “unmasking” of symbols as “cheap and artificial” and poses a question about how real and un-mystical love is to be portrayed49. On an intuitive level, such criticism seems correct: it is disappointing to read or look at artworks that are in the business of self-denunciation and that declare that what has been read or viewed is all raging madness and a crude entertainment. We usually want artworks, especially those into which we “sink” considerable time and emotion, “to play fair.” Of course, one could say that art portrays the haze and impermanence of the everyday world and offers a position from which it could be regarded from the viewpoint of the absolute. Shouldn’t we, to use an Acmeist expression, dispel all this fog, and instead use the opened perspective onto the absolute to artistically affirm the earthly existence of singular things? To that, the symbolists would have answered that the symbol for them is not a rose that gives a nod to a girl, but an object that, thanks to its symbolic meaning, becomes self-referential and that, therefore, is complete and self-sufficient. A “good” symbol—a mirror, a fair lady, a doll, etc.—does not signify some individual thought or thing. Thanks to the plurality of meanings that it contains, it amplifies its own manifest being by becoming more concrete, richer, and stronger than the simple facts. The disincorporation belongs to the symbol only as a moment (in the Hegelian sense of the word), and the true real being is not existence, per se, but the meaningful being of the symbol. We can find examples of this in the works of the Acmeists themselves—on closer consideration it turns out that their preference for the “existing” objects is thoroughly symbolic (giraffes, trams, stones, horseshoes, etc.). However, both groups see clearly that “the struggle” for being, to use the expression from Heidegger,50 is an inherent theme of art. Heidegger51 himself constructs an aesthetic close to the symbolists: its paradigm consists of objects that do not

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symbolize anything besides themselves and that carry within themselves their own emptiness: a temple, a chalice, a bell. Heidegger’s archenemy Adorno too espoused, in a way, a symbolist aesthetic. As is well-known, Adorno52 considered as authentic only those works of art that embodied their own negativity, that is, which embodied their own failure to become a real embodiment of either the dream or a nightmare that produced them. Once again, we are dealing here with a type of object that becomes all the more tangible and material as a result of the disintegration of existence. Vladimir Nabokov, a successor to the quarrels of the 1910s and 1920s, had his finger on the pulse of Russian symbolism better than others—almost all of his novels are characterized by a certain movement toward derealization. Realist narrative in Nabokov inevitably begins to falter, and eventually becomes impressionistic, revealing some hallucinatory details. It encourages the reader to conclude that everything that happened was just a fever dream and reveals all things as “transparent”—as per the Acmeists’ critique. It is possible that Nabokov is projecting those same symbolist poetics onto the Russian Revolution that he famously rejected, creating a pessimistic world of vivid images, illuminated by the light by the triumph of extinction. In contemporary literature, this device has been borrowed by Victor Pelevin, whose novels are often organized around a series of awakenings—when somebody wakes up from somebody else’s nightmare or when somebody exits virtual reality. (It isn’t an accident that one of the characters in Pelevin’s Chapaev and Void is a symbolist poet.) It is true, though, that Pelevin does not share Navokov’s pessimistic nostalgia. What we encounter in his novels is sublimation, a cult of personality of a lonely artistic genius who can both create and destroy entire worlds. At the same time, Pelevin’s prose also contains moments of a very precise social realism: every instance of mystical zombification is a metaphor for a relation between power and opposition, and all mystical symbols and things—are but projections of capitalism’s fetishism of abstract substances like money, oil, or drugs. In one of his recent novel entitled S.N.U.F.F.53 money is called “manitu”: it is simultaneously a god, a currency, and a monitor. This is a classical symbol; however, its sacral character is treated ironically and the plurality of its meanings allows the author to unify and organize the otherwise fragmented perception of the contemporary person. We will see how in the works of Jacek Malczewski, multiple meanings similarly get condensed into a single image. Considering that this article is about art, the influence of the author’s own taste is unavoidable. Therefore, I will state right away that I consider symbolism taken broadly—from Wagner through Secession to Proust—as one of the

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apexes of Western art (I am not alone in this, as it appears that Badiou shares my opinion—most of his philosophy revolves around examples drawn from Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck). I will list my previous arguments. First, symbolism is an intensive and effective art that depicts and expresses negative characteristics of modernity. It practices negation both in the abstract sense of erasure and in the concrete sense of depicting counterimages and counterforces. Therefore, unlike abstract painting, symbolism never becomes nihilistic. Second, symbolism is a dialectical, synthetic, and balancing art that tentatively unites figure and ornament, idea and its physical incarnation. Third, symbolism forces us to consider the real as a union of ideas and matter. In what follows, I analyze two eponymous artworks, created one hundred years apart. Both are entitled Melancholia. Both attain a sublime aesthetic effect through a hyperbolic portrayal of negation. Their characters are defeated and perish without any apparent cause—through psychological reasons alone. However, what stands behind their failure is an objective catastrophe. This catastrophe becomes concentrated in an expressly artificial, fantastical symbol. The form of both works is fraught with tension, complicated by reflection; its proportions and genres are askew. This, however, does not result in a rejection of figurativity. On the contrary, the very tension and distortion become the central subject matter and are materialized in a symbol.

III Jacek Malczewski’s Melancholia Jacek Malczewski, a painter and the recognized leader of Polish symbolist artists, painted Melancholia in Kraków in 1890–94.54 The work won initial fame in 1900 when it was shown at that year’s World’s Fair (in the absence of Polish pavilion, it was exhibited in the Austro-Hungarian one). This is also when it acquired its present title: the original name was A Prologue. A Vision. The Last Age of Poland. Tout un siècle, but when in 1900 a critic suggested changing it to Melancholia, Malczewski did not object. The painting is energetic and saturated—in its both composition and color. Its intense expressive energy is immediately arresting. Thanks to the asymmetrical and sharply tilted perspective, its volume is open, pulling the spectator’s gaze into its spiraling vortex.55 To describe it in the most direct and simple terms, one could say that it shows the artist’s studio, where we can see - The artist himself, painting (in the background).

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- The images from this “painting within a painting”: they begin to float out of their frame and into the space of the studio, filling up the “real painting” in front of us. These images show an incredibly dense crowd, so dense, that it is almost impossible to distinguish the individual people in it. They are carrying spears. The people in this group are young at the start (on the left): they are brightly lit but are painted in a rather quick impressionist manner. The figures at the end (on the right) are darkened but are distinct and realistic. - A window on the right edge of the studio, toward which everyone is rushing. - Idyllic nature outside the window. - A woman standing outside this window. She is dressed in black and is either recoiling from the idyllic sight behind the window or is preventing the crowd from escaping through the window. - In the foreground—a table with the painter’s tools and (once again) the artist himself, now shown as one of the men in the crowd. What we have here is a closed structure—“a dream within a dream,” to borrow Jan Cavanaugh’s description.56 We are shown the process of creation of this very painting. The viewer is forced to look at it from the point of view of the artist working on it. The painting within a painting shows the three unsuccessful Polish uprisings of the nineteenth century and the three ages of man. In this manner, two motifs are overimposed and are made to comment on each other. These are, first of all, the images swirling around in the artist’s mind and escaping into reality just to find themselves—once again—within the space of art. The second motif deals with the Polish revolutionaries, trying to escape the vicious circle of foreign occupations and to gain freedom, but getting defeated and remaining trapped in the closed antechamber of time, incapable of transcendence. Judging from the presence of the woman dressed in black—a representation of melancholia—the defeat that they suffer is at least partially due to their own fault, for they are actually afraid of freedom, afraid of stepping outside into a dream that they are striving for. The fate of an artistic image as a dream that is trapped within an artwork, but that wants to break free from it, is juxtaposed here with the fate of revolutionaries, whose militant negativity suffers defeat and remains only a negativity that fails to advance into the utopian future. Both paradox and tension are obvious here. If we were to consider the situation of the artist himself and think of this painting as his self-reflection, then, to quote Cavanaugh:

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Malczewski was divided between his desire to follow Matejko [his teacher] as a spokesman of the nation and a loss of faith in the mission of national art, which seemed futile to him. Melancholia expresses the artist’s feeling of powerlessness and comments on the impossibility or “decadence” of the national situation and the vicious circle in which the Poles were bound up this time.57

Andrzej Pienkos agrees with this analysis. He sees in Melancholia primarily a work of “automatic” art that belongs to a long tradition of artists depicting their studios to show the resistance exerted by the images against the will of their creator (Pienkos 2002: 45–57). At the same time that Malczewski is invoking the most famous painting of this type—Gustave Courbet’s Artist’s Studio (1855)—he is polemicizing with it. Whereas Courbet offers an apology of art and states his faith in the attainability of artistic dreams in reality, Malczewski, with a double gesture, emphasizes the border that separates imagination from reality: by creating a distance between the viewer and the painting, he, at the same time, is encouraging the characters as well as the viewer to break it (Czekalski 2002: 96). All of this brings us to the well-known subject of melancholia, which has occupied artists and thinkers for a long time. One of Malczewski’s most classical allusions is Dürer’s Melancholia: it too has a window; the futility of revolutionaries’ efforts corresponds to the theme of vanitas represented by the instruments that we see on both images. The border between art and reality in Malczewski painting is guarded by a mysterious woman clad in black. If we were to speak of the painting’s “symbolism,” she is its main symbol. She is an embodied “no” that has come to life as a symbol of melancholia and negativity, of the impermeability of borders and the inexhaustibility of meaning—that is, if we are to follow Hegel, she is a symbol par excellence. It isn’t just that revolutionaries are trapped in their unfreedom like fantasies within one’s soul, and it isn’t that both—the dreams and the revolutionaries— are yearning for liberation and are equipped with essential negativity (spears). What is significant is that this artwork is striving to reach a reality that would surpass the mere reality of illusion. To achieve that, it must revert to selfcriticism and self-reflexivity. Revolution and its defeat are regarded not only on the level of content, but form and expression as well. This endows its characters with life—for it is form and not content that constitutes the empirical reality of an artwork. To be more exact, reality here lies in the relation between form and content. In Malczewski’s painting, this relation is isomorphically doubled. On the level of content, we are presented with the very same conflict—the conflict of content and form—that determines a concrete factuality of every painting. Reflexivity and self-criticism are not just forms of autophagy, but

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a way of revealing  history  within an artwork. In this manner, the central question of symbolism, which would later also become the central question of modernism and the avant-garde, coincides with the main political question of the present time. Modernism or the avant-garde? The choice is between an autonomous work of art and a desire to bring art into life—something that requires art’s selfcriticism. Both ends can be achieved through reflexivity and irony, through an interrogation of the mimetic function of art. However, the solutions may be radically different. Malczewski is a symbolist, which, at first thought, seems to align him with modernism. However, we clearly see that he has doubts about the modernist aesthetic solution: the autonomous, absolute work of art that represents itself through itself, and with it—the entire world (or, at least, Poland)—in his interpretation is a locked trap. Images that fly from the canvas out into the world are not just fantasies—Malczewski wanted to inspire and serve the cause of Polish liberation (that is why the original title of the painting includes both the “Last Age of Poland” and “The Prologue”). He points out the limitation of art and sets an intention to overcome it. An avant-garde impulse is present here negatively: the images are merging into a unified swirl, they are on the verge of disintegration. As a result, Malczewski’s painting is a representation of itself alone—it is an image about the process of producing a painting. In its extreme limit, it is therefore free from external content. In Melancholia, we witness a collision between two competing intentions— the tension between its centrifugal and centripetal movements produces a real forcefield. Here a window into the world to which painting is traditionally compared (from Leon Battista Alberti to Marcel Duchamp) is pushed to the side. Normally, a landscape seen through the window in Renaissance paintings (e.g., in Leonardo da Vinci) functions simultaneously as a backdrop for the figure on the foreground and as a symbol for a painting itself being a kind of a window into the world. Malczewski’s landscape, however, presents an unattainable utopia— it could be a dream or some a higher reality. It also decenters the composition, transforming all other elements of the painting into a shadow or a background. Rather than look out of the window into the outside, and, consequently, into an artwork and into the world, we are gazing from within an artwork onto an unreachable external world. The mimetic relation between the painting and its model is twisted inside out. On the foreground, we see a spiraling crowd that “twists” a viewer (as well as a painter shown on it) into the painting. Not finding a release for this tension, the movement begins to swerve in the opposite direction. The mass of people should

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have been able to reach the viewer and the artist, but not having found their way there, they made a turn and swerved to the right, toward the window of utopia and melancholia. This collision has a political dimension that is not reducible to the Polish question. Almost all of the nineteenth-century revolutions were unsuccessful (and not only in Poland): even if they succeeded with a negative breakthrough, they failed to build a new society. At best, they accomplished the institutionalization of negativity in the existing state. In the twentieth century, the situation changed, even though then, too, negativity (terror and melancholia) prevailed over the Ideal. What is revolution striving for—for the creation of a “demonstration democracy”58 inside the state or for a construction of new society premised on the permanent heroic yearning for difference? In the twentieth century, revolutions followed the former trajectory. And it is this trajectory that corresponds to the movement of Malczewski’s revolutionaries trapped in their immanence. But good old transcendence is waiting for them by the window nevertheless.

IV Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia Michael Gibson, a leading scholar of nineteenth-century symbolism, remarks that the decline that befell symbolism in painting and poetry in the 1910s coincided with the rise of cinema. Gibson believes that cinema has absorbed many characteristics of symbolism: its dark atmosphere, its monsters, its fascination with the psycho-pathological, with detective mysteries and Wagner’s music, and so on.59 We should note that this continuity has not only a historical and chronological explanation, but also an objective reason behind it. Symbolism was an attempt at literal realist depiction of the symbolic. And cinema, based as it is in the movement of photographic images, is doomed to realism even when the tasks that it places before itself may be modernist. Unlike the cinema, twentieth-century poetry and painting rejected representational verisimilitude and, in doing so, radicalized the destructive impulse that was initially introduced by symbolism. Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) shares with Malczewski’s painting more than just a title—the film wears its allegiance to symbolism on its sleeve. As in his other films, in Melancholia, von Trier follows the tradition of Henrik Ibsen, the major Scandinavian symbolist of the early twentieth century. The film contains many references to symbolism: Wagner’s music, a fascination with evil, a visual citation of a John Everett Millais painting (who was a Pre-Raphaelite and therefore

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a pre-symbolist), mysterious carnal symbols of the planet Melancholia, horses, wigwams, a plethora of cultish, ritualistic, and openly mystical elements, as well as an inclusion of a spectator by means of the vivid self-referential metaphors for cinema-viewing (an optical “device” that a little boy, one of the film’s characters, invents to watch the movement of the planet that, once it finally arrives, comes to fill the entire screen). In one of his interviews, von Trier says that among his methodological principles used in Breaking the Waves was to treat the genre of melodrama with maximal realism.60 I would venture a suggestion that von Trier is a neosymbolist and that his popularity is something of a déjà vu from the fin de siècle of a century ago. Trier, it should be said, supplements the symbolist tradition with avant-garde or even postmodern elements such as the hyperbolic,61 overdoing nightmares and misfortunes and overtly manipulating the spectator’s emotions. Here, Trier surpasses the limitations of a modernist artwork (that tends to remain autonomous and distant from the rest of life) by reverting to kitsch and mass-art tricks. However, what he is trying to achieve by this is to surpass art’s limitations and to express, from within art and perhaps even despite art, something “real”—a catastrophe that is imagined so vividly, it begins to acquire tangible outlines. The film begins on the wedding day of a character named Justine, who, we are told, works as an ad executive. Justine suddenly grows profoundly depressed at her wedding and her marriage dissolves during the night of the wedding party. Her behavior bears marked symptoms of melancholia (among other things, she suggests an ad campaign for an object that would be branded as “nothing”). Living in a superficial bourgeois society filled with empty rituals and disingenuous emotions, Justine begins to feel as if the world was slipping from beneath her feet. This experience of the “loss of the world” finds its allegorical and literal fulfillment in the second part of the film, during which Justine, together with her sister and the sister’s family, is watching the end of the world. The wandering planet Melancholia crashes into Earth and destroys it right before their eyes. Melancholia here is not just an emotional affliction, it is a mood that is formative of an artistic soul. It is typical of many artworks that rather justifiably mourn the heavy human lot. Von Trier borrows several motifs from Dürer’s famous Melancholia (1514): the proximity of a mysterious star—a comet or an exploding meteorite—watched from a picturesque bank of a river, a young woman’s emotional numbness, multiple optical devices and mathematical calculations.62 Von Trier also draws from Sigmund Freud’s well-known theory of melancholia: whereas for Freud, the lost object casts a shadow on the subject’s ego (Freud 1957: 249), in von Trier’s film the strange planet “casts a shadow”

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over Earth. Considered this way, the film appears interesting, but, potentially, derivate—yet another Nordic saga of European nihilism and Western depression. However, it has yet another, less obvious theme. The protagonist tells her sister that she knows that life does not exist on any other planet besides Earth: “We are alone in the universe.” Justine not only avoids people, she also enjoys her narcissistic solitude (as when she leaves her wedding party to take a bath or when she undresses and masturbates in the light of the deadly planet). Justine is very close with her sister Claire. There are several scenes of the two women caressing each other. Claire is pensively watching Justine when the latter is stroking her breasts illuminated by Melancholia’s light. The fact that each of the film’s two parts is named after one of the sisters emphasizes the importance of their relationship. By the end of the film, there are only the two of them and Claire’s young son to greet the deadly arrival of Melancholia. (They attempted to escape, but “you cannot escape from Earth.” The theme of claustrophobia was, of course, also important for Malczewski, with his trapping of ghosts in the artist’s studio.) A planet—blue and identical to Earth—crashes into it, we see an explosion wave, and the light goes dark. It appears that what the director is after is more than just a problem of the loss of connection between a person and an object. Rather, it tells a story of excessive self-identification between the protagonist and her sister, whose presence sends her into an erotic and mimetic crisis. Unconscious incestuous attachment here is combined with mutual identification accompanied by sibling rivalry (love toward one’s double is a favorite subject of Jacques Lacan and René Girard). Justine’s melancholy is caused not so much by the loss of the world (in fact, she seems glad to lose it), but by the suffocating presence of the Others, as well as by the traumatic combination of her own narcissism and her incestuous desire for her sister (whom she loves narcissistically, as her alter ego). The film demonstrates the complexity of the “ego”—whether it has been abandoned by the world or not. Ego must become entangled with the Other, and every attempt to isolate oneself results in a paranoid catastrophe (the blue planet Melancholia pursues the Earth and destroys it at the end). The main intrigue of the film—the relationship between the two sisters—is doubled by the relationship between the two planets. This corresponds to the objective structure of reflection. Earth encounters its twin sister who casts her shadow over the other. The characters watch the approaching planet through an improvised device—a ring that should but does not contain Melancholia in its frame. This is a clear reference to avant-garde art with its desire to move beyond the frame and enter life. A direct collision with an image may be

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dangerous: “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.” Art can not only frame and distance reality, it can also bring it closer, making what has appeared as innocently “aesthetic” step out of its frame and enter the life itself. This is especially dangerous in the case of mimetic reflections of reality, that is, when a viewer must recognize herself and her world in the film: mirrors as well as telescopes are often used in art as tools of narcissistic melancholia. The speculative, reflexive structure of this film as well as the relationship between the two sisters offers a self-referential metaphor for the very form of cinema. Art is a speculum mundi, it may also become a deadly ghost of numbness (as in Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”63). Being simultaneously a world’s “mere image” and its double, artwork can trade places with its model and return the gaze (for instance, in Plato it is not the artist who must imitate things, but the things that should imitate an idea). In von Trier’s film, everyone (besides the protagonist) is busy consoling themselves that the world would not be destroyed, that the evil planet would “fly by.” We can read in this a parody of those who treat art as innocuous, as a zone of special license.64 But the planet escapes the frame and crashes right into the spectators: as it is rapidly approaching Earth, it gets to fill the entire screen, forcing us to remember the scale and materiality of the screen itself. As is with Greek tragedies, this spectacle deprives its audience of their alibi, it catches them unawares and vulnerable at a point, when they were hoping to remain as distant “egos”—to remain melancholic moviegoers, idly searching for entertainment and impressions. To present the audience with the problem of reality, the film demonstrates its destruction. Art questions and probes the reality of the depicted things and their materiality, but it does not stop at that. Aesthetic act may be compared to a ritual that is performed with insufficient seriousness, as if in gest. The central theme of this film (as well as of von Trier’s several others) is an unsuccessful, interrupted ceremony (in this case—a wedding).65 And yet, art is not quite a ritual, not even a semi-ritual. In fact, Girard rightly maintains that art is born out of a crisis of ritual. Unsuccessful ritual, or, rather, the impossibility of a ritual in contemporary society, emerges as the film’s central theme. It is in the space of a botched ritual of wedding that the symbolic value of things is suspended and that the aesthetic process takes place. However, at the end of the film, the characters perform yet another ritualistic magic gesture: together they build an improvised wigwam that is meant to keep them safe in the midst of catastrophe. And although their plan is bound to fail, we get an impression that unlike the wedding, this ceremony does become a successful symbolic gesture that grants strength and dignity to the perishing characters and film viewers alike. In this

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way, art that in itself does not have reality and therefore goes searching for it suddenly gains this reality in a moment of catastrophe—during an event that mirrors art’s own negativity. The tension within von Trier’s film is created not only by the melancholic mood and the expectation of the end of the world. It also comes from a collision of several rather concrete forces and principles. What stands behind the abstract negativity is its actual opposite—that is, resistance. The negativity of the fin de siècle is not born out of nothing but out of the struggle between several different real forces. The contrast between the two sisters (whereas one is rich, the other is poor) as well as Justine’s paradoxical enjoyment of despair correlate with the film’s formal tension. The film unites two different genres: the epic with the lyrical, a sci-fi blockbuster about the end of the world with domestic melodrama. The latter, private, story symbolizes a claustrophobic enclosure of being that has been placed inside an enchanted chalk circle of melancholia and that is desperate to break this spell. The genre is wrenched open and the lyric is united with the epic. On the one hand, everything is being destroyed without becoming a foundation for a new beginning, nothing contradicts the bourgeois order, no true love emerges in place of an inauthentic one. Perhaps this negativity could be explained by the influence of the distant planet? On the other hand, the cosmic plot also disrupts generic stereotypes. No one will save the Earth this time, it will get “happily” destroyed when it collides with Melancholia. Justine, as an epic hero, is incapable of resolving a domestic melodrama—she is simply not built for that. At the same time, Justine’s heroism is lacking in scale—it is not sufficient to deal with the challenge of that magnitude. Besides, the proximity of a foreign planet only exacerbates the family’s isolation from the external world (they cannot leave their house). This only hints at a synthesis and an expression of this contradiction come through numerous aesthetic quotations. They allow for the domestic isolated space to be inscribed within a universal scale of human history, and for this history to be somewhat domesticated. (The protagonist decides to switch a reproduction of a Kandinsky painting with a Breughel.) The film also offers an allegorical depiction of both conflict and interconnection between actor’s and spectator’s positions, between activity and passivity in art. While art is one of the many things that the planet Melancholia symbolizes, Justine plays the role of a spectator (the scene of her, nude, stargazing is a reference to that). Her depression is partially motivated by the fact that she is forced into the position of a passive viewer. Her immediate fascination with the planet is akin to Hamlet’s fascination with the ghost (the film contains a direct reference

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to Hamlet, when we see Justine floating down the river, looking like Millais’ Ophelia). The contradiction here stems from the fact that in von Trier’s film, the spectator is called up on stage and the cinematic action is somehow supposed to change this passive position into an active one. As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an intruder (a planet as an enemy) is ascribed the role that the protagonist is secretly dreaming of, himself or herself. (According to Freud, Hamlet wanted to kill his father and marry his mother himself and it is the fact that all of those actions were performed by his uncle instead of him that disturbed him so much.) Returning to Malczewski’s painting, we can recall that the passivity of his revolutionaries is projected onto the artist’s studio and with it—onto the constitutive passivity of art itself. The passivity of the fin de siècle’s aesthete is, therefore, overcome not through a decisive heroic action, but through a realization of this passivity as a dramatic action. The negativity of experiencing one’s passivity becomes a conscious one. Within the play of these contradictions— between the public and the private, art and spectators, love and strife between the two sisters—everything else crashes and burns, leaving the spectator with a sublime feeling of a cosmic force. Artwork itself does not get destroyed, it endures and thrives among a high density of contradictions.

V Conclusion The parallels between the two Melancholias are obvious. Both works pose a question about being-inside: about the life inside an artwork, within the limits of one’s epoch or planet. In both works, the immanence of events is emphasized through the use of reflexive tropes: by a painting within a painting in Malczewski and by playing with paintings and optical devices in von Trier. Both works combine a dream of transcendence with a jouissance that can be gained only through intense self-absorption. A psychological malaise is experienced in parallel with a grand external catastrophe. Melancholia is associated not only with a wandering planet or a fear-frozen black witch, but also with trance, into which it hypnotizes its characters and which is painful for an individual who either wants to act but is afraid to (as in the nineteenth century) or is simply too terrified of the world (as in the twenty-first). And yet, in neither Melancholia do we see a complete breakdown of figurativity, eventfulness, and representation. Neither transitions into the socalled avant-garde. Negativity is pooling inside a painting/film, gathering energy in preparation to either deliver a blow or protect oneself from it. Artwork stands

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before the face of history as a subject—and a subject that is more ontologically open than a human subject who hasn’t experienced the events yet. Today, we still belong to the nineteenth century. Neither the optimistic early avant-garde, nor the critical late avant-garde succeeded in overcoming apocalyptic and melancholic tendencies of modernism and modernity (for obvious reasons: after the Second World War, the world grew afraid of change and stepped into a route of prolonged restoration). And formalism with its intellectualized games could not compete for a mass audience against the symbolist imagination. It is difficult to assess this phenomenon as a whole. The irrational melancholia of a progressivist society should be restrained. Mere reflection of negative content in negative form (as is done in modernism) does not yet stay the urge for self-suppression. One could try practicing harsh censorship or stamping out formulaic optimistic art, as was done on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1950s and 1960s. However, one could also work through the horror by visualizing negativity itself—as an event, a force, and an idea. The object of such symbolist art is manifold: it is the very event of negation, as well as an idealized object that no negation would completely destroy, and is the very threshold between an object and its existence.

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I The Problem of the Intellectual Legacy of 1917 In this chapter, I consider Andrei Platonov the most important representative of the intellectual tradition that was engendered by 1917. World historical events usually give rise to a rich reflexive tradition which allows us to identify and assign a rhythmic coherence to the impulse that they engender. They put forward new concepts that give names to marginal or previously traumatic experience. They facilitate (i.e., entrench and grant recognition to) forms of creative praxis. They identify and, thereby, alleviate certain morbid fears. Thus, the French Revolution, which produced the very concept of a secular worldhistorical event, gave rise to the most important ideologies of modernity (i.e., it gave name and positionality to previously isolated ideas). It articulated the idea and value of representative democracy, introduced the world to the concept of terror, and inspired German philosophers to create a dialectical philosophy that is reversible and takes negativity into consideration. Unfortunately, the 1917 Revolution, which changed the world so radically as to leave it unrecognizable, did not engender such a rich intellectual tradition. This means that its legacy—its accomplishments and its open vistas, the problems that it posed, and the dangers that it presents—remains largely unassimilated.1 This, of course, is especially important for Russia and its current state. For this reason, one of the most fundamental tasks for researchers is to uncover the most significant reflexive moves and concepts that emerged as a result of the 1917 Revolution. This intellectual work was underway, of course, but it has been buried under the catastrophic degeneration of the revolution and the subsequent opposition between equally unappealing ideologies: dogmatic,

A shortened version of this chapter had appeared in Russian, in the journal "Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie", no. 106, 2010, 56–88.

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epigonous Marxism and dogmatic, epigonous Liberalism. That being said, we must not read these texts from the past from the haughty perspective of the know-it-all (as is usually the case when scholars try to understand Platonov through the prism of the ideas of his time, for instance, identifying in his fiction the conflict between materialism and idealism), but, rather, learn from them, asking them contemporary questions. Andrei Platonov is one of the central intellectuals of the Russian Revolution. No mere prose writer, he was a brilliant dialectical thinker, who always devoted special attention to revolutionary eventfulness as the horizon of his life and creative work.

II The Revolution of Modernity The revolutionary tradition is usually imagined by conservatives like Burke, ironic liberals, and optimistic radicals like Lukács and Bloch alike as a striving toward imaginary utopia. It is viewed as the intrusion into everyday life of the absolute, which, encountering the resistance of material inertia, leads to terror and, later, to defeat. According to this interpretation, revolutions are carried out by intellectuals, who impose their idealistic schemes on living reality. As Karl Mannheim shows, this conception of revolution brings liberals to a compromise: the necessity of gradual movement toward an ideal, as it was conceived, for example, by Kant or Condorcet. This tradition, however, does not account, first, for the democratic component of modern revolutions and, second, for its interpretation by the Romantics. Moreover, in the conventional intellectual worldview, Romantics themselves are typically conceived of as the most inveterate ideologues and ideocrats. At the same time, Rousseau, who is rightly regarded as a precursor of Romanticism, put forth a program of democratic revolution which is connected with the ontology of and, in many ways, an apology for the solitary, inwardly directed individual. These two features are also characteristic of the German Romantics of the revolutionary epoch, who, on the one hand, made use folklore and the prosification of mythological and religious motifs (in the spirit of “Romantic” irony), and, on the other, engaged in protracted meditations on internal, solitary communication and a hidden, secret absolute, that is, the aesthetics of loneliness and melancholy. These motifs are not only combined but are intimately connected with one another through the principle of paradox. All Romantics emphasize the sensory and affective aspects of perception, and, moreover, like

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the ancients, they regard suffering as the most important of the passions. People suffer, the logic goes, because they feel too strongly. As opposed to our commonplace contemporary conception of Romanticism as something lofty and naïvely removed from reality, the actual Romantics placed value on “the earth,” prose, and the sensory aspects of nature as new poetic principles. It must also be appreciated that they had striven to discover, both in the depths of this same nature and in simple people, the sparks of freedom and love, which the Enlightenment strove to impose morally “from above.” This is why the first Romantic novel, Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a book written in an extremely mystical key, is dedicated to mining. This is why Schelling opposes the Enlightenment philosophy of Fichte’s individual “I” to its mirror opposite (though they resemble one another in terms of method): the philosophy of nature. “We dream of traveling throughout the entire universe,” Novalis writes, “but is not the universe to be found in us ourselves? We do not know the depths of our own spirit. A secret path leads us inside ourselves.”2 That said, the path toward “embodying” freedom was different for different Romantics: for some it meant a movement toward the depths, as opposed to the sky, and for others it mean “heavenly” ideas coming down and being embodied in sensuous matter. On the whole, however, the tendency among the Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century can be summed up by Marx’s words: “the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of earth.”3 Another important feature of Romanticism which unites it with the twentieth-century revolutionary moment was the role of the affects, especially negative ones. Most well-known in this respect is Romantic spleen in the spirit of Byron and Lermontov, but it was characteristic of the second, post-revolutionary stage in the development of Romanticism, when poetic enthusiasm collides with disenchantment and political reaction. However, even as early as Jena Romanticism there was the important motif of Sehnsucht, a nostalgic yearning provoked by the intrusion of the infinitude of the absolute into the prosaic world. Previously we considered Hölderlin, someone close to the Romantics, in relation to his understanding of revolution as the “spirit of unrest.” Hölderlin also understood revolution as downward movement. In his Notes on Oedipus and Notes on Antigone, Hölderlin calls revolution a “categorical inversion.” He emphasizes that the tendencies of modernity, of modern history are opposed to the tendencies of the ancients. Whereas the former, working with the soil and the fate they had inherited, strove for the “heavens” of reflexive concepts, modern society finds itself in the opposition situation. The concepts have already been developed, but we have lost the soil beneath our feet, and this is why history and

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revolution must be oriented toward the acquisition of sensory faculties and a fatherland (the ominous side of Hölderlin’s rhetoric of “soil” is its implied turn toward the prose of life, toward the heart of the sensorial and away from the lofty propaganda characteristic of many French Revolutionaries). Later, in Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel, a friend and follower of Hölderlin’s, put forward the concept of pure negativity in order to explain the paradoxes of the French Revolution. Like Hölderlin, he drew attention to the way that the workings of negativity could deprive words of meaning (“the banality of the syllable,” der Tod, “death”), while, in the end, affirming that negativity itself is entrenched in a new positive structure.4 The most important Romantic theorist of the French Revolution was the French historian Jules Michelet. In France Romanticism saw serious development as a movement a decade later than in Germany, but, nevertheless, the principal intuitions lying at its foundation were one and the same: the chaotic destruction of form, reflexivity in art, and a turn toward the depths of nature and the life of the people. Michelet did not work alone, but, rather, made up one part of a  powerful cultural movement, which began in the 1820s, came into its own in the 1830s (Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, etc.), and gradually made the transition from conservatism to liberalism and ultimately to socialism. Romanticism in France inspired not only writers and artists but also political thinkers like Lamennais, Buchez, Louis Blanc, and Michelet himself. In his two-volume History, Michelet imagined the French Revolution as a popular drama without protagonists and as a history of the strongest collective feelings. Revolution, for Michelet, is “the tardy advent of Eternal Justice,” belated because it arrives as a response to millennial of suffering and vain hopes.5 The medieval monarchy’s attempt to create unity and peace on earth failed because it depended on grace and was, thus, arbitrary. This is why “we must dig lower than Dante [the author of Purgatory, but also On Monarchy—A. M.], and discover and look into the earth for the deep popular foundation whereon the colossus [the monarch, A. M.] was built.”6 Michelet compares revolution to a lonely peak, sticking out from a mountain massif: What were then the subterraneous revolutions of the earth, what incalculable powers combated in its bosom, for that mass, disturbing mountains, piercing through rocks, shattering beds of marble, to burst forth to the surface! What convulsions, what agony forced from the entrails of the globe that prodigious groan! I sat down, and from my eyes tears of anguish, slow and painful, began to flow. Nature had but too well reminded me of history. That chaos of mountain

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heaps oppressed me with the same weight which had crushed the heart of man throughout the middle ages; and in that desolate peak, which from her inmost bowels the earth had hurled towards heaven, I saw pictured the despair and the cry of the human race. That Justice should have borne for a thousand years that mountain of dogma upon her heart, and, crushed beneath its weight, have counted the hours, the days, the years, so many long years—is, for him who knows it, a source of eternal tears. He who through the medium of history has participated in that long torture, will never entirely recover from it; whatever may happen he will be sad; the sun, the joy of the world, will never afford him comfort; he has lived too long in sorrow and in darkness.7

Michelet sees it as necessary to address this sorrow, to redeem it, but he also recognizes its negative consequences in the present. This is how he portrays the figure of the woman, who is, for him, by nature a counterrevolutionary, because she empathizes with the enemy and transfers its pain onto the very subject of the revolution: (“in every family, in every house, the counter-revolution had its ardent … preacher … who cried, suffered, and did not say a single word which was not, or did not seem to be, the shard of a broken heart.”).8 In a similar way, in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt tried to explain the Jacobin terror and the failure of the French Revolution as a whole from a liberal perspective in terms of an outburst of passions, especially, empathy.9 Arendt is, by and large, right when she points to the catastrophic consequences of the accumulation of negative melancholy. And, although it is apparent that these passions were in fact the vehicles of revolution, they were also the modus of communication and suffering from its impossibility and carried the Messianic feeling of the unbearable suffering of waiting for redemption. The masses speak and cry in part because they suffer from the impossibility of speaking of anything except their own naked existence.10 In his book, Names of History, Rancière shows that all revolutions, beginning with the Great French Revolution, confront the following dilemma: revolution tries to provide the illiterate masses who were excluded from the Enlightenment with a voice.11 But they cannot say anything intelligible! And then the revolutionaries speak for them. Passion, or, more precisely, compassion and pity, become the mode of “translation,” while the pain and suffering of the poor become the principal pathos (Hannah Arendt wrote compellingly about this in the twentieth century, albeit, with liberal condemnation). “The wretched are the powerful of the earth,” as Saint-Just put it.12 And this mood gives rise to an atmosphere of widespread suspicion and terror.

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Rancière shows how Michelet, in a different work, develops the unique figure of prosopopoeia in relation to the masses: “what were the mothers’ griefs? They alone could say. The stones wept over it.”13 First of all, the speech of the mute mothers is “hidden” in an unreal mode. Second, their speech is conveyed to dead things. Rancière goes on to write that, in recent historiography, Michelet’s “revolutionary” technique has been abandoned, and that, in the contemporary period, historians move back and forth between the objective history of the masses in the spirit of annals (according to this logic, if the masses are silent, then we might as well describe them as inanimate objects) and the traditional history of eventfulness, which inevitably presents the history of the “victors,” those who are left to speak. What is lost is the revolutionary moment in which the new subject is born and its primal mumbling is transformed into a voice. Lost are those alien names, which cannot be removed, which are our own but which the past imposes on us in relation to ourselves. Without this feature there would be no way for the positivists to objectively “describe,” count, and register the subject of history. In relation to the Russian Revolution and its epoch (a world-historical event, after all), we see how history repeats itself and, in in the process, is deepened and enters upon its next turn. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the heirs to the early Romantics were the Symbolists, and, although they would influence the language of post-revolutionary culture, their ideas were too spiritualist and theological for the moment. On the other hand, the revolution made translations of Marx and Engels into key texts in Russian culture. The two were so radical in their Romanticism that they directly adopted the language and ideology of German predecessors like Hegel, Heine, and Bettina von Arnim. The liberal stereotype of the intrusion of spiritualist idealism into life is not true of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or of the French Revolution of 1789. Recalling that “materialism” was a core foundation of Marxism, the more penetrating ideologues of the revolution insisted on the internalizing orientation of the event. Thus, Aleksei Gastev, a central figure in Proletkul’t, a major influence on the young Platonov, a singer of the machines of the underworld, and someone in many ways close to the Italian futurist and similar tendencies, writes (in a spirit very different from theirs): We are not going to race to those heights called the heavens. The heavens are the creation of idle, reclining, lazy, and meek people. We will plunge below! Together with flame and metal, and gas, and steam, we will dig mine shafts, drill the most enormous tunnels in the world, with explosions of gas we will

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empty the old, untouched layers in the depths of the earth. Oh, we will go down, we will dig ourselves into the depths, cut through them with a thousand steal lines, light up and expose the underground chasms with cascades of light, and fill them with the roar of metal. For many years we will leave the heavens, the sun, the shining of the stars, and merge ourselves with the soil: it is in us, and we are in it. We will enter the earth by the thousands, we will go in there by the millions, we will go in there as an ocean of people … We will perish, bury ourselves in the insatiable race and in the thralls of labor. Born of the earth, we will return to it, as it was said by the ancients, but the earth will be transformed: locked from all sides—with no ways in or out!—it will be full of the relentless storm of labor; enchained from all sides by steel, the earth will be the boiler of the universe, and when, in the delirium of a burst of labor, the earth cannot withstand it and breaks apart its steal armor, it will give birth to new beings, the name of which will no longer be human. The newborns will not notice the little, low-hanging heavens, lost in the explosion of their birth, and they will immediately move the earth into a new orbit, mix up the map of suns and planets, and create new floors above the worlds.14

To be fair, it should be noted that even more traditional motifs of the sublimation of machine’s appear in Gastev’s work, and in the cited passage the narrator cannot resist the temptation to send humanity off to “new floors.” However, in another text, “Iron Pulses,” an engineer who wishes to break a workers’ strike organizes a seductive concert which creates such a powerful impression on its listeners that “people race from the earth, it is cramped, it has been entirely taken by the hammer and the machine.”15 In what are, by all appearances, programmatic, ideological artistic works, it would seem that Gastev is working through the struggle of these opposing principles. Platonov, whose personification of the machine is far more complex and multi-faceted than Gastev’s, nevertheless shares with him a preoccupation with ensuring that the bright future and the corresponding negative desire to, as soon as possible, flee the present, pressing situation never lose their connection with their own past, that is, with their origins. In fact, as we will see, in Platonov’s work, the problematic of the material underworld of the Russian Revolution becomes an entire theory of subjectivity: the person who achieves happiness must be the same person/collective who, in poverty, dreamt about it. Another one of the most important features of the Russian Revolution of 1917 which it shares with the French Revolution and its interpretation (especially by Michelet) is the problem of the awakening and autonomy of the illiterate people.

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In this case, the contradiction is deepened because the Russian Revolution, to a far greater extent than the French Revolution, was oriented toward the poor, illiterate classes and relied on material, prosaic slogans as opposed to juridical and political ones (e.g., Lenin’s “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country”). On the other hand, it was a revolution directed by a new kind of party, and Lenin, as early as his 1902 What Is to Be Done, explains the role of the vanguard and, in particular, the intelligentsia in helping the workers to achieve self-consciousness as a class. It is apparent that, after the revolution, the sublimation of the slogans and names related to the revolution, occurs quickly, even if they originally were prosaic in character (industrialization, the general line, etc.). It is precisely in relation to socialist revolution and, more generally, the socialist movement as a whole that Antonio Gramsci put forward his concept of the “organic intellectual.”16 Between the proletariat or the peasantry and the traditional intellectuals (i.e., ideologues who occupied the highest position in the division of material and intellectual labor) there was a great abyss, but, according to Gramsci, it could be overcome through the mediation and support of the intermediary class of “organic intellectuals”— engineers, rural doctors, etc.—who are closely tied to their class, but who, at the same time, are capable of universalizing its position. It is clear (although Gramsci does not write about it) that it is precisely revolution which is the event which stimulates and shapes these “organic intellectuals,” but risks immediately professionalizing them. In the book cited above, Rancière devotes special attention to Isaac Babel’s prose, focusing on how the latter tries to reproduce the “naïve” speech of proletarians and demonstrating how he ultimately fails to do so. Moreover, the dynamic translates into a vicious circle because both Babel’s Cossacks and, it would appear, their real prototypes speak in formulas borrowed from the Bolshevik press, where intellectuals like Babel publish their writings.17 In essence, Andrei Platonov sets himself the same task as Babel (hence, his ingenious, but not unprecedented language, mixing illiterate speech, a naïve, defamiliarizing gaze, and terms from Soviet ideology and philosophy), but he carries it out in a different way. Platonov’s heroes are naïve subjects, speaking in a mixture of colloquialisms and bureaucratic jargon but expressing in this idiom interesting, original, and often poetic or philosophical thoughts. Unlike Babel, Platonov does not occupy an ironic position with respect to this speech but, rather, himself uses it to speak, and, in doing so, he in no ways supposes that the correct literary language or “true” meaning of the terms of bureaucratized Marxism contains more truth than his characters’ speech.

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Unlike Babel, Platonov is a major, philosophically erudite thinker. At the same time, he really did come from a working-class family (Babel came from a family of merchants), so in Platonov we really have an entirely “organic” proletarian intellectual working as both an engineer and a writer. From the very beginning, Platonov explores the symbolic and literary significance of the activities of the engineer and sees literature through the prism of Proletkul’t traditions and from the perspective of engineering. However, “mediating” between material and symbolic activities does not come easy to him. Toward the end of the 1920s, as public moods changed, motifs of melancholy and toska (the Russian word, toska, preferred by Platonov, is famously hard to translate) grow more prominent in Platonov’s fiction.18 What this means is not recognition of the failure of the development of the organic intellectual but, rather, the discovery of toska as a subjectivizing and intellectualizing “operator.”

III Revolutionary Toska and Negativity In my book, Negative Revolution, I drew attention to the strange pathos of melancholy, hypochondria, and catastrophism which was characteristic of Russian citizens at the beginning of the 1990s and which became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.19 I juxtaposed this situation with the affective background of the French Revolution, which was in many ways analogous and which was one of the factors which precipitated the Terror of 1792–4. Moreover, I proposed that such affect was provoked, first of all, by the uncertainty of and drawn-out nature of the “transitional period,” when all past institution had lost their potency but still remained relevant, and second, by the disappearance of the external object of criticism (the Soviet state). This affect plays a role in a unique negative subjectivization: in the face of sudden changes, the subject, first and foremost, returns to its past, which has lost meaning, in order to bring it into the future, at least in the form of suffering. I proposed that such a subjectivity represented a certain nucleus of passive resistance to possible authoritarianism. So far, experience has shown that I was mistaken in my calculation that apathy and escapism could be easily “transferred” into a political language and in my failure to draw the distinction between deep, radical mourning and private mourning, which is limited to a solitary existence by the boundaries of family and nation and does not translate into a division between the elements of society itself. As I have shown in Negative Revolution, the paradoxes of negativity can be understood and interpreted philosophically if one takes into consideration the

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logic of negation as a logical operation. It turns out that there is an asymmetry between negation and affirmation: negation is secondary in relation to affirmation; that is, it is applied in relation to some sort of affirmation. This allows us to deduce certain aspects of negation and, in particular, that which the subject interprets as negativity in the world (after all, without the subject there can be no negation): —The latency of negation: we tend to notice the affirmation and not the negation which is connected to it. For example, we attribute love to ourselves and hatred to external causes. Struggling against an unjust situation, we explain this conflict in terms of the particulars of the situation and not our own aggression, etc. —The phantasmatic nature of negative phenomena: because the ultimate negativity (for example, the evil of the devil) cannot itself exist, we finish constructing it in our imagination. —The insufferability of negation: paradoxical, not entirely existent, potentially infinite negation repels us, and we force our experience of hostility, hatred, and toska out of our everyday consciousness and our self-image.

Revolution, as an event which includes within itself not only physical destruction but a symbolic rift between the old and the new, is in equal measures negative and constructively affirmative. The old order, which has lost its potency but not been completely destroyed, gives rise to the strange phenomena of morbid, uncanny life, which can provoke either a state of melancholy or the joyous play of imagination and consumption. In imaginary and ideational terms, the revolutionary event is always also a “Copernican Revolution”; that is, it provides a new point of view on reality and allows one to see it from the obverse side.20 This is why both the French Revolution and especially the October Revolution were marked by a desire to liberate not only the living, but also the dead, to give another chance to those who have lost, etc. Perhaps more than anyone else, Platonov exploits the Copernican character of the 1917 Revolution. It represents both Nikolai Fedorov’s idea of the resurrection of all of the dead, which he both affirms and negates (in agreement with the idea of reversibility), and the propensity of his poetics toward inversion, which Brodsky aptly notes (what is meant is not just linguistic inversion in the narrow sense, but a general orientation toward dismantling linguistic norms).21 In 1937, the critic Aleksandr Gurvich wrote about Platonov with hatred: The words which are most often encountered in Platonov’s works are words of negation, negative words, words which speak not of that which exists, but of that which is missing, not of that which has been found, but of that which has

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been lost. Unknown, homeless, defenseless, parentless, rootless, nameless, unaccountable, inactive, helpless … These are the words which are thickly sewn over the pages of all of Platonov’s books, because these words represent the pinnacles of his feelings and thoughts. Can an artistic work made up of these endless “-lesses” and “un-s” be life-affirming and cast light on ‘true optimism’?”22

In truth, Platonov himself recognizes that his works, like The Foundation Pit, constitute a certain form of anti-matter and are nourished by the negative energy of destruction, the energy of deferred dying, fatigue, and death: “Everything that I write is nourished by some sort of decomposing substance of my soul.”23 In Platonov’s works, we see the literal emergence of “negative magnitudes.” For example: As he contemplated the lake over the years, the fisherman always thought about one and the same thing: about the interest of death … In a year the fisherman could no longer resist and threw himself into the lake, having tied his legs together with a rope so as not to accidentally swim. In secret, he did not believe in death at all, most importantly, he wanted to have a look at what there is there: maybe it is much more interesting than living in a village or at the edge of a lake; he saw death as another province, which is situated under the sky, as if at the bottom of the cool water, and it drew him. Some of the peasants whom the fisherman told about his intention to live a little while in death and return tried to talk him out of it, but others agreed with him: “Well, there’s no harm in trying, Mitry Ivanych. Try it, and tell us afterward.” Dmitryi Ivanovich tried it: they pulled him out of the lake three days later and buried him near the wall of the village cemetery.24

Here we may clearly discern the logic of revolution: a person feels free from the age-old order of asymmetry and hierarchy and performs a rebellious negative gesture in pursuit of the utopian “world the other way around.” However, the reversibility of negation and affirmation is only partial: negation is in reality non-existence, and it is irreversible. Life in death (a figure present as early as Sophocles’ Antigone) here is also an artistic figure, specifically, a literary one, in its mysterious state of suspension and mirror-like flatness.25 For this reason, as we will see, Platonov does not mean for the image of the fisherman to symbolize the futility of utopias or their identity with the afterlife. What he means is that literature, turning the mirror world upside down, throws the reader out of it. Unlike the fisherman, the reader should find in the endless abyss of death the “foundation pit” for the construction of a free and prosperous society.

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Thus, without a doubt, during the revolutionary epoch of the 1920s and 1930s, Platonov studied phenomena akin to the “negative revolutions” of France in the 1790s and Russian in the 1990s. “Toska,” “death,” “loneliness,” these are the words used most often in his texts from the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. At approximately the same time (the same decade), Freud writes his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he “discovers” in place of the “pleasure principle” which he had previously hypothesized a seemingly paradoxical “death drive” or attraction to displeasure.26 Walter Benjamin writes his doctoral dissertation, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, in which he uncovers the melancholic tone, both of sovereign power in modernity and of the new tragedy.27 Heidegger, in Being and Time, deduces the capacity for decisive action (a revolution of sorts) from fundamental anxiety.28 In short, it was a time when in Europe, after the First World War and a series of revolutions, there is a rediscovery of the gloomy tradition of revolutionary Romanticism. Meanwhile, in the USSR, enthusiasm and happiness are established as official emotions. Platonov, however, works in direct opposition to these emotions, which, in art and, more generally, in life, are accompanied by bursts of “toska.” In her article, “Happiness and Toska,” Sheila Fitzpatrick demonstrates the widespread presence of this affect in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s.29 Among her literary sources, Platonov is the principal one, she also addresses the work of Yury Olesha. Moreover, there are diaries which demonstrate that the affect of toska, which did not suit the tone of official ideology, played a crucial role in the emotional dynamic of the time. Fitzpatrick perceptively notes the paradoxical connection between happiness and toska. But, in her opinion, toska was a natural reaction forced on ordinary people from above. This explanation would have been fitting for the disenchanted intellectual of the 1970s, but, as far as the 1930s go, it sounds inadequate. It seems that what Fitzpatrick is getting at but not mentioning outright is another important phenomenon: sudden happiness, especially when it is connected to a feeling of transcendence, often gives rise to a desire to verify its authenticity, and this verification translates into an obsessive search for the bad in one’s past and current surroundings. In other words, the subject cannot be sure that it is really she, with all of her past misfortunes, who has arrived at happiness, that all of these misfortunates have now been redeemed. To put it simply, the subject becomes scared of her own happiness and searches for counter-arguments against it.30 This paradoxical dynamic represents the principal process of subjectivization.31 Fitzpatrick’s own material, for example, the following diary account from the writer, Vladimir Stavsky, supports this interpretation:

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Yesterday was “Aviation Day.” I can’t find the words to express my emotions; a poignant, gentle ache somewhere in the depths of my soul speaks to me, repeating over and over, why am I getting old? Why didn’t I try earlier to get in shape and improve my health? And how many precious hours did I waste, just drinking them away? Suddenly a memory flashes across my mind … The infinite depths of the March sky, with the stars sparkling overhead … That moment, there under the sky, on a crystal-clear spring night—a moment of bitter, excruciating reproach.32

And so, what does this toska of Platonov’s characters mean? Does it mean Platonov’s rejection of the Soviet order? That’s what Stalin’s doctrinaires thought, and Soviet liberals later supported them in this reading, but we can hardly take this interpretation seriously today, especially if we take the context of Platonov’s works and his own explanations into account. Platonov saw his works as “socialist tragedies,” which at once portray and overcome the “dialectic of nature,” that is, the opposition of nature and technology.33 In the same way, he voiced his “anxiety” for the Soviet future, which prompted him to “kill” the girl by the name of “our dear girl, the USSR” in The Foundation Pit.34 This is what Platonov writes about this episode in the epilogue to The Foundation Pit (which is often left out of contemporary editions). Will our dear girl, the USSR perish like Nastia or grow into a whole person, into a new historical society. It was this anxious feeling that made up the theme of the work, when the author was writing it. The author may have been mistaken in depicting the death of our socialist generation in the death of the little girl, but this mistake came only from an excess of anxiety for something beloved, the loss of which is equal in strength to the destruction not only of all of the past, but of the future, too.35

Toska (the word is used ninety-three times in Chevengur and thirty-three times in The Foundation Pit) is explained here to imply an anxiety (the Russian trevoga, another key word from this epoch, is analogous to the German Angst, which became an important ontological concept for Freud and Heidegger)! In other words, Platonov is indicating that toska does not reflect the objective state of affairs but, rather, represents a creative, active force, and so it is not accidental that it becomes an aesthetic organ of sorts for him. As he writes in Chevengur, “what acts in books is not the skillfulness of the composer but the searching toska of the reader.”36 In the 1930s, which liberal critics usually interpret as a period of compromises, Platonov introduces into his works critical reflection on the anxious toska that he

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previously attributed to himself as author. Thus, in the novella Dzhan, he notes the counterproductivity of melancholy, its paradoxical and inhibiting effects: What was strange to him [Chagataev—A. M.] was not her grief but the fact that she believed in her own doomed isolation, although he married her and shared her fate. She protected her grief and was in no hurry to squander it. This means that, in the depths of reason and amidst the very human heart there is a force hostile to it, which can make living, shining eyes go dark amidst the summer of life … Chagataev had grown tired of grief since childhood, and now that he had become educated, it seemed to him to be a vulgarity, and he decided to install a happy world of bliss in his motherland, and it was uncertain what else there was to do in life. “It’s nothing,” Chagataev said and he caressed Vera’s big belly, where the baby, that resident of future happiness, lay. “Give birth to him soon, he’ll be glad.” “But maybe not,” Vera doubted, “Maybe he will be an eternal martyr.”37

In fact, Vera dies in childbirth and Chagataev is left to live the “naked life” of survival together with his lost, nomadic people, as if what is depicted is at once his tribulations and, at the same time, doubtless tragic heroism. In “On the ‘Liquidation’ of Humanity,” Platonov’s 1938 work of criticism dedicated to Karel Čapek’s novel, War with the Salamanders, Platonov criticizes the Czech writer for his pessimistic view of history.38 He addresses a more general reproach to Western modernism as a whole, which Platonov defines (with reference to Joyce, Proust, and Céline) as a poetics of destruction and death. One suspects that he includes at least some of his own work in this category, especially considering his reference to “one little-known Western-European writer,” who supposedly composes a story which is thoroughly Platonovian in spirit about a teenage boy who makes a lantern out of the corpse of a beloved girl, a story which both denounces nihilism and takes it to its limits. In fact, this criticism, in many ways consonant with that of Nietzsche and Benjamin, is addressed to nihilism in general and more specifically to the nihilist interpretation of history and the event. Naturally, Platonov’s proposed alternative to this “liquidationism” and apocalypticism in relation to humanity is revolutionary action and Soviet society. It would be unfounded to judge Platonov on moral grounds for this apparent reappraisal of his previous modernist position. One gets the impression that some intelligent readers (like Mikhail Geller and Thomas Seifrid) are prepared to regard toska and melancholy as something “good,” either out of hatred for the revolution or out of decadent aestheticism. Meanwhile, this affect is, by

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definition, morbid, negative, and, for this reason, ambiguously interrogatory and non-affirmative.39 In general, this affect cannot be affirmed, although sometimes one probably needs to work it through. Moreover, it is possible that the hyperbolic treatment of grief so many of Platonov’s works, like The Foundation Pit and “Fro,” serves to push the reader out of the work and out of this affect. Toska and, more generally, negativity as an aesthetic force are designed to act like a mirror which both reflects and pushes the gaze away. In this sense, the negativity of Platonov’s works, just like their acute metaphorical nature and infinite unfinalizability, is the sign not of a modernist work of art (as Flatley proposes), but an avant-garde one, with the distinction (as developed above in Chapter 1) that modernist refers to an absolute work of art and avant-garde to art against art, art which extends beyond its own framework into “non-artistic” life. In this sense, any negative poetics is avant-garde in the spirit of Brecht, who called on the actor and viewer to distance themselves from what is depicted and resist identification. It is no coincidence that Brecht notes negativity’s special role in drama, where it makes latent alternatives of action manifest: “When [the actor] goes on stage, he will, through all of the essential parts of what he is doing, also make something else that he is not doing traceable, identifiable, and foreseeable.”40 But it is entirely apparent that negation, destruction, and suffering in Platonov and Brecht’s works can play a modernist role entirely contrary to the opposite, avant-garde one, not pushing the reader out of the work but luring her into it (like the fisherman into the lake). It is for this reason that negation is latent and undefined. It possesses the capacity to fascinate and impose itself on the reader. Its unfinalizability requires “searching toska” of the reader. Such is the ambivalence of the tragic. All the same, as we have seen, toska for Platonov is subject to question on thematic grounds, too. It would seem that the late Platonov does not impoverish but, rather, enriches his work by introducing authorial affect and reflection on his own aesthetic principle into the fabric of his prose. Moreover, this supposed biographical rupture is doubly dubious, because the very same anxieties are expressed, in weaker form, in the earliest period of the great writer’s life (a period which is also disregarded by the liberals). In his piece, “The All-Russian Clunker,” he writes: “It is not the revolutionary but the total fool, the ‘block head,’ who reckons with reality. It is the same thing as striking a punch and feeling the pain from one’s own blows. Such a fighter will not last long, he’ll fall from the imagined pain from his own blows.”41 The mature Platonov’s poetics cannot be described more fittingly—it is precisely the pain from one’s own blows, precisely an “imagined” and aesthetically emphasized pain that is the payment

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for the subjectivization of the proletarian. It is foolish, yes, but apparently it is necessary. In his previously mentioned article, Gurvich writes: Platonov experiences an insurmountable need to speak about and on behalf of those who are weak and mute. Helplessness possesses an enormous strength of attraction for him. He is inalterably attracted to destitute, abandoned people. Wherever lonely, forgotten people might wander, Platonov follows them like a relentless shadow, as if he were afraid that someone’s mute grief might die without anyone knowing, without giving birth to a reciprocal mourning.42

And later on: Entirely arbitrarily and unjustly Platonov gives the name of communist to people in whom compassion, passivity, and meekness happen to be stronger than all other feelings, people who are able to dissolve in mourning and despair without the slightest remainder.43

The contemporary intellectual reader would likely interpret these lines as a compliment, whereas for Gurvich they implied criticism of pity in the spirit of Nietzsche: this affect is contagious and can infect the individual with weakness. This is why Gurvich insists that literature must put forward a “hero”: “the authentic hero inspires in us a desire to live his life, to walk next to him, hand in hand … If he is truly a hero of our time—you feel joyous and strong with him.”44 Gurvich does not cite Nietzsche (though he likely has him in mind), but he does cite the Nietzschean Gorky: “Suffering is the shame of the world, and it is necessary to hate it in order to exterminate it.”45 According to Gurvich, Platonov is surprisingly laconic and dry when he is describing happiness and victory, and he is eloquent only when describing torment and grief. Moreover, he “revels” and “takes pleasure” in grief. The world of his workers is abstract—he puts his heroes in direct contact with the universe, because the world is only “an enormous resonator for the feeling of loneliness.”46 According to Gurvich, Platonov’s later literary criticism, especially his article, “Pushkin is Our Comrade,” points in the right direction, showing that the truth is to be found both in Pushkin’s Peter and in his Evgeny. But these ideas are not embodied in reality, since, in the short stories that Platonov had most recently published, “Immortality” and “Fro,” the last word goes again to suffering. Platonov reacts strongly to Gurvich’s article, but he does not touch upon its essence: Platonov’s principal argument is that Gurvich is referring to Platonov’s previous, erroneous works, thus, failing to distinguish them from the more recent ones, such as “Immortality” and “Fro.” Moreover, Gurvich could not, of course, appraise even newer, more mature works, which, written at the same time as

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Platonov’s 1937 articles in Literary Critic, had not yet been published (Platonov might have had in mind his now lost Journey from Leningrad to Moscow, which he was working on during this period). Platonov might have noted that, in all of his works, there is, at the very least, an ambivalent appraisal of suffering, but for political reasons this would have been inappropriate, and he simply accepts all of the accusations and indicated that he had “reforged himself.” In reality, of course, Gurvich is not quite right. Even in the early Platonov, for example, his short stories, “The Thirst of the Impoverished” and “Heirs of the Sun,” we can find that twin kernel of powerful humanity and the lonely hold-over of the past that is, once again, affirmed in the article, “Pushkin Is Our Comrade.” Moreover, it would almost certainly be incorrect to regard Platonov’s prose simply as depressive. Platonov is not Liudmila Petrushevskaia.47 In all of his works, even the most hopeless ones, there is a strong presence of the utopian impulse, a certain breath of transcendence, which gives everything that is finished a destitute character. Platonov is not “in search of happiness,” as Geller thought. His characters possess happiness from the very beginning and only come to grief as a sort of excessive and uncontrollable, elemental happiness, and, in this respect, Platonov’s is a classic tragic logic. But, all the same, toska is the instrument and sensorium of his prose. Tragic art involves an innate risk. It plays with poison—too big of a dose infects the viewer with suffering, whereas the right one “rarefies” this suffering, giving it a forceful, active (literally, “dramatic”) character. In Platonov’s work, anxious toska really is a sensorium that sharpens the viewer’s feeling of the world, allowing the work to “catch hold” of the viewer. But at the same time, this toska is suspended and demonstrated to be not a feature of external reality, but a force. Platonov does reflect reality to a greater degree than “varnished” Socialist Realism in the spirit of Gurvich; however, it is not reflection but the symbolic documentation (or legitimization) of negative experience and its critical use that are the ultimate end. What is most important, as we will see, is for this anxious toska to serve as a mechanism of revolutionary subjectivity. Without sensitivity to suffering, including to one’s own, the “happiness” of the new epoch, which is often close to mystical ecstasy, is impersonal, belonging to no one in particular, and, moreover, marked, in its affective intensity, by Apollonian illusion. The “hero” of such an exultant culture loses touch with reality, giving rise to a society in which, as theorists of totalitarianism like Evgeny Dobrenko rightly demonstrate, the symbolic system replaces and completely subjugates experience.48 This happens because the forgotten revolutionary event, the event of political subjectivization, which Platonov tries to preserve in the form of the literary machine, is

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forgotten. That is, the backward movement that Platonov achieves with his toska is the playback of the event as it unfolds in two directions. In the same act, a dynamization and mobilization of the situation are enacted, awakening the reader’s fantasy and granting Platonov’s prose its beauty: its whimsical inspiration, its inventive  approach to naming, and the free play of opposing forces. The mechanism with which toska facilitates this artistic virtuosity is related to its sensitivity to negativity. Toska is perceptive to every missed opportunity, everything which did not happen in a given situation but could have. Thus, it sees in “objectivity” an enormous swarm of unrealized specters. In this sense, toska is closely related to jealousy. In the same way that jealousy makes us imagine vivid images of pleasure in which we are not present, our imagination is inflamed by missed opportunities.49 From a historical point of view, it would seem that Platonov observes the same phenomenon that we did with respect to the French Revolution of the 1790s and the “negative revolution” of the 1990s: the disenchantment and defeatism of the urban class made possible the usurpation of power by Stalin’s bureaucracy. As in the period of the French Revolution, the Stalinist Terror was, among other things, a barbaric attempt at renewed mobilization. It was not only and not so much that toska was a reaction to official optimism as it was that mobilizational enthusiasm was directed at the danger of demobilization, apathy, and weariness from revolution. It is no accident that Benjamin, an outside observer in Moscow in 1927, notes: The generation that was active in the civil wars is growing old in vitality, if not in years. It is as if stabilization had admitted to their lives the calm, sometimes even the apathy, that is usually brought only by old age. When the party one day called a halt to wartime Communism with the NEP, there was a terrible backlash, which felled many of the movement’s fighters … For Bolsheviks, mourning for Lenin means also mourning for heroic Communism.50

As we will see later, fatigue occupies an important part in Platonov’s work and is not merely a physiological condition, but a sign of negative activity, of the draining feeling of the ending and the active realization of the finalization of the event.

IV What Is Toska Searching For? And so, there is something paradoxical in Platonov’s creative oeuvre. The author came from the family of a low-level railroad worker, embraced and supported

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the revolution from the very beginning, and was affiliated with the Proletkul’t movement. He wrote political prose from the very beginning to the end of his career: sometimes he wrote utopias, and sometimes he wrote epic allegories based on contemporary political processes. In the twenties he wrote about the revolution, at the beginning of the thirties he wrote about collectivization and the assimilation of national borderlands, and at the end of the thirties he wrote about fascism. In his early articles, which were full of the enthusiasm and utopianism of the time, he nevertheless touches on a theme developed in his more mature period: the suffering of the unhappy, rootless, proletarian loner. It is suffering of this sort which is the real source of humanity’s utopian activity, the condition for the possibility of utopia. “Despair, torment and death, these are the true origins of heroic human activity and the powerful motors of history,” Platonov writes in 1921 in The Voronezh Commune.51 The thirst of the proletariat, it would seem, must be quenched with a new communist society, but in the utopian fantasy, “The Thirst of the Destitute Person. Visions of History,” this thirst outlives the “Big One” of technical humanity: “I am so insignificant and empty that the universe and even full consciousness of all truth are not enough for me to be full the brim and to be finished.”52 At the same time, from Platonov’s perspective, this prioritization of proletarian kenosis over utopia does not to any degree negate utopia itself. It is just that, according to the laws of the technical mechanism which he considered to be universal, emptiness and thirst are the inner workings of utopia, inner workings that are opposed to action and which are in danger of being destroyed accidentally by this action. Platonov will never abandon this intuition. In response to the political censorship of his works, the writer did not grow embittered but, rather, tried (not very successfully) to adapt to the normative ideological (but not linguistic) canon. Platonov did not adopt a detached, ironic position in relation to the revolution and did not resort to cynical groveling, as many in his position did. Every indication suggests that, from the beginning to the end, he identified with the revolution as a historical event as an affirmation of the repressed subjectivity of the proletariat. At the same time, we have good reason to suppose that he was critical of the bureaucratization of Soviet society in the 1930s and of Stalin in particular. His invectives against fascists can certainly be read as being addressed also toward internal Soviet fascism (and how else are we to regard the Gulag?). But this does not in any way allow us to conclude that he was disenchanted with the revolution or with the Soviet project. For this reason, when interpreting Platonov’s work it is necessary, first, to follow his own numerous meta-literary comments. Second, we must study him not only in the context of his own revolutionary time, not only of his epoch,

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but also of world history in general as it appears to us in the present moment. This, after all, is the moment of the next successive suspension of history after it seemed to have “ended” but nevertheless continued to give rise to desires and projects as echoes of the mobilizational events of our past: the revolution of 1917, the war of 1941–5, and the anti-Soviet revolution of 1989–93. The paradoxical “negativity” of Platonov’s works—the toska of his characters, his pessimistic finales, his grim and grotesque imagery—what could this be if not a middle finger hidden in the pocket of a secret dissident? We have already said a bit about Platonov’s own interpretation of negativity as anxiety (the epilogue to The Foundation Pit) and desire (his early articles), but this interpretation is ambiguous and too laconic. It is not clear why anxiety cannot be counterbalanced by activity (the activity of the party, for instance) geared toward protecting and saving the weak proletariat, why desire is sometimes satisfied, and why these negative affects outweigh the positive ones. Let us consider several possible interpretations of this phenomenon. 1) The first obvious hypothesis is objective in character. According to this interpretation, Platonov, who loved and believed in the revolution, nevertheless embodied the reality of the event, with all of its destructive injustice, in his works. Any event, especially a revolutionary one, contains negativity, because it disrupts the course of history and destroys social connections. During revolutions people die in large quantities in the prime of their lives right in front of the living, something which cannot help but leave an imprint on even the most resilient historical enthusiasm of the living. Nevertheless, in Platonov the depiction of every conceivable misfortune is always overdetermined by the temporality—both of history and of the narrative itself—in which they are depicted. Negativity is time: “ … time is the movement of grief,” Zakhar Pavlovich says in Chevengur.53 But this time can be understood and experienced in different ways. It seems that in Platonov’s texts there are three models of temporality, respectively directed toward the past, the future, and the present as the “last time,” which simultaneously carry out their destructive work. 2) Most obvious in the temporal structure of Platonovian eventfulness is an eschatological structure. Even though the meaning of revolution, according to Platonov himself, consists in the opening of a new future, his characters clearly understand it in eschatological, millenarian terms, not necessarily out of any special religiosity but, rather, simply by virtue of the catastrophic logic of the event (and the narrative). But one can react to this logic in different ways: one can despair, one can joyfully strive for death as a culmination, or one can resist, disrupt the eschatological motion using its own energy. Thus, in Dzhan,

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Chagataev, who is nearly dead, pretends to be actually dead, using this seeming death as an original means of procuring food (he lures vultures to his “corpse” and kills them). “Life consists in the fact that it disappears,” Platonov remarks in his Notebooks.54 That is, its movement itself has death as its origin. But in his early article, “The Symphony of Consciousness,” Platonov points directly to the duality of this ending: “А new civilization that will crown and complete humanity is growing from within dying Russia with its corpse-like stench.”55 Eschatology, beginning with the prose of labor, is a leitmotif of Chevengur which is announced already in the figure of the “skilled worker” Zakhar Pavlovich. Zakhar Pavlovich exhausted himself too much and truly had a presentiment of his own quiet death. This happens in old age with many skilled workers: the hard substances that they work with for entire decades secretly train them in the immutability of universal deadly fate. Before their eyes train engines fall out of working order, decay for years under the sun, and then end up as scrap metal.56

And then the allegory of historical haste unfolds, in which, racing ahead of history, the revolutionaries build “communism” and undertake mass murder. In Happy Moscow a fantastic bio-historical concept is developed according to which people contain a certain energy in reserve for finalization: At the moment of death, a final gateway opens up in the body of a person, one which we have not yet explained. Behind this gateway, in some dark crevice of the organism, the final charge of life is sparingly and faithfully preserved. Nothing except death opens this source, this reservoir—it is tightly sealed until death itself … But I will find this cistern of immortality …57

Sambikin, a character in the novel, cuts open the corpse of a girl in order to find this charge: You see!—Sambikin said, opening the empty section between the food and the excrement up a bit better.—This emptiness in the intestines sucks up all of humanity into its intestines and moves world history. This is the soul—smell it!58

His interlocutor, Sartorius, however, does not believe him: he thinks that the role of emptiness is an illusion, that “first we must feed people so that they won’t be drawn into the emptiness of the intestines,” and that “the world consists almost entirely of destitute substance, which is almost impossible to love but which must be understood.”59 That is, negativity is incorporeal (“to smell” it means to try to perceive it anyway and, thereby, partially embody the incorporeal) and, for

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this reason, dubious. There is a competition in history between matter (destitute and deprived of soul, discarded) and emptiness as principles of motion. The problematic, which is close to that of Platonov’s younger contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre (by coincidence, almost a homonym of Sartorius), is that negativity—the origin of consciousness for Sartre and Sambikin alike—is the invisible mover and meaning-bearing principle of repulsive flesh. Sartre, like Platonov, demonstrates the delicate imperceptibility and emptiness of negative energy. But Platonov, in representing this philosophy, does not agree with it and insists, instead, on an original, messianically understood materialism of refuse and shit. In this respect, it would seem he is closer to Sartre’s opponent, Georges Bataille, with his concept of “base” materialism.60 But Bataille too, to an even greater degree than Sartre, was preoccupied with his apology for pure and radical sacrificial negativity. In Happy Moscow the finalizing energy is not only the mover of history, but also a secret energy which can be used to construct a certain machine of immortality. Platonov here asserts that negativity itself is not “something” (thought it seems to be), arguing instead that the body that is on the verge of destruction nevertheless requires additional finalizing energy. This is a paradox. In The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agamben indicates that this secret time—an “operative time” that extends the time of history, finalizing it—corresponds to the “messianic” time, which, in theological tradition, simultaneously destroys and liberates.61 There are two central Platonovian themes that are related to eschatology and time’s orientation toward an end: first, fatigue, and, second, the criticism of sex and, especially, the orgasm. Almost all of Platonov’s characters are constantly exhausted. Igor Chubarov rightly sees here the opposition of proletarian sensuousness to the bourgeois body: the laboring person is usually in a fatigued condition and is unlikely to have any excess energy left over for pleasure.62 But it would seem that fatigue is not simply a bodily condition. It is a phenomenon that is not only natural but psycho-physiological. Fatigue implies a distinct form of temporality. Usually, we do not actually grow tired in direct proportion to expended effort—fatigue catches up with us during the pauses and breaks between our exertions. Exhaustion from alienated labor is different from the blissful fatigue that sets in after having achieved one’s goal. In both cases, however, it would seem that we deliberately curb (or finish curbing [дотормаживаем]) our activity. As a result, in one case, a feeling of emptiness and loss of self sets in, and, in the other, we experience a pleasure from having been relieved of our efforts, from our negative activity, the pleasure of negation. In a word, fatigue is

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an eschatological affect, and its ambivalence is a consequence of the ambivalence of eschatology as such. Either the end is external negation, loss, or emptiness, or it is an internal negation, a finalization, and a culmination. “Imagine the highly complex armature of modern society under imperialism and fascism, the extreme exhaustion, the destruction of the person there, and it will become clear what the cost of increasing productive forces was,” Platonov writes in the article, “On the First Socialist Tragedy.”63 Fatigue in Platonov is the world inside out, the secret, back door of technical civilization. Here is his character’s position on the matter: “Voshchev could agree not to have the meaning of existence, but he did desire to at least observe it in the substance of another close person’s body, and, in order to be close to that person, he could sacrifice his entire weak body, exhausted by thought and senselessness, on labor.”64 “Exhaustion” has a dual character: it is intensified by the senselessness of labor, but it is actualized by thought, which, in the case of Voshchev, is expressed in the interruption of his activity. In other words, thinking about meaningless serves as the external negation of labor which becomes his internal truth at the untimely moment of interruption: “Voshchev soon grew exhausted, as soon as his soul remembered that it had stopped knowing truth.”65 What is surprising is that many of Platonov’s fatigued characters (ones like Levin, for example) continue to work, afraid to stop, in spite of their fatigue. The characters who “go on strike” (like Voshchev and Makar) are opposed in Platonov to people who cannot or are afraid to stop, for example, Lui from Chevengur, who cannot stay in one place for long. What is interesting about Lui is that he originally appears as an exhausted proletarian, but, nonetheless, he is eternally in motion: Gopner felt Lui’s hand and examined it in the sunlight: the hand was big, sinewy, covered with the signs of former labor which never heal, those birthmarks of all of the oppressed. “Maybe it is true,” Gopner thought about Chevengur, “After all, airplanes heavier the air fly, curse them!”66

Thanks to his desire never to stop it is Lui who is able to preserve his sober view of Chevengur as a “step” in motion and not its telos. In Bread and Reading, a train engine is described which has come to resemble a person—“the most tormented substance”—and which makes sudden stops out of fatigue but, nevertheless, moves onward.67 Such stops, it would seem, serve as moments of accumulation of energy and are not the breakdowns of final fatigue.

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Such images, which are ubiquitous in Platonov, relate not just to the life and corporeality of individuals, but also to the historical time. The “breather,” just like the subsequent “construction of socialism in one country,” are key formulas of the time which justify the Bolsheviks’ shifts in tactics and their departure from radical revolutionary positions. Thus, Lenin writes in the article “The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power” (April, 1918): All our efforts must be exerted to the very utmost to make use of the respite given us by the combination of circumstances so that we can heal the very severe wounds inflicted by the war upon the entire social organism of Russia and bring about an economic revival, without which a real increase in our country’s defense potential is inconceivable … The objective situation reviewed above, which has been created by the extremely onerous and unstable peace, the terrible state of ruin, the unemployment and famine we inherited from the war and the rule of the bourgeoisie …,all this has inevitably caused extreme weariness and even exhaustion of wide sections of the working people. These people insistently demand—and cannot but demand—a respite.68

Platonov is keenly aware that people are exhausted and therefore incapable of active mobilization (not dissimilar to the worn-out revolutionary locomotive in “The Technical Novel”). Like Lenin, Platonov too is searching for a respite, a caesura that would be restorative and energizing, without, however, slackening one’s powers. But the periods of respite make Platonov anxious and not just with some psychologically comprehensible anxiety of the empty time, but with a quite rational worry that this respite might irrevocably alter the meaning of the entire movement, that it might devolve into nihilistic enjoyment. Platonov was correct to feel this anxiety—the “respite” proposed by Lenin already in 1918 as a re-orientation of the Bolsheviks from politics toward “governance” (upravlenie) did indeed irreversibly alter the course of the revolution despite the false inconsequentiality of this measure. Now about sex. Platonov wrote about sex a lot: mostly about the failures or repulsiveness of sexual acts and the admission of their futility. “With his free arm, Dushin embraced his girlfriend, sharing with her the sadness that nothing happened in the result of love.”69 Eric Naiman explains this “anti-sexualism” of Platonov by the general asceticism of the Soviet culture of the 1920s70. Igor Chubarov thinks that Platonov found sexual act repellent for it presupposes a form of violence against women, and that for that reason Platonov’s critique of sexuality has an overt and deliberate political character. Further on we will offer

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a detailed discussion of Platonov’s attitude to sexuality (which is ambivalent, as the rest of his positions) but for now we should note that sexual activity interests Platonov primarily as a moment of quotidian eschatology. The problem with sexuality is that orgasm presents a form of completion (which in reality is illusory). This is why Platonov warns about “abandon”: A man who had a ten-year-old son left him with the boy’s mother, and married a beauty. The child began to miss his father, and patiently, clum—sily hanged himself. A gram of enjoyment at one end was counterbalanced by a tonne of grave soil at the other. The father removed the rope from the child’s neck and soon followed in his wake, into the grave. He wanted to revel in the innocent beauty, he wanted to bear his love not as a duty shared with one woman, but as a pleasure. Do not revel—or die.71

Asceticism, of course, is present here. But it is subjugated to a more fundamental thought about the danger of relaxation and interruption, especially if this interruption appears to be a logical end of something. Inner, seemingly logical completion assumes an outer form of disappearance, death, loss of meaning, apathy. An alternative to this is the broken rhythm of constant, ceaseless labor and peregrinations, a gambit on the edge of death (recall Chagataev’s playing dead). Platonov is very interested in eschatology, in the orientation toward the end as in the negative logic of the event. However, at the same time, he harshly criticizes this logic. “Do not complete anything—at the end is only a joke.”72 But at the same time: “In order to last long, one has to imagine oneself ‘on the eve of extermination’— this way, one will live for two centuries.”73 The energy of the end can sustain one, as long as the end itself is being indefinitely postponed.74 3) Negativity in Platonov is not just the time of completion and destruction. It is also a time of return and recoil. It is that very pause that interrupts the movement toward the abyss and that has its own nature and impetus. The eschatological drama Chevengur in Platonov’s work exists in symmetrical opposition with The Foundation Pit, which is a story of excessive recoil: the poetry of acceleration is matched by the epic tale of delay. “Мan puts up a building—and falls apart himself ”75—what is implied here is not the eschatological negativity of a completed building (since the subject of action changes), but the force of recoil, of a reverse movement that secretly

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acts upon us during any constructive activity. The Fedorovian theme of the “ancestors” deals with the same problem. In this context, negativity appears as emptiness within the world that gets revealed and freed in the result of an event—to bring sorrow as well as new beginnings. In Alain Badiou’s heroic and optimistic philosophy of the event, event reveals a gaping emptiness (within a concrete situation) only once some previously unnoticeable phenomena begin to emerge out of this emptiness. Platonov, on the other hand, paints a situation when the work of negativity precedes the birth of the new, when this emptiness needs to be outlined first, before anything else is possible. 4) But another temporal vector giving rise to negativity is oriented into the future. It is precisely this vector that Georg Lukács—one of the most influential philosophers in the world and the author of The History and Class Consciousness, possibly the most profound reflection on the revolutions of 1917–19—discovers in his interpretation of Platonov’s negativity. By a happy and non-accidental coincidence, Lukács was closely acquainted with Platonov. The two deepest thinkers of the Soviet project knew each other and exchanged thoughts. Moreover, the article that Lukács wrote on Platonov had not only theoretical, but also pragmatic significance. The philosopher defended the beleaguered writer. The defense of negativity was in this case simultaneously a political action and an expression of a philosophical position. For Platonov as the writer of literary texts the pragmatics of negativity has a more complex character—it is suspended rather than asserted. Lukács’ article entitled “Emmanuil Levin”76 discusses “Immortality,” Platonov’s late short story—perhaps, his more conformist, socialist realist text that liberal critics tend to disregard. Indeed, the story features a figure of a benevolent fatherly people’s commissar painted in rather rosy colors as well as other naively authoritarian elements. And nevertheless, Lukács manages to extract precisely from this short story the key principle of Platonov’s poetics—its negativity. Lukács begins by addressing the “positive” sides of Levin’s image, in particular his ability to govern organically, to organically establish a harmonious relation between nature and technology (in other words, to overcome the gap between subject and object, which, according to Lukács, is characteristic of Western society). Eventually, however, Lukács gets to the most important thing: In themselves, negative qualities cannot bring life to a literary image. A living interaction between a person’s positive traits and his errors, an understanding

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that these errors are not accidental but very frequently spring from the positive traits, an understanding of how the sum of these traits is bound with the social destiny of a person as well as with the key problems of contemporaneity—this is the only possible foundation for the creation of a living literary image.77

Lukács rather delicately introduces the negativity which in Platonov, as we know from the context of his entire work, does not set anything into a relief, but is entirely dominant. One does not have to be particularly observant to notice the signs of hidden suffering in Levin. We can sense it behind his conversation with Pirogov (Levin wants to pose a question of expelling Pirogov from the Party): “I too am a poor man, perhaps even more miserable than you!—exclaimed Levin, having for a moment lost control over his will.”78

But what is the meaning of this suffering? Those who are even slightly familiar with Lukács’ philosophy can guess it immediately: Ascetic sorrow and self-negation arise in him [in Levin] because of impatience, from a desire to mentally leap over the present-day stage of development. This mental anticipation, this gaze that is steadily set into the future are not only subjectively justified, but are also objectively necessary. A conscious reconstruction of social reality, economy, and people would have been impossible without such mental anticipation of the future.79

Lukács applies to Platonov the central idea of the History and Class Consciousness: proletariat anticipates the future and therefore has a chance of a total, organic understanding of reality. The sufferings of a proletarian person, of a reified human being, paradoxically provide him with a vantage point, from which he can recognize the present-day dominant alienation as well as catch a glimpse of the non-alienated future. The negativity of the present follows from the positivity of the future. We suffer because we are already standing with one foot in the future and know that a different world is possible; we can compare the present reality with a real ideal. The sorrows and lamentations of a revolutionary subject are a sign that he or she has already transcended his own situation; this is a sign of a change for the better. The catastrophism and chernukha80 in the post-perestroika Russia are often explained in a similar way. At the same time, Lukács notes that Levin’s negativity is somewhat hypertrophied and, in complete correspondence with dialectics, may even destroy the future of which it is but a faint echo. Lukács criticizes Levin, but not

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Platonov (even though, knowing Platonov’s other texts, we could address the same criticism to him as well): Impatience and refusal to reconcile with existing imperfect reality was always typical for the revolutionaries in the past and it remains an important part of their character today. Manifestations of this impatience in Levin’s work and in his relationships with people are truly socialist. We attempted to demonstrate that even the problematic parts of his personality stem from reality and are marked by a socialist character. However, at the same time, despite his typicality, there is an aspect to Levin that must be overcome and overcome in a manner that is different from his own—that is, not through ascesis.81

And yet, Lukács agrees with Platonov’s statements from the 1930s in which he criticizes melancholy and nihilism. Lukács offers an optimistic and positive (i.e., affirmative and thetic) interpretation of pessimism. He connects it to an essential anachronistic character of the present, its non-coincidence with itself. Is this a well-founded interpretation of Platonov’s poetics? Broadly speaking, it is. However, it does not explain its excesses—the deaths of Nastya in The Foundation Pit and Dvanov in Chevengur or the morbid melancholy of the likable characters. On the other hand, Lukács rectifies the ambivalence of Platonov’s poetics, where the negative in its instability and spectrality is alternatingly rejected and asserted. It is this instability that gives us the theme of wanderings: Platonov’s characters, in particular Levin (who “wandered about with this knapsack and wealth had never swelled it …. It felt as if goodness itself issued from this knapsack, from the hands of the person who carried it, though the knapsack itself was always empty”82), are perpetual travelers, vagabond creatures, signs without meaning, whose activity is essentially directionless. The wanderings of Platonov’s characters signify the ghostly and incomplete nature of images deprived of any nodal point. Finally, Lukács has a rather narrow view of time as directed into the future—he shares this trait with other philosophers of his period, for instance with Bloch and Heidegger (who developed their futuristic concept of time under the direct influence of Lukács). What is this asymmetry funded on? Doesn’t it undermine Lukács’ just desire to discover in Levin an organic educator, essentially, an organic intellectual? For to become “organic,” one needs not only the future, but also the past and their reciprocal dialectics.83 Moreover, Platonov himself does write about the past: he says about Levin that “perhaps it was precisely then, in his childhood, that his soul was astounded so forcefully that it began to crumble and pre-emptively sensed its distant death”84 (this refers to an anti-Semitic offense

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that young Levin had to suffer as a schoolboy). It turns out then that the force of negativity is coming from the past as an overwhelming force demanding justice and redemption. This is already the concept of the history of the “defeated” that Walter Benjamin would later oppose to Lukács and Heidegger.85 However, what is more important is that neither future nor past exists in the present moment fully. They appear for us only as efforts, whether conscious or unconscious, made by a person who, running ahead or stepping back, attempts to establish a correlation with himself—as well as with the Other in himself and in others— thus forming a subject and through individual subjectivity—a collective: Perhaps true future people had already been born, but Levin did not consider himself one of them. In order to understand others, he needed to turn away from himself for whole days on end; he needed to pinch and adapt his own soul in order to bring it closer to another person’s soul—something that was always shrouded and bewitched—and so be in a position to attune this other soul from within to the simple labor of moving train cars around the station. In order to hear every voice, it was necessary almost to go mute oneself.86

Negation appears here not as a utopian force of the future, but as a conscious activity of self-correlation as self-destruction by a finite, mortal creature. This activity stems from the tasks of leadership and communion with others. And here we transition to yet another explanation of Platonov’s negativity, not directly related with the form of time. Jonathan Flatley, in his Affective Mapping: Melancholia and Politics of Modernism,87 poses a question about the origin of Platonov’s “revolutionary toska” and answers it. In Flatley’s view, toska in Platonov is a collectivizing, uniting affect. Platonov’s goal as a writer is to describe and shape a communion of people that would surpass a simple civic comradery and be grounded on affective foundation. Event in this case is characterized not only by the fracture of times, but also by the mixing and molting of its elements. Paradoxically, it is precisely the negative emotion of toska that, according to Flatley, is most suitable for bringing down individual’s boundaries and opening one up toward the Other. Chevengur turns out to be an epic about the friendship between Dvanov and Kopenkin—a friendship bordering on homosexual connection. According to Flatley, such communist essence of toska is different from the apocalyptic moods of Dvanov’s father or the compensatory mourning practices of his adopted father Zakhar Pavlovich. Unlike them, “Sasha Dvanov, by contrast, develops a melancholic practice that moves him toward collectivity, bringing him into community not only with persons but also with everyday

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objects, machines, and animals.”88 Flatley interprets the splitting of the subject in two, as, for instance, in the image of “the eunuch of the soul,” as a condition for communing with others—reflexive subjectivity and community appear as two aspects of a unified whole. Flately offers a very convincing reading and my task here is not to criticize it. Rather, I would like to add to Flatley’s collectivist function of toska its subjectivizing function. Two questions could be posed to Flatley. First, what is the source of toska? We learn about its function, but we do not know where it originates. Flatley offers a rather trivial answer to this, connecting toska with the sense of loss and melancholy, which he believes to be characteristic of a revolutionary event. And the second question is the following: why is it that Flatley views toska only as a collectivizing affect? Considering that it is a markedly negative affect, it seems that it should divide at least as well as it unifies: the “searching” toska does more than just reflect the loss and the persistently reiterated loneliness of Platonov’s characters owes to the dissociative power of toska resonating through them like an echo of a catastrophic event. For this reason, toska—an affect that isolates while simultaneously opening up a subject to the world—cannot be regarded with such an openly and unambiguously tender sympathy that Flatley shows it. On the contrary, as I argued earlier, we should interpret it as a strictly aesthetic affect that is called to work through toska while, at the same time, pushing the reader out of it, forcing the reader out of the space of an artwork into the life of action, out of the tender comradery into the receptive emptiness of solitude. Bringing people together is an important task for all times (and it is not an accident that Flatley analyzes Platonov in parallel with Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois). But it is important not to lose sight of the historic event horizon of Platonov’s prose. And here yet another function of Platonov’s texts comes into view—the function of subjectivization. I will discuss it in the next section.

V Revolutionary Doubject As follows from what has been said above, negativity in Platonov performs not only a collectivizing, but also a subjectivizing function. Subjectivity here should be understood in the full meaning of this term, which historically was marked by a certain duality. First introduced by Kant but usually retroactively ascribed to the ideas of Descartes (who did not use it in the present meaning at all), the term “subject” refers to, on the one hand, the self-identity of a reflexive “I,” the bearer

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of the experience, and, on the other, to the “I” as a unique creative  source that is not simply identical with itself, but is permanently searching for itself and reflexing simultaneously in two directions: of self-negation and selfconstruction. The first of these meanings—subject as institution—is indeed characteristic for the Cartesian tradition, in particular, for Kant and Husserl, and also for the quotidian meaning that the term “subject” gains in the nineteenth century. The second meaning—subject as process—achieves its meaning with Hegel (although, only in his best moments) and goes through a rebirth in France during the second half of the nineteenth century: in Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Rancière, and Badiou. The last two are writing already about political subjectivity as a foundation of democratic or, simply put, leftist politics that is often neglected in the “system” of contemporary liberal state. In the context of post-revolutionary Russia, the category of the “subject” was recently used by Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin, who justly criticized the “totalitarian” paradigm that offered a naïve picture of the Soviet society as a place where individuality was suppressed by the state.89 Hellbeck and Halfin point out that within the Soviet regime subjectivity was actively constructed. However, they interpret the notion of the “subject” merely as an instance of reflection and self-analysis, but not as a subject of free action (which, evidently, they believe to be either impossible in principle, or possible, but exclusively in the situation of spontaneous unaccountability). Noting that at least “in part this obsessive concern with the Self was a direct offshoot of the Revolution itself, an immediate articulation of the revolutionary ideas of human liberation, social emancipation and the dignity of the personality, all of which had made an explosive appearance in 1917”90 and citing Platonov and Babel in support, Hellbeck immediately shifts the conversation to how this humanistic discourse was, from the outset, appropriated by the Soviet regime and integrated into an agenda of individual activation and mobilization in the service of strengthening the revolutionary state. With its stress on subjective involvement in the revolutionary cause, the Bolshevik regime was pursuing a quintessentially modern agenda of subjectivization, of fostering conscious citizens who would become engaged in the program of building socialism of their own will.91

Notably, characterizing of the “positive” side of subjectivity within a strictly liberal and individualistic, humanist key as an “idea of personal dignity” leads Hellbeck to reject outright the “revolutionary state” and the “Soviet regime” as institutions, which are a priori alienated. In doing so he is implicitly relying on the liberal doctrine that comes to us from Luther and Hobbes, a doctrine that holds

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that state is by definition a menacing alienated monster. The fact that people can sincerely and out of their volition attempt to participate in the construction of a free state is never even considered. For the same reason, when Hellbeck comes across the utterly fascinating diaries describing the negative labor that a subject performs on herself, he writes: More typical of Soviet diaries was a mode of doubt, insecurity and intense selfcriticism … In these cases the diary acted as a normalizing technique, a medium through which the mind observed and controlled psychic and bodily processes.92

Astonishing! An attempt to critically come to terms with one’s very self and to turn toward oneself is interpreted as an invasion of the subject by an eye of Sauron-like external apparatus! The approach of Hellbeck and Halfin is founded on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, who had simplified and depoliticized Louis Althusser’s earlier concept of a subject as an ideological apparatus.93 Foucault of the 1970s is a dark and despairing anarchist, who had inspired, among others, the “new philosophers,” these French fighters against “totalitarianism” in the whole world. His thought is behind the non-hermeneutic position of Hellbeck and Halfin with regards to the Soviet society as the illiberal subspecies of a frightening and oppressive system of modernity. For this reason, although they uncover the great material about the emergence of reflexivity and the formation of subjectivity in the Soviet society, they limit themselves to describing this process without including the obvious political context of subject-making, the revolution. In reality, the question of subjectivity follows directly from the central question of the revolution of 1917— namely, how to shape from above the initiatives of the lower strata of society, how to “empower”: how to create a democratic, proletarian, self-governing society out of a country of illiterate peasants. Of course it is a hard task, much harder than just being a free subject on your own. The authoritarian solutions to this question, which eventually followed, must not conceal from us the truth and the urgency of the dilemma that is still relevant for us today. Only now, we need to transform “a subject according to Foucault” into a true subject. Platonov, one of the greatest theoreticians of Soviet subjectivity, raises the question not about how to “assert the dignity of human personality,” and not about how the Soviet state can control the soul. He poses the question of how, while engaged in a joyful collective labor, while conquering nature, building a just society, can we not forget about those for whom all of those technology and society are being built, about the sufferers, whose dreams will be fulfilled in the coming kingdom of plenty. For there will be no victory without suffering,

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there will be no happiness without desire: satiation and reveling will turn to annihilation. In his early short story “A Poor Man’s Thirst,” Platonov sets the question in precisely this way—humanity has built a “Big One” (“Bol’shoi Odin”), but the “Residue” [“Ostatok”] remains, and at the end this Residue speaks: I am so thoroughly insignificant and empty, that the universe and complete understanding of the entire truth are not enough for me to get filled to the brim and to end. There is nothing big enough to diminish my insignificance. This is why I am greater than others. All of humanity, all of the future humanity and all of the Universe with its mysteries and the Big One are in me. And all of this is just a drop for my thirst.94

What is most important here is not the theological theme of kenosis, but a rather contemporary motif of the splitting of a subject between the desire to join something and the desire to remain oneself, namely to be a pure desire, desire as such. We can already see that subjectivity is closely linked with negativity. And this negativity consists not in a mythical original “desire” or “loss,” but in the reverse movement taking place here and now. In Platonov, this reverse movement finds expression in angst and anxiety, but also in the reflexive labor of thought that is inseparable from them. His characters begin to get anxious only once they fall into “thoughtfulness,” as did Voshchev or the doubtful Makar. “Voshchev did his walking straight past people, sensing the gathering strength of his grieving mind and becoming more and more secluded in the cramped space of his sorrow.”95 Note the contrast with Flatley’s associative negativity. The instance of melancholia, the loss of meaning is linked here with he “organic intellectualism” in the Gramscian sense, with a transition from a thoughtless mechanical activity to consciousness. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who, according to Platonov, were “reveling,” and enjoying themselves to abandon in their free time, the proletariat will think.96 That is, teleological completion is juxtaposed here with a plateau of tension, of time before or after the end, the time of fatigue that is never followed by rest. The object of this melancholic thinking is, once again, subjectivity, that is, the development of the proletariat and each individual person into a subject of revolution and praxis. “Voshchev … was lying there in a dry tension of awareness, and he did not know whether he was of use to the world or whether everything would get along fine without him.”97 In another instance, Voshchev address his comrades, afraid that they might die from exhaustion: “Time to call

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it a day! Or else you’ll wear yourselves out and die—and then who’ll be left to be people?”98 A subject is created here by the interruption of work which does not coincide with its completion. In the context of Hellbeck’s and Halfin’s research, we should examine the following passage from Platonov’s short story “Confusion in the Motherland of Kompot.” A protagonist, somebody named Zhurkin, a “wretch” who “for his critical nature was kicked out from everywhere by the bureaucrats.” He writes the following letter to the trade union: Despite recognizing myself as a rightist, leftist, and a quietist, I am still grieving and consider this statement insufficient, that is, a common useless attempt of concealing a class enemy.99

Soviet subjectivity here reaches its paroxysm and self-cancels in some kind of performative paradox. Platonov parodies the Stalinist terror, which then (in 1930) was just beginning, and shows its close connection with the paradoxical logic of subjectivity. But the main orientation of this subjectivity is constant selfdestruction: the revolutionary subject is rebelling against her very subjectivity to the degree to which it is controlled by the state. The connection between this Platonov’s parodic hyperbole and Soviet “selfcriticism” campaigns (the main one of which took place in 1928) is obvious. In the future, the discourse of “self-criticism” would be actively used during the party purges. Bolsheviks and the Soviet bureaucrats developed this discourse thanks to their disinterest in pluralism with regards to other parties and classes. Since they placed the emphasis on dictatorship, self-criticism became the only possible form of democracy. Or, we could say that democracy appeared in the form of self-criticism. Oleg Kharkhordin, in his important work Individual and Collective in the Soviet Russia,100 describes self-criticism and purges as a form of conceiving individuality (in our terms, subjectivity) that is specific to Eastern Christianity and later to the USSR. This form presupposes that human conscience is realized publicly and, as a consequence, there emerges a collective power over a personality. Just like Hellbeck and Halfin, Kharkhordin begins with a Foucauldian premise, but whereas Hellbeck and Halfin are emphasizing the inner, intimate subjectivity of Soviet citizens, Kharkhordin points out instead that “self-criticism” more often found expression accusing somebody else in the name of the collective (until, of course, it was your turn to be arrested and confess your sins as an enemy of the people). Like Hellbeck and Halfin, Kharakhordin treats individual as well as collective subjectivity with irony

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and skepticism and distinguishes a Russian “Eastern Christian,” insufficiently interiorized type of personality. And yet, subjectivity in one form or another is the main project of Western civilization (Orthodox Christianity in this regard is also the West, as Kharkhordin’s book demonstrates). This includes democracy, freedom, contemporary constitutional state, a self-governing individual, and, most importantly, the historicity of an individual and the collective, which at some point break with the past and start counting their lives within the horizon of a particular event. While ironically criticizing subjectivity, we should not forget just how fundamental this concept and phenomenon is. With his hyperbolic parody, Platonov demonstrates the tragic paradox of the revolutionary subjectivity. It destroys itself in the process of self-creation. A true subject is the one who can cancel herself. But this means that revolutionary project, when taken to its limit, is catastrophic. In this light, the terror of the 1930s appears not as a simple Thermidorian incarnation of the party (according to the leftist version) and not as a logical culmination of the power when seized by mad extremists (the rightist version), but as a self-destruction of a revolutionary subject in the paroxysm of her subjectivity. How else can we explain that party leaders publicly (even if after torture) confessed fantastical crimes, as if hoping that just like in Platonov’s works their confession will destroy itself as a linguistic act (that it will subvert the performative power of their statements), but not them as people. Terror was then a combination of Thermidorians’ cynicism and fatal self-destructiveness of the revolutionaries as individuals and as collectives. Dostoyevsky predicted something similar in Demons, when he described Kirillov’s metaphysical suicide (which for him is the highest expression of subjectivity) next to a gang of degenerates who exploit this suicide in terroristic purposes.101 Platonov in his works poses the problem of a subject deliberately and literally: Voshchev opened his eyes in doubt onto the light of the day that had set in. Yesterday’s sleepers were alive and standing over him, observing his powerless position. “What are you walking and existing here for?” ask the one with a beard growing out of his exhaustion. “I do not exist here” said Voshchev, ashamed that so many people are aware of him alone now. “I only think here.”102

Voshchev does the thinking not where he exists and exists not where he does the thinking. This is obviously an ironic jab at Descartes.103 The subject of thought is not identical to the subject of existence, does not coincide with

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herself, is alienated from herself, but not in a fatal or irreversible way. In Chevengur, Platonov introduces the figure of the “eunuch of the soul”—a form of contemplative subjectivity that is also misplaced with regards to existence and cut-off from praxis.104 “The eunuch of the soul” is unconsciously conscious. His is neither consciousness nor being, but a function of belatedness of consciousness with regards to being. Eunuch does not cognize, he protects the experience, so that later it could be integrated by the consciousness and the subject into a whole. At the same time, while protecting the experience, the eunuch blocks access to it, he allows a subject to experience traumatic things without censoring or slowing down these experiences with his integrating consciousness. Valery Podoroga rightfully points out that eunuch here is a figure for the literature itself.105 But Podoroga does not explain why this is the case. And the reason is that literature, like the eunuch, allows part of a person’s soul to safely enjoy the frightening and the ambivalent: the dreamworld of negativity that art castrates and de-activates by framing. To be more precise, what gets castrated is the gaze of the reader (and the subject of the unconscious) who plunges into these depths. Moreover, logically, negativity itself is already, by definition, impotent and castrated, since it cannot completely destroy what it negates. Subject, by the very meaning of this term, must underlie its actions, but the subject of the revolution appears retroactively during its course. In the process she gains entirely new definitions and a new place within the system. This is the reason for the questions of who is proletariat, who made the revolution happen, and who will live during the communism arise. I have already quoted this phrase from The Foundation Pit: “Man puts up a building—and falls apart himself. Who’ll be left to live then?”106 In Chevengur, Kopenkin directly names this problem by referring to himself as a doubject, a portmanteau word that includes itself “subject,” “double,” and “oak,” which in Russian connotes stupidity (they say: “thick as an oak”). There emerges an idiot-subject, a subject, for whom idiocy is the condition of existence and who, at the same time, is “doubled,” that is, split between existence and consciousness, between the past and the future. In Chevengur Platonov precisely delineates the dilemma of political subjectivization, which is also the dilemma of the event—the dilemma that was discussed in great detail in French twentieth-century philosophy. On the one hand, Chevengur is an assembly of Others, of unaccounted and unaccountable for people. On the other hand, they are actively engaged in self-naming: for example, one of them names himself Dostoyevsky, so the narrator continues to refer to him as Dostoyevsky throughout the novel. And this character actually does try to resemble Dostoyevsky. Name precedes reality, creates it

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(Brodsky notes this in his reading of Platonov107). However, this empty name is corresponded by the nameless, incomplete power of the subject, who hasn’t yet become one (and this is something that Brodsky does not recognize). We have already cited Jacques Rancière, for whom the political by definition presupposes a transformation of somebody who has never been a subject of action into one, a discovery of voice by the previously voiceless, unrecognized people. For Rancière,108 the revolutionary event is one of the moments of possibility for the emergence of such new voices. During the event, proper name becomes the center of subjectivization. An objective account about the event is impossible, for its name itself is an imposition. What would we have been writing about, had the name “French Revolution” not existed? And in the meantime, it is one of the most contested instances of self-naming of the revolutionary processes.109 Still, Rancière leaves the vicious cycle that appears here unresolved. Alain Badiou in his philosophy of an event sets out to think through this very circular motion.110 For him the event is a release of nameless elements, a release that can take place only if in addition to these elements we advance a new proper name—the name of the event. Later this self-anointed event can sustain its existence only thanks to the subject, who herself is constituted only by the event. We see that Rancière and Badiou describe a logic that resembles that of Platonov’s Chevengur, even though they do not take into consideration the negative force of the revolution that must not only transform the “miscellaneous” into revolutionaries, but also do the reverse—change revolutionaries into the “miscellaneous.” The Foundation Pit is, perhaps, the most vivid allegory of subjectivity out of all of Platonov’s works. The subjectivity’s need for a foundational underlying principle results in that in place where a building should have been erected, a foundation pit grows deeper with each day, and a child, a symbol of a future dies within its bowls. “On the First Socialist Tragedy” explains that what came into play in this case was the dialectic of nature. The aim of technology is: ‘give me a place to stand and I will move the world’. But the construction of nature is such that it does not like to be beaten: one can move the world by taking up the lever with the required moment, but one must lose so much time along the way and while the long lever is turning that, in practice, the victory is useless.111

This essay is, in essence, a commentary to The Foundation Pit, where the death of the little girl comes precisely during the long preparation for a leap toward the future. Platonov criticizes (rather prophetically) the all-too-thorough subjectivity of the Soviet project, for it risks to never move beyond the phase

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of the recoil. Let’s note in parenthesis that this contains a hidden critique of the futurist notions of history, popular at the time—in particular, the concepts of Lukács and Heidegger. Heidegger’s future-oriented “project” of building is mocked here as something that begins by digging a pit in the past (Platonov did not know about Heidegger’s thought as such, but was aware of similar intellectual moods). Notably, technology is viewed here as a technique of subjectivization— stepping back in order to spring forward. Platonov’s early technical initiatives often consisted of shaping voids. For example, to fight erosion in Crimea, he suggested making “very small holes of a narrow diameter” in the soil.112 To improve Siberian climate—he proposed “blowing-up tunnels” through the rock mass of the mountains that separate Siberia from the southern regions.113 To ameliorate the soil, Platonov wished to charge it with negative electricity.114 A later commentary on this in The Foundation Pit contains a criticism of this simple negative solution—dialectical metaphysics of technology is disrupted by human finitude and, correspondingly, by temporality. We will all die while working on the construction of the machine of communism. Reversibility is disrupted and, as a consequence, requires a caesura, a pause “in a position on the eve of annihilation,” of an abrupt ending of a potentially endless text, and an exit into the space of action. This is the fundamental problem of every revolution—how to put an end to the time of interruption, how not to linger in this suspended time for too long. As Heinrich von Kleist, a Romantic thinker, writes about the essence of technology, puppets and all machines possess “the virtue of being immune to gravity’s force … Like elves, the puppets need only to touch upon the ground, and the soaring of their limbs is newly animated through this momentary hesitation; we dancers need the ground to rest upon and recover from the exertions of the dance.”115 Thus, subjectivization in Platonov is linked with a peculiar attempt to introduce negative magnitudes into literature.116 This is the reason behind the recurrence of the figures of the emptiness and devastation in his writing. One shouldn’t equate emptiness and all human mortality, death, and suffering. Generally speaking, death and suffering are natural, and void is always artificial. There is no emptiness in nature, but people keep on imagining and actively introducing it into it. “Not one of the miscellaneous had seen his father, and they all remembered their mothers as a vague longing of the body for that lost peace, a longing which in the adult years was transformed into a devastating melancholy.”117 I emphasize, devastating. In this case, Platonov’s interpretation brought us to what perhaps is the most developed twentieth-century theory of subjectivity—the theory of Jacques

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Lacan. On the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan developed a complex metaphysical system by interpreting the phenomena of intimate experience as transcendental concepts, akin to classical philosophical categories. Lacan develops the classical notion of a subject with the use of Freud’s notion of castration. Castration is understood here not in a reductionist manner—Lacan (following Freud) maintains that the history of every human individual contains the event of an encounter with sexual difference, which then forms a foundation for the transcendental matrix of her subjectivity. But, this sexual difference is understood through the negativity (“castration”) which affects both men and women. Let’s take a closer look at this theory. First of all, a subject in Lacan is always the subject of the unconscious, that is, the subject who has been displaced with regards to herself and who is not a “real” object, but an instance of the symbolic (which sometimes also gets filled with phantasmatic images). Secondly, the subject is formed in the result of “castration.” What is meant by castration here is not a physical castration, but an anxiety-causing fantasy about it, as happening in the future (men) or in the past (women). This fantasy is enough for a child to, at a certain moment, “accept” his or her castration, that is, the impossibility of immediate realizing their libidinal desires. At the same time, the fantasy of castration becomes the figure for the objectively incomplete autonomy of a human being in the world, for his or her claims to everything, as well as for the threat that the world poses for him or her. In the result of this claim to everything and a threat to all, the child’s world “explodes” into multiple partial objects, which could be added or subtracted from her. Whereas if a girl accepts the castrational limitation, “thinking” that she is castrated, for a boy the fear of castration, which practically amounts to the “symbolic” castration as a fait accompli, suffices. The first “moment” of castration is the boy’s discovery of the mother’s castration—a discovery and acceptance. (Later, in the second moment, he attributes this fact to his father and learns to fear that the same procedure would, by analogy, be applied to him; in the third moment, he sees the father, in contrast as an empowering, giving force.)118 This, in turn, gives rise to sexual desire—a woman begins to be perceived as possessing an “anti-phallus.” However, the very fact of female castration is doubted from the very beginning and for that reason its acceptance by the subject does not amount to complete certitude. The subject keeps on returning to the point of accepting the mother’s castration in his unconscious. As Freud has demonstrated, the phenomenon of fetishism is connected precisely with this dynamic. The fetish

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(fur, underwear, a foot or a shoe) begins to signify the moment, immediately preceding the instance of the discovery of mother’s castration. “Castration” is a fantasy of negatification of phallus, which Lacan marks with a negative number—φ119. According to this fantasy, a woman doesn’t have a phallus because she was castrated, even though this contradicts reality, in which she never had and wasn’t supposed to have a phallus in the first place (each embryo first develops female genitals). We introduce castration into a phallic economy (or a “dialectic of nature”), turning it into a negative function. And then we apply it to ourselves, regardless of whether we are men or women. We should note that castration remains a fantasy and that, in general, every negation contains something unreal or not entirely real. The negation “is forced” to assert what it negates, and for that reason it is by definition incomplete and impotent. In this sense, castration itself has been castrated. This is the reason why the fantasy of castration or negation, according to Lacan, generally requires the introduction of a signifier. “Every real privation requires symbolization.”120 The signifier (e.g., a negative number) simultaneously provides the name for the operation that is opposite to being and sets a limit to it. It stops, it limits essentially limitless proliferation of emptiness—the proliferation that occurs precisely because of the impotence of negation and the necessity to keep on repeating it. “If the signifier is thus a hollow, it’s insofar as it bears witness to a past presence”121—this is a strange thesis on the first glance, but it comes directly out of the previous one with one correction that any signifier is, according to Lacan, a sign of castration. We use it as a substitute for being, we acknowledge our inability to possess objects, and, as a consequence, we affirmatively fixate our desire and its inherent lack. As was demonstrated by Jacques-Alain Miller, a “subject” is the moment of signifying castration, that situation when lack begins to count as a unit of something122. In a broader sense, Lacan views castration as a refusal of enjoyment, a refusal that is responsible for a person’s subjectivization, for the continuation of her desire made possible at the price of refusal. Only a “castrated” individual can be more or less successfully socialized, that is, learn to distinguish his/her fantasies from reality and, at the same time, continue to “recognize” some objects as the objects of desire. The latter is possible, for castration, according to Lacan, carries negative as well as positive outcomes. The male subject “learns” about separability of the phallus, one of his most “prominent” parts, and along with the fantasy of a wound and devastation, he experiences a fantasy of an object that is separate, as if suspended in the air, floating and untethered from any definition. Lacan calls it objet petit a. It too is a product of castration. Later, during sexual

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relations, two principal subject-positions emerge—the position of possessing an object coupled with a fantasy of a castrated being who requires us (in men) and the narcissistic identification with an object (I as an object of desire, a phallus), combined with attraction to the one from whom this object is detachable and controllable and who, therefore, can be a subject of desire (in women). Another complicated moment in the logic of castration is the ambivalence of castration itself and the so-called aphanisis or the loss of desire. These two fantasies are often interconnected. However, castration supports and constitutes desire, even if in roundabout ways, while aphanasis kills it. In this regard, they are opposites. But, aphanisis can become a form of the excess of castration, just as the death of Nastya becomes the excess of the digging of the foundation pit. In this sense, castration is ambivalent, in the same way that negation is ambivalent. This is precisely the reason why a disbalance in the function of castration may lead to depression and melancholia. Meant to create desire, devastating, negative passion may destroy the object instead of simply detaching it. It may get “stuck” in the negative stage. This exposition allows us not only to point out the proximity between Lacanian theory of subjectivation and the theory of subject implicit in Platonov, but also discover in these texts a new plane of meaning which suggests immediate references to psychoanalysis. Even though Platonov was familiar with Freud’s writings,123 which in Russia during the 1920s were often read for ideas on how to conceptualize revolutionary subjectivity, this fact alone can hardly explain the degree to which Platonov’s prose is saturated with sexual themes. Rather, the revolutionary event, together with the shock and the melancholy of immanence that it causes, actualizes in unconscious the memory of the discovery of sexual difference, that early event of one’s life, the unwavering fidelity to which one carries until the very end (in the form of attraction to the opposite sex that survives even the decrease of purely physical arousal). Platonov is actually just obsessed by the fantasy of female castration. In Chevengur alone this theme is repeated five times. The eunuch of the soul, so dear to Podoroga, is also not just a cold observer, but also a castrato, a product of negation and devastation. And the aforementioned criticism of sexuality that Platonov inherits from Fedorov is connected to the fear and fascination with the castrating power of women (this critical attitude, however, does not prevent Platonov from constantly depicting unsuccessful, troubled sexual relations of his characters). Dvanov stroked Fekla Stepanovna with experienced hands, as though he had already boned up in advance. Finally his hands froze in fright and surprise.

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“What’s wrong?” Fekla Stepanovna whispered in a near and noisy voice. “Everybody’s got one the same.”124

First of all, the scene of lovemaking between Dvanov and Fekla Stepanovna takes place on a stretch that was “scotomized” for him and kept watch over by the “eunuch of the soul.” Secondly, note the subtle play of allusions that takes place in this passage. Fekla’s phrase that “everybody’s got one the same” immediately means that she rejects Dvanov’s surprise and renders sexual act prosaic by pointing out that all women have more or less the identical sexual organs. However, on the literal level, the text is asserting just the opposite—namely, that since all women have the same genitals, Dvanov’s surprise can be explained by the fact that Fekla Stepanovna has a phallus. On the unconscious level of the subtext, Dvanov encounters a phallic mother and enters a pre-castrated state. For this reason, the eunuch of the soul (who is also the guardian of castration) blocks the access for the consciousness to this traumatic and beautiful fantasy. It is not difficult to draw a parallel between this and the logic of utopia that unfolds in Chevengur. The realization of utopia in this novel is the revelation of the poverty of the world and disillusionment in the fantasy of the phallic mother. (It is in Chevengur that we read that “their [women’s] main member is already cut off.”125) It is precisely for this reason that the text recoils and pushes the reader away from such literal realization. The frequent evasion and  condemnation of sexual act by Platonov’s characters and the moving and loving descriptions of women as decisive and active subjects of the revolution might mean the same thing—the sacralization of a woman in her ambivalence and the fear of discovering her tabooed castration. In other words, Platonov is a fetishist. Freud interprets fetishism literally—as a denial of female castration and a fixation on an object that one saw immediately before the discovery of this castration. His main example of a fetish is, unsurprisingly, the legs, especially when seen from below: “Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up.”126 A fetish, according to Freud, is “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis.”127 The founder of psychoanalysis thinks that a fetishist “refused to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis … for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.”128 The subject has “retained” his belief in female phallus, “but also given it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached … ”129 Lacan adds

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that a fetishistic child identifies not with the phallic mother, but with a phallus itself—“a phallus hidden under the mother’s clothes.”130 A fetishist is repulsed by castration. As a consequence, his attitude to women bears an ambivalent character (Freud uses the term Entfremdung or “alienation” to describe it). Fetish is what makes a woman interesting to a fetishist, but it is fetish itself, with its metaphorical functions and ambivalence that attracts him. According to Freud, time plays a crucial part in the fixation on a fetish: “It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some process occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia.”131 Platonov as if intentionally follows the structure described by Freud. His fetishism is manifest in his writing as well as in his life.132 For instance, consider this passage from Chevengur: He looked once more at her ascending legs and could understand nothing clearly. There was a path of some sort from these fresh feminine legs to the necessity of being committed to and trusting of his usual revolutionary business, but that path was too long and Serbinov yawned in advance from the exhaustion of his mind.133

Or this one, also from Chevengur: Then a white estate appeared on a rise before them, magnificent and uninviting. The columns of the main building were in the lively form of well-turned female legs, which importantly supported crossbeams upon which rested only the sky. The house itself stood back a few yards. It had a special colonnade in the form of bent, motionless toiling giants. Kopenkin did not understand the meaning of the solitary columns, and took them to be the remains of some revolutionary revenge upon unmoveable property.134

And here’s an example from The Foundation Pit: And Voshchev began to feel shame and energy—he wanted quickly to discover the universal, long meaning of life, so that he could live ahead of the children, move quicklier than their swarthy legs filled with resolute tenderness.13534

Note this paradoxical “resolute tenderness.” And here’s a quote from Happy Moscow: That winter, after an alarm signal at two o’clock in the morning, the lift was put into operation in shaft number 18 of the Moscow Metropolitan Construction Project; a young female worker was brought to the surface and an ambulance was summoned. The young woman’s leg had been crushed – the full, upper part of her right leg, above the knee ….

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Sambikin gave orders for the mutilated woman to be made ready, so he could operate when it was day. In the morning Sambikin saw that it was Moscow Chestnova on the operating table; she was conscious and she greeted him, but her leg had gone dark and the veins, filled with dead blood, had swollen up like the varicose veins of an old woman. Moscow had been washed, and her pubic hair shaved.136

Note the phallic image of the swelling accompanied with a transparent metaphor for castration. The materiality of Platonov’s images—the literalization of metaphors, his peculiar “materialism,”137 the images of the dead bodies, waste, etc.—stems from the specific fetishistic-melancholic complex.138 Estrangement; deliberate refusal to recognize things; oscillation between undershooting (The Foundation Pit) and overshooting (Chevengur); pausing on the edge “on the eve of destruction”; the enigmatic suspension of images (compare the eyes of the dead fish with their “mystery of death” in Chevengur); eternal wanderers forever severed from home; the image of the void, emptiness, and devastation; the figure of the dead father (who is “killed” by the author with an obvious pleasure) and Mother-wetearth, who needs to be nourished and made fertile—all of this forms a fetishistic poetics in which alienation (in a Marxist sense, as the deprivation from objects, an empty immanence of the world) becomes an aesthetic principle, a principle of representing things in their prosaic materiality, and of simultaneously suspending139 and destroying them in order to re-create them. Fetishism allows Platonov to convey a certain suspension and freezing of a revolutionary event, to preserve its incompleteness, its “permanence.”140 But it also permits him to constantly reproduce desire, to use anxiety as a lever for a leap, for the utopian naming of phantasies that draws together irreconcilable opposites (singularities and totalities, calculation and passion). Castration, in which Platonov refuses to fully believe, is constantly played out in his texts in its full ambivalence. Like revolution, castration destroys and erases the meaning of the previously existing things, it de-activates the world, suspending it and making it material. This leads to melancholy that threatens with depression and impotence (“The River Potudan’”), a state that is always balancing on the edge of aphanisis. However, castration is also what constitutes desire and will for the future, it supplies subjects for the building of the new world on the ruins of the old one, it shapes the cavity for its future naming by esoteric Ur-signifiers, these castrating names-of-the-father (“Chevengur”, “Dzhan”, etc.). All of this takes place in literature, under the supervision of the “eunuch of the soul” and is therefore responsible for working through the castration complex, of

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castration as a fantasy. But is this eunuch such a good guardian after all? Cannot the force of a literary work spill over into reality? None of this is certain. And this lack of certainly is at the root of Platonov’s (and his critics’) perpetual worry that depression and toska (melancholia) described in his texts might contaminate the readers. For Platonov, literary works are machines. And just like the machines made of metal, they do not always work; reverse movement might break them, wear them out before their time, etc. And although the initial revolutionary impulse already brought these machines into motion, their task now is to keep up the rhythm, pushing off from the fantasy of the living death.

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Dialectic is a doctrine of the levels of being understood as levels of negativity. It used to explain this negativity through either a theory of a substance, a hyperbeing larger than the world, or a theory of a free subject actively negating a substance that remains alien to him/her. Aesthetic figured in this dialectic only as a moment. In the present book I attempt to trace a properly aesthetical dialectic, more precisely a negative dialectic. I understand aesthetic as a privileged sphere of dialectic, a reserve of a sort, where the negative and the activity of negativity can persist for a long time. We have seen how art is obsessed with the symbolic protection from nature, with abhorrence from it, as well as with the dissolution and devastation of itself: it becomes an explosion of itself, of its imaginative and symbolical matter. The result is a being sui generis: a subtractive being, a minus-being. One can see this negative art in a Platonic way, as a moment in the progress of knowledge, where we have already surpassed the object, but have not yet captured the Idea. Or, one can see this art as a self-sufficient existence of what had been negated and which only then can finally exist for itself. This said, art exists in this book as a complex phenomenon: it includes a reaction on itself. This includes a paradoxical symbolic efficiency of what is not, and the elabotration of the technique of bypassing and evading this dangerous spectral zone. This also includes an eschatological nihilism ready to destroy the world in for a cheap effect, and a recoil from this nihilism into festishization of a thing merely existing. One hypothesis of this book is that modernism and the mass art of apocalyptical attractions grow from the same root, and that they are not as sharply opposed as it might seem. Their difference is the internal dissociation of the negation. To a temptation to explode everything (remaining in safety) responds an attempt to delay the explosion and to trace the trajectories of fragments, in slow motion. However, modernism remains insufficient as long as, behind the melancholic

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results of negatiove activity, we do not discern the Bacchic frenzy of destruction, which can only be of a mass/choral nature. Modernism is also insufficient as long as, behind the reflection and irony, we do not discern the explosions of carnival laughter: of this physiological analogon to the word “no.” Today, substantive reality gets thin under the pressure of the subject. It gets “weak” and thus susceptible to aesthetic gaze. The subject on its part, keeps discovering, in surprise, his/her own destructive tendencies, and does not know what to do with them. The aestheticization of behavior and of self-perception gives him-her at least some chance to coexist, inside himself/herself, with what is potentially obscene and nefarious. And conversely, in the world of tolerance and the heightened ethical sensitivity, the very enunciation of “no” and, especially, “no-no” requires a certain virtuosity and coquetry. (This is why the next volume of my dialectical studies will be devoted to ethics.) Set against the heavy, pompous, and alienated, official art of Soviet Union, my generation in Russia chose modernism: both as a trajectory of constant invention and self-invention (that would guarantee being unlike the others) and as a way to look more “Westernized,” that is, not naively. But, this Westernized orientation meant a profession of negativity if not nihilism. The “West,” which has become global, combines the aesthetical aggression in everyday life and mass culture, and a fixation on disasters, with a culture of heightened vulnerability and sentimentality. What would be the alternative? A new classicism like the one proposed in the USSR by Mikhail Livshitz? Or, as I suggest here, we can return not as far back, but to the edge of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, the origin of Modernism: to look there for ways of synthesizing the classical imagery with the all-negating self-affirmation of free spirit via fantasy. And, I suggest to look there for the ways of synthesis between mass and expert art, between the passivity and the activity of the aesthetic perception, in an unseen and self-destructive Gesamtkunstwerk—a synthesis for which there are today some fantastic technological possibilities.

Notes Introduction 1

2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

See James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in the 1980s American Cinema (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009); Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence. Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester and Washington, DC: O Books, 2009). One can recall Greenberg’s famous interpretation of the avant-garde as an art that self-encloses and specializes on its own material. See Clement Greenberg, “AvantGarde and Kitsch,” http://sites.uci.edu/form/files/2015/01/Greenberg-ClementAvant-Garde-and-Kitsch-copy.pdf See, for instance Nadezhda Man’kovskaia, Parizh so zmeiiami (Vvedenie v estetiku postmodernizma) (Moscow: IFRAN, 1994), 176–8. Theoreticians of the postmodern often rely on the works of Baudrillard, for example: Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). It gives a rather somber portrait of contemporaneity. See Foster Hal et al., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016). Francis Ponge on Giacometti in Foster et al., Art since 1900, 485. Karl Rozenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition, edited by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (London: Bloomsbury UK, 2015). Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol.” Art in America, Vol. 75, No. 5, 1987: 129–36. See for instance René Girard, The Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (New York: Continuum, 1997), 135. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 110. Mikhail Lifshitz, “Why I Am Not a Modernist,” https://garagemca.org/en/ exhibition/i-if-our-soup-can-could-speak-mikhail-lifshitz-and-the-soviet-sixties-i/ materials/pochemu-ya-ne-modernist-why-i-am-not-a-modernist Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art. Historical Materialism Book Series, vol. 158 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 47. Ibid., 78.

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15 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 497–8, 503. Žižek does not directly claim that the object itself is a negative operator (this is my interpretation). However, he does specify that unlike Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation distills the spirit and turns it into a pure form, for Freud this higher negation, on the contrary, expresses itself in attachment to the object. 16 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 132. 17 Dina Khapaeva, Goticheskoe obshestvo (Moscow: Novoe literatunoe obozrenie, 2007). 18 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. I, trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3. 19 “Je ne sais quoi” is a typical for the eighteenth-century expression of the beautiful as something that is accessible to us only intuitively. In Rousseau we find it in his Confessions: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Les Confessions,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 114. 20 Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1891), 55–65, cit. 61. 21 And it will resurface/ it resurfaces again and again, especially in French tradition: in Deleuze, in Rancière, and earlier (but treaded more seriously) in Merleau-Ponty. 22 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Remarque sur Adorno et le jazz.” L’animal, Vol. 19–20: 203–9. 23 Osip Mandelstam, “Slovo i kultura,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v trekh tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2009), 49–54, cit. p. 51. 24 Aleksandr Blok, “Oh, How Desperately I Want to Live…,” trans. Andrew Wachtel, Ilya Kutik, and Michael Denner, https://ruverses.com/alexander-blok/oh-howdesperately-i-want-to-live/326/ 25 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110. 26 Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. St. Halliwell, in Aristotle, Poetics, Longinus, On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–142, 1448b5–10, 37. 27 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), 75–91. 28 Jacopo Pontormo, Visitazione di Carmignano (1528–1530). Propositura dei Santi Michele e Francesco, Carmignano, http://www.comune.carmignano.po.it/turismo/? act=i&fid=5760&id=20130205100023684 29 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533). The National Gallery, London, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-theambassadors 30 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 17–81, cit. p. 41.

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31 I use the word “trance” here in its quotidian meaning, although I understand that from etymological point of view it is not innocent. “Trance,” trans—this word directs us to the philosophical notions of transcendence and transgression and, further, to metaphysics in its scholastic meaning of scientia transnaturalis. However, this is a false path, the path of abstract negation. In reality, “trance” is a state of meditation and hypnosis, harkening back to transire (“to go beyond or across,” “to transition”)—a term that is known since the fourteenth century. Its meaning lies not in leaving one world for another, but in entering a transitional, borderline state—you are not moving “beyond” things, but through them, inhabiting them as you go. The atmosphere becomes elastic: you are passing through each event as through the sphincter of history. 32 Vladimir Bibikhin, Les (hyle) (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001), 85. 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 106. 34 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Ashby Willoughby (Oxford and New York: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 2005). 35 Pavel Tschernykh, Istoriko-etymologicheskii slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo iazyka v 2kh tomakh (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1999), t. 1, 358–9. 36 On the existential fragility of art see Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 37 Nicholas of Cusa and Sermo CCXLI1I, “Tota pulchra es, amica mea et macula no est in re,” in Cusanus: Ästhetik und Theologie, ed. Michael Eckert and Harald Schwaetzer (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), 129–46. 38 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 39 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 22: “A project is the subjective germ of a developing object. A perfect project should be simultaneously entirely subjective and entirely objective—an indivisible and living individual. As to its origin, it should be entirely subjective, original, and possible only in this mind; as to its character, it should be entirely objective, physical, and morally necessary. The sense for projects—projects could be called fragments from the future [Fragmente aus der Zukunft]—differs from the sense for fragments from the past only in direction, progres—sive in the former and regressive in the latter. What matters is the ability to simultaneously idealize and realize things immediately, to complete them and carry them out partly within oneself. Since the word ‘transcendental’ refers precisely to the connection and separation of the ideal and the real, one could easily say that the sense for fragments and projects is the transcendental part of the historical spirit.” (Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 18–93 cit. on 20–1).

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40 Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 1183–246 (cit. on 1199–200). 41 Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 53. 42 Ibid., 2. 43 Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 44 Ibid., 212–13. 45 Ibid., 180. 46 As Aristotle writes in “Poetics”: “… and equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects. no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated…The explanation of this is thatcause of this too is that understanding (mathesis) gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but likewise to others too …” (1448b10–15, 39). 47 See, for example, Ian Mukařovský, Issledovaniia po estetike i teorii iskusstva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 55; Utitz, Emil, Grundlegungen der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft, (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1914–1920), Bd. 1–2. 48 Alain Badiou, The Century (New York: Polity 2007), 55. Jacques Rancière, on his part, vigorously denies the role of negativity in the definition of avant-garde. Instead, he views it through the framework of the “sensible.” See in particular, Jacques Ranciere—Chto delat /// You Can’t Anticipate Explosions, https:// chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-57/you-cant-anticipate-explosions/, where I had a chance to discuss this question with him. I think that the term “sensible,” or “sensuous,” is a heavy metaphysical term, which historically also had negative connotations, since it was historically conceived in correlation with the ideal, formal, or suprasensible. To evoke it today, after a philosophical revolution that had put the very division into question, and with regard to a movement that has in a large part emphasized formal experiment and the institutions of art, bears a risk of aesthetic hedonism. 49 John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (New York and London: Verso, 2015). 50 Agamben, Man without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 51 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (Columbia University Press 1984); Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXème siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1974). The English translation is abridged, it comprises only a half of the French one. 52 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 28. 53 Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 606ab, 289–90. 54 Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (Los Angeles: University of California, 1984); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University, 1984). 55 Plato, Republic, 602c, 285.

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56 Aristotle, “Poetics,” trans. St. Halliwell, in: Aristotle, Poetics, Longinus, On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 57 Aristotle, “Poetics,” 65 (1452a2025). 58 Pseudo-Longinus, “On the Sublime,” trans. Hamilton Fyfe, in Aristotle, Poetics, Longinus, On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style. 59 Plato, Parmenides (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). 60 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 47ff; see also Mladen Dolar, In “Parmenidem parvi commentarii.” HELIOS, Vol. 31, No. 1–2, 2004: 62–98. 61 Hegel, Aesthetics, 347. 62 Ibid., 354. 63 Ibid., 802–4. 64 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October, Vol. 31, Winter, 1984: 16–32. 65 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 66 Charles Baudelaire, “Taste for Nothingness,” in Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. Baudelaire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–9. 67 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18–19. 68 Ibid., 39–40. 69 Ibid., 21. 70 Ibid., 32–3. 71 Jean-Paul Sartre, Imaginary. A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2010), 24, 48. 72 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmaticism and Criticism,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794–1796, ed. Schelling, trans. Marti (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980). 73 Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 54. 74 Ibid., 119. 75 Ibid., 130. 76 “The Roads of Freedom” is the title of Sartre’s series of four novels. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les chemins de la liberté (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–4). In English the title was erroneously translated as “Roads to Freedom.” Sartre’s idea is that humans find empty spaces of freedom in the generally deterministic world. 77 Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique, 327. Translation mine. 78 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancolia (New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1992). 79 Kristeva, Black Sun, 226. 80 Alexey Losev, “Dialektika Khudozhestvennoy Formy [Dialectic of Artistic Form],” in Forma. Styl. Vyrazhenie, ed. Losev (Moscow: Mysl, 1995), 45.

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81 Ibid., 145. 82 Alexey Losev, “Antichnyi Kosmos I Sovremennaya Nauka [Ancient Cosmos and contemporary science],” in Bytie, Imya, Kosmos, ed. Losev (Moscow: Mysl, 1993). 83 Losev, “Dialektika khudozhestvennoy formy,” 141. 84 “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernest Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 161. 85 On this classification, see Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. Ella Mary Edghill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 17a–20b; Aristotle, Categories, trans. Ella Mary Edghill (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2012), 11b–15a; A. M. S. Boethius, On Aristotle, On Interpretation, trans. Andrew Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 1–3; Artemy Magun, “De Negatione.” Stasis, Vol. 1, No. 1 2013: 6–41. 86 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 361–2 (II—266). 87 Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-mund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974), 233–40.

Chapter 1 1

Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman’,” trans. Daniel Gerould. The Drama Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Popular Entertainments, March, 1974: 77–85. 2 See Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3 Aristotle, “Poetics,” 37 (1448b), translation modified (AM). 4 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Epoch of Its Mechanical Reproduction. Third version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4 (1938–40), ed. Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 255. 5 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. 6 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Typography,” in Typography. Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Lacoue-Labarthe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43–139. 7 Aristotle explains the attraction of mimesis by the fact that it brings knowledge: “Poetics,” 37, 1448 b10. “We enjoy contemplating the most precise image of things whose actual sight is painful to us. … The explanation of this too is that understanding gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but likewise to others, too.” 8 Hegel, “Existence” [Dasein], Science of Logic, vol. 1, 83–125. 9 Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016), 56–8 (428a–429a).

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10 Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 196. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 155–62. 12 Historically, these terms were defined in many different ways. In the United States, beginning with Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” essay, avantgarde and modernism tended to be conflated. German Art History, on the contrary, tends to separate them: avant-garde is understood as an art of social protest (and rightfully so), something that most modernist art of formal experimentation has nothing to do with (Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde and Schulte-Lasse’s introduction to it [Peter Bürger, Theory of the AvantGarde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)] are particularly good examples of this line of thought.) I suggest that we distinguish between modernism and avant-garde: The former, as a tendency to absorb the world into a work of art, while the latter as its opposite—a rejection of the autonomy of art and desire to dissolve art in life. 13 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book, Spiritual Instrument,” in Poems and Prose Poems, trans. Jim Hanson (Fennville, MI: Jim Hanson, 2016), 119–25. 14 Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, ed. Celan, trans. John Felstiner (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 409–10. 15 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Epoch of its Mechanical Reproduction,” 283. 16 Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX (2011)—chtodelat.org. In this video, migrants agree to live in a cage in the Stedelijk Museum, thus to become objects of art, as a way to legally remain in the European Union. 17 “Bracketing” (German—Einklammerung, Greek—epokhē) is the most important operation of Husserl’s phenomenological method, part of his “phenomenological reduction.” It isolates the meaning of an object, regardless of its physical or objective nature. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (London: Routledge 2002). 18 Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 141–54. 19 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectics of Desire,” in The Ecrits, 233. 20 On disinterest in beauty, see Immanuel Kant Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91 (205), on the sublime, see ibid., 145 (261). On irrationalism in Kant’s aesthetics, see Umberto Eco, History of Beauty (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 264. 21 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 131, 133. 22 Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente, 3rd ed. (Milano: Garzanti, 2011), 101. The quote is absent in the English translation: Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992).

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23 Magritte René, La trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas une pipe] (1928–9), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, http://collections.lacma. org/node/239578 24 Sartre introduces the notion of “empty intention,” referring to a perception of a non-existent object. “The Knight and Death are reached through Dürer’s engraving but without positing them.” Sartre, Imaginary, 24; “In the hypnagogic image we have a primitive positing of consciousness that closely resembles our positing when faced with Dürer’s engraving: on the one hand, I see Death, on the other, the Death I see does not exist.” Ibid., 49. 25 “The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.” Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 96 (211). 26 Walter Benjamin, “Einmal ist Keinmal,” in Illuminationen, ed. Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 297–8. 27 “[I]t is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a common—place that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” Selected Writings, vol. 2 (1927–34) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 511–12. On walking, Benjamin (unconsciously?) repeats Shklovsky’s characterization of defamiliarization: “Dance is walking that can be felt,” in Viktor Shklovsky, “The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Funks Grove, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 15, translation modified. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 28 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Epoch of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” 254–5. 29 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 231. 30 Ibid., 233. 31 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). 32 Jacques Lacan, Seminar X. Anxiety (London: Polity Press, 2016). 33 Ibid., 177. 34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 255–65. 35 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, Chapter X, 253. 36 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, Chapter XI, 102.

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37 Ibid., 108. 38 Ibid., 88–9. 39 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 243–90. 40 Ibid., 248–9. 41 Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961), 147–57. 42 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, 265. 43 Ibid., 249. 44 Cf. Nils Thorsen, Geniet (Copenhagen: Politiken Forlag, 2011); quoted from the Russian translation: Nils Thorsen and Lars von Trier, Melancholia Genia, trans. Y. Palehova (Moscow: Ripol-Classic, 2013), 99. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux 1981), 4. 46 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 73–90. 47 Ibid., 15. 48 Ibid., 16. 49 Joseph Conrad, Typhoon (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1950), 29; Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 8. 50 This is an oral phrase of Marcel Duchamp’s; Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 111. Krauss refers to Alain Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 51 Olga Meerson, “Svobodnaia veshch’”: Poetika neostranenie u Andreia Platonova (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2001). 52 Andrey Platonov, Chevengur, trans. Anthony Olcott (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978), 80–1. 53 Pieter Bruegel de Oude, De val van Icarus (1588), Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles, http://www.opac-fabritius.be/fr/F_database.htm; Bruegel de Oude, De Bekering van Paulus / De Bekering van Saulus (1567), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien, http://www.khm.at/ 54 Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, 173, for an imprecise translation; see also Meerson, Svobodnaya Vesch, 47. 55 Toni Morrison, Songs of Solomon (New York: Vintage Books, 2007 [1977]). 56 Ibid., 237. 57 Pseudo-Longinus, “On the Sublime,” 22, 239. 58 Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 145–60. 59 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art аs Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 6. 60 Roman Jakobson, “What Is Poetry?” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010), 597–609. 61 Foster et al., Art since 1900, 35.

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62 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 36. 63 Alain Badiou, The Century (London: Polity, 2007), 56. 64 Pseudo-Longuinus, “On the Sublime,” Cg. 10, 205. 65 Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Medvedev (see particularly 69–71) emphasizes the negative work of ousting meaning which precedes, according to him, any formal analysis. 66 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 67 The story is translated into English as “Light Breathing”: Ivan Bunin, “Light Breathing,” in Light Breathing and Other Stories, (Moscow: Raduga, 2001); Vygotsky, Psychology of Art, 145–65. 68 In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida notes that “figuration and the socalled places (topoi) of rhetoric constitute the very concern of apophatic procedures.” Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” in Languages of the Unsayable. The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, trans. Ken Frieden (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 1996), 27. 69 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Victoriously from Beautiful Suicide Having Fled …,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), 46–7. 70 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Réponses à Jules Huret, dans l’Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire,” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 869; the English translation is cited from On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, ed. Umberto Eco, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Seeker and Warburg, 2004), 349–50. 71 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, 134. 72 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 2008), 114–15. 73 Freud, “Fetishism.” 74 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. D. Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 46. 75 Hegel, “Symbolism Proper,” in Aesthetics, 347–56. 76 Jacques Lacan, “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits, 413–41., cit. 422 [507]. 77 Foster et al., Art since 1900, 101. 78 Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Free Vintage Classics, 1999),140; Roman Jakobson, “Noveishaya russkaya poeziya,” in Texte der Russischen Formalisten, vol. 2, ed. Wold-Dieter Stempel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), 3–32. 79 Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky, The Final Circle of Paradise (New York: Mass Market, 1976), the original title is “Khishnye Veschi Veka,” “The Predatory Things of our Age.”

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80 Andrey Belyi, Rhythm kak dialektika i mednyi vsadnik (Rhythm as Dialectic and the Bronze Horseman) (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929), 22. 81 Ibid., 46. 82 Vygotsky, Psychology of Art, 218 83 According to Irina Staf, the cobla dissoluta involved six-and-a-half stanzas of six lines each with rhymes only between stanzas. Rhymes, however, were replaced by words with rare sounds that were paired by assonance and repeated in a fixed order. Irina Staf, “Liubov’ v lirike trubadurov,” in Slovar’ srednevekovoi kul’tury, ed. Aron Gurevich (Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2003), 525. See Francesca Manzari, De la cobla à la stanza, du trobar clus à Éros mélancolique Lecture comparée de Doutz brais e critz et de la canzone dottrinale Revue Silène. Centre de recherches en littérature et poétique comparées de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, 2015, http:// www.revue-silene.comf/index.php?sp=comm&comm_id=145 84 Arnaut Daniel, “On a nice, gleeful and happy melody,” http://www.trobar.org/ troubadours/arnaut_daniel/arnaut_daniel_04.php (accessed January 18, 2018). 85 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 209 (5:333). 86 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 134. 87 George Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 153. 88 George Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 92. 89 Ibid., 37. 90 Aleksandr Kozintsev, Chelovek i smekh (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2007), 33; this book has been translated as Alexander Kozintsev, The Mirror of Laughter, trans. Richard Martin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 91 Ibid., 206–22. 92 Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, ed. Leopold SacherMasoch and Gilles Deleuze (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Compare to Bergson: “Sometimes, on the contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the method of humour. Humour, thus denned, is the counterpart of irony. Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilst humour partakes of the scientific. Irony is emphasised the higher we allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to be: thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of high-pressure eloquence. On the other hand, humour is the more emphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in order to set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference.” Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 127. 93 Ibid., 149–50.

244 94 95 96 97 98 99

Notes

Ibid., 10–13. Ibid., 25 Ibid., 104. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 49. Alenka Zupançiç, The Odd One in: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 114. 100 Bergson, Laughter, 189. 101 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010). See Freud’s later meditations on the “shadow” that the object casts on the ego of melancholic: Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 243–58. 102 Bergson, Laughter, 45. 103 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 134–5. 104 Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1448b, 39. 105 Ibid., 1449b25, 46. 106 Aristotle, Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1342a15, 672. 107 Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 136. 108 Gothold Efraim Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy (London: Clowes, 1878), 407. The Dramatic Works of G. E. Lessing (gutenberg.org). 401–25. 109 Johann-Wilhelm Goethe, Nachlese zur Aristoteles’ Poetik. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Berliner Ausgabe. Herausgegeben von Siegfried Seidel (Berlin: Aufbau, 1960 ff), Bd. 18, 118–25. 110 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. C. Reeves (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2018), 1382a–1383b, 195–8. 111 Gothold Efraim Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, 407. 112 “Poetics,” 1451b5, 58. 113 Hölderlin, Friedrich, “Remarks on Oedipus,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. T. Pfau (Albany: SUNY Press: 1988), pp. 101–8, Cit. p. 107. 114 Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993). 115 Ibid., Part 6, 215–32. 116 Friedrich Schiller, Works of Friedrich Schiller in Eight Volumes, vol. 8 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1902), 346–67, cit. 346. 117 René Girard, The Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 118 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” in Werke, Briefe, Dokumente, (München: Winkler, 1990), 62.

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119 “All-capable incapable, first in the city, citiless.” Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 69–70 (lines 360 and 370); see Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd ed., trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 169–70. 120 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Commentary on the Book of Sentences, 1, 31, 2; cited in On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, ed. Umberto Eco, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Seeker and Warburg, 2004), 132–3. 121 Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatem, 12.28–9; cited in The “Things of Greater Importance.” Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art, trans. Conrad Rudolph (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 283. 122 Eco, On Beauty, 330. 123 Ibid., 336–7. 124 See Bojana Kunst’s description of this performance in Bojana Kunst, “Trouble with Temporality. Micropolitics of Performance,” Stedelijk Studies. No. 3 (2015), http:// www.stedelijkstudies.com/beheer/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Stedelijk-­Studies_ The-Trouble-with-Temporality_PDF.pdf 125 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 109–16. 126 Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger,” trans. Jerolf Wikoff, New German Critique. No. 17 (1979): 123. 127 Alexei Yurchak, “Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Nightlife,” in Consuming Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 84. 128 Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. and trans. Edward Maccurdy (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), 76. 129 Ibid., 73. 130 “Leonardo de Vinci writes: ‘Nothingness has no middle, and its boundaries are nothingness.’—‘Among the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of nothingness is the greatest.’” Martin Heidegger, “The Question of Being: Letter to Ernst Jünger ‘Concernign’ The Line (1955),” in Philosophical and Political Writings, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 146. 131 Mariia Chernysheva, Mimesis v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve ot grecheskoi klassiki do frantsuzskogo siurrealizma (St. Petersburg: Sankt–Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2013), 100. 132 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 801. 133 Benjamin (following Jacques Rivière) notes that, in Baudelaire, some words “collapse” from “subterranean shocks,” they sag down, look awkward in the

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context of this verse, and lend it a certain prosaism. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 164; Hölderlin, “Die Bedeutung der Tragödien,” in Werke. Briefe. Dokumente (München: Winkler, 1990), 534. 134 Mikhail Arkadiev, “Zagadka nezvuchashchei noty v 7–i sonate Skriabina,” ARKDV (blog), Livejournal, August 19, 2015, http://arkdv.livejournal.com/34079.html. See also Arkadiev, “V nachale byl ritm,” Mikhail Arkad’ev (Blog), Snob, May 8, 2015, https://snob.ru/profile/23839/blog/96088. 135 Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science [Anti–Dühring], trans. Emile Burns (New York: International Publishers, 1894), 155–6. 136 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 137 Hegel, Aesthetics, 222–3. 138 See Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1453a, 72. 139 Shane Weiler, Modernism and Nihilism (New York, London: Palgrave, 2011), 93. 140 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematizm. Mir kak Bespredmetnost [Suprematism. The World as Objectlessness], vol. 3 (Moscow: Gilea, 1998), 38. Translation mine—AM. 141 Weiler, Modernism and Nihilism, 93. 142 Conversation of Christian Zervos with Pablo Picasso, cited in: Russell Ferguson, “The Show Is Over,” in Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950, eds. K. Brougher, R. Ferguson, and D. Gamboni (Munich, London and New York: DelMonico, Prestel, 2013), 105‒6 (105‒74). 143 Foster et al., Art since 1900, 312–13. 144 Ferguson, “The Show is Over,” 105. 145 Jean Fautrier, “Parallèles sur l’informel.” Blätter + Bilder, No. 1 (March–April, 1959): 54–6. 146 Yves Klein, cited in: Brougher, Ferguson, and Gamboni, Damage Control, 56. 147 Gustav Metzger, Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art (1960, remade 2004, 2015), Tate, London, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ metzger-recreation-of-first-public-demonstration-of-auto-destructive-art-t12156 (accessed February 20, 2018). 148 Brougher, Ferguson, and Gamboni, Damage Control, 96. 149 Joe Sola, “A Short Film about Looking” (2010), http://www.joesola.info/a-shortfilm-about-looking (accessed January 18, 2018). 150 Maire Jaanus Kurrik, Literature and Negation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 151 Freud, “Negation,” in Standard Edition, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 235–9. 152 Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho,” in Nohow On (London: Calder Publications Ltd, 1992), 101–28.

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153 Paul Celan, “Weggebeizt,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 31. 154 Paul Celan, “Todesfuge,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 39. 155 On German hymnal poetry in relation to acclamation, Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 232–7; on hymns see also Vladimir Bibikhin, Grammatika Poezii (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishers, 2009), 24–60. Also see my article, “Conspiracy of Hymn,” in Thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2023), 157–74. 156 See more on this, in Maud Meyzaud, “Une langue révolutionnaire. Paul Celan lit Büchner,” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. La césure et l’impossible, ed. Jacob Rogozinski (Paris: Lignes, 2010), 111–32. 157 Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 2, 39. 158 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude, rev. George Gibian (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 362. 159 Celan, “Tübingen, Jänner,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, 226. 160 Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, 217; Ibid., 233. 161 Beckett, “Worstward Ho,” 106; Ibid., 122, 127. 162 On Democritus’ “Den,” see Mladen Dolar, “Tyche, Clinamen, Den.” Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2013: 223–39. 163 Beckett, “Texts for Nothing,” in Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 100. 164 Werner Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan’s Poetry.” Yale French Studies, No. 69, 1985: 276–311. 165 Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion,” 298–9. 166 Ibid., 300. 167 Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 413; Cf. Pajari Räsänen, Counter-figures (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2007). 168 Joseph Brodsky, “The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn,” in Collected Poems in English, 1972–1999, trans. Alan Myers with Joseph Brodsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 259–62. 169 Hölderlin, “Reflexion,” in Werke, Briefe, Dokumente, 501–4. 170 Boris Porshnev, O Nachale chelovecheskoy istorii (St. Petersburg: Aletheia, 2007). 171 Boris Porshnev, Scholar’s Diary, Russian State Library, Department of Manuscripts, Fund 684, K 27, Unit 17, Sheet 20.2. 172 Quoted in Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion,” 281, 282. 173 Ibid., 288. 174 Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 22–3, 104–5. 175 Ibid., 75.

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176 Celan, “Mandorla,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, 244; Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 172. 177 Celan, “Grosse, gluhende Wölbung,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 2, 97. 178 Celan, “The Meridian,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, ed. Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 407. 179 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 180 Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art (Amsterdam: Brill, 2018). 181 Platonov, Chevengur, 6. 182 Osip Mandelstam, “The Equinox,” trans. Stephen Dodson, http://languagehat. com/in-the-woods-are-orioles/ (accessed January 18, 2018); Osip Mandelstam, “Ravnodenstvie” (“Est’ ivolgi v lesakh”), in Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1, 59. 183 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre trans. A. Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). 184 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 271–2. 185 Ibid., 410 n. 186 Ibid., 410–11. 187 Ibid., 379. 188 Ibid., 308. 189 Ibid., 28. 190 Platonov, Foundation Pit, trans. Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith (London, Harvill, 1996). 191 Cf. my article, Artemy Magun, “The Intellectual Heritage of the 1917 Revolution: Reflection and Negativity,” Constellations, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2017: 580–93. 192 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 37. 193 Johannes Scotus Eriugena, De Divisione Naturae, cited in Eco, On Beauty, 85. 194 Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37‒54. 195 Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art. 196 Bunin, “Light Breathing.” 197 Vygotsky agrees with Nikolay Chuzhak on this pragmatic purpose of art. 198 Vygotsky, “Tragediia o Gamlete, printse Datskom U. Shekspira,” in Psikhologiia iskusstva, 339–498, 425. My translation—A.M. 199 Vygotsky, Psychology of Art, 215. 200 Platonov, Foundation Pit, 116. 201 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53. 202 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard edition, vol. 18: 1–65; see also Wolfgang Iser, “The Play of the Text,” in Languages of the Unsayable, ed. W. Iser and

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S. Budick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 325–39, who maintains that the negativity of art is a necessary condition of providing a neutral and open space for play. 203 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, par. 28, 144. Translation modified in accordance with Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. 204 Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy” (1763), in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–70 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203–42, on resistance in Kant see Françoise Proust, De la résistance (Paris: Cerf, 1997). 205 Friedrich Schiller, Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, ed. Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker, trans. Jane V. Curan (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 123–70. 206 Heidegger, “On the Question of Being,” Pathmarks (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 291–21.

Chapter 2 See in particular the letter to Nikolay Liubimov, the co-editor of Brothers Karamazov, from May 10, 1879. Dostoevsky, Sobranie Sochineniy v 15 tomakh vol. 15 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1989), 575, and everywhere in the Demons. 2 Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI (1927–1931), ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 24 vol., 1953–1974), 177–94. 3 Sartre, Imaginary, 183. 4 Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Lydia Davis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 300–44., quot. 300. 5 Ibid., 320–1. 6 “Cruel talent” is a characteristic given to Dostoevsky by Nikolay Mikhailovsky who accuses him, in a review of the posthumous collected works, of a measureless sadistic activity. Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, Dostoevsky: A Cruel Talent, trans. Spencer Cadmus (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978). 7 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 46–7; Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Zapiski iz podpolya,” Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 5 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1973), 128–9. 8 See Nancy Ruttenburg, Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) for the argument that the space of debasement and transgression, in Dostoevsky, equalizes and communalizes the subjects in a democratic way. 9 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious. 10 Sergey Bulgakov, “Russkaya Tragedia,” Russkaya Mysl, 1914, book IV, 1–26. 1

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11 See Olga Meerson, Dostoevsky’s Taboos (Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1998). 12 Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 92. 13 Ibid., 9, 90. 14 Ibid., 90. 15 Simona Forti, The New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 16 Sergey Bulgakov, “Russkaya Tragedia”, in Russkaya Mysl, 1914, book IV, 1–26. 17 Fyodor Dostoevsky, “White Nights,” in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–56, quot. 27; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy vol. 2 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1972), 102–41, quot. 119. 18 Ksana Blank, Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 73–5. 19 Artemy Magun, Negative Revolution (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 20 Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Double,” in The Double and the Gambler, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), ch.4, 48; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy vol. 1 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1972), 109–229, quot. 135. 21 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 2, 1877–1881, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 1183–6; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy vol. 26 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1984), 65–7. 22 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (London: Polity, 1991), 86. 23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York and London: Continuum, 2005). 24 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government and The Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 175. 25 See on this, Artemy Magun, Negative Revolution. 26 Nathalie Heinich, “L’art du scandale. Indignation esthétique et sociologie des valeurs”, Politix 2005/3 (n° 71), 121–36. 27 Jonathan Platt, “Queer Militancy in Post-Soviet Russia,” in The Sex of the Oppressed, ed. Nikolay Oleinkov and Grey Violet (New York: FreeMarxistPress, 2016). 28 http://users.erols.com/kennrice/lego-kz.htm 29 http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt_eng.php?id=t033 30 https://labiennale.art.pl/en/wystawy/repetition/ 31 https://www.kfda.be/en/program/episode-iii—enjoy-poverty-2 32 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 56. 33 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol.6 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1975), 6. 34 Ibid., 6; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 6, p. 7.

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35 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 675; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 10 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1974), 514. 36 Adorno, Negative Dialectics; Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing. 37 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 230; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 23 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1981), 147. 38 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 261; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 14 (Leningrad: Pushklinsky Dom, 1976), 238. 39 Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience, 10; Citing Jean-Luc Marion, “Le Mal en personne,” in Prolégomènes à la Charité (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 11–43. 40 Sergey Bulgakov, “Russkaya Tragedia,” in Russkaya Mysl, 1914, book IV, 1–26, quot. 13. 41 Avital Ronell, The Test Drive, 14. 42 Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, vol. 1, 1873–1876, 655; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 21, 36–7. 43 James Mclachlan, “Mystic Terror and Metaphysicall Rebels: Active Evil and Active Love in Schelling and Dostoevsky,” in The Problem of Evil: The New Philosophical Directions, ed. Benjamin McCraw and Robert Arp (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 141–60. 44 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1997). 45 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 239; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 14 (Leningrad: Pushkinsky Dom, 1976), 217. 46 Ibid., 241; Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy, vol. 14, 220. 47 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb.

Chapter 3 1 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. 2 Mikhail Lifshitz, Pochemu ia ne modernist, 40–57 (Why Am I Not a Modernist), https://garagemca.org/en/exhibition/i-if-our-soup-can-could-speak-mikhaillifshitz-and-the-soviet-sixties-i/materials/pochemu-ya-ne-modernist-why-i-amnot-a-modernist 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel and The Human Spirit. A Translation of the Iena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6) with Commentary, trans. L. Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 86. 4 Ibid., 86–7.

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

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22

Notes See Dennis Denisoff, “Decadence and Aestheticism,” in Cambridge Companion to Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Nikolai Minsky, Pri svete sovesti: Mysli i mechty o tseli zhizni [In The Light of Conscience: Thoughts and Dreams about the Purpose of Life] (Saint-Petersburg: Iu.N. Erlikh, 1897), 216. Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick (ed.), The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). Birgit Beumers (ed.), Russia’s new fin de siècle. Contemporary Culture between Past and Present (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2013) Michael Gibson, Symbolism (Koln and London: Taschen, 1995), 8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004). Jean Moréas, “Le symbolisme.” Le Figaro, le samedi 18, septembre 1886. Supplément littéraire: 1–2. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. John Malmstad and Robert Maguire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018 [1913–1914]). James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,” 251–83. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 161–99. Cit. 188. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (London: Verso, 2010). Ibid., 14. In Russia, the main critics of symbolism were the futurists, in Italy, also the futurists, and in France, the cubists. On this subject, see Boris Gasparov’s lecture at the Smolny Institute of StPetersburg State University from April 2006 (Unfortunately, the results of B.M. Gasparov’s work on Socialist Realism have not yet been published). To cite Badiou’s own words: “ … I will suggest that the subject of Parsifal is the question as to whether a modern ceremony is possible. The subject is the question of ceremony, and this question is intrinsic to Parsifal. It is distinct from the question of religion. Why? Because a ceremony can be said to have a collectivity’s or even a community’s mode of self-representation, but transcendence is not an essential condition of it. In fact, we could say that the question posed by Parsifal is whether a ceremony without transcendence is possible.” (Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 147) See also the discussion of contemporary ritual performances by Genesis P-Orridge, Bob Flanagan, Ron Athey, and ORLAN in Dawn Perlmutter, “The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder.” Anthropoetics, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1999/2000, http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0502/blood/ Pierre-Louis Mathieu, La génération symboliste (Geneva: Skira, 1990), 9.

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23 Gabriel-Albert Aurier, “Le Symbolisme en Peinture: Paul Gauguin.” Mercure de France, Vol. 2, No. 15, 1891: 155–65; Natal’ia Man’kovskaia, Esteticheskoe kredo frantsuzskogo simvolizma [Aesthethic Credo of French Symbolism] // Estetika: Vchera. Segodnia. Vsegda [Aesthetics: Yesterday. Today. Always]. Issue 5 (Moscow: IF RAN, 2012), 20–39. 24 Maurice Denis, Théories du symbolisme et de Gaugin vers un nouvel order classique (Paris: L. Rouart et J. Watlin, 1920). 25 Jan Cavanaugh, Out Looking in. Early Modern Polish Art, 1890–1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 16–17. 26 Denis, Théories du symbolisme. 27 Sharon Hirsh, “Symbolist Art and Literature.” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2, 1985: 95–7. 28 Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 148. 29 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (New York: Penguin, 1998), 47. 30 Friedrich W.J Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. D.W. Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1989), 46. 31 Moréas, Le symbolisme. 32 Reinhold Heller, “Concerning Symbolism and the Structure of Surface.” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2, 1985: 146–53. 33 Reinhold Heller, Concerning Symbolism and the Structure of Surface, Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2, (Summer, 1985), 146–53. 34 Michael Gibson, Symbolism (Koln; London: Taschen. 1995), 45. 35 Gérard Conio, L’art contre les masses: esthétiques et idéologies de la modernité (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2003), 43–65. 36 Hegel, Aesthetics, 299–426. 37 Stéphane Mallarmé, Prose et Vers (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977), 116–18 38 Hegel, Aesthetics, 354. 39 Ibid. 40 Umberto Eco, On Literature (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 153. 41 Ibid., 160. 42 Mathieu, La géneration symboliste, 22. 43 Philippe Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence. Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 15. 44 Michael Gibson, Symbolism (Köln; London: Taschen, 1995), 17. 45 See, for example, Georges Lacombe, La Mer jaune, Camaret (1892). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest, https://curiator.com/art/georges-lacombe/la-mer-jaune-camaret 46 George Frederic Watts, Sower of the Systems (1902). Watts Gallery Collection, Guildford (UK), http://www.wattsgallery.org.uk

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47 Osip Mandelshtam, “Mandelshtam’s Acmeist Manifesto.” Trans. Clarence Brown. The Russian Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1965: 46–51, Cit. 50. 48 Korney Chukovsky, “Pshibyshevskii o simvole” [Pshibyshevskii on Symbol], in Vesi [Libra] 11, 1904, http://www.chukfamily.ru/kornei/prosa/kritika/pshibyshevskij-osim-vole. 49 Alexander Blok, “A Puppet Show,” in Aleksandr Blok’s Trilogy of Lyric Dramas, ed. and trans. Timothy C. Westphalen (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19–33. 50 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 111. 51 Martin Heidegger, Poetry. Language. Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2001). 52 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. 53 Viktor Pelevin, S.N.U.F.F, trans. Andrew Bromfield (London: Gollancz, 2016). 54 Jacek Malczewski, Melancholia (1890–94). Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu, Poznan, http://www.mnp.art.pl/en/ 55 “Malczewski’s figures with their firm volumes … might pass muster in a provincial art academy, and his perspective illusions are based on traditional training. But these components are stretched to breaking-point, with palpable figures now deying gravity in their collective tornado of passion and gloom and with the ledge of the window rushing from near to far at a vertiginous speed and tilt that create, with still-rational tools, a space with still-rational tools, a space for dreams and nightmares”. Robert Rosenblum, “Art in 1900: Twilight or Dawn?” in 1900: Art at Crossroads, ed. Robert Rosenblum, Mary Anne Stevens, and Ann Dumas (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000), 26–53, 36. 56 Cavanaugh, Out Looking in, 192. 57 Ibid., 194. 58 Amitai Etzioni, Demonstration Democracy (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970). 59 Gibson, Symbolism. 60 Niels Thorsen, Lars von Trier. Melancholia Genia, trans. Yana Palekhova (Moscow: Ripol Klassik, 2013), 427. 61 Ibid. 62 The film mocks the pretentiousness of natural science that often makes wrong predictions. 63 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Ecrits, 1–6. 64 See again, Chto Delat? Museum Songspiel, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9dYTCfK68Sk. 65 The theme of a ruined celebration is very important for von Trier’s work overall. For instance, it has found a brilliant realization in his script that Tomas Vinterberg used for his film, The Celebration (1998). The film’s protagonist successfully ruins the celebration of his patriarch-like father’s birthday with his revolutionary and provocative actions.

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Chapter 4 1

Cf. Artemy Magun, The Intellectual Heritage of the 1917 Revolution: Reflection and Negativity, Constellations, vol. 24, 4, 580–593. 2 Cited in Georges Gusdorf, Fondements du Savoir Romantique (Paris: Pavot, 1982), 371. 3 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 132. 4 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 355–63. 5 Jules Michelet, Historical View of the French Revolution from Its Earliest Indications to the Flight of the King in 1791, trans. C. Cocks, B. L. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), 71. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Ibid., 23–4. 8 Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, vol. II (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), 16. 9 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 88–98. 10 Infants (the etymology of which term points their inability to speak) cry so long and inconsolably for the exact same reason. 11 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 12 Cited in The French Revolution: A Document Collection, ed. Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 261. 13 Michelet, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 3, 607; Cited in Rancière, The Names of History, 54. 14 Aleksei Gastev, “My posiagnuli,” in Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia liteatura, 1971), 138. 15 Gastev, “Zheleznye pul’sy,” in Poeziia rabochego udara, 148. 16 Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–14. 17 Rancière, The Names of History, 52–4. 18 Scholars and translators have long debated how to translate the Russian toska. As Vladimir Nabokov has noted, “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, a Novel in Verse, vol. 2, Alexander Pushkin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 141. With this in mind, Platonov translator Robert Chandler proposes that toska be

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introduced into English by analogy with ennui, a practice that has been adopted in this translation. Robert Chandler, “A Word about Platonov,” in Platonov, The Portable Platonov: Andrey Platonov, 1899–1999, Glas: New Russian Writing, vol. 20, eds. Natasha Perova and Joanne Turnbull (Moscow: Glas, 1999), 11. See Jonathan Flatley’s elucidation of the word in Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 159–60. 19 Artemy Magun, Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and Its Fate after the Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 20 Ibid., 208–9. 21 “His main tool was inversion; and as he wrote in a totally inverted, highly inected language, he was able to put an equals sign between ‘language’ and ‘inversion.’ ‘Version’—the normal word order—came more and more to play a service role.” Joseph Brodsky, “Catastrophes in the Air,” in Less than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987), 289.As Denis Akhapkin correctly noted (in a spoken remark at a seminar on “The Critique of the Social Sciences” on December 16, 2009), this remark of Brodsky’s is not meant to be understood in the literal, linguistic sense, because the inversion of words in a sentence is not among Platonov’s most characteristic devices. 22 Aleksandr Gurvich, “Andrei Platonov,” in Andrei Platonov. Vospominaniia sovremennikov. Materialy k biografii, ed. Natalya Kornienko (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1994), 358–413. 23 From a letter from Platonov to his wife: Platonov, “13 fevralia 1927 g., Tambov,” in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova, book 1 (Moscow: IMLI, 2009), 477. 24 Platonov, Chevengur, 5. 25 This is a Leitmotif of this drama, for instance: Still alive, Hades … at last, / Is leading me to The banks of the River/Akheron. Sophocles, Antigone, 90, lines 870–5. 26 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961). 27 Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 2009). 28 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 29 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war Soviet Russia.” Australian Journal of Politics & History, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2004: 357–71. 30 Thus, Platonov writes in the same letter to his wife: “But, all the same, these places here are sad, even a small happiness here is shameful.” Platonov, “13 fevralia 1927 g., Tambov,” 477. 31 Magun, Negative Revolution, 43. 32 Fitzpatrick, “Happiness and Toska,” 368–9.

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33 Platonov, “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” in Platonov, Happy Moscow, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Jonathan Platt, and Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), 153–7. 34 Platonov, “Kotlovan: Povest’”, in Chevengur: Roman, Kotlovan: Povest’, Sobranie, ed. N. M. Malygina (Moscow: Vremia, 2009), 534. For an English translation, see: Platonov, The Foundation Pit, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Olga Meerson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 1–150. 35 Platonov, Kotlovan, 534. 36 Platonov, Chevengur, 129. 37 Platonov, “Dzhan: Povest”, in Schastltivaia Moskva. Ocherki i rasskazy 1930-x godov Sobranie. ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: Vremia, 2010), 126–7. Dzhan is translated into English as Soul: Platonov, “Soul”, in Soul and Other Stories, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 3–146. 38 Platonov, “O ‘Likvidatsii’ chelovechestva (Po povodu romana K. Chapeka Voina s salamanderami),” in Fabrika literatury: Literaturnaia kritika. Publitsistika, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: Vremia, 2011), 240–65. 39 See the analysis of the latency and spectral quality of negation in Magun, Negative Revolution. 40 Bertold Brecht, “Neue Technik der Schauspielkunst,” in Versuche, vol. 11 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), 92–3. 41 Platonov, “Vserossiiskaia kolymaga,” in Sochineniia, vol. 1, book 2 (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), 189. 42 Gurvich, “Andrei Platonov,” 358. 43 Ibid., 379. 44 Ibid., 383. 45 Ibid., 411; Maksim Gor’kii, “Gor’kii—Zoshchenko. Tesseli. 25 marta 1963 g.,” in M. Gor’kii i sovetskie pisateli: Neizdannaia perepiska, ed. I. Zilberstein and E. Taker (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 166. 46 Gurvich, “Andrei Platonov,” 403. 47 Liudmila Petrushevskaya is a Soviet-Russian playwright. Most of her plays are a dark and desperate analysis of woman's everyday life. 48 Evgenii Dobrenko, Politekonomiia sotsrealizmza (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007). 49 Platonov, as we learn from his letters to his wife, was extremely jealous. Marcel Proust famously understood jealousy as a metaphor and motor of literary imagination. Proust’s translator, Walter Benjamin, considered this mourning of lost opportunities—a jealousy toward the past (but not the future)—the source of true knowledge about the past (and, in equal measure, of the revolutionary act). Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 389. 50 Benjamin, “Moscow”, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 45.

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51 Platonov, “Zhizn’ do kontsa,” in Sochineniia: Nauchnoe izdanie, vol. 1, book 2, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), 180. 52 Platonov, “Zhazhda nishchego. Videniia istorii,” in Sochineniia: Nauchnoe izdanie, vol. 1, book 1, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), 171. 53 Platonov, Chevengur, 48. 54 Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: IMLI, 2006), 257. 55 Platonov, “Simfoniia soznaniia,” in Sochineniia: Nauchnoe izdanie, vol. 1, book 2, 226. 56 Platonov, Chevengur, 53. 57 Platonov, “Schastlivaia Moskva”, in Schastltivaia Moskva. Ocherki i rasskazy 1930-x godov, Sobranie. ed. N. V. Kornienko (Moscow: Vremia, 2010), 60. 58 Ibid., 61. 59 Ibid., 61, 62. 60 See Oksana Timofeeva, Vvedenie v eroticheskuiu filosofiiu Zh. Bataia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009). 61 Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste (Paris: Payot and Rivages, 2000). See my interpretation of this logic with respect to labor in Magun, “Marx’s Theory of Time and the Present Historical Moment.” Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2010: 90–109. 62 Igor Chubarov, “Ot budnei matritsy k prazdniku truda. Stat’ia pervaia,” Agenstvo politicheskikh novostei, July 24, 2007, https://www.apn.ru/publications/article17474. htm (accessed July 14, 2016). 63 Platonov, “O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii,” in Andrei Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov. Materialy k biografii, ed. N. V. Kornienko and E. D. Shubina (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1994), 322. 64 Platonov, Kotlovan, 422. 65 Ibid., 416. 66 Platonov, Chevengur, 235. 67 Platonov, “Khleb i chtenie”, in Efirnyi trakt: Povesti 1920-kh nachala 1930-kh godov, Sobranie, ed. N. M. Malygina (Moscow: Vremia, 2011), 435. 68 Vladimir Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” https://www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm 69 Platonov, “A Technical Novel,” translated by Anastasiya Osipova. 70 Eric Naiman, Sex in Public (Princeton University Press, 1999). 71 Platonov, “On the First Socialist Tragedy.” New Left Review, No. 69, 2011, https:// newleftreview.org/issues/ii69/articles/andrei-platonov-on-the-first-socialisttragedy.pdf 72 Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki, 132. 73 Ibid., 115. 74 This theme of using eschatological energy is also present in Nietzsche. Compare my interpretation in: A. Magun, “Sdvig po Nietzsche: filosofiia istorii F. Nietzsche v

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nashe vremia,” in Nietzsche i sovremennaia zapadnaia mysl’, vol. 472, ed. V. Kaplun (St. Petersburg: Letnii sad; European University in Saint Petersburg, 2003), 467–89. “Nietzsche thinks that it is possible to use the eschatological, messianic energy while cunningly avoiding its tyrannical propulsion.” 75 Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit (New York: NYRB, 2009), 9. 76 Georg Lukács, “Emmanuil Levin,” in Literaturnoe obozrenie, No. 19–20, 1937, http://mesotes.ru/lukacs/Platonov.htm 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Chernukha, in Russian, is a slang notion for the exaggerated representation of violent and uncultured everyday life, by contrast with the optimistic canon of Socialist realism. 81 Ibid. 82 Andrei Platonov, “Immortality,” trans. Lisa Hayden and Robert Chandler. E-flux, Journal #91—May 2018, Immortality—Journal #91 May 2018—e-flux. 83 One cannot but think here of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “progressive-regressive method”: a psychoanalytic explanation by the impulses from early childhood has to be dialectically combined, says Sartre, with a study of the person’s “project” and the objective difficulties in its realization. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Problem of Method (London: Methuen, 1963). 84 Ibid. 85 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.” 86 Platonov, “Immortality.” 87 Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 88 Ibid., 173. 89 Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Language and Revolution. Making Modern Political Identities, ed. I. Halfin (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), 157–83; Hellbeck Jochen, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 90 Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Language and Revolution. Making Modern Political Identities, ed. I. Halfin (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002), 115. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., 122. 93 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” trans. Ben Brewster, in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, ed. Louis Althusser (New York and London: Verso, 2014), 232–72 (The book also contains a more complete version previously published only in French—A.M.).

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94 Platonov, “Zhazhda nishchego. Videniia istorii,” 171. Translated by Anastasia Ossipova. 95 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 9. 96 Platonov, “Tekhncheskii roman,” 6. 97 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 3. 98 Ibid., 18. 99 Andrey Platonov, “Zabluzhdenie na rodine kompota,” in Arkhiv A. P. Platonova. Kniga I, 254. [Translated by A.O.] 100 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1999). 101 Dostoevsky, The Demons. 102 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 11. 103 This irony might have in turn followed Platonov’s reading of Freud. Compare Freud’s famous formula of “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII (1932–1936), 1–182, http://www. yorku.ca/dcarveth/Freud%20NIL%20L33%20Dissection.pdf 104 Platonov, Chevengur, 80. 105 Valery Podoroga, “The Eunuch of the Soul: Positions of Reading and the World of Platonov.” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 90, No. 2, 1991: 357–408. 106 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 9. 107 Joseph Brodsky, “Catastrophes in the Air,” in Less than One (New York: Farrar. Strauss, Giroux, 1986), 268–303. 108 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. 109 Before Rancière, Deleuze proposed a similar structure in The Logic of Sense. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 110 Alain Badiou, Being and Event. 111 Andrey Platonov, “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” https://newleftreview.org/issues/ ii69/articles/andrei-platonov-on-the-first-socialist-tragedy 112 Andrey Platonov, Sochineniia, vol.1, book 2, 297. 113 Ibid., 308. 114 Ibid., 302. 115 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Idris Parry, TLS (October 20, 1978 [1810]). 116 By analogy with Kant’s “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy.” 117 Platonov, Chevengur, 230. 118 Jacques Lacan, The Formations of Unconscious, trans. Russell Crigg (London: Polity, 2017), 179–96. 119 Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire.”

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120 Lacan, The Formations of the Unconscious, 168. 121 Ibid., 322. 122 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier).” Screen, Vol. 4, No. 18, 1977: 24–34. 123 Iurii Nagibin, “Eshche raz o Platonove,” in Andrei Platonov. Vospominaniia sovremennikov. Materialy k biografii, ed. Natalya Kornienko and Elena Shubina (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1994), 74–7. 124 Platonov, Chevengur, 90. 125 Ibid., 184. 126 Freud, “Fetishism,” 147–58. Cit. 155. 127 Ibid., 152. 128 Ibid., 153. 129 Ibid., 154. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., 155. 132 Platonov’s remarkably frank yet at the same time literary correspondence with his wife demonstrates the elaboration of a particular machine of pleasure. At times, it is masochistic, and at times—almost paranoid. Platonov worships his wife, but at the same time constantly suspects her of being unfaithful to him, exaggerates and relishes the scenes of humiliation (allegedly, she once sent him a letter containing a single four-letter word. Letters from 06.27 and 06.28–29.1935. Andrey Platonov, “June 27, 1935, Moscow,” in Arkhiv A.P. Platonova, vol. 1 [Moscow: IMLI, 2009], 529–30). There we also encounter the familiar theme of fetishism: “I have long been recalling in my imagination our first meeting… I don’t want to think past the moment when I embraced you and lifted your little skirt in the dark corridor. That’s where the lies started.” (Letter from 02.13.1927: Platonov, “February 13, 1927. Tambov,” 477). 133 Platonov, Chevengur, 293. 134 Ibid., 111. 135 Platonov, The Foundation Pit, 7. 136 Platonov, Happy Moscow. 137 On Platonov as a hyperbolic “materialist,” see Thomas Seifried, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 138 On fetishism and melancholia, see Magun, Negative Revolution. What is important about fetishism is the disavowal, ignoring of the obvious—for instance, of the fact that mother does not have a phallus, but a father does. Also, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London and New York: Verso, 2009 [1928]). Benjamin does not directly link the two phenomena, but he does speak about the seventeenth century as of a period of melancholia and as of a time which saw a densening, consolidation of material objects in the face of the vanished telos and emptied sky.

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139 On the fetishistic suspension read Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 140 For more on this subject, see Jean-Christophe Bailly’s wonderful essay on Platonov, “Événement suspendu,” 155–66. Bailly points out the static images in Chevengur and regards them as instances of the breakthrough of messianic, anti-narrative temporality. For him, as for Benjamin, the event invades the situation as something static, frozen. It disrupts the narration and makes synthesis impossible. This is a really important moment that is connected, among other things, with the frozen character of a fetish (objet petit a) as well as with the disintegration of the world into partial objects in the experience of castration. I demonstrate that Platonov does not stop at this: he is interested less in the immobilizing fascination with the revolutionary event, but in the dialectic of self-possession, in the production of energy through destruction.

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Index Abramovic, Marina 6–8, 164 Adorno, Theodor 2, 9–12, 16, 17, 21, 27, 34–8, 40, 44, 48–9, 55, 74, 107, 109–11, 123, 130–2, 137, 151, 157, 173 Agamben, Giorgio 28, 206 Aggression, aggressiveness 5, 8–9, 30, 39, 44, 47, 50, 66, 80, 102, 105–13, 148, 232 Althusser, Louis 216 Anderson, Paul 3 Aristotle 17, 25, 30–1, 35, 42, 48–9, 54–5, 58, 67, 85, 92–9, 109–10, 120, 130, 135 Arkadiev, Mikhail 108 Arnaut Daniel 82 von Arnim, Bettina 190 Artaud, Antonin 6 Aurier, Gabriel-Albert 164 Babel, Isaac 192–3, 196, 215 Badiou, Alain 27, 74–5, 139, 162–3, 174, 210, 215, 221 Bailly, Jean-Christophe 262 Bakhtin, Mikhail 35, 42, 44, 76, 84–90, 92, 119, 124–9, 162 Bakunin, Mikhail 142, 153 Ballard, James 3 Barthes, Roland 66, 72 Baumgarten, Alexander 14 Beardsley, Aubrey 167 Beckett, Samuel 5, 6, 10, 112–18, 123 Bely, Andrei 73, 82, 132, 161–2 Benjamin, Walter 37, 48–9, 52, 59–60, 67–8, 72, 87, 102–3, 114, 161, 196, 198, 202, 213, 240, 245, 257, 261 Berg, Alban 5 Bergson, Henri 85–92, 243 Beumers, Birgit 159–60 Beuys, Joseph 164 Bibikhin, Vladimir 19, 247 Blanc, Louis 188 Blanchot, Maurice 141–2, 235 Blank, Ksana 250 Blok, Alexander 172

Böcklin, Arnold 163 Bogdanov, Alexandr 161 Bois, Yves-Alain 74, 80 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio 99 Brecht, Bertold 199 Brodsky, Joseph 120, 194, 221, 256 Broodthaers, Marcel 6 Bryusov, Valery 161 Buchez, Pierre-Joseph 188 Büchner, Georg 116, 121, 123 Bulgakov, Sergey 144, 148, 152 Bürger, Peter 51 Byron, George Gordon 100, 187 Caillois, Roger 34, 48, 61 Čapek, Karel 198 Carnival 9, 43–4, 51, 65, 92, 100, 119, 125–9 Castration 8, 58–65, 68, 78, 84, 87, 92, 146, 220, 223–9, 262 Cavanaugh, Jan 175 Celan, Paul 52, 54, 112, 115–23, 125 Céline, Louis-Ferdinande 198 Cézanne, Paul 109 Chagall, Marc 161 Chernysheva, Maria 107 Chto Delat 52, 236 Chubarov, Igor 206 Chukovsky, Korney 171 Coppola, Francis Ford 3 de Palma, Brian 3 Defamiliarization (ostranenie) 57, 65, 68, 72–3, 77, 80, 92, 240 Deleuze, Gilles 75, 87, 243, 260 Derrida, Jacques 24, 74, 92, 242 Dialectics 5, 7, 12, 26, 30–42, 47–52, 52–8, 61–5, 71, 75, 82–3, 89, 94, 118–19, 124–7, 130–5, 150–1, 165–7, 170–1, 174, 197, 211–12, 221–4, 231–2 Dix, Otto 5, 9, 113 Dobrenko, Evgeny 201

274

Index

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 22, 47, 91, 129, 141–56 Dubuffet, Jean 5–6 Duchamp, Marcel 112 Dürer, Albrecht 165, 176, 179, 240 Eastwood, Clint 3, 103 Eco, Umberto 100, 168 Eisenstein, Sergey 19, 47, 110 Engels, Friedrich 108 Eriugena, Johannes Scotus 131 Ernst, Max 67 Expression, expressionism 9, 31, 37, 41, 80, 101, 107, 113, 119, 131, 160, 169, 176 Fautrier, Jean 113, 115 Fernie, Ewan 144, 152, 154–5 Figure/ground 61, 67–9, 71, 73, 80–1, 77–8, 88–9, 107, 144, 146–7, 170, 171–7 Film 2–4, 7, 10, 47, 57, 59–60, 100, 103–5, 114, 136, 178–83 Filonov, Pavel 161 Fisher, Marc 4 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 196 Flanahan, Barry 114 Flatley, Jonathan 199, 213–14, 217 Fontana, Lucio 112 Forti, Simona 144, 154 French Revolution 116, 142, 185, 188–93, 202, 221 Freud, Sigmund 28, 39, 43–4, 53–4, 59, 65, 72, 78, 86, 90, 118, 135, 141, 143, 179, 183, 196–7, 223–7 Friedrich, Caspar 166 Gastev, Alexei 162 Gaugin, Paul 163 Geller, Mikhail 198, 201 Giacometti, Giacomo 6, 233 Gibson, Michael 169, 178 Girard, René 98, 109, 180–1, 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 95, 97, 134, 165–7 Gorky, Maxim 161, 200 Görres, Joseph 78 Gramsci, Antonio 192, 217 Gumiliov, Nikolay 171 Gurvich, Aleksandr 194–5, 200 Halfin, Igal 215–16, 218 Hamacher, Werner 118–19

Haneke, Michael 3, 100, 103–4 Hegel, Georg 5, 13, 23, 27–8, 31, 33, 35–42, 49, 72, 78–9, 84, 94, 107, 109–10, 120–2, 129–31, 142, 146, 158–9, 167–9, 176, 188, 190, 234 Heidegger, Martin 18, 20, 26, 35, 37, 43, 107, 172–3, 196–7, 212–13, 222 Heine, Heinrich 190 Hellbeck, Jochen 215–16, 218 Heller, Reinhold 166 Hirsh, Sharon 165 Hölderlin, Friedrich 83, 96–8, 107, 117, 120, 123, 187–8 Hugo, Victor 79, 188 Ibsen, Henrik 165, 178 Iñárritu, Alejandro 3 Jacobson, Roman 81 Janez Janša 101 Jean Paul 78, 86 Johns, Jasper 112 Jorgensen, Johannes 164 Joyce, James 161 Kafka, Franz 5, 9–10, 110, 131, 169 Kandinsky, Vassily 159 Kant, Immanuel 1–2, 14, 16, 19, 24, 34–5, 54, 57, 59, 62, 65, 83–4, 91, 96–7, 100, 109 Khapaeva, Dina 12 Kharkhordin, Oleg 218–19 Kharms, Daniil 159 Khlebnikov, Velimir 6, 159 Khnopff, Ferdinand 163 King, Steven 2 Klee, Paul 159 Klein, Yves 6, 112, 113 Klimt, Gustav 166 Kooning, Willem de, 6, 112 Kozintsev, Alexander 85–6 Krauss, Rosalind 59, 67–8, 143 Kristeva, Julia 28, 32, 39, 40 Lacan, Jacques 18, 23–4, 26, 33, 44, 53, 61–8, 78–9, 81, 134, 180–1, 215, 223–6, 234 Lacombe, Georges 169 Lamartine Alphonse 188 Lamennais, Félicité 188 Latham, John 114

Index Laughter 37, 83–92, 243 Lenin, Vladimir 208–9 Lessing, Gothold Efraim 44, 94–5, 97 Lewitt, Sol 6 Libera, Zbigniew 148 Lifshitz, Mikhail 10–12, 28, 124–5, 157 Literature 2, 3, 6, 37–40, 50–2, 64, 115, 125–30, 141–4, 150, 154, 156, 162–3, 169, 195, 200, 220, 225, 228 Llosa, Mario Vargas 9 Longinus, Pseudo- 31, 70–1, 75, 99, 123–4 Losev, Alexey 40–1 Lukács, Georg 210–12 Malczewski, Jacek 102, 174–8 Malevich, Kazimir 6, 44, 74–5, 109, 111–13, 119, 148, 159, 162 Mallarmé, Stéphane Mandelshtam, Osip 15, 117, 160, 168, 171 Mann, Thomas 123 Marion, Jean-Luc 47, 56, 152 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Martens, Renzo 148 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 52, 162 McLachlan, James 154 Medvedev, Pavel 75–6, 242 Meerson, Olga 68–9 Melancholia, toska 2, 4–5, 13, 24, 66, 102, 105–6, 123, 128–9, 142–4, 157–84, 186, 189, 193–214, 215, 222, 228–9, 231 Mendieta, Ana 7 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry 143 Metzger, Gustav 114, 115 Michelet, Jules 188–90 Mikhaylovsky, Nikolay 143, 249 Miller, Jacques-Alain 224 Minsky, Nikolai 159 Mondrian, Piet 5–6, 67, 81, 113, 159 Monet, Claude 101 Montale, Eugenio 168 Moréas, Jean 164, 166 Moreau, Gustave 159 Morris, Robert 6 Morrison, Toni 9, 69–70 Muehl, Otto 114 Music 19, 82, 108, 110, 123, 170, 178 Nabokov, Vladimir 50, 173, 255 Naiman, Eric 200

275

Name, nomination 39–40, 69–70, 77–8, 91, 123, 145, 189–92, 195, 220–1, 228 Nesbø, Jo 2 Nietzsche 18–19, 24, 58, 65, 100, 127, 135, 152, 198, 200 Nitsch, Hermann 114 Novalis 78, 158, 187 Nuncques, William Degouve de 169 Ono, Yoko 7–8, 113–14 Ortiz, Rafael 114 Osbert, Alphonse 169 Paik, Nam Jun 164 Painting 11, 17, 30, 34, 61–4, 67–8, 74–5, 80–1, 106–7, 113, 159, 163–70, 183, 174–8 Peckinpah, Sam 3, 105 Petrov-Vodkin, Kuzma 161, 163 Picasso, Pablo 5, 9, 11, 102, 109, 113, 149, 163 Pienkos, Andrzej 168 Plato 28, 29–34, 39–42, 48, 50, 54, 73, 93–5, 111, 121 Platonov, Andrei 68–70, 72, 125, 128, 134–5, 160–1, 163, 185–229 Plotinus 25 Podoroga, Valery 220, 225 Pollock, Jackson 5 Porshnev, Boris 115, 120–1, 162 Privation 41–5, 58, 65, 107, 119–20, 224, 228 Przemyski, Zenon 164 Przybyszewski, Stanisław 164, 171 Rancière, Jacques 14, 51, 67, 102, 103, 105, 111, 160, 189–90, 192, 215, 221 Rauschenberg, Robert 104 Rimbaud, Arthur 101 Roberts, John 28 Romanticism 86, 100–1, 186–8, 196 Ronell, Avital 23–4, 152 Rosenblum, Robert 254 Rosenkranz, Karl 6 Rothko, Mark 5 Rousseau, Henri 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 98, 126, 186 Ruttenburg, Nancy 147, 249 Sartre, Jean-Paul 35, 37–8, 43, 50, 56, 62, 81, 137, 144, 169, 206, 237, 240, 259 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 16, 23, 38, 41, 78, 96–7, 139, 144, 154, 165–6, 187

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Schiller, Friedrich 20, 44, 78, 85, 89, 92, 87–8, 134, 136–7, 145 Schlingensief, Christoph 148, 164 Schoenberg, Arnold 5, 9–10 Schulte-Lasse, Johan 51 Scorsese, Martin 3 Sentimentalism 1, 8, 12, 30, 57, 94, 100–1, 111, 128, 135, 143–5, 150, 155, 232 Sérusier, Paul 168 Sharkey, Kevin 106 Shklovsky, Viktor 52, 73, 80, 137 Sophocles 64, 98–9, 195 Sorokin, Vladimir 3, 6, 91, 104, 105 Symbolism, symbol 28, 33–6, 41, 45, 51, 63–5, 73, 75, 77–9, 82, 84, 89–92, 122–3, 145–6, 157–84, 190 Tatlin, Vladimir 111, 162 Test, probe, temptation 20–4, 32, 47, 50, 68, 98, 103, 131, 149–56 Tragedy 31, 64–5, 84, 86, 92–9, 109, 133–5, 138, 207, 221 trance, entrancement 18–20, 60, 72, 79–84, 88, 92, 160, 180, 183, 235

Trier, Lars von 3, 20, 57, 66, 91, 100, 103–4, 113, 115, 159, 178–83 Turner, John 158 Vasarely, Victor 6 Vattimo, Gianni 55 Verlaine, Paul 117 Vigny, Alfred de 188 Violence 1–5, 7–8, 10, 16, 24, 35, 44–5, 55, 80, 85, 93, 98, 99–105, 109, 111, 113, 129, 135–6, 149, 155, 169, 218 Vygotsky, Lev 50, 73, 66, 82, 130–4 Wagner, Richard 155 Watts, G.F. 170 Whistler, James 101 Wilde, Oscar 167 Woolf, Virginia 51 Yevreinov, Nikolay 51 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 32–3, 151 Zola, Emile 158 Zupançiç, Alenka 89 Zweig, Stephan 135

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