Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust

Geoffrey Hartman

Also available from Continuum Interrupting Auschwitz, Josh Cohen Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida, Ruben Borg

Geoffrey Hartman Romanticism after the Holocaust

Pieter Vermeulen

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Pieter Vermeulen 2010 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. Pieter Vermeulen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vermeulen, Pieter. Geoffrey Hartman : romanticism after the Holocaust / Pieter Vermeulen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover) 1. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 2. Criticism--History--20th century. 3. Romanticism--History--20th century. I. Title. PN75.H33V47 2010 801'.95092--dc22 [B] 2009048033

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Contents

Abbreviations

vi

Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma

1

1.

Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature

8

2.

Of Climatology: Literature after Structure

39

3.

Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge

61

4.

Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss

5.

“Darkness makes abode”: Mourning, Testimony, Community

Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust

83 100 131

Acknowledgments

138

Notes

139

Works Cited

156

Index

175

Abbreviations

References to Geoffrey Hartman’s works are preceded by the initials listed here in alphabetical order. Complete bibliographical information for these items can be found in the works cited section. Hartman’s works are listed there chronologically by date of first publication, which I have added here in order to facilitate cross-reference. 1. Books AM André Malraux (1960) BF Beyond Formalism (1970) CJ A Critic’s Journey (1999) CW Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) EP Easy Pieces (1985) FQ The Fateful Question of Culture (1997) FR The Fate of Reading (1975) GH The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004) IJ A Scholar’s Tale (2007) LS The Longest Shadow (1996) MP Minor Prophecies (1991) SS Scars of the Spirit (2002) ST Saving the Text (1981) UV The Unmediated Vision (1954) UW The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987) WP Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964) 2. Articles, Essays, Reviews, Interviews “AA” “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure” (1966) “AC” “The State of the Art of Criticism” (1989)

“AE” “AG”

“AI” “AP” “AS”

“Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz” (1994) “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum” (1969) “The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas Chare” (2004) “Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics” (1992) “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962)

Abbreviations “BF” “BH” “BM” “BP” “BS” “BT” “CA” “CC” “CD” “CI” “CM” “CR” “CS” “DC” “DD” “DF” “DS”

“DV” “EM” “ES” “ET” “EW” “FC” “FE” “FN” “FR” “FS” “FT” “GD” “GL” “HA” “HG” “HH” “HL” “HR” “HT” “HW” “IC” “IF”

vii

“Beyond Formalism” (1966) “Benjamin in Hope” (1999) “Introduction: 1985” to Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (1986) “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’” (1969) “‘Breaking with every star’: On Literary Knowledge” (1996) “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style” (1978) “The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” (1995) “The Culture of Criticism” (1984) “Literary Criticism and Its Discontents” (1976) “Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony” (1980) “Camus and Malraux: The Common Ground” (1960) “Criticism and Restitution” (1989) “Christopher Smart’s Magnificat: Toward a Theory of Representa-

tion” (1974) “The Dream of Communication” (1973) “Diction and Defense in Wordsworth” (1980) “The Discourse of a Figure: Blake’s ‘Speak Silence’ in Literary History” (1987) “Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of the Poet’s Mind” (1961) “Introduction: Darkness Visible” (1994) “Envoi: ‘So many things’” (1986) “Reflections on the Evening Star: Akenside to Coleridge” (1971) “The Ethics of Witness” (interview by Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay) (2002) “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth” (1987) “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection” (1978) “Freud for Everyman (and Everywoman)” (2005) “The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature” (1955) “The Fate of Reading” (1975) “Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit” (2003) “False Themes and Gentle Minds” (1968) “Ghostlier Demarcations” (1966) “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” (1968) “Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma” (1996) “Homage to Glas” (2007) “Holocaust and Hope” (2003) “Communication, Language, and the Humanities” (1981) “The Heroics of Realism” (1963) “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction” (2006) “History-Writing as Answerable Style” (1970) “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman” (interview by Cathy Caruth) (1996) “The Interpreter’s Freud” (1984)

viii

“IM” “IP” “IS” “JI” “JP” “JT” “LC” “LH” “LL” “LS” “MB” “MC” “ME” “MI” “MM” “MS”

“NF” “NW” “PD” “PE” “PI” “PM” “PN” “PP” “PR” “PS” “PW” “RA” “RF”

“RH” “RL” “RM” “RR” “SA” “SF” “SH” “SI” “SL” “SP”

Abbreviations “Introduction” to Midrash and Literature (1986) “Introduction” to The Power of Contestation (2004) Interview by Imre Salusinszky (1987) “On the Jewish Imagination” (1985) “History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man” (1988) “Jewish Tradition as/and the Other” (1993) “Letter” (letter in Critical Inquiry) (1989) “Toward Literary History” (1970) “A Life of Learning” (2000) “The Longest Shadow” (1989) “Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist” (1961) “Milton’s Counterplot” (1958) “Meaning, Error, Text” (1985) “Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979” (interview by Robert Moynihan) (1980) “Polemical Memoir” (1999) “Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope” (1964)

“‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: A Brief Allegory” (1968) “The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos” (1983) “Public Memory and Its Discontents” (1994) “Passion and Literary Engagement” (2004) “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (1973) “Public Memory and Modern Experience” (1993) “Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by Northwest” (1981) “The Poet’s Politics” (1970) “The Poetics of Prophecy” (1981) “Preface to the Second Edition” (preface to the second edition of Criticism in the Wilderness) (2007) “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa.” (1962) “Reading Aright: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’” (1983) “Reflections on Romanticism in France” (1970) “The Reinvention of Hate” (1996) “Religious Literacy” (1988) “The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s Profane Illumination” (2006) “Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’” (1994) “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” (1973) “The Struggle for the Text” (1986) “The Sublime and the Hermeneutic” (1972) “Shoah and Intellectual Witness” (1998) “Maurice Blanchot: The Spirit of Language after the Holocaust” (2004) “A Short History of Practical Criticism” (1979)

Abbreviations “SS” “ST” “TC” “TD” “TH”

“TL” “TK” “TM” “TR” “TS” “TT” “TU” “UA” “UW” “VS” “VW” “WA” “WB” “WE” “WG” “WH” “WI” “WL” “WM” “WN” “WO” “WR” “WT” “WV” “WW”

ix

“Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats’s Hyperion” (1974) “Signs of the Times” (1971) “A Touching Compulsion: Wordsworth and the Problem of Literary Representation” (1977) “Memory.com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era” (2000) “Self, Time, and History” (1975) “Trauma within the Limits of Literature” (2003) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” (1995) “The Taming of History: A Comparison of Poetry with Painting Based on Malraux’s The Voices of Silence” (1957) “Theories on the Theory of Romanticism” (1971) “Text and Spirit” (1999) “Tea and Totality: The Demand of Theory on Critical Style” (1986) “‘Timely Utterance’ Once More” (1985) “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’” (1975) “The Unremarkable Wordsworth” (1985) “The Voice of the Shuttle” (1969) “Virginia’s Web” (1961) “War in Heaven” (1973) “Wordsworth before Heidegger” (1987) “Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment” (2005) “‘Was it for this . . .?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods” (1990) “The Weight of What Happened” (1983) “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry” (1965) “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History” (1975) “Wordsworth and Metapsychology” (2009) “Words Not From on High” (2003) “Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth” (1979) “Wordsworth” (1969) “ Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing” (2002) “Witnessing Video Testimony” (interview by Jennifer Ballengee) (2001) “Words and Wounds” (1980)

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Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma

The major event affecting the theoretical imagination in the second half of the twentieth century was undoubtedly the massive dissolution of time-honored certainties and distinctions, a process that has been captured in such phrases as “the demise of metaphysics” or simply “postmodernity.” The late Jacques Derrida, one of the privileged witnesses of this movement, famously distinguished two possible responses to it: one response revels in a melancholic nostalgia for a lost order, while the other embraces the destabilization of the traditional delineations between different genders, species, and ethnicities and affirms this new reality “with a certain laughter and with a certain dance” (1982a: 27). Such an exhilarating affirmation has long found embodiment in the heroes that have peopled the theoretical imagination: the nomad, the hybrid, the transvestite, or the cyborg. And even if other prominent figures have squarely refused to join that dance—the subaltern, the schizophrenic, the homo sacer—mournful nostalgia and joyous affirmation have effectively served as the affective poles organizing the critical forcefield in the last few decades. It is not certain that they still do so today. Take, as one indication of the recent disorganization of that field, the strange fact that this crew of iconic figures has recently been joined in the contemporary critical imagination by that most unlikely of heroes (if only because he is an American icon), Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Following prominent interventions by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby’s famous formula “I would prefer not do” has increasingly begun to disturb the enabling tension between a nostalgia that says “no” and an affirmation that says “yes.” Being “neither an affirmation nor a negation,” the paradoxical potency of Bartleby’s deflection is that it effectively manages to render inoperative the logic that would force him to choose (Deleuze 1998: 70). Rather than satisfying the demands of a system that requires the actuality of either strong affirmation or resolute resistance, it opens onto “a sort of reserve or incompleteness; it announces a temporary or provisional reserve” that makes room for an unactualized but persistent potentiality (Derrida 1995: 75). So what do we make of the remarkable recent career of Melville’s character? It certainly seems that the critical embrace of Bartleby’s retreat from action and actuality signals an all too recognizable anxiety that all action, however

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well-intended, may only end up adding to the wreckage of modernity and to the pile of debris that Walter Benjamin’s angel of history impotently watches growing skyward. On this interpretation, Bartleby’s neutralizing gesture emblematizes a widespread skepticism about the possibilities of concrete action—although the conjuring of Bartleby, especially in the work of Agamben, can sustain calls for grandiose, even messianic, forms of intervention and change. But a less dejected reading is also possible. What if the critical adoption of Bartleby signals the recovery of a potentiality that has remained latent in earlier efforts to imagine the wake of modernity and metaphysics? This potentiality may, for one thing, be closer to the complexity of Derrida’s own position than many of these earlier efforts, as I argue later (Lambert 2000: 183–9). It points to the quiet persistence of a deliberately minor and scrupulously polite mode of engagement with the disasters of the present and the memories of the past that cannot be conflated with either vocal refusal or determinate affirmation. The currency of Bartleby indicates the timeliness of such subdued forms of commemoration and engagement that, far from wishing to dominate current debates on memory, community, media, and ecology, yet hold out the possibility of neutralizing the polarization between resistance and affirmation that all too often paralyze such debates. The central argument of this book is that the work of Geoffrey Hartman has over the last half century carefully theorized and embodied such a minor mode of commemoration and engagement. It locates in his work a paradoxically powerful form of Romanticism that responds to the exigencies of past and present by giving shape to a mental ecology that makes room for that which resists actualization. Even if Hartman’s work is often missing from most of the debates that currently entertain the theoretical imagination—with the notable exceptions of the memory of trauma in general, and the Holocaust in particular—this book demonstrates that it can make an as yet unremarked contribution to them. Whether as an advocate of Romanticism in the 1950s and 1960s, as a reluctant fellow traveler of American deconstruction in the 1970s, or as a pivotal presence in the domains of trauma studies, Jewish studies, and the memory of the Holocaust, Hartman, like Bartleby, has scrupulously avoided polemical self-assertion. He has, moreover, consistently theorized such reticence and circumspection as a particular Romantic ethic and aesthetic that, so this book argues, is surprisingly timely. The unfortunate upshot of this characteristic lack of self-promotion is that Hartman is today mostly treated with a pious reverence that precludes a more critical engagement with his work. A 2006 issue of the Wordsworth Circle dedicated to his work calls itself “a deviant homage,” and it often seems like homage is the only appropriate mode in which to address Hartman’s oeuvre (Redfield 2006). Even the very texture of his writing seems to invite a mode of superficial appreciation: as has often been remarked, Hartman’s essayistic style deliberately eschews point-scoring and definite assertions; he himself describes it as a “subprophetic” mode and a “nondeclamatory, low-key engagement in

Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma

3

cultural affairs” (IJ 60). Because his style leaves little room for firm assertions, and even thrives on the evasion of unambiguous affirmations, there seems to be very little in Hartman’s work to disagree with. This book demonstrates that Hartman’s oeuvre deserves—and survives—a more unflinching and incisive kind of attention. It sets out to do two things. First, it takes Hartman’s characteristic reticence seriously by relating it to other patterns, biases, and obsessions in his oeuvre in order to unearth a flexible but eminently systematic effort to theorize a Romantic mode of remembrance and imagination that subtends his work. I show how Hartman’s ambition to develop a theory of modern poetry in his first book, The Unmediated Vision from 1954, persists in his sustained attempt to develop his monumental interpretations of Wordsworth—most famously in Wordsworth’s Poetry from 1964—into a deliberately minimal form of aesthetic mediation that can play a paradoxically potent role in contemporary culture—paradoxical because, like Bartleby, it derives its performative power from its withdrawal from the available terms of debate. My emphasis on Hartman’s commitment to aesthetic mediation in general, and Wordsworth in particular, is of course hardly surprising to anyone who is in the least familiar with his work. Hartman opens his 1987 volume The Unremarkable Wordsworth by noting that he has “never been able to get away from Wordsworth for any length of time,” and the resigned tone of that statement already anticipates that that felicitous inability would persist for the next few decades, as indeed it has (UW xxv). These elements remain a fixture of his work from the very beginning until his most recent cultural criticism and his work on Holocaust memory. Hartman repeatedly rethinks these commitments in light of his career-long concern to grant them a place in a theory of modernity, and to affirm the viability of a Wordsworthian mode of aesthetic mediation in the face of cultural forces that seem to deny its potency. In his early work, this challenge is figured as Hegel’s prediction of the ends of art and history; later on, it is structuralism, deconstruction, postmodern media culture, myths of progress, and so-called aesthetic ideologies that force Hartman’s work to reorient itself so as to be able to honor its double dedication to the aesthetic and to a Wordsworthian mode of remembrance. My story begins in the mid-1950s and traces how Hartman’s work reaches the consolidated form it still has today in the late 1970s. The first chapter traces a peculiar movement of self-correction as Hartman revises his earliest theory of modern poetry (articulated in The Unmediated Vision), which still relies heavily on a transcendent dimension, in the decade leading up to what remains his major contribution to the study of English literature, his book Wordsworth’s Poetry. The second chapter focuses on the ways this more secular conception of modernity confronts the major critical players of the 1960s: structuralism, the New Criticism, Georges Poulet’s criticism of consciousness, and the work of Northrop Frye. I demonstrate that Hartman’s work at this stage already shares many concerns and affinities with the contemporaneous work of Jacques Derrida, which was still unread in the United States in the 1960s. These subterranean

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connections not only modify the available accounts of Hartman’s—and the other so-called Yale critics’—engagement with Derrida in the 1970s, it also offers evidence that the poststructuralist reception of Derrida’s deconstruction missed vital elements of his work that did find a hearing in the work of Hartman. The third chapter maps Hartman’s attempts to reconcile his theory of modern poetry with a cultural criticism of what can, in retrospect, be recognized as the emergence of postmodernity in the early 1970s. Hartman’s revised theory of poetry discovers that its relevance crucially depends on its ability to factor in the decline of poetry as a cultural force. Hartman’s work accommodates the hard lesson of poetry’s loss of authority by making poetry the placeholder of loss in a world in which the domination of actuality and visibility threatens the very possibility of loss; poetry emerges as a form of “memorial mimesis” that functions both as a particular mental ecology and a mode of remembrance and that serves as a counterforce against a contemporaneity that hastens forgetting and depletion. It may seem strange to argue that Hartman’s project already achieves its definitive shape in the late 1970s. After all, it is only in the 1980s that Hartman’s work branches out into the domain of Holocaust memory, which has since then become at least as important as his more purely critical and theoretical practice. This remarkable extension of the range of Hartman’s concerns makes clear that when I refer to his work from the late 1970s on as his “mature” work, I do not mean to identify it as a stale period of unproductive stasis. Still, Hartman’s work with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, and its connections to his work on trauma and on Jewish identity, can easily be coordinated with his ambition to guarantee the persistence of memory and the viability of the mind’s interactions with others and the world; as such, they are perfectly continuous with Hartman’s “mature” interpretations of Wordsworth, to which I devote my fourth chapter, and which similarly promote a deliberately unspectacular mode of reference and preservation. This mode serves as a vital alternative to more grandiose schemes that are tempted to cancel the mind’s reliance on its natural and cultural environments and that fail to appreciate the sufficiency of phenomenal reality as such, rather than of its virtual or transcendent alternatives. In the last analysis, both Hartman’s work on Wordsworth and his work on the memory of the Holocaust testify to a Romanticism that is dedicated to the resilience of the imagination and to the reality of the phenomenal world. Mapping Hartman’s consecutive reorientations and reinventions of his project in ever new intellectual and cultural climates is only one of the aims of this book. A second ambition, which comes to the fore in the fifth chapter and in the coda, is to explore the viability of Hartman’s consolidated take on the relation between modernity and the aesthetic in a variety of current critical and theoretical debates. Hartman’s work has engaged the momentous issue of the memory of the Holocaust, as well as discussions on media, community, ecology, and Jewish identity, even if not always as systematically and as firmly as one

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might have wished. While this reticence is a crucial aspect of Hartman’s project, I have found it unhelpful to use this as an excuse not to articulate these often less than explicit arguments in terms that make clear what they can and cannot contribute to contemporary thinking in these domains. By treating Hartman’s characteristic circumspection as a crucial aspect of his theoretical efforts rather than as an excuse to stop investigating his project, it becomes possible to recode the often merely latent theoretical, ethical, and political dimensions of his oeuvre in terms that make it possible, or even imperative, to agree or disagree with his project. While this book does not systematically spell out (any of) the forms that such a disagreement might take, restoring the possibility of (dis)agreement ultimately aids Hartman’s work more than preserving it in a form that only leaves either homage or indifference as available modes of (dis)engagement. Hartman’s work deserves a more incisive reading, and it is such a reading that this book initiates. This book spends more pages on explanation than on principled disagreement. It traces the ways in which Hartman’s project adapts itself to ever new cultural and intellectual contexts, and how its persistent commitment to a Wordsworthian ethic and aesthetic orients these revisions. In the process, it inevitably betrays the latency and unobtrusiveness that define Hartman’s peculiar Romanticism. While I believe that Hartman’s Romanticism deserves to be translated in more determinate terms that make it available for affirmation and critique, adding a sustained critique to that work of translation and explanation would arguably foreclose rather than enhance the possibilities of future agreements and disagreements with his project. The two main disagreements with Hartman’s project that I do want to spell out in some detail concern very explicit aspects of his project: first, its massive investment in a particular version of English culture that is much more determinate than the Wordsworthian Romanticism that permeates his work, and second, its reliance on a rhetoric of trauma and loss, which to a large extent allows Hartman to carry over his concern with English Romantic poetry into his engagement with the memory of disaster. If Hartman’s work “prefers not to” theorize its reliance on a rhetoric of loss and on a particular understanding of English culture, this is in these instances not part of the self-conscious construction of a minor and unobtrusive form of commitment, but rather indicates that they serve as pretheoretical, affective catalysts of his critical practice. In his book The Fateful Question of Culture from 1997, Hartman speculates that English culture managed the transition from a premodern rural world to an industrialized society in a way that prevented the traumatization that later led to the disasters of Nazism and Fascism on the continent. I will have more to say on the strange temporality of Hartman’s claim that England’s exemplary work of preventing and avoiding the Holocaust singles it out as an adequate model for contemporary negotiations of the memories of the disasters that non-English cultures failed to prevent. The tendency to identify English culture with the fantasy of an unhindered and untraumatic interanimation of nature and

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imagination is a staple of Hartman’s work. What it fails to take into account is that, even if England has arguably to a large extent been spared the extreme violence that the European continent did inflict on itself, this has not prevented it from exporting violence and suffering in the name of imperialism and colonialism, or even of a war on terror. Hartman’s repeated mobilizations of the example of England in his cultural criticism fail to acknowledge that England’s spectacular avoidance of national trauma coincided with the massive exportation of trauma. This does not mean that Hartman’s approach to the memory of the Holocaust can simply be dismissed as Eurocentric: in my fifth chapter, I explain that this approach is inherently transcultural to the extent that it proscribes all exclusive claims on particular experiences of loss and suffering. What it does mean is that Hartman’s persistent attempt to think modernity in a way that makes room for the privilege of literature fails to take into account the colonial and imperial dimensions that are yet crucial elements of that modernity. If the mode of remembrance and engagement that defines Hartman’s Romanticism is to be able to take on those very different traumas, it will have to sever its associations with the particular vision of England that sustains it. Of course, Hartman’s peculiar affective investment in England can easily be explained away by relating it to his life story. A Scholar’s Tale, his memoir from 2007, reminds us that the young Hartman was evacuated from Germany on a Kindertransport to England where he spent the rest of the war. His stay in the countryside fostered his receptivity to English nature and poetry, especially Wordsworth’s. England served Hartman as a life-saving alternative for the Holocaust, and his critical mobilization of England in his thinking on the memory of disaster honors that alternative. Yet in a book such as this one that is, unlike Hartman’s memoir, not so much interested in tracing an “intellectual journey” as in testing the development and consistency of an intellectual project, it is important to underline that there is a momentous difference between an avoidance of or an escape from the disaster (as in Hartman’s autobiography), on the one hand, and an adequate survival of it on the other. Hartman’s decision to honor England’s crucial role in his own escape from the disaster by deploying it as a crucial reference point in his cultural criticism cannot prevent a certain slippage between these different temporalities. What goes for England also goes for Hartman’s insistent recourse to a rhetoric of trauma, disaster, and loss throughout his oeuvre. Such an emphasis on negativity may suggest that the Romantic ethic and aesthetic at the core of Hartman’s project constitutes a particularly potent mode of survival that can teach us how to live on after trauma. Yet just as it is more accurate to say that England allowed the young Hartman to avoid the Holocaust rather than teach him how to survive it, Hartman’s Romanticism thrives on an avoidance of (or an escape from) the utter negativity of trauma rather than on the capacity to survive it. His Romanticism is powered by a fundamental faith in the mind’s resilience that robs experiences of dispossession and pain of their radical hopelessness. My second major critique of Hartman’s project is that it often

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cultivates this (rhetorically effective) confusion and fails to make a distinction that is yet all-important for an understanding of the stakes of his work. His Romanticism is not a strategy to cope with the aftermath of trauma, but rather an ethic and aesthetic that intervenes in a culture that is manifestly saturated by the images, memories, and aftershocks of trauma, but whose members are not for all that directly exposed to radical trauma themselves. It does not aim to offer an antidote to suffering, but wants to function as a paradoxically potent force in a media-saturated culture in which traces of suffering circulate promiscuously. Such a culture, in which direct traumatic experiences are less readily available than the refracted images of the suffering of others, can without too much difficulties be recognized as our contemporary Western culture. Inevitably removed from yet unavoidably addressed by memories of past disasters and images of contemporary terror, this is the context that Hartman’s Romanticism engages. Like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” his Romanticism contains the promise of a salutary disengagement from the dictates of the present as well as an acknowledgement of the fatality of our disengagement from the reality of trauma and the trauma of reality. If I have entitled this book Romanticism after the Holocaust, it is in order to mark such a distantiation that is both an inescapable fact and a hopeful promise.

Chapter 1

Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature

. . . him who looks In steadiness, who hath among least things An undersense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. William Wordsworth, The Prelude

The publication of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 in 1964 immediately established Geoffrey Hartman as one of the most important postwar interpreters and advocates of English Romanticism, and of Wordsworth in particular. While Hartman’s name will later be routinely associated with the American fate of French theory (in the 1970s and 1980s) and with the memory of the Holocaust (since the 1980s), his contributions in these fields are undergirded by a particular interpretation of Wordsworth that was already underway in his early work. Hartman’s later engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man and with broader cultural issues should not be understood as an escape from the provincial confines of his early Romanticism, if only because this early Romanticism was developed in dialogue with a surprisingly wide range of European literature and thought. Hartman’s first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954), featured chapters on Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry; he published a short book on the French writer and politician André Malraux in 1960, and introduced the work of Maurice Blanchot to American audiences in two seminal essays. Hartman’s first decade is not only crucial because it reveals the decidedly unprovincial groundwork of his Romanticism, but also because it performs a spectacular self-correction of its original position. While The Unmediated Vision celebrates poetry’s capacity to escape linguistic and historical mediation and to achieve a direct vision of reality, such a belief in an unmediated vision fails to account for the biological, linguistic, and historical determinations of human life, and Hartman’s work after The Unmediated Vision is an attempt to correct this failure by relocating literary significance within historical time. Indeed, one of the reasons that Hartman responds so immediately to the work of Derrida in the 1970s is that Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence

Immediacy, History, Nature

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confirms the self-correction that Hartman’s work has already performed by that time—without, however, fully surrendering its initial transcendent ambitions. In the first section of this chapter, I trace Hartman’s initial ambition to theorize literature as a distinctive form of knowledge by identifying a rarely acknowledged intertext of his oeuvre: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The second section focuses on Hartman’s reception of the work of Erich Auerbach, author of the monumental Mimesis and one of Hartman’s teachers at Yale, in order to demonstrate how his work opens new avenues in literature’s struggle with philosophy. Auerbach reveals the possibility of historical meaning, which Hartman, as I show in the third section, uses to great effect in the story of Wordsworth’s gradual poetical development in Wordsworth’s Poetry, even if he does not fully accept Auerbach’s turn to history. In the final section, I show how the developmental pattern that Hartman locates in Wordsworth informs a particular conception of Romanticism as well as a peculiar understanding of English culture. Such an English ideology, grounded in what Hartman calls “the Wordsworthian Enlightenment” (“GL” 307, “WE” 33–5), is implicit in much of Hartman’s work, and becomes most overt in his writings on the evening star around 1970, to which I turn in my second chapter, and in his famous claim in The Fateful Question of Culture, to which I return at different moments in this book, that Wordsworth saved English politics from “the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue” that led to such disasters in France and Germany (FQ 6–7).

1. The Dream of Immediacy Hartman prefaces The Unmediated Vision, the book version of his doctoral thesis, with “A Short Discourse on Method.” These few pages display a precocious awareness of the difficulties of interpretation, and they offer the earliest instance of Hartman’s characteristic conviction that neither definitive understanding nor total liberty of interpretation are possible. They acknowledge the tension between the viability of “a thousand varied approaches” and “uniqueness of meaning” (UV ix), between the multiplicity of different “equally valid” explanations and the “unity or identity to which [they] all tend” (xii). Hartman reconciles these divergent tendencies in his ambition to achieve “a unified multiple interpretation,” which he also describes as “a method of interpretation which could reaffirm the radical unity of human knowledge” (ix–x). Such an affirmation of the link between literature and human knowledge is long overdue, as “[w]e have barely started to attempt to understand literature as a distinctive mode of knowledge in which the processes, or, better, the desires of the human mind find their clearest expression” (xi). Literature, that is, testifies to the rich variety of human life, and the task of literary criticism is to assert the viability of literature as a mode of knowledge that is different from abstract knowledge (xi). One implication of Hartman’s remarks is that such non-literary,

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abstract knowledge is also, somehow, nonhuman knowledge. Although The Unmediated Vision does not explicitly identify this form of knowledge that threatens both literature and human life, Hartman’s work will soon begin to associate it with Hegel.1 Hegel is an insistent intertext in Hartman’s work: as late as 2002, he provides the title for Hartman’s Scars of the Spirit, and he plays a central role in Hartman’s essays on Derrida, which are collected in Saving the Text (1981). In Hartman’s early work, Hegel is less an object of discussion than the name of an affectively charged idea that hovers in the background of his project. He is described as a “master of dead spirits” and an “unshakable ghost” that haunts modern literature, which operates under his “curse” (“TM” 115, “FN” 66–7). The curse affecting both literature and man is Hegel’s famous “prophecy concerning the end of art with the triumph of philosophy and the coincidence of the real and the ideal” (“FN” 75). In the 1950s, this dictum was often complemented by declarations of the end of history that were also associated with Hegel. The vast influence of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) on postwar thought has been well-documented, but it is especially Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence from 1952 that can help us understand the threat that the end of history poses to literature and man. In this book, Hyppolite’s “disciplined antihumanism” (Rajan 2002: 40) focuses on the transition from history to absolute knowledge (the last stage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit) and concludes that this transition constitutes the passage from human life to nonhuman knowledge. Absolute knowledge comprehends both nature and history, and it also comprehends itself. “This self-comprehension,” Hyppolite writes, “is not a plan similar to a human plan. Hegelian logic sublates every human and moral view of the world” (1997: 188). As this scheme is dominated by philosophical logic, literature has no essential place in it (40).2 In light of this threat, we can see why Hartman wants to demonstrate that literature is a form of knowledge that differs from such a gesture of self-comprehension that annuls human diversity. Even if literature is not itself interested in describing the rich variety of human life, the very fact that it exists as a non-abstract form of knowledge turns it into a testimony to such diversity. Literature’s distinctive form of knowledge must relate to the truth in a way that is different from a philosophical approach. In the case of absolute knowledge, no aspect of the truth remains external to knowledge, and all transcendence becomes immanent (Hyppolite 1997: 41). Literature, in contrast, retains a moment of “vertical transcendence,” as the linguistic and historical material that constitutes it keeps it at a distance from the infinite (Hyppolite 1946: 543). What is special about literature, for the early Hartman, is that in spite of this distance, it yet has the capacity to directly grasp the true reality of things. This belief in directness is one meaning of the title of Hartman’s book. Still, the idea of an “unmediated vision” also refers to another crucial aspect of the book, which links its case for literature to a particular theory of modernity. For Hartman, the modern age is marked by a lack of mediation, and poetry has

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the singular capacity to “re-mediate” this modern condition; modern poetry presents evidence for the continued availability of a transcendent source of meaning that is no longer simply present in the world, as was the case in the pre-modern world. The pre-modern world was characterized by a mediated vision: in this period, “[n]either man nor his soul . . . can be preserved unless his life and his faculties seek the mediation of Christ, and the Church, Christ’s temporal incarnation and visible continuance” (UV 148). It is Descartes who breaks with the idea of the divine mediation of the natural world: he “breaks away from the mediated vision, and supports his break by appending the continuity of life, creation, and thought directly to God” (148). After Descartes, natural and historical objects of experience are no longer automatically charged with divine significance, and this means that poetry must suspend its customary relations to the things of this world in order to achieve a singularly intense kind of phenomenological vision. Through this achievement, poetry directly indicates God, the source of things’ significance; even if the modern condition has temporarily hidden this source from us, poetry can remind us of its continued existence. Modern poetry, in other words, is no longer the mimesis or imitation of historical and natural reality, but an attempt to achieve a vision that pierces through worldly objects in order to connect directly to their source of significance. Descartes’ break with the mediated world also means that poetry must now use words differently. In the pre-modern world, words not only had an arbitrary meaning “as words,” but they were at the same time also symbols of the divine (161). Now that mediation is no longer self-evident, “[e]verything is in potentia equally sign and equally symbol” (161). In an age when words and things are no longer experienced as symbols (that is, as mediated), poetry must reaffirm the faded distinction between symbol and sign. Through the creation of symbols, poetry can to a certain extent escape the tensions and confusions generated by our habitual relations to things; symbols are “signs having the power to release the mind from the tyranny of the eye, as from all singular impressions” (127). Such an ability to bracket language’s normal relations to the world and to the tradition also implies that modern poetry cannot rely on poetical examples, but must radically break with them. Modern poetry, in other words, has the double capacity to transcend the boundaries of a world that is no longer self-evidently mediated by divine significance and to demonstrate the continued possibility of transcendent meaning. And because it does not collapse the tension between an unmediated world and that world’s transcendent source of significance (as Hegel’s absolute knowledge does), it distinguishes itself from abstract forms of knowledge, and as such testifies to the radical unity of human knowledge. This theory of poetry’s place in modernity informs Hartman’s interpretations of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry. These interpretations show how precisely poetry manages to transcend history and reality, and how it brackets the customary relations between mind and things.3 Hartman will soon realize that his early conception of modern poetry is untenable, and that he has to find

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a way to locate the possibility of significance within history, rather than in poetry’s supposed capacity to transcend it—especially since literature has to affirm the viability of a specifically human kind of diversity. Before we look at this remarkable self-correction, I briefly focus on Hartman’s discussions of Wordsworth and Rilke in order to pinpoint some of the difficulties besetting his early theory of modern poetry, and to identify another intertext that will survive Hartman’s revisions of his early theory: the work of Heidegger. The chapter on Wordsworth, which is centered around a discussion of “Tintern Abbey,” describes Wordsworth’s achievement as the successful neutralization of “relational thinking” (39). This “remission of the relational will and its assertion” means that the particulars of creation can present themselves as a mere “matter of fact,” and that “the description of experience is kept pure of the arbitrary or associational connections which are the necessary product of a searching mind” (8). The bracketing of customary relations and of human projections makes room for a connection to a more genuine reality: “The poem for Wordsworth, the aesthetic intuition, is not the result of an epistemological act but of an epistemological event: a mutual and transcendent principle of generosity has gone into action” (182–3n34). Poetry’s capacity to neutralize our habitual view of things and to break through to an immediate vision testifies to the existence of a sustaining “principle of generosity,” of “a transcendental principle blending” mind and world (20, 25). Poetry liberates us from particular relations, only to reveal a more essential condition of relatedness: The poet, insofar as he writes poetry, feels himself, and is able to express himself, as fundamentally in relation, not with any particular, in any particular way, for any particular reason (though with some thing, in some way, for some reason), but in relation; so that poetry is more immediate, that is, less dependent on a relational use of symbols, than ordinary discourse. (39) Hartman states Wordsworth’s achievement in terms that can easily be coordinated with the theory of modernity and of poetical achievement that undergirds The Unmediated Vision as a whole. Still, demonstrating this achievement through interpretation is another matter. Indeed, the question remains, “by what process Wordsworth’s poetry suggests this great consummation?” (21). Hartman names this process “incremental redundance”; his demonstration centers on Wordsworth’s evocation near the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” of “these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion” (1993: 116–20, ll. 4–7). Wordsworth here manages to bracket the conventional causal connection between the “scene” and the “thoughts,” and to replace it with the suggestion of a transcendent principle of connection: “The phrase ‘of more deep seclusion’ has a referent of which we are hardly conscious because a transcendent one immediately suggests itself. It is the cliffs that cause the scene to appear more secluded, it is the thoughts that are by nature more secluded even than the scene, but the suggestion persists

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that the cliffs and the scene have, by the very fact of entering the mind, caused a deepening there” (22). Hartman glosses the suspension of normal causality that the phrase “of more deep seclusion” achieves as follows: “the quality of a thing redounds on the thing it qualifies and is perceived as its very cause; the part of the whole appears greater than the whole of which it is a part” (22). Incremental redundance is the main poetical figure that supports Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth, which is in its turn the cornerstone of the book’s development of its theory of modernity and of poetical significance. The tensions we encounter in Hartman’s description of this figure can then indicate the directions that Hartman’s self-correction of the project of The Unmediated Vision will take. The first thing to note in Hartman’s description is that incremental redundance enables an altered perception—the quality “is perceived,” it “appears”—that does not conform to the way things normally confront us. This new perception points to the scene’s “ultimate referent,” which is a “subsistent ground of vision” that itself cannot be perceived (23, 26). Poetry manages to provide an altered perspective on reality, and as such demonstrates the possibility of transcendent significance; it reconnects a modernity that is defined by a lack of mediation to a source of significance that, even if it is no longer self-evidently present, is not for all that irrevocably lost. But how precisely does incremental redundance achieve this? The rhetorical figure in which an effect is perceived as the cause of the thing that causes it is “a kind of metonymy” (Bahti 1979: 602)—more specifically a metalepsis. In the second part of Hartman’s description, this metalepsis is redefined as the subversion of a part-whole relation (synecdoche).4 This means that the operation of incremental redundance relies on the availability of part-whole relations, and thus of a world in which things are seen as parts of an articulated totality. The problem is that this state of affair contradicts Hartman’s early theory of modernity: modernity is defined as an era in which phenomena are no longer mediated and lack all articulation. Hartman describes incremental redundance as if it merely changes an already intrinsically meaningful reality, whereas poetry, in Hartman’s theory of modernity, is the very operation that constitutes the world as meaningful in the first place. This contradiction undermines Hartman’s project in The Unmediated Vision, as he himself will soon realize. The first problem with his theory of modern poetry is that it is not sufficiently modern, the second that it is insufficiently poetical. It is not modern enough because it defines modernity not as an age that has lost its faith in transcendent meaning, and that has begun to look for meaning in the historical world, but rather as an age in which the source of transcendent significance is concealed. It is not poetical enough because it defines the achievement of poetry as the capacity to temporarily retrieve that transcendent dimension. Even if it defines poetical achievement as a particularly intense form of phenomenological vision, such a vision implies the reduction and ultimate transcendence of the natural, historical, and literary-historical forces that afflict modern poetry. A more satisfying account of modern poetry requires a more intrinsic connection between poetical

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achievement and these determinants of historical experience than Hartman’s early project can provide. Hartman’s chapter on Rilke, like that on Wordsworth, is concerned with the distinction between our ordinary perception of nature and a “sensuous intuition” of “[n]ature’s untranslatable concreteness.” It aims to trace Rilke’s poetical transformation of “transience into continuous motion,” and his capacity to conjure an “eventfulness without event,” an “audibility without sound,” and a “visibility without image” (86–94). Hartman’s interpretation takes off from “Die Erwachsene,” one of Rilke’s so-called Dinggedichte. Hartman writes that Rilke’s poetry blurs the distinction “between the human and the natural object,” and thus manages to “suggest a broad identity” in response to “the call and summoning (Lockruf) of all Creation” (74–5). It masters “the invincible variety and multiplicity of perception” by ordering them in an “inevitably transcendent direction” (75–6, 89). Poetry achieves an “inflexible aloofness from the things of this world,” a Gelassenheit that makes room for the contemplation of “a pure physical fruit” that is constitutively “independent of human will” (79–87). Rilke, like Wordsworth, achieves a heightened form of perception through the neutralization of the mind’s ordinary desires and projections; his poetry revels in “the sudden upward radiation of a thing on entering consciousness” (87). His poetry saves things from their unmediated existence and reveals how “[a]ll things carry with them the mark of a transcendent orientation” (87). This phenomenological reduction of reality is a response to the demise of traditional mimesis—a concept that here begins its remarkable trajectory through Hartman’s work. Hartman singles out Rilke’s fifth Duineser Elegie as a “[s]uccessful metaphysical statement” that exemplifies this transition from traditional imitation to modern poetry (38). The passage Hartman interprets stages a group of acrobats who, in their attempt to build a human pyramid, discover that there is no point in trying to “mimic the automatic and immanent fertility of the natural world.” Their attempt to imitate nature falters when they find it impossible to mimic the one “season almost unknown to man, namely true winter.” Still, winter is only apparently unnatural, infertile, and meaningless; in fact, it is the “season in which life is secretly and radically renewed, the season of death preceding resurgence” (80). The cycle of nature thus contains a moment in which natural life disappears, and in which it disguises itself as its own absence. Yet precisely because of this paradox, the acrobats’ failure to come up with an imitation of winter paradoxically turns their attempt into a successful re-enactment of natural process: “inasmuch as the pure physical fruit is a more spontaneous product of Nature (phusis, natura naturans) than the rest of nature (natura naturata, die Kreatur) the acrobats have achieved their end” (80). The paradoxical success of the acrobats closely resembles the achievement of modern poetry in the face of the modern lack of mediation: the impossibility to imitate the particulars of nature leads to an affirmation of a totality that

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encompasses these particulars—whether that totality is called the divine, a principle of generosity, or “a purely physical process” that subsumes “the source and end of life” (78). The acrobats’ failure to make sense of a part of creation (natura naturata) becomes the successful affirmation of natural process as a whole (natura naturans, phusis). This distinction between nature and Nature will prove all-important in Hartman’s plotting of Wordsworth’s development in Wordsworth’s Poetry, and this makes it all the more vital to understand how he models that distinction here. In a reading of Kant’s third Critique in his essay “Economimesis,” Derrida describes the process in which “[t]he artist does not imitate things in nature, or, if you will, in natura naturata, but the acts of natura naturans, the operations of the physis” (1981: 9). Mimesis, that is, intervenes “not only as one would expect in reproductive operations, but in the free and pure productivity of the imagination as well” (6). The end of reproductive mimesis does not spell the end of a “divine teleology” and of the possibility of poetical success, because the free productivity of the imagination allows an analogy between artistic and divine creation (UV 153). Derrida writes that “since an analogy has already made natura naturans the art of an author-subject, and, one could even say, of an artist-god, mimesis displays the identification of human action with divine action—of one freedom with another” (1981: 5). As Hartman writes, “[g]reatest art is not imitation of nature but repossession of the book of Genesis” (“TM” 125). Therefore, the less free productivity depends on nature, “the more it resembles nature”—the kind of nature that Hartman will capitalize in his interpretation of Wordsworth (Derrida 1981: 9). Marking the distinction between particulars and totality by a mere capital has a venerable precedent in Heidegger’s distinction between beings (Seiende) and Being (Sein), and it is no surprise that Hartman’s interpretation of Rilke explicitly invokes Heidegger in order to model the complex relations between different aspects of nature.5 While Hegel, as I noted, hovers over Hartman’s work as a threat to literature and to human history, Heidegger provides Hartman with a script to smuggle residues of his early transcendent temptation into the ostensibly secularized theory of modern poetry that informs Wordsworth’s Poetry.6 Hartman seems to be invoking Heidegger when he glosses winter, the season “in which life is secretly and radically renewed,” as a time of “hidden growth, Verborgenheit, that perpetual and winter-like stasis in which the secret ripeness gathers” (UV 80). Hartman links this idea of hidden growth to Heidegger’s conception of phusis as “Erde.” Erde, according to this definition, is not to be thought of as mere sedimented matter, rather, “[d]ie Erde ist das, wohin das Aufgehen alles Aufgehende und zwar als ein solches zurückbirgt” (qt. 189n8). As Heidegger also writes, “[i]m Aufgehenden west die Erde als das Bergende” (1977: 31). The earth, in other words, is pictured as a safe haven that collects all things that emerge. Yet as Hartman’s association between this dynamic and the Verborgenheit of winter underlines, this totality itself does not appear in the world, but comes very close to being the secret truth of a “subsistent ground of vision” (UV 23) that we can only reach by bracketing our

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customary relations to the particulars of nature—which means, in the case of poetry, by abandoning traditional mimesis. In the 1943 text “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” which is central to Hartman’s understanding of Heidegger’s work, Verborgenheit is valorized as an essential moment of truth. For Heidegger, Dasein relates to truth in a relation of Gestimmtheit. This Gestimmtheit is crucially a relation to the totality of Being, rather than to a sum of particular beings: it is “eine ek-sistente Ausgesetztheit in das Seiende im Ganzen,” which is not the same as the sum of all beings that are already known (Heidegger 1954: 18). The truth is not revealed through the accumulation of worldly particulars, or through the mimesis of the particulars of nature that Rilke’s acrobats initially attempt, but rather through an entirely different relation to Being as a whole (im Ganzen). The acrobats, as we know, achieve this more essential relation precisely through the failure of their attempt to imitate nature. In Heidegger too, the relation to the whole is revealed at the limits of accumulation and calculation: “Dieses ‘im Ganzen’ erscheint aber im Gesichtsfeld des alltäglichen Rechnens und Beschaffens als das Unberechenbare und Ungreifbare” (19). This “Unbestimmte, Unbestimmbare” escapes the categories in which we normally capture the world, and it activates a relation to a dynamic of concealment and unconcealment that Heidegger identifies with the truth as such. This explains the paradoxical success of Rilke’s acrobats: the failure of their “man-willed and artificial” attempt at mimesis (UV 80) liberates them into a dynamic of concealment and unconcealment to which the imitation of nature could never have granted them access. Such a shift from imitation to a movement in which nature and life intermittently present themselves as statis and death is already announced in their decision to build, of all things, a pyramid, a construction that, in the words of Derrida, “consecrates the disappearance of life by attesting to the perseverance of life” (1982b: 82), which is precisely the logic that we find in Hartman’s description of winter as a “season of death” in which “life is secretly and radically renewed.” What matters here is less a responsible exegesis of Heidegger—for one thing, the relation between the dynamic of truth and poetry (or art) would deserve a much longer discussion— than an understanding of the way a crucial movement in Heidegger’s work informs the relation between natural particulars and natural process in Hartman’s later interpretation of Wordsworth in Wordsworth’s Poetry. Of course, Hartman’s decision to borrow this movement for a description of natural process—rather than of Being—is itself significant: it presents this movement as a physical process, and avoids unwelcome metaphysical, or even theological implications. Still, the fact that this movement already finds a place in The Unmediated Vision, in which theological concerns play an enabling role—not least in its chapters on Wordsworth and Hopkins—indicates that Hartman’s later Wordsworth will not be the fully secularized poet he may initially appear to be. The discussion of Heidegger points to the persistent difficulty in Hartman’s early work of relating poetical achievement to the historical, material, and

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literary-historical determinants of modern life, rather than to their reduction and transcendence.

2. Auerbach and the Possibility of Historical Meaning The last chapter of The Unmediated Vision is entitled “The New Perseus.” While the old Perseus used “a resplendent mirror” to escape the mortifying effects of Medusa’s glance, the new hero “disdains or has lost Athene’s mirror, and goes against the monster with naked eye” (UV 156). For Hartman, this dramatizes the dilemma of modern poetry: modern poetry is marked by “an almost total break with Judeo-Christian traditions,” and therefore modern poets are united in “their effort to gain pure representation through the direct sensuous intuition of reality” (156). Modern poetry is committed “to the task of understanding experience in its immediacy,” yet only in order to convert this immediacy into “tokens of mediation” or “panentheistic symbols” (164). When Hartman later comes to reflect on his early theory of modern poetry, he acknowledges that this scheme simply left out too much reality, and that it mistook both the meaning of modernity and the capacities of poetry. He admits that he was wrong “in thinking that because the authority of sacred or canonical writing had been removed, the artist’s only ‘text’ was nature, the body, consciousness” (“SA” 214). The desire for an unmediated vision seems “in retrospect, not a solution but a form of heroism,” whose ambitions had more to do with a desire for “religious or ritual purification” than with the realities of modern life. Unable to realize that the chaos of modern life “was already a chaos of forms,” his earliest work discovered a deep perplexity in perception only to spirit it away by interpreting it “in metaphysical terms” (214–16).7 Engaging with the modern chaos of forms is not only a prerequisite for doing literary history, it is also necessary for an adequate appreciation of literary achievement as such. Immediately after his first book, Hartman’s work defines modernity no longer by a lack of mediation—understood as the absence of transcendentally warranted significance—but rather by “the curse of mediacy”— the idea that an unmediated vision is impossible, and that man and literature inevitably find themselves “in the midst of things, and specifically in the midst of the treachery of words” (“MB” 163). In two essays that immediately follow The Unmediated Vision, “The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature” (1955) and “The Taming of History” (1957), which deal with Maurice Blanchot and André Malraux respectively, Hartman underlines that literature has the singular capacity to reflect on its inescapable confinement to the modern chaos of forms. Literature, that is, still to a certain extent transcends the world to which it is consigned, but this achievement is no longer accompanied by the claim that it has a privileged, unmediated access to a reality that everyday life is hiding from us. Literature plays a crucial role in the life of the mind in that it partakes of “a deeply human need for the illusion of immediate life,” and does so in the

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medium of words, which are “sign and proof of the impossibility of immediacy” (“FN” 67–9). It is a crucial medium for negotiating and limiting the temptation to escape from the mediacy of words into an unmediated vision; it is, in other words, a medium that trains us to resist the temptations to which Hartman himself fell prey in his first book. In his essay on Malraux, Hartman sets out to test to what extent Malraux’s monumental Les voix du silence, which is mainly occupied with the visual arts, can serve as a model for literary history. Whereas Malraux attempts “to achieve for art a proclamation of independence from history” (“TM” 114), Hartman situates the distinctiveness of literature precisely in its consciousness of its own historicity. For Malraux, modern art operates in an “imaginary museum” from which all historical difference is removed; it is no longer a representation of its historical moment. For Hartman, such a claim to have surmounted history sounds too much like Hegel’s absolute knowledge. The diversity of human life can only be maintained by insisting on historicity, and this is precisely what literature does. Literature, for Hartman, always expresses its historical moment, yet is not for all that enclosed in it: works of literature have the power to “somehow have themselves, or the activity of art, as their subject” (“MB” 148). In a radical inversion of the theory of modern poetry that we found in The Unmediated Vision, literature now occupies a crucial place in modernity because it is both the expression and the interpretation of its place in history. Importantly, this new conception of literary significance also opens up new possibilities for the practice of literary interpretation. In the interpretation of Wordsworth in The Unmediated Vision, Hartman had to explain how Wordsworth’s language manages to neutralize our habitual relations to things, so as to indicate the persistent possibility of significance. The problem was that Hartman’s interpretation already had to assume the availability of worldly significance in order to demonstrate how poetry generates such significance. In this revised account of literature, literature creates its own significance, because it has the power to interpret its own historical occurrence. One possible new interpretive approach that avoids the difficulty of converting linguistic operations into the reassertion of meaning is the decision to trace literature’s own interpretation of its operations. This approach informs Wordsworth’s Poetry, in which Hartman, on his own account, “followed Wordsworth’s self-interpretations as closely as possible” (WP xii). By focusing on “Wordsworth’s consciousness of consciousness” (xii) Hartman can trace the trajectory of the development of that consciousness, and present it as a much more satisfying account of modern poetry than his earlier attempt. Hartman coins the term “problematics” to describe this form of literary history: “To study the problematics of art would be to consider each work as standing in a dialectical relation to consciousness and a critical relation to the whole activity of art” (“MB” 163). Literature’s reflexive potential also means that each work implicitly formulates its own literary history, and that part of the work of interpretation consists in tracing the work’s understanding of its relation to the tradition.

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Defining literature in terms of its historicity and its reflexivity is vitally different from Hartman’s earlier account of literary significance. Still, the fact that literature is still defined in terms of its meaning-making capacities, and is thus still considered as a distinctive mode of knowledge, also indicates that the metaphysical frame of The Unmediated Vision is not simply abandoned. We may well ask how literary significance is still possible in the modern age—how, that is, it survives the demise of the idea that “art is an imitation of nature” without either falling prey to pure senselessness or simply transcending modern reality (“TM” 118)? “The Taming of History,” the first essay that showcases Hartman’s early obsession with this question, offers a clue when it supports the claim that in the nineteenth century “the concept of art as imitation is not lost, but finds new embodiment in the novel of the great realists” with a reference to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (121). The name of Auerbach, one of Hartman’s teachers at Yale, and someone to whom he feels a close personal affinity, occurs rather infrequently in his work. Still, Auerbach’s history of style can help us understand the stakes of Hartman’s more worldly notion of literary meaning, even if Auerbach’s attention to “the nearly inexhaustible variety of humanity and its creations” (IJ 173) in the final analysis strikes Hartman as somewhat too worldy—a divergence that is reflected in the difference between Hartman’s persistent belief in poetry and Auerbach’s commitment to prose. Tracing the ways in which Auerbach’s work informs the more secular account of literature that leads up to Wordsworth’s Poetry—which is dedicated to the memory of Auerbach—also makes it possible to home in on some of the tensions that beset Hartman’s displacement of transcendence. I already associated the name of Heidegger with this imperfect displacement; as will become clear, Auerbach’s ostensibly worldly and historical realism itself retains a number of traces of transcendence, and Hartman’s peculiar reception of his realism will, if anything, make these traces more prominent.8 In a “Polemical Memoir” from 1999, Hartman recalls that the “influence” of Auerbach’s “personal style” on him “had two aspects”: first, “it confirmed the possibility of going beyond formalism,” and, second, Auerbach transmitted “a certain demeanor,” being “less a professor than a worldly humanist” (“MM” xiv–xv).9 These two aspects need to be combined: it is precisely an adequate literary style that moves literature beyond mere convention and reconnects its formal features to everyday life. This combination of literature’s expressive and interpretive capacities is at the core of Auerbach’s notion of mimesis. In his epilogue to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach describes the book’s subject as “the interpretation of reality through literary representation or ‘imitation’” (2003: 554). For Auerbach, literary representation only qualifies as interpretation when it treats “realistic subjects” “seriously, problematically, or tragically” (557). Literature is interpretation through representation, and as such it is the privileged “artistic expression” of “our human conscious and unconscious apprehension of reality, our attitude towards the world” (Calin 1999: 465). It has the capacity to represent the truth of its historical moment if

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it manages to recognize “the enigmatic richness of daily life” as an “incomparable historical vantage point” (IJ 176; Auerbach 2003: 553). Because the individual author-subject is part of the continuity of history, his most faithful expression of historical reality becomes at the same time the most adequate interpretation of it (Costa-Lima 1988: 489–90). But how can we simply assume the truthfulness of historical particulars? In his important 1938 essay “Figura,”10 Auerbach constructs an opposition between allegorical interpretation, on the one hand, and the Christian exegetical principle of the figura (more commonly known as typology) on the other. While allegory abstracts historical particulars into ahistorical meaning, the figura distinctively maintains the historical particularity of the two events it connects by interpretation: “figura is something real and historical which announces something that is also real and historical”; it distinguishes itself by “the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies” (Auerbach 1984: 29, 54). The figura connects two distinct moments in a historical continuity: “The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life” (53). The figura assures that historical significance is possible without the need to transcend history; it assumes that there is a meaningfulness that is intrinsic to history. In order to appreciate how Auerbach could offer Hartman a convincing alternative to the framework of The Unmediated Vision, we also need to ask where he locates the particular modernity of modern literature. In The Unmediated Vision, it will be remembered, modernity was inaugurated by Descartes, after which transcendent meaning lived a merely subterranean existence and depended on the poetical reduction of everyday life in order to be able to see the light of day. For Hartman, the poetical version of this shift to modernity was located in Milton: he is “perhaps the last who, with the strength of despair,” can still express “the view of created things as instantaneously created, and of man as the absolute creation,” the view that modernity will replace with a regime of “accidence and fortuitousness” and of “material or environmental fatality” (UV 157–60). For Auerbach, it is the figure of Dante who ushers in the modern age and who makes possible a more satisfying literary encounter with the accidence of everyday life. Near the end of Mimesis’ central chapter on Dante, Auerbach connects his interpretation of Dante to the “Figura”-essay, and notes that Dante’s realism consists in the production of “an almost painfully immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings.” This achievement cannot be isolated from Dante’s Christian worldview, as it is “the Christian idea of the indestructibility of the entire human individual which made this possible for Dante” (2003: 199). Yet no sooner has Dante’s realism actualized this possibility than it breaks with this transcendent framework and declares the self-sufficiency of creaturely life. Dante, Auerbach writes, “created a world of earthly beings and passions so powerful that it breaks bounds and proclaims its independence. Figure surpasses fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief” (200). In Dante’s

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realism, “[t]he tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the image it had to contain” (202). Dante, that is, assures the continued possibility of literary significance in modernity. After the Christian Middle Ages, significance is generated in a process of “immanent refiguration” that no longer requires reference to a transcendent source of meaning (Géfin 1999: 29). Auerbach’s affirmation of the modern possibility of literary significance makes it possible to connect literature to the rich variety of human life, which, in Hartman’s early work, is always imagined as being under threat of Hegel’s prophecy of the ends of art and history. Mimesis was written during the Second World War in Auerbach’s Turkish exile from Nazi Germany, and these dismal conditions explain why for Hartman these concerns crystallize in the figure of Auerbach. Near the end of the 1970 essay “Toward Literary History,” Hartman sketches Auerbach’s position in terms that are equally applicable to his own early work: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, written in exile and published after World War II, foresaw the end of western history as we know it—of history as a rich, particolored succession of events with personalities and writers dramatically divided by the pressure of class and consciousness. Auerbach looked at this canvas of history, on which he saw consciousness strive with consciousness in the Hegelian manner, with something of Virgilian regret . . . he surmised that we were moving toward a nivellement which would reduce the autochthonous element and gradually eliminate both local and national traditions; and for him this beginning of conformity augured the end of history. (“LH” 379–80) While Hartman’s account foregrounds an undercurrent of pessimism in Auerbach’s work, it is important to emphasize that Auerbach’s affirmation of realism also contains a much more hopeful aspect. For Auerbach, further immanent refigurations of the European literary tradition remain possible in the modernism of Woolf or Joyce with which he ends Mimesis. In a more recent text on Auerbach, Hartman acknowledges Auerbach’s remarkable confidence in the powers of prose: Auerbach, he writes, enjoyed “the spaciousness and variety prose allowed: he foresaw a prosaic modern era but did not regret it as such, only a tendency toward standardization” (IJ 178).11 When we observe the difference between these two assessments of Auerbach, we see that the more recent one implicitly recognizes that the earlier projection of pessimism reflects Hartman’s own inability to be satisfied with the prose of the world. This inability testifies to Hartman’s residual investment in a reality that is not the stuff of everyday life. By associating Auerbach’s attachment to a mundane reality with the idea of prose, moreover, Hartman suggests an affinity between this other reality and poetry. While Hartman’s case for English modern poetry, and for Wordsworth especially, profits from Auerbach’s affirmation of historical meaning, it still credits poetry with a power that is unavailable in Auerbach’s own history of realist prose. For Auerbach, Dante’s realism makes

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possible the flourishing of the great realist novel in the nineteenth century. The achievements of Balzac, Stendhal, and others demonstrate a historical continuity that connects the nineteenth century to the Christian era that Dante brought to an end, while allowing it to survive itself. The novel’s immanent refiguration offers, in Laszlo Géfin’s words, “a secularized follow-up to an older, ontologically based notion of justifying the present in terms of the past” (1999: 36). While it “may aspire to a deontologized semiotics of immanence . . . it still contains vestiges of the renounced system” (39). In Hartman’s first decade, the need for an assured continuity between modernity and the system it ostensibly renounces—a need that Hartman’s early work inherits from The Unmediated Vision, even if it no longer directly refers to a transcendent dimension—is reflected in the idea that English modern poetry is essentially post-Miltonic. It is after all Milton who managed the transition to modernity, and by reconnecting to that passage, all English poetry after him testifies to the continuity of the modern tradition.12 Throughout his career, Hartman codes this continuity as an English privilege. In the important 1962 essay “Romanticism and ‘AntiSelf-Consciousness’,” he remarks that the “difficulties surrounding a modern poetry of vision vary with each national literature.” The differences between English, French, and German Romanticism are linked to the fact that “for the German and the French there was no easy return to a tradition deriving its strength from both learned and popular sources.” While English Romanticism profits from its connections to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, in Germany and France, “[i]n the absence of this English kind of literary mediation, the gap between medieval romance and the modern spirit seemed too great” (“AS” 310). In light of Auerbach’s work, we can understand that such a loss of continuity implies a loss of history and of the rich variety of human life that allows literature to serve as “testimony to oppose the forces of uniformity and intolerance,” as well as Hegel’s prophecy of the ends of art and history (IJ 179). Auerbach’s affirmation of the variety of historical life makes it possible for Hartman to define literature as a form of resistance against metaphysical fictions, and as a medium that ties man to the reality it at the same time expresses and reflexively interprets. This reflexivity replaces transcendence and immediacy as the marker of literature’s uniqueness. In an essay on Blanchot, Hartman writes that “the inherent temptation is to desert the labour of the negative by going over into one’s symbols. The artist posits a transcendence (metamorphosis) of this kind but his art exists in order to resist them” (“MB” 161). Regarding the work of Camus, Hartman remarks that his prose offers “a strong No” to the “irreducible metaphysical anguish” that drives man to metaphysical fictions (“CM” 107–10). For Hartman, the mimetic affirmation of reality is emphatically a reflexive affair: it offers a “‘yes’ within the ‘no,’ a yes to the no the human body offers to ultimate fictions” (110). The difference between Hartman and Auerbach not only has to do with the distinction between poetry and prose: for Hartman, the affirmation of reality is also explicitly the affirmation of the

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negation of forces that deny reality by aiming for ultimate fictions. This peculiar combination of reflexivity and affirmation organizes Hartman’s account in Wordsworth’s Poetry: while the book traces Wordsworth’s “consciousness of consciousness,” such a focus on his “doubts, revisions, and vacillations” does not prevent a countervailing emphasis on nature and reality, as Wordsworth’s mental development precisely consists in a gradual overcoming of his so-called apocalyptic imagination and an ultimate rediscovery of nature. Wordsworth learns to overcome an “apocalyptic” obsession “with the supernatural and especially Last Things” and to resist the “desire to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things” (WP xiii, xxii). In the end, his imagination self-consciously “binds” itself to nature—what Hartman refers to with the term akedah, after the “binding” of Isaac by Abraham (xiii). In order to underline the peculiar combination of reflexivity, nature, and poetry (rather than prose) in Hartman’s early work, and to appreciate the way it diverges from Auerbach, I want to briefly look at an essay entitled “Virginia’s Web,” from 1961. The essay deals with the work of Virginia Woolf, which is not coincidentally also the main subject of “The Brown Stocking,” the last chapter in Auerbach’s Mimesis, in which he interprets Woolf and other modernist writers as the last stage in the history of prosaic realism. Auerbach writes that these modernist novelists submit, “much more than was done in earlier realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena” (2003: 538). Especially Woolf “holds to minor, unimpressive, random events” (546). Near the end of his essay, Hartman reclaims Woolf for poetry, that is, for the reflexive affirmation of nature: “I suspect that it is her subject, not her form, which is poetic, for she deals always with a part of the mind closest to the affirmative impulse” (“VW” 84). Even if poetry, for Hartman, is the “natural medium” for the affirmation of nature, and even if “[p]oetry gives us this nature more vividly than Virginia Woolf” (84), Woolf’s subject qualifies her as an essentially poetical novelist. So what is the difference between the poetical affirmation of nature and the prosaic affirmation of a merely contingent reality? Hartman begins by noting that, whereas the study of Woolf traditionally concerns itself with “her solipsism and her treatment of time and character,” his essay deals with her treatment of space (71). Woolf’s imagination has an absolute respect for appearances—rather than for “a world beyond the world of appearances” (AM 77)—which has to do with the “inherently affirmative structure of imagination” (“VW” 74). Even before the question of meaning arises, the imagination has always already affirmed a particular reality. Hartman’s essay attempts to make sense of the mind’s need for “a substantialized Yes,” of “the necessity or fatality of some primary affirmation” (74). Still, in the same way that literature not only expresses history, but also has the capacity to take a reflexive distance from it, Woolf’s work has the power to “interpolate” a No to the imagination’s inescapable Yes in order to achieve “a purer affirmation” (72, 78). One of the dangers involved in the capacity to interrupt the mind’s affirmative relation to the world is that the relation to nature will make way for

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“pure will” and lose itself in an unbounded self-assertion. Yet this is not the only danger involved in the dialectic of affirmation and negation: it is also possible that the mind stops resisting the fatality of affirmation to the point where it passively blends with space and dies (73–4). Imagination, that is, must resist two temptations: that of the assertion of the “pure will” and that of a fatal blending with space. This first threat can easily be recognized as the “apocalyptic” desire to skip natural reality and break through to an unmediated vision—the error, that is, that Hartman himself committed in his first book and that Wordsworth manages to overcome in his second book by ultimately deciding to “bind” his imagination to nature. Hartman’s description of the imagination indicates that this binding to nature involves a danger of its own: the danger that nature’s “intimations of peace and of a happy death of the will” will cancel the distinction between the imagination and the space it inevitably affirms (73–4). Hartman goes on to argue that art automatically resists the apocalyptic desire to break with a nature to which it always remains faithful. Even while artists may attempt to oppose the fatality of affirmation, they have to do so through the creation of a work of art “which is its own implicit critique”; the artistic negation of (the affirmation of) reality “still involves an affirmation—the new work of art” (74). Hartman proposes to code the moment of self-critique in Woolf’s project as a tension between “a certain kind of prose and a certain kind of plot” (74). The function of prose always depends on the structure in which it functions, and in the case of a novel or a story, it always has to be understood together with plot, that is, “some finite series of events necessary to produce suspense and move the reader toward the resolving point” (75). For Hartman, plot is on the side of realism, whereas prose is on the side of expression; plot “suggests a more natural continuity” and points to the contingencies of everyday life (76). The tension that Hartman observes between realism and expression breaks apart two elements that are inseparable for Auerbach. While for Auerbach, realism is simply the adequate expression of reality, an expression that also counts as an interpretation, Hartman is here introducing a subtle distinction between an affirmation of the contingencies of everyday life, on the one hand, and a form of prose that expresses its relation to reality differently. Prose, that is, is almost poetry—but not quite: Hartman writes that plot and prose “stand to each other dialectically as major types of affirmation, the plot line coinciding mostly with what we call nature, and the prose line intimating something precarious but also perhaps greater—the ‘Nature that exists in works of mighty Poets’ ” (76–7, italics mine). Plot affirms our customary relations to things, while Woolf’s prose indicates something that it can only “intimate” because it is not poetry. So what is this something? The first thing to observe is that it appears here as a quotation from Wordsworth, a quotation that is about, precisely, the powers of intertextual continuity (and the fact that it is quoted in Hartman’s essay obviously affirms this power). This very mode of appearance already points us to Hartman’s investment in the continuities of English modern poetry, which, as I showed, spins a particular variation on Auerbach’s theory of immanent

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refiguration. Hartman is here separating Auerbach’s principle of intertextual continuity from the affirmation of historical particulars that this continuity makes possible, in order to connect it to a more elevated idea of nature, rather than to the things of this world. If we return Hartman’s quotation to its original context, his divergence from Auerbach’s work becomes unmistakable. Near the end of Book V of The Prelude, entitled “Books”, the poet finds himself walking with “a dear Friend,” “Repeating favourite Verses with one voice, / Or conning more” (1985: 109, ll. 566–7). Yet this recitation does not prevent that “full oft the objects of our love / Were false, and in their splendour overwrought” (ll. 571–2), a disappointment that characteristically calls for compensation: Yet was there, surely, then no vulgar power Working within us, nothing less, in truth, Than that most noble attribute of Man, Though yet untutored and inordinate, That wish for something loftier, more adorned, Than is the common aspect, daily garb Of human life. (ll. 573–9) Wordsworth here voices the half-hidden ambition that informs Hartman’s divergence from Auerbach: his wish for “something loftier” than Woolf’s prosaic “random events.”13 This more lofty reality is intimately related to the medium of poetry. While Woolf’s prose can affirm “an impersonally and constantly active principle of life” (“VW” 78), it cannot grasp this purely poetical dimension of reality. In the passage from which Hartman quotes, Wordsworth writes that he, who “in his youth” With living Nature hath been intimate, Not only in that raw unpractised time Is stirred to extasy, as others are, By glittering verse; but, further, doth receive, In measure only dealt out to himself, Knowledge and increase of enduring joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty Poets. (ll. 590–7) Wordsworth’s poetry not only responds to the impersonal “living Nature” that Woolf’s prose also intuits, but it also has a privileged access to a greater Nature because it perpetuates the greatness and might of modern English poetry. Poetry makes it possible to affirm a natural reality without fatally blending with that nature’s impersonality. The affirmation of nature is no longer a fatality, as poetry affirms “a nature persisting through the negative moment” (80) rather than the random contingencies of life. For Hartman, literary achievement is

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neither mere negation (as it is for Malraux) nor mere affirmation (as it is for Auerbach), but rather the capacity to reflexively engage the fatality of a primary affirmation.14 Auerbach’s position threatens to surrender human difference and individuality to the impersonality of nature. Near its end, Hartman’s essay comes close to naming Auerbach as its privileged intertext when it mentions the “brown stocking,” Auerbach’s iconic instance of Woolf’s submission “to the random contingency of real phenomena” (2003: 538). Hartman refers to it as a “reddish brown stocking,” as if such attention to random detail threatens to suck all blood from the human life it thinks it is affirming in all its variety. We can read Hartman’s description of To the Lighthouse’s Mrs. Ramsey as a veiled expression of his main objection to the teacher who taught him to overcome his early transcendent temptation and to find significance in history and nature: “Although most open to life, sitting by the window, knitting every impulse into a fabric of thought and feeling, what she worked proved finally to be a shroud.” Resolutely open to the contingencies of everyday life and affirming them in the texture of her prose, she forgets to respect human difference and individuality: “Mrs. Ramsey, thinking to affirm life really affirms death” (“VW” 82). For Hartman, here as elsewhere, the affirmation of human life requires the loftier protocols of poetry.

3. Wordsworth: The Phenomenology of Counter-Spirit Hartman’s continuous revisions of his theory of modern poetry in his first decade can be understood as parts of an attempt to falsify Hegel’s prophecy of the ends of art and history. While The Unmediated Vision failed to find the right terms to assert the value of historical and natural variety and of human individuality, Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s poetical development in Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 is the culmination of a more adequate theorization of the relations between poetry, reflexivity, and history—however compromised by remnants of transcendence that theory still is. Not only is Hartman’s account a celebration of Wordsworth’s achievement of “binding” his imagination to nature (of akedah rather than apocalypse),15 the very fact that it narrates the development of the poetical imagination on the level of the individual serves as a retort to Hegel’s alleged indifference to human difference and individuality. The level of narration, in other words, is itself, in the book’s terms, anti-apocalyptic. Hartman writes that “Wordsworth’s explicit subject . . . is not cosmic or societal except in implication. His subject is the growth of the mind . . . The special nature of his theme, his focus on the individual mind, is already a sign of a ‘general and gregarious advance’ in human self-consciousness” (WP 50). Even while Hartman emphasizes that he has not schematized “an emerging Phenomenology of Mind” (xxiii), the book is aware that the story of Wordsworth’s imagination that it offers is an alternative to the victorious march of Hegel’s philosophical knowledge. Wordsworth’s human imagination proves that a

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transition to a philosophical knowledge that undoes it is not inevitable: Hartman writes that “[h]umanization . . . is conceived as a precarious transition from imagination to the philosophical mind,” and that poetry manages to express “the precarious and blended quality of human consciousness, which is always in transition between natural and supernatural” (160–2). The dates in the book’s title—1787–1814—may well convey the subtle suggestion that at the very time that Hegel was engaged in the Teutonic systematization of philosophy—The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, The Science of Logic between 1812 and 1814—England was quietly going through a “Wordsworthian Enlightenment” that would serve as a more humane alternative to philosophical systematicity. The narrative of Wordsworth’s Poetry offers a varied catalogue of applications of the principle of affirmation through reflexivity that I outlined in the previous section. Wordsworth’s imagination manages to affirm its essential relatedness to nature throughout its growing awareness of its seeming independence from it. The development of the story is propelled by an imaginative movement that simultaneously affirms the priority of nature and its own increasing reflexive distance from it. The book is at least comparable to the Phenomenology of Spirit in that it applies this movement to ever new natural contents and ever new poetical devices, in the same way that Hegel’s book proceeds through the repeated application of a movement of Aufhebung. The narrative conceit that organizes nature’s multiple roles—as both the origin of significance and as something to be ceaselessly overcome—casts nature as a teacher or a guide: nature is a pedagogical agent that weans the poet’s mind, only to expose it to its “often fearful methods,” which are only “propaedeutic” in what is ultimately a merciful “pedagogy” (“PW” 214–18). It is nature itself that leads Wordsworth beyond nature. Of course, this double role of nature—as both an active underlying process and a visible set of particulars—recalls the Heideggerian setup of the earlier interpretation of Rilke. And to compound the complexity of nature in Hartman’s story, his divergence from Auerbach has also singled out a privileged form of nature that, because of its association with the works of mighty poets, is essential in enabling a process of poetical individuation—which is to a large extent what Wordsworth’s Poetry is about. Importantly, the complexity of nature is not as such a problem for the book: it makes possible the remarkable descriptive variety and conceptual flexibility that characterizes Hartman’s presentation of the multifarious interrelations between imagination and nature, which this complexity allows him to trace at great length and in great detail. It is instructive to home in on the different roles of nature a bit longer, if only because it allows me to put into perspective the prevalent idea— promoted by Hartman’s own later work—that Hartman’s Wordsworth presents an exemplary strategy for dealing with the memory of trauma and death. When we look at the emergence of these themes in Wordsworth’s Poetry, it becomes clear that this model of survival is rooted in a spectacular avoidance of negativity.

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In his book Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Alan Liu offers a “bare paraphrase of Hartman’s argument.” For Liu, the emergence of the poet’s self-consciousness “involves a dialectic between ‘apocalypse,’ in which the self moves toward imaginative independence from nature, and ‘humanization,’ in which the self restores nature to primacy through the ‘myth’ that nature guided mind beyond itself in the first place” (Liu 1989: 514n3). Liu’s distinction between the truth of self-consciousness and the myth of nature is not surprising when we note that he considers Hegel as the most relevant “precedent” of Hartman’s book—as opposed to, for example, Heidegger (515n4). Still, when we take into account the trajectory that led Hartman to the writing of his book on Wordsworth, it is clear that he turns to Wordsworth in order to underline the decidedly non-mythic reality of nature. Hartman objects to what he sees as a Hegelian disregard for historical and natural reality, and his decision to promote Wordsworth as a counterfigure to Hegel is informed by the conviction that Wordsworth, unlike Hegel, first and foremost affirms nature’s resistance to philosophical abstraction. Moreover, Heidegger’s first cameo appearance (in the chapter on Rilke) already asserted the insufficiency of consciousness’ restless attempt to master the particulars of nature, and the necessity of a moment of Gelassenheit if we want to gain access to an underlying natural process. In Wordsworth, the idea of the “heroic priority” of the apocalyptic imagination (Liu 1989: 514n3) is only a momentary—if repeated—temptation, and not the last word in the history of consciousness.16 So how can we explain that nature figures in Wordsworth’s trajectory as both a self-effacing teacher and as an individualizing force that enables the continuity of a modern English poetical tradition? We can connect these seemingly unrelated aspects of nature by looking at Hartman’s most explicit engagement with Heidegger’s thought, which we find in an essay on Blanchot from 1960. Hartman refers to a short essay by Blanchot on Heidegger and Hegel, which distinguishes what it calls an “essential” from a “worldly” solitude. Blanchot notes how our existence among the things of this world involves a dissimulation of Being. Moreover, our human self-actualization separates us from these things, and this leads to “solitude in the world.” We are not only separated from Being, but also from the totality of beings. Still, this worldly solitude makes possible an experience of anxiety that relates us directly to the nothingness of Being (1955: 264). This is an “essential solitude,” which first constitutes us in our individuality. Such a movement, in which we first have to disengage ourselves from worldly particulars in order to be able to relate to Being as such, is of course reminiscent of Hartman’s earlier interpretation of Rilke’s acrobats. What is important is that this shift cannot be the object of a volitional intention—it is not something we can actively pursue, but rather an event that follows the failure of another project. Blanchot’s essay blurs this point by equating the (Heideggerian) moment of anxiety (Angst) with a (Hegelian) struggle unto death (264–5). Yet what this association does emphasize is that we can only relate to Being as such, and only

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emerge as individuals, by confronting the possibility of our own death. For Heidegger, such a confrontation is the very condition for the “eigentliche Ganzseinkönnen” of Dasein, for Dasein’s capacity to set out on an existential project (2001: 234). And the same goes for Hegel’s Phenomenology: here, the struggle between master and slave is located at the threshold of the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. Hartman’s revision of Blanchot’s two-step scenario skips this moment of confrontation; when this revised picture then informs the narrative of Wordsworth’s Poetry, this evasion crucially limits the relevance of Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s development. Hartman repeats Blanchot’s and Heidegger’s distinction between the worldly project of “an historical appropriation of the earth” and a confrontation with Being that breaks through the worldly dissimulation of Being (“MB” 152), yet this confrontation does not play a role in his account of individuation at all— even if, in the sources on which he relies, such a confrontation is a necessary step if the project of individuation is to get underway at all. Instead, the dissimulation of Being has itself to be dissimulated: Hartman notes that, in order “to live humanly and dynamically,” “besides the dissimulation of the whole there must also be a dissemblance of the dissimulation.” In order to become “existentialists,” “we must become freely blind” (152). Yet instead of explaining this remarkable avoidance of Blanchot’s and Heidegger’s moment of individuation in the face of death, Hartman overlays the relation between Blanchot and Heidegger with a very different tradition: though I think Blanchot is indebted to Heidegger, his understanding of the latter’s philosophy is likely to have been mediated by a larger and predominantly literary tradition. If there is any one trait that unifies literary movements since the Romantic period, it is their quest for an adequate theory of unconsciousness or creative self-oblivion. (“MB” 153) So instead of an outright confrontation with the dissimulation of Being, Hartman pictures a form of literary individuation that occurs by confronting a tradition of “creative self-oblivion.” Connecting to such a literary history that dissimulates dissimulation allows the modern poet to avoid a face-to-face with his own nothingness, without therefore having to surrender the possibility of a project of individual self-development.17 In a Heideggerian scenario, the project of individuation can only begin when the confrontation with death has created the possibility conditions for such a project; for Hartman, poetical consciousness is already established through an intertextual connection to the English poetical tradition at the moment the poet is confronted with loss and negativity. As Thomas Pfau has noted, Hartman’s Wordsworth addresses lethal threats to his own project “only after the fact of “consciousness” has already been established,” and therefore the threat of mortality “remains a psychological (rather than ontological) crisis of an essentially reified ‘poetic’ consciousness-of-self” (1987: 496). The threat of

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death, or of a lethal (apocalyptic) separation from nature, figures in Hartman’s account of poetical individuation as a psychological temptation, not as an ontological fatality.18 In Wordsworth’s Poetry, Wordsworth’s self-conscious assumption of his role in the history of English literature establishes him as a poetical individual, and his sense of vocation generates a web of dynamic interrelations between nature and the imagination. “[T]he great Nature that exists in works / Of mighty Poets” activates a relation to natural process that is unmistakably modeled on Heidegger’s account of the relation between Being and beings.19 On the book’s last page, Hartman acknowledges that he “may seem to exaggerate Wordsworth’s sense of mission” (WP 338); still, this exaggeration is a methodological requirement: the assumption that Wordsworth’s sense of poetical vocation is the salient fact in his career is a necessary condition for the book’s account of the interrelations between nature and the imagination. As “Virginia’s Web” already suggested, the nature that is celebrated in Wordsworth’s Poetry is something loftier than the mere sum of the things of this world. When we note how this nature overlays the confrontation with death in Hartman’s account, we see that Wordsworth’s nature is, quite precisely, reality minus death. This idea of a nature and of an existence in nature that are essentially invulnerable even in the face of loss still informs Hartman’s later interpretations of Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s Poetry presents an intricate web of connections between nature and the imagination, and this web is streamlined in a tale of the growth of the poet’s mind.20 The poet’s progress consists in an ever more adequate integration of ideas of time and place with the poet’s style, which reflects an increasingly nuanced reciprocal attunement between nature and the imagination. Hartman’s name for both this stylistic achievement and this web of interconnections is “metaphor”; he writes that in Wordsworth’s “unique style,” “metaphor (transference) is a generalized structure rather than a special verbal figure” (WP xxiii). This “metaphor”—a term that is derived from the Greek for “to carry over”—is importantly a two-way affair, and is as such to be distinguished from the one-sided activity of positing. In his essay “‘Setzung’ and ‘Übersetzung’,” Rodolphe Gasché notes that metaphysical positing, “and even more so the empirical, humanized version of it,” is “the activity of the self” (1981: 53). Such a logic of self-assertion still governs Wordsworth’s position in his early Descriptive Sketches (written in 1791–2), in which the eye “both puts and restlessly exceeds ‘the line where being ends’”: “if the eye continuously goes beyond, it is only to fix a new line . . . and to transcend that also” (“DS” 524). Gradually, Wordsworth’s poetry moves toward a very different ontology, in which such subjective positing (Setzen) is always the translation (Über-Setzung, or metaphor) of a position that precedes such subjective activity. Gasché connects this metaphorical process to Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia: All concepts of positing, according to which the act of positing is a present act constitutive of presence, hinge on positing as the letting coming forth into what is present. In order that an act may be the present act of a self

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engendering itself as spirit, a self presupposed by all real subjects, an original thesis must already have taken place: a thesis through which the clearing is freed in which a self can come to posit itself. (54) This is the very structure of a nature that only reveals itself as a guide after it has enabled the imagination’s assertion of its independence from nature. Gasché notes that physis “as the holding-sway (Walten) of nature is thesis par excellence” (55). The poetic thesis responding to this original thesis is then always a metathesis. This is what Hartman refers to as Wordsworth’s concern with “the very origin of metaphor, of living metathesis, without which an individual cannot communicate or receive life” (WP 392n17).21 Hartman’s use of “metaphor” as both a generalized structure and a poetical achievement is extraordinarily enabling: not only does it allow him to adopt the Heideggerian scenario on which his story depends, it also grants poetry— which is, after all, the medium in which the potential for metaphor can be actualized—an essential place in this story. Hartman describes how “Wordsworth’s greatest poetry” is “a web of transfers” that reveals “a dizzy openness of relation between the human mind and nature” as well as “to-and-fros (‘traffickings’) between inner and outer, literal and figurative, or present and past” (WP 66). This dynamic is more important than the contents to which it is applied: “The question why the poet is moved is subordinated to the fact that he is moved” (7); “the soul, remembering how it felt in exalted moments, but no longer what it felt, continually strives to find a new content” (43). I noted that Wordsworth’s progress consists in the increasingly successful stylistic integration of ideas of time and place, which becomes the ever more successful expression of the metaphorical structure of reality. In the early Wordsworth—the poet of “The Vale of Esthwaite,” An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches—encounters with places still lead to an “apocalyptic wounding” (87), which brings on the fear of “visionary blindness (blindness to nature)” (87–9). Wordsworth’s style has not yet achieved his mature “dynamism of contrasts” or metaphorical “blendings”—instead, it is marked by “strong contrasts and juxtapositions” (104–6). The young Wordsworth suffers from a tyranny of the eye, and he is overwhelmed by “a multitude of objects whose strong outlines compete rather than blend” (107). The encounter with place does not yet acquire any temporal continuity that would allow its integration with the imagination. The poet is confined to natural particulars, and he has not yet grasped the enabling role that natural process plays in his existence; he does not realize that the sum of particulars will never allow him to apprehend natural process as such. This apprehension is only enabled by a decision Wordsworth makes on Salisbury Plain. The plain is a “no-place,” and because it does not offer the eye anything to focus on, it inspires a “horror of the horizontal.” Wordsworth is saved from despair by his decision to refuse “a near-apocalyptic horror of the boundless” and to instead accept a “defeat of the eye which leads him from visible to less visible” (122, 240–1). As Hartman’s

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revisions of Heidegger have made us expect, a renunciation of vision leads to the compensatory activation of “a power in the mind independent of sight” (241), a power that is drawn from an intertextual source. Hartman writes that for Wordsworth, Milton serves as “the great example of a principle of compensation he seeks to find in nature but which may also live at nature’s expense” (99). By recognizing this example, Wordsworth manages to arrest his exclusive confinement to external natural impulses, and to begin the poetical labor of finding a place both inside and outside of nature. Encounters with place are now no longer isolated traumas, but can become part of English literary history.22 Hartman distinguishes two stages in Wordsworth’s overcoming of his break with nature: first, there is the (nonpoetic) stage of selfhood, which is simply a “criminal or ideological position” that affirms this break; then there is (properly poetic) manhood, which is more than a mere position (Setzung), but creates the possibility of activating metaphorical structures (Übersetzung) in order to erase this rupture. While selfhood assumes that the intellect “is basically revolutionary or contra naturam,” and is thus bound to “perpetuate the ‘crime against nature’ from which it sprang,” manhood embodies the “hope that man does not have to violate nature to become human” (126–34). Manhood, in other words, consists in a massive reinterpretation of the fact of our separation from nature; it involves the—again, metaphorical—capacity to see the “straits of individuation . . . as a summation of natural process rather than as an alienation from it”; Wordsworth “now sees the separation as part of a process providentially encouraged by nature itself” (132–5). Rather than leaving Wordsworth exposed to the traumatic memory of his separation from nature, poetry “acts as a veil that uncovers another veil” (139). This is the conversion from apocalypse to akedah that defines Wordsworth’s distinctive poetical achievement. Hartman observes “a more general conceptual shift from advent to presence, from picture-simultaneity to parousia, from hierarchy to reciprocity” (205). In Wordsworth’s mature style, “[t]he strongest contrasts become blendings” in which “[n]othing is denied its own mediatory role,” “yet nothing is defined into absolute independent singleness” (166–8, 187). For Hartman, Wordsworth’s “potentiality of interchange points to the ethics of metaphor and perhaps of poetry as a whole” (186). Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth combines a remarkable trust in the unhindered continuity of nature and mind with a particular investment in a rhetoric of trauma, shock, negativity, and death. This double emphasis may lead to the conclusion that Wordsworth’s return to nature can count as an exemplary case of post-traumatic stress management. Yet as I explained above, Wordsworth’s remarkable resilience is made possible by an avoidance of negativity, rather than by its survival. In light of the seminal role that Hartman’s work will go on to play in the formation of trauma studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and of his own spectacular claim in The Fateful Question of Culture that Wordsworth’s mediation of the trauma of industrialization achieved a

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“precarious cultural transfer . . . of English rural life” (FQ 7), it is helpful to home in on Wordsworth’s Poetry’s tendency to recuperate moments of negativity and death for the uplifting message of nature’s beneficial operation. Because these encounters with negativity and the threat of mortality only occur as episodes in an already consolidated self-consciousness, these traumas paradoxically serve as privileged vehicles for nature’s essential “non-traumaticity,” for its care and concern for the individual. One of the book’s emblems of man’s resilience in the face of death is the shepherd in Wordsworth’s poem “The Last of the Flock.” Hartman can only make him serve as such an emblem, however, by seriously misreading the extent of his despair. “The Last of the Flock” is one of the Lyrical Ballads, and it recounts the speaker’s encounter “on English ground” (1993: 85–8, l. 5) with a crying man who tells the story of how, after having bought a ewe, “from this one, this single ewe, / Full fifty comely sheep [he] raised” (ll. 32–3); when he is later denied parish relief, he has to sell these sheep one by one (l. 51), and at the moment of the encounter he carries the last lamb on his arm: “To-day I fetched it from my rock: / It is the last of all my flock” (ll. 99–100). Hartman converts the shepherd’s despair into an emblem of human resilience by noting that “[e]very new sacrifice is prophetic, and brings home the idea of separation . . . from all that stands between the self and its nakedness” (144). Although Wordsworth’s poem gives no indication that the last lamb will in its turn be sacrificed, Hartman’s interpretation already anticipates the loss of even the last of the shepherd’s properties. It hastens the death of the lamb because such a radicalization of the separation paradoxically enables a perspective of infinite hope: Hartman writes that the dignity of the shepherd shows “how infinitely capable of loss a man may be; so that our final image is the perseverance of an individual” (144). In light of the book’s overarching argument, we can see that this conversion of a scene of suffering into a demonstration of nature’s charity involves a recoding of the shepherd’s bare “rock” as the place of the sacrificial scene that undergirds the book: the altar on which Abraham binds Isaac, that is, the scene that is traditionally named the akedah, which is the name Hartman uses to sum up Wordsworth’s anti-apocalyptic achievement (225). This scene demonstrates how a sacrificial logic of substitution—Isaac is substituted by a ram, which is in its turn a substitute for a lamb (Genesis 22.7)—generates the promise of future multiplication (Genesis 22.17). When we apply this logic to Hartman’s recuperative interpretation of Wordsworth’s poem, this means that it envisions the future inversion of the shepherd’s story of decline, which will repeat the earlier multiplication of sheep that started from a single ewe (ll. 24–5). Still, Hartman’s interpretation can only echo Abraham’s promise of compensatory multiplication when we gloss over an all-important detail in the poem. As I noted, the last surviving lamb is not yet added to “the iterated sacrifice of fifty sheep, one by one” (WP 144), as the poem gives no indication that it has already been killed—it is, in fact, explicitly said to be alive (l. 38). When the shepherd

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exclaims “Alas! And I have none” (l. 98), in spite of this last lamb being the “only one” alive (l. 96), this indicates his radical refusal to have this “one,” unlike “this one, this single ewe” with which the flock originated (l. 32), in its turn serve as a source of multiplication. For the disillusioned shepherd, the lamb is irrevocably the last one, and he no longer invests any hope of regeneration in it. Only this interpretation—which resists Hartman’s recuperative efforts—can explain why, even when the last three sheep alive are “a lamb, a weather, and a ewe” (l. 93), the shepherd allows precisely the male lamb to survive, rather than the ewe, which would arguably retain the residual hope of future restoration (that the lamb is male is made clear in line 20, where the shepherd says that “He is the last of all my flock”).23 Hartman’s interpretation of this poem as an illustration of the logic of akedah would only hold if the lamb were dead or if it were female; it is neither. Hartman is avoiding the confrontation with a negativity that simply refuses to carry the promise of a future “binding to nature” (WP xiii). This avoidance is characteristic of Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth more generally: the reality of loss is only asserted in order to invest it in “a calculus of gain and loss” (“IF” 152). The shepherd’s radical despair is pre-emptively overwritten by a promise of restitution. Trauma, for Hartman’s Wordsworth, is only ever a psychological crisis in consciousness, and as such serves as an occasion to remind us of nature’s enabling role in our existence. In the words of one of Hartman’s privileged touchstones, the famous “Boy of Winander” passage from The Prelude, trauma only ever delivers a “gentle shock of mild surprise”— nothing a little English poetry cannot deal with.

4. The English Ideology Wordsworth’s Poetry is a magisterial display of Hartman’s temporary resolution of the concerns that had dominated the first decade of his career. His account of Wordsworth’s poetical development establishes poetry as a distinct form of knowledge that differs from abstract, philosophical knowledge. As poetry has the paradoxical capacity to affirm both the freedom of the imagination and the necessity of our connections to history and nature, it takes a substantial place in modernity. In the immediate aftermath of this achievement, Hartman establishes himself as an important critic of criticism, and as the proponent of a particular interpretation of modern English literary history. This double emphasis on theory and literary history is reflected in the almost periodical publication of collections of very diverse essays that follow Wordsworth’s Poetry in Hartman’s bibliography: Beyond Formalism in 1970, The Fate of Reading in 1975, and Criticism in the Wilderness in 1980. Hartman’s insights in Wordsworth, moreover, are soon repackaged in a number of essays as both an assertive conception of English exceptionality and a distinct theory of Romanticism. Even though these versions of England and of Romanticism are repeatedly challenged in the

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rest of Hartman’s career, the fact that he rethinks them time and again in the light of these challenges testifies to their centrality in his work. Together with his commitment to the vital importance of the aesthetic as such, they serve as the immovable reference points that orient his career; and like that commitment to the aesthetic, they always remain closely connected to Wordsworth. The three essays in which the insights of Wordsworth’s Poetry are generalized and promoted as a distinct theory of Romanticism and as an English ideology are “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962), “False Themes and Gentle Minds” (1968), and “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” (1968), which are reprinted side by side in Beyond Formalism. The “Anti-Self-Consciousness” essay presents what Hartman calls “some tentative generalizations” about Romantic poetry (WP xxi), and it treats German and England Romanticism in the context of the Enlightenment, and of the issue of the “death of poetry” that Hartman again associates with Hegel (“AS” 310). Hartman argues that Romanticism is essentially concerned with finding “remedies for the corrosive power of analysis and the fixated self-consciousness” (299). This concern with the “perilous nature of consciousness” is reflected in the figure of “the Solitary, or Wandering Jew,” who appears in (post-)Romantic poetry as “Cain, Ahasuerus, Ancient Mariner, and even Faust” (303).24 Against prevailing accounts of Romanticism, Hartman holds that the Romantics do not opt for a return to nature or to religion, but rather decide “to draw the antidote to self-consciousness from consciousness itself” (300). Romanticism interrogates “the ideal of absolute lucidity,” and turns to art and poetry in order “not to escape or limit knowledge, but to convert it into an energy finer than intellectual” (299–300). Hartman writes that “in this progress from primitive to sophisticated kinds of visionariness, poetic reflection is the refining principle: it keeps nature within nature, and resists supernatural fancies” (“FT” 67). Such a definition of Romanticism as essentially concerned with the place of poetry in a problematic of consciousness needs to be situated against the background of the famous debate between A.O. Lovejoy’s “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (from 1924), which notoriously questions the possibility of a unified conception of Romanticism, and René Wellek’s response in “The Concept of Romanticism” (1948). Hartman’s definition of Romanticism as a particular problematic and dynamic, rather than a set of fixed positions, not only responds to Lovejoy’s skepticism (“AS” 300–1), but also corrects Wellek’s earlier attempt at such a response. Wellek famously defines Romanticism through “three criteria,” yet he fails to establish a dynamic relation between the imagination (“for the view of poetry”), nature (“for the view of the world”), and symbol and myth (“for poetic style”) (1963: 163). While Wellek merely notes these elements’ “profound coherence and mutual implication” (197), Hartman positions them as orientation points in a constellation that circumscribes the problematic that he defines as Romantic. Another vital point of reference for Hartman’s Romanticism is Morse Peckham’s important 1951 article “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” an essay that already brings together most of the ideas

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that Hartman promotes in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’,” yet does so in a less dialectical, and therefore less adequate, way.25 Peckham attempts to “reconcile” Wellek and Lovejoy by reducing Wellek’s three criteria to a “basic or root-metaphor” that he terms “dynamic” (or “positive”) “organicism” (1951: 12–14). This positive organicism, which Peckham finds in The Ancient Mariner, The Prelude, and Sartor Resartus (15n10), is radically different from a “negative romanticism” that he encounters in “individuals who are filled with guilt, despair, and cosmic and social alienation . . . they are Harolds, they are Manfreds, they are Cains” (20). Here the advantage of Hartman’s account becomes clear: for him, these solitary figures are a crucial part of the problematic he is mapping, while Peckham excludes them from his ideologically much more determined version of Romanticism. “Negative romanticism,” for Peckham, is a “necessary complement” of “positive romanticism,” and it is only discussed because Byron has to be given a place within Romanticism;26 he acknowledges the existence of such a negative Romanticism only to relegate it to the moment of Sturm und Drang, that is, before Romanticism proper really took off.27 Hartman, in contrast, combines negative and positive Romanticism in “a vital, dialectical movement of soul-making” in which the movement is as important, and as distinctly Romantic, as the final state of this dialectical progression (“AS” 299).28 Hartman’s double focus on Germany and England in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” is strategic: it allows him to grant the question of the relation between Enlightenment and Romanticism the serious treatment it has received in the German tradition, only to end the essay by privileging the English version of Romanticism. This English literary history can be seen as an analogical extension of Wordsworth’s development. Indeed, when Hartman remarks that “Wordsworth exemplifies a peculiarly English relation of new to old” (67), Wordsworth is made to exemplify a tradition that is itself an analogical extension of his own example. As I noted, this modern tradition begins with Milton, whose mature work is credited with the successful transcendence of the “dichotomy of ‘gentle mind’ and ‘false theme’ which appears early in his poetry”; this achievement “shows the enlightened mind still emerging,” and as such constitutes “a stage in the growth of the English poetic mind” (“FT” 56–7). The emergence of the poetic mind in Milton is “peculiarly English,” because his poetry “produces the sense of a middle-region in which everything is numinous and semi-divine,” and this temperance constitutes “the right kind of spirit, or spirits, for English landscape” (58). English poetry does not “give up the sophisticated superstitions by which literature had always amused, shocked, or instructed” in favor of the progress of reason, but uniquely manages to respect romance as “an eternal rather than archaic portion of the human mind, and poetry [as] its purification” (55, 60). England exemplifies a reciprocal integration of nature and imagination, of fact and fiction, and of romance and reason that is neither abstract nor traumatic. Yet because it also constitutes a particular tradition, it can be compared

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to other literary histories, most notably German and French literary history. What is more problematic is that Hartman’s account of English literary history also informs his most outspoken literary theoretical statements. These statements are found in the essays “The Voice of the Shuttle” (1969) and “Toward Literary History” (1970), which are printed at the conclusion of Beyond Formalism and are thus presented as a serene summation of the theory that informs the book’s preceding 19 chapters. In fact, their claim to generality is severely undercut when we appreciate their reliance on a particular national tradition. This tradition does not suffer from “the gap between medieval romance and the modern spirit,” because the connection to “the line of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton” has never been decisively broken (“AS” 310). Characteristically, this historical continuity is also reflected in and sustained by an uninterrupted interaction with “English landscape as alma mater—where landscape is storied England, its legends, history, and rural-reflective spirit” (“GL” 297). These continuities are reactivated whenever the poets that make up this tradition interiorize them as a vocation to take on “the destiny of an individual or a nation” (292). “False Themes” formulates the German alternative to England’s literary history in a discussion of Gottfried Bürger’s “Der wilde Jäger” (and that one poem is made to exemplify the German national condition is at least remarkable, but it confirms Hartman’s reliance on analogical thinking in this phase of his work). Hartman first determines “Bürger’s literary situation, and its difference from that of the English poets,” only to find it wanting: there is “no one, like Milton, to guide his steps” (“FT” 62–3). Neither is there a significant relation to nature: the poem is “totally steeped in myth and superstition” and is unable to maintain a “naturalistic perspective” (64–6). The result is that it is impossible to patiently bind the imagination to nature: the poem wants to “make up for Germany’s lost time”; time is “intrinsically demonic,” because “the mind is not given enough natural time in which to reflect” and becomes “a mere reflector of compulsions and spectator of fatalities” (64–5). Historical discontinuity prevents a reciprocal relation between mind and nature. Hartman’s interpretation of Bürger is less an attempt to understand the particularity of Bürger’s poetry, or even of German literary history, than an assessment of their failure to live up to the English norm. Whereas Hartman’s understanding of English literary history is carefully developed by patient and often impressive readings of Wordsworth and others, his discussion of Bürger simply serves to illustrate the difference between the English situation and non-English poetry. Frances Ferguson has remarked that in the relation Hartman observes between Wordsworth and England “[o]ntogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as individual poetic development rehearses literary history” (1991: 488); the assumption of such a perfect fit between poem and nation leads Hartman to treat the case of Bürger as symptomatic of the German condition more generally. The opposition between England’s non-traumatic continuities and Germany’s apocalyptic ruptures will inform Hartman’s famous claim for Wordsworth’s role

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in the prevention of an English Holocaust in The Fateful Question. As the genealogy of this claim in Hartman’s early work makes clear, it derives less from a responsible exercise in comparative literature than from a peculiar affective investment in a certain idea of English literature and culture. Germany, it seems, never manages to rid itself in Hartman’s work of its early association with Hegel’s “curse”—even if, given the much more positive light in which he figures in Hartman’s memoir A Scholar’s Tale (2007), Hegel himself eventually manages to overcome that association. And if this is the critical fate of Germany and England, we may well ask what has happened to France? The French theory of Valéry, Sartre, and Blanchot played an important role in the development of Hartman’s Romanticism. Yet after 1966, the work of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida will present Hartman with a form of French theory that offers a much more direct challenge to his English ideology. As the next chapter shows, Hartman’s readiness to rethink this ideology in the light of such challenges testifies to his absolute unwillingness to let go of Wordsworth’s England.

Chapter 2

Of Climatology: Literature after Structure

. . . who is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual, whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or distracted by a multitude? After a certain time we must select one image or object, which must put the rest out of view wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth as a Head. William Wordsworth, “Letter to Lady Beaumont”

The international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” that took place at Johns Hopkins in October 1966 is generally considered as a landmark in the history of twentieth-century criticism and theory. The conference inaugurated the American career of French theory: it featured contributions by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, who, together with the Belgian Paul de Man, who made a number of remarkable interventions in the discussions following the different presentations, would go on to become key figures in the rise of theory in the 1970s. Hartman’s work in this period—together with that of de Man, Derrida, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller—is routinely associated with the rise of French theory through the label of the “Yale criticism.” Still, his engagement with the work of (especially) Derrida and Lacan is often dismissed as a domestication that fails to appreciate the true radicality of that work. Even if Hartman’s two main essays on Derrida, which were published in 1975 and 1976 in the Georgia Review and were later reprinted in Saving the Text (1981), read like derivations or even pastiches of Derrida on account of their allusive and playful style, it is generally assumed that Hartman somehow missed—or obscured—the real point of Derrida’s deconstruction, just as he had missed the event at Johns Hopkins that launched deconstruction in America. So what was Hartman doing at the time of the Johns Hopkins conference? In the fall of 1966, while Derrida was deconstructing the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Baltimore, Hartman was presenting a lecture in Berlin entitled “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure,” in which he underlined the continuities between the work of Lévi-Strauss and Anglo-American thought.

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This text is but one of three essays that Hartman published in 1966, and in which he positions himself in relation to the dominant critical paradigms of the period: structuralism, the New Criticism and Georges Poulet’s criticism of consciousness (in “Beyond Formalism”), and the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye (in “Ghostlier Demarcations”). In Hartman’s career, “1966” does not signal the discovery of French theory—as I showed in the first chapter, Hartman has been thoroughly familiar with French thought since the very beginning of his career—but rather his coming out as a critic of criticism. On the strength of his work on Romanticism and French thought in his first decade, Hartman self-consciously comes to claim his place among rivaling critical voices and approaches. Before I turn to these three important essays in the second section of this chapter, I demonstrate that in the case of Hartman, the advent of Derrida does not signal the interruption of a dogmatic American slumber, if only because his work has been in dialogue with European literature and thought from the beginning. Indeed, far from necessitating a major reorientation of his work, Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism confirms the movement of self-correction that structured the first decade of his career. It ratifies Hartman’s own insight in the untenability of The Unmediated Vision’s metaphysical theory of modern poetry that is centered around a transcendent source of meaning, a theory for which Wordsworth’s Poetry offered a more historical and secular alternative. While this alternative no longer explicitly invokes a transcendent source of meaning, Hartman’s accounts of Wordsworth’s trajectory and of the English imagination emphatically hold on to the possibility of meaningful development and significant orientation. The third section of this chapter demonstrates how Hartman takes up the challenge of (post)structuralism by rethinking his English ideology in the terms suggested by semiology and structuralism. His revised account of the English exception focuses on the thematic of the evening star, which does not, like the sun, serve as a transcendent center of meaning, but which can still function as a point of orientation in a post-metaphysical world. Hartman’s attachment to such a reference point and his refusal to abandon the things of the world to a resolutely disorganized freeplay indicate that his embrace of the lessons of (post)structuralism was never unconditional.

1. The Derrida Event The lecture that Derrida presented at Johns Hopkins was entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Even if the stakes of its deconstruction of structuralism were largely lost on an American audience for whom structuralism was essentially a “foreign import” at the time (“AA” 150), in the following years Derrida’s intervention sent “seismic tremors and aftershocks” through the field of literary criticism (Martin 1983: xxiv).1 Standard

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accounts of the history of criticism note that American academia soon managed to control these shocks by enlisting the work of Derrida for strictly formalist approaches to literature; in such accounts, American deconstruction becomes “simply another version of New Criticism’s traditional methodology of close reading” (Nealon 1992: 1266–8).2 Hartman’s work is often seen as paradigmatic of such an apostasy from deconstruction’s radical promise. Hartman’s first two essays on Derrida (from 1975 and 1976) are then considered as somewhat disingenuous and unserious attempts to mobilize the authority of Derrrida for Hartman’s own case for a creative criticism (about which more later); they use Derrida’s work in order to license Hartman’s own “ludic and libertarian” critical exuberance (Norris 1982: 99; Berman 1988: 261). Frank Lentricchia’s book After the New Criticism from 1980 offers a fairly typical account of Hartman’s reception of Derrida. Lentricchia begins his story with Derrida’s “quietly subversive appearance on the American scene,” and laments that this subversive dimension is soon obfuscated by the likes of Hartman (1980: 160).3 According to Lentricchia, Hartman reduces Derrida’s work to a brief for the “unbounded freeplay” of his own “verbal revels” in his attempt to establish himself as “the philological athlete of American poststructuralism” (162, 180). The “Yale formalists” embrace Derrida’s affirmation of freeplay while forgetting that this affirmation, for Derrida, also involves a call to “historical labor”—a call that, for Lentricchia, has “the effect of moving us on . . . in order to interrogate, from within writing, and on wholly temporal and cultural grounds, what (if not naked being) does shape and inform the play of signification” (174). Instead of investigating the historical conditions that make signification possible, Yale formalism “establishes writing as a monolith itself that forever escapes determination,” and to do only that is, Lentricchia writes, “to see only the negative side of Derrida (Hartman, de Man, and Miller have chosen to see little else)” (179–80). By presenting Hartman’s (and others’) deafness to Derrida’s call for historical labor as a conscious choice, Lentricchia is suggesting that they willfully suppress a vital aspect of Derrida’s intervention. Lentricchia hears Derrida’s call near the ending of the essay “La Différance” (1968), which, he writes, is “echoing the conclusion of ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’” (172). Yet it is only by listening to the way this echo distorts its origin—something Lentricchia fails to do—that we can arrive at a more adequate understanding of Hartman’s relation to Derrida. The ending of “La Différance” invites us to accept the absence of a “unique name” and of a fixed center “without nostalgia”; instead, we “must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play— with a certain laughter and with a certain dance” (Derrida 1982a: 27). Derrida’s essay presents nostalgia and affirmation as two options between which we must choose, and for both Lentricchia and Derrida in 1968 it is clear that we must decide in favor of the latter. Still, the essay from 1966—which the ending of “La Différance” echoes—presents the relation between nostalgia and affirmation somewhat differently. In the conclusion to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida

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opposes two different “interpretations of interpretation”: on the one hand, there is a “nostalgia” for the “absent origin,” which “lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation”; on the other, there is an interpretation “to which Nietzsche showed us the way” that instead “affirms freeplay and tries to move beyond man and humanism” (1972a: 264–5). Nostalgia and affirmation are, however, not presented as two elements between which we “must” choose (il faut, as it says in “La Différance”).4 Derrida writes in the last paragraph of his essay: For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing—in the first place because here we are in a region (let’s say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference. (265, translation modified) Derrida evokes a region in which we are not so much faced with an imperative to choose as with the impossibility of even knowing what such a choice might be about. When we take a closer look at “Structure, Sign, and Play,” we notice that this region strongly resembles the condition of Hartman’s work after the demise of the metaphysical framework of The Unmediated Vision. Derrida begins by evoking an “event” that “has occurred in the history of the concept of structure”: we have witnessed the “decentering” of the center that traditionally functioned “to orient, balance, and organize the structure.” This event took place when “it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions to this law of the central presence” (247–9, translation modified). While the center of the system traditionally “permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form,” such a controlled freeplay is no longer possible when the system has been decentered and can no longer be totalized (248). Derrida names “two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization,” of accounting for the impossibility of organizing systemic freeplay. First, this limitation is reflected in the “vain and breathless quest” of the “empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse” to master “an infinite richness”—a nostalgic attempt that is doomed to failure. This first limit still conceives of the “event” in the history of structure in terms of a relation between a subject (or a discourse) and the world, even if this relation is profoundly unhinged. Derrida’s second limit is more radical, in that it no longer locates the limit to totalization in the subject or in discourse, but in “the nature of the field,” in the unbounded freeplay of the elements themselves, which lack “a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions” (260). These two limits to totalization correspond to the two interpretations of interpretation—nostalgia and affirmation. In Lévi-Strauss, Derrida locates

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a nostalgic desire to hold on to the discredited empirical view. He attempts to preserve “as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes” and adopts “bricolage not only as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity” (255–6). His position signals “an ethic of nostalgia for origins,” which is “the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation . . . would be the other side” (264). Such a nostalgic strategy that attempts to recuperate elements from the renounced system in order to allow the possibility of order and meaning to survive the demise of that system is very similar to the development of Hartman’s career from The Unmediated Vision to Wordsworth’s Poetry. Indeed, Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s development can quite accurately be described as the “vain and breathless quest” of an empirical subject and a poetical discourse to capture a chaotic reality that forever escapes them. Hartman’s careful effort to leave room for the possibility of significance and order after the demise of his earliest theory of modern poetry betrays a concern that the end of the metaphysical worldview would surrender the things of this world to mere disorder and freeplay, a dimension that Derrida indicates by signaling the possibility of a Nietzschean affirmation. Before Derrida will call for a decision between nostalgia and affirmation in 1968, their mutual imbrication in “Structure, Sign, and Play” describes the dynamic of Hartman’s early career quite correctly. This means that Hartman’s explicit engagement with Derrida in the 1970s is not just an attempt to respond to a challenge that confronts his oeuvre from outside, but a way of continuing developments that have been a vital part of his work since its first decade. This also means that, even while Derrida does not yet call for a decision between nostalgia and affirmation in 1966, the author of Wordsworth’s Poetry has at that time already made a decision in favor of the nostalgic perpetuation of humanity and historical significance. What Derrida’s pairing of nostalgia and affirmation makes clear is that such critical nostalgia need also be understood as a (conscious or unconscious) avoidance of an affirmation of freeplay, “with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.” The proceedings of the Johns Hopkins symposium were first published in 1970 as The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, and later republished under the apparently more appealing title The Structuralist Controversy. By bringing Derrida’s contribution in relation to Hartman’s work, rather than to the (post)structuralist concern that the later title seems to impose on it, we can see that it also engages with a (post-) phenomenological problematic—with the question of how the subject relates to his world, and how the insufficiency of framing the problem in this way leads to a new kind of philosophical question. As I show in the next section, Derrida and Hartman treat the notions of structure and system as parts of such a (post-)phenomenological concern. This points to what Tilottama Rajan has called “the remainders of phenomenology” in early deconstruction, which were soon forgotten when deconstruction in America became institutionalized as poststructuralism. As Rajan writes, the

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term poststructuralism “names the fact that deconstruction in England and America was perceived almost entirely as a problematizing of or emancipation from structuralism, which retained the latter’s dismissal of phenomenology and its rhetoric of the end of man” (2002: 4). Even if the encounter between Derrida and Hartman failed to materialize in Baltimore in 1966, Hartman’s work, in marked contrast to poststructuralism, confronts the challenge of deconstruction without taking the dismissal of phenomenology and the end of man for granted. Before its institutionalization as a poststructuralism that proclaims the end of man, deconstruction still harbored the possibility of a “humanisme de l’autre homme,” of a different ethics (4). Rajan notes that while deconstruction transposes “phenomenological into linguistic models,” it “retains the ontological concerns of the former”; more precisely, it maintains an “analytic of finitude at the core of its focus on language” (7–8). In Rajan’s difficult words, which bring to mind the residual Heideggerianism of Hartman’s early work, deconstruction’s “turn to language returns on itself in an unforgetting of the use of language to forget being, which will once again be forgotten by poststructuralism” (124). This pre-poststructuralist deconstruction closely resembles the early development of Hartman’s career. This is the deconstruction he received, and not the slightly later poststructuralist version that so thoroughly determined American theory in the 1970s and 1980s. This divergence also explains Hartman’s rather uneasy alliance with American poststructuralism, for which his work has always seemed to be too much occupied with the human, psychology, nature, and other themes that belong in a (post-)phenomenological, rather than a (post) structuralist context. Indeed, it is only in the mid-1970s that Hartman manages to find a place for Nietzschean affirmation in his work. In an essay on the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, Hartman writes in a note that he does “not know how Derrida would interpret Smart’s use of names and proper nouns. Or his ritualistically insistent, repetitive, affirmations. Would he compare all this with Nietzsche’s ‘affirmation en jeu’ or Heidegger’s risky ‘espérance’”? (“CS” 452n19). Hartman only admits this more affirmative moment, however, after he has carefully carved a space for it in his essentially nostalgic critical project. So before we move to that conditional affirmation, we need to look at Hartman’s self-emergence as a nostalgic critic of criticism in the fateful year of 1966.

2. The Constellation of Criticism: Frye, Lévi-Strauss, Poulet, and the New Criticism The three essays in which Hartman takes on the major critical voices and paradigms of the age together make up the first part of Beyond Formalism, the collection of essays that Hartman publishes in 1970 and that consolidates his status as a major critic and theorist.5 Such a confrontation with major critical

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figures is obviously a common ritual for any young critic who wishes to claim his place in the fields of criticism and theory. These essays are unified by an abiding concern for the survival of literature and by a remarkably consistent investment in literary form, as well as in the vital importance of form and narrative for the life of the mind. The “beyond” in the phrase “beyond formalism” that Hartman uses to sum up his critical position points to the interactions between mind, time, and world that testify to Hartman’s persistent phenomenological orientation, an orientation that his temporary engagement with system and structure does not fundamentally alter. “Ghostlier Demarcations” is the textual record of an assigned “assessment of Northrop Frye’s work” for the English Institute (Krieger 1966: v). In the mid-1960s, Frye’s archetypal approach was still massively influential in the field of literary studies. Hartman sees Frye’s work as the “latest and most ambitious exponent of a systematic criticism”; for Hartman, Frye occupies “a new vantage point with its promise of mastery and also its enormously expanded burden of sight” (“GD” 109). This promise of mastery is fulfilled when a “total form” is attained—when criticism achieves “the synoptic vision of art as composing a simultaneous order” (“GD” 114, “AA” 157). Hartman’s emphasis on mastery, system, and simultaneity in his characterization of Frye clearly recalls his early concern with Hegel’s vision of the ends of art and history; the reference to “total form,” for its part, also recalls Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” which talks of “total form” (la forme totale) when it notes that the traditional function of “the center of a structure” is to orient and organize the coherence of the system in order to allow “the freeplay of its elements inside the total form” (1972a: 248; 1967: 409). It is not surprising that Hartman writes that Frye “seems to approach the concept of structure with which structuralism . . . is concerned” (“LH” 361). Hartman’s analysis of Frye’s total form is, in other words, also an oblique critique of structuralism.6 “Total form” is achieved by adopting a “new” point of view, which Hartman explicitly associates with “the point of view of the Hegelian end-state” (“GD” 115, 123). Unsurprisingly, Hartman compares Frye’s Hegelianism unfavorably to the work of Auerbach; for Hartman, Frye’s “visionary politics” is too optimistic about the challenges of technology, and is oblivious of the threat that technology poses to the “fully individuated civilizations” that are at the vanishing center of Auerbach’s Mimesis, “a book almost obverse in temperament to Frye’s Anatomy” (110, 119). Hartman concludes the first part of his essay by assessing the current situation of literature and of criticism: What, then, is the future of historical criticism? Can the aura of the individual work be saved? Or is Frye’s totalizing approach, which looks more and more Olympian, the true alternative? The theory of literature, like literature itself, seems to have entered the crisis stage in its attempt to find the relation of the particular, the “dreadful sundry of this world,” to any authentic concept of totality. (119, italics mine)

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The future of literature and of criticism depends on a decision between saving “the individual work” or adopting a totalizing approach. In order to save individuality and difference, criticism needs an authentic, non-Olympian kind of totality that does not simply neutralize the specificity of particulars but rather brings them together in a way that is more respectful of their particularity, or of what this passage calls their “aura.” Only through such a benign form of totality can criticism save literature; and because literature is also criticism’s object, this rescue operation also saves criticism itself. So where do we find this authentic totality that can prevent the loss of the object of criticism? When the passage above compares the situation of criticism to “literature itself,” we recall that for Hartman, literature, and most specifically Wordsworth’s poetry, is an act of preservation that avoids apocalyptic loss and manages to bind itself to a nature that threatens to disappear. As such, literature’s work of preservation can become an exemplar for criticism’s attempt to avoid the loss of literature. This means that it is doubly important for criticism to bind itself to literature: if criticism lets go of literature it not only loses its particular objects, but it also loses the very example through which it can learn to relate to those objects. Literature is both the object of criticism and the model for criticism’s relation to its objects. Frye’s error is that he severs the vital connection between literature and criticism and only beholds literature from an Olympian distance. Archetypal analysis threatens to “degenerate into an abstract thematics where the living pressure of mediations is lost and all connections are skeletonized,” precisely because it “depends on a disjunction between our immediate experience of literature, which is guided by the tempo of the work, and criticism, which lays out the completed pattern spatially” (118, 121). Instead of immediate experience, Frye presents us with the posture of “the ‘virile man standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets’” who can only scan “the Milky Way of Romance as if it were an alienated part of his—and our—imagination,” and not the fruit of the fertile interactions between nature and the imagination (109, 131). The neutralization of literary experience alienates nature from the imagination and condemns criticism to virile impotence. Hartman’s uncompromising insistence on the value of the concrete experience of literature and art is a constant in his work. Yet as the essay also makes clear, this attention to direct experience is not only an epistemological issue, but also betrays a concern with hierarchy and order that again points to the persistent ambivalence of Hartman’s response to the demise of the metaphysical framework of his first book. He offers the following comment on the cornerstone of Frye’s critical enterprise, the operation of “universalization”: it must be pointed out that he fuses, or confuses, two notions of universality. One is the scientific, and holds that the criticism of literature should be pursued as a coherent and systematic study, which, like mathematics, has elementary principles explainable to everyone. The other is evangelical, and holds that critics have stood like priests between literature and those desiring

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to participate in it, whereas even a child should be able to be instructed in the principles that make art nourishing. (111, italics mine) While Frye’s approach adopts the principles of mathematics, Hartman proposes to follow the example of literature. Frye’s “mathematical” approach dismisses the traditional assumption that literary studies should be “the training, through literature, of a specific and judicious sensibility” (113). For Hartman, Frye’s evangelical ambition to do away with the experts who mediate people’s relation to literature needs to be understood as an application of a pastoral motif that he sums up in a line from Milton’s “Lycidas”: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” (115). The line from “Lycidas” is usually interpreted as part of Milton’s indictment of the clergy of his time. This partly explains why Hartman invokes it here, but the resonances of the line do not stop there (and how could they?). The line is delivered by the “pilot of the Galilean lake” (Milton 1997: 243–56, l. 109, commonly assumed to be a reference to St. Peter) as an indictment of his successor-shepherds’ failure to properly feed their sheep. These shepherds disregard the hunger of their sheep “for their own bellies’ sake” (l. 114): they “[d]aily dev[our] apace” (l. 129), and their mouths remain blind (“Blind mouths,” l. 119) to the fact that their abuse of privilege has abolished the legitimacy of their claims to clerical distinction; their abuses have reduced them to being merely the fittest participants in a struggle for survival in which no genuine hierarchy remains. Yet Milton’s crucial figure of the “blind mouths” also has a different meaning, which underscores the hope of the restoration of real distinction that this passage intimates: the unworthy shepherds’ “blind mouths” make them bad poets, as “their lean and flashy songs / Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw” (ll. 123–4). This reminds us that Milton’s poem is first of all a lament for the loss of that better poet, Lycidas. St. Peter’s intervention is not only an indictment of the shepherds’ mistreatment of poetry, but it also uses poetry as a medium to express the promise of a restoration of real distinction and of genuine poetry. St. Peter, in other words, is Hartman’s exemplary critic, who has the power to preserve the promise of poetical eminence—the very power that is at issue in Hartman’s essay on Frye. We can now understand why Hartman invokes Milton: in the same way that Milton invokes St. Peter in order to borrow his critical power, Hartman turns to Milton’s poetry in order to borrow poetry’s power for criticism; what criticism does with this power is, precisely, uphold poetry as a medium for the preservation of real difference and distinction. Poetry is both the object and the exemplar of criticism. The point of Hartman’s criticism of Frye is that his faith in the “radically protestant” availability of the poetical imagination threatens to do away with the privilege of poetry (“LH” 359). In order to avoid this, criticism must operate “like literature itself,” not “like mathematics.” In a decentered world, criticism must adopt poetry as a new and no longer transcendent center that can orient its operation and restore hierarchical order among the things of

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the world. For Hartman, poetry and criticism thrive only in a rigorously inegalitarian economy. While poetry is not a divine gift, but merely a privileged thing among things, criticism can still elevate it to an exemplary status that, even if it is not purely transcendent, can still organize the world. Such an investment in poetry as a placeholder for the residual possibility of meaning and order in a world that threatens to unravel will remain a crucial component of Hartman’s work. Hartman’s concern with the specificity of poetry recurs in the text he read in Berlin, “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure.” Hartman, very much like Derrida, situates the question of structuralism in the “crisis” that occurs now that the classics have lost the “power to be models for communal behavior,” which has led to “a deepening insight into the nature of modelmaking” and of mythmaking (“AA” 152). Myths are now taken to be not only analogous with one another, in that “they show a correspondence of function if not of structure,” they are also “homologous, or of the same structure.” This perspective obviously threatens to obliterate the distinctiveness and the “formal differences of literature” (“GD” 122). Countering structuralism’s insistence on the similarity of ostensibly distinct phenomena demands a strategy to assert the specificity of different kinds of mediation. While in Hartman’s early work, this strategy—then aimed against Hegel’s vision of the end of art—consisted in the affirmation of national distinctions, he counters structuralism by demanding that it exerts “a genuine historical consciousness vis-à-vis itself” (“AA” 154). Structuralism, that is, needs to ponder its relation to the literary phenomena it describes in the hope, again, of arriving at a more authentic form of totalization.7 Hartman’s historical reflection takes the form of an examination of “the progress of structuralism in England and America” (154), which leads to a restatement of his critique of Frye and an application of this critique to LéviStrauss. The central term in this discussion is “mediation,” which, for Hartman, again points to the possibility of restoring a sense of orientation and direction in a post-metaphysical world—that is, after the metaphysics of presence. Mediations, we read, “presuppose a discontinuity, a separation from the presence they seek”; when we are faced with “a radical discontinuity between firsts and seconds, between original and copies,” mediation can constitute “as it were, a ‘third’ moment which allows us to return to an origin, to recover, if only at moments, some link between second and first” (159). This radical discontinuity is both “temporal” and “logological” (160): it signals a “distancing intrinsic to language,” which is, for Hartman, just as for Derrida, by definition cut off from the plenitude of being (“VS” 340). Yet Hartman’s approach to this intrinsic distancing again reveals his divergence from Derrida: while Derrida affirms that “the nature of the field” of language “excludes totalization” (Derrida 1972a: 260), Hartman accepts this situation only to opt for a certain nostalgia that harks back to order and totalization, even if the totalization he is after is more authentic than that of Frye or Lévi-Strauss. As always, it is literature that sustains his

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belief in such a more benign order. Hartman underlines his difference from structuralism by identifying its desire for the “purity of presence and self-presence” (“AA” 164), and by making this desire part of his own critical reflection, which thus manages to incorporate an awareness of the absence of a center and of the futility of that desire. So how does poetry figure in this scheme? Hartman situates Lévi-Strauss in “the functionalist tradition” on the basis of his conviction that “[t]he function of myth is to allow man to keep on functioning” (162). This leads Hartman to the question of what “a firm and adequate conception of the role of art in human life” might look like (152). Such a conception cannot be arrived at by a purely structuralist approach, but demands that we take seriously “our immediate impression of myths”—only in this way can we “respect surfaces as well as depths,” and avoid skipping over the reality of appearances. When we return to our immediate impressions, Hartman notes, “what is most obvious in [myths] is the instability of the story-line, or of the ‘mediator’ found for a particular problem” (152). What is most remarkable, in other words, is the way in which myths resist their reduction to structure. Hartman makes this point after quoting “one of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘myths of reference’”: The instability of social relations is most remarkable here. If the story reveals a “structure” it is clearly that of the unreliable mediator . . . We easily perceive how tenuous the thread of the tale is, as tenuous as existence itself. It is almost as if the narrative line were the life-line. Thus we find a direct structural equivalent to that “periodic discontinuity in the mediatory process” previously mentioned. (164) Whereas structuralism observes a homology between different myths, Hartman notes a quite different structural equivalence: that between the ontological discontinuity on which he remarked before, on the one hand, and the tenuousness and precariousness of narrative on the other. Myths are, in other words, no longer homologous with one another, but with the structure of being. Hartman’s conception of art’s role in human life is then a rather different version of LéviStrauss’ functionalism: “the thread of the tale” is an adequate expression of our discontinuous existence, and it therefore also functions as a medium that somewhat remedies that discontinuity. Because the distinctive feature of art’s mediation is its tenuousness, Hartman’s revision of Lévi-Strauss does make room for the particularity of art and literature: language cannot be taken for granted, as it is a “mediation to be renewed by the vulnerable genius of each single poet” (“AA” 164–5). In this way Hartman, as he did in the essay on Frye, manages to find a place for the specificity of literature in a post-metaphysical framework, while ostensibly adopting a number of elements from the forces that challenge that specificity—totality in the case of Frye, structure and homology in the case of structuralism. Such concessions to the approaches he discusses are, of course, an indication of Hartman’s partial agreement with and respect

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for these approaches (this is especially clear in the case of Frye); at the same time, they signal a strategic awareness that he cannot afford to dismiss such movements as structuralism and archetypal criticism, but rather needs to enlist them for the critical effort to preserve poetry—a concern that will move to the center of Hartman’s activity as soon as his criticism begins to address contemporary culture around 1970. We find the same concern in the third and last of Hartman’s essays from 1966 that I want to discuss, the important “Beyond Formalism.”8 Hartman opens his essay with a redefinition of formalism: it is not, as F. W. Bateson holds, “a tendency to isolate the aesthetic fact from its human content,” but rather the “method” of “revealing the human content of art by a study of its formal properties” (“BF” 542). As the essay on structuralism already indicated, Hartman’s idea of form is immediately connected to human existence. Indeed, form is even essential to existence, and this is why “to go beyond formalism is as yet too hard for us” (543). The rest of the essay aims to demonstrate that the errors of the New Critics F.W. Bateson and Cleanth Brooks and of Georges Poulet’s criticism of consciousness are a result of their failure to appreciate the essential connection between form and mind. According to Hartman, the faults of the self-avowed formalists Bateson and Brooks are due to “their not being formalistic enough,” while the “avowed anti-formalist” Georges Poulet “is more formalistic than he thinks” (542). By showing how these critics’ misunderstanding of the relation between mind and form leads to interpretive errors, Hartman’s essay demonstrates the correctness of his own complex understanding of that relation. The essay compares Brooks’ and Bateson’s different interpretations of Wordsworth’s famous Lucy poems—an exercise already performed by E. D Hirsch six years earlier (E. D. Hirsch 1960)—only to conclude that they do not live up to the formalism that they profess. Remarkably, these interpretations are not formalist enough because they are not historical enough and fail to take into account Wordsworth’s self-understanding of his place in the history of English literature (one of the themes of Wordsworth’s Poetry). Bateson’s view is “nonhistorical . . . in that his understanding of the poet does not harmonize easily with the poet’s understanding of himself,” whereas Brooks fails to “relate the new and subdued style to the more overt style it replaced” (544). A more adequate account of Wordsworth’s poetry has to focus on the way this poetry understands its own relation to its precursors; it requires a “‘formalistic’ exercise in literary history” that traces a generic history of the lyric and explains the emancipation of Wordsworth’s modern lyric from the “pointed” style that precedes it (548)—an exercise that Hartman undertakes in great detail in the 1965 essay “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” which forms an essential appendix to Wordsworth’s Poetry. While Hartman’s correction of Brooks and Bateson can easily be linked to his earlier work, it is also clearly connected to the two other essays from 1966 in that Wordsworth’s poetry is not only the object of criticism, but is also marshaled as an exemplar for

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criticism—something which the logic of Hartman’s essay does not strictly require. Wordsworth’s formal achievement warns criticism not “to overobjectify, to overformalize” (550). Criticism, like poetry, has to overcome the desire for a fixed point or for some ultimate referent. Yet, as Hartman knows, this desire cannot be completely avoided, as “it seems inextricably tied to the referential nature of signs or the intentional character of thought. All Wordsworth can do is to emancipate the direction of reference” (550). Even if Wordsworth’s Lucy is not to be reduced “to the imagined or the real by a temporal principle of anteriority or an ontological one of priority” (550), criticism and poetry still require a point of orientation, even if it is merely fictional. In his discussion of the work of Georges Poulet, Hartman unearths Poulet’s unavowed formalism by demonstrating that Poulet’s principled focus on the writer’s consciousness forces him to “postulate a period consciousness” in order to avoid the embarrassing problem that there are “as many consciousnesses or cogitos as there are individuals” (551). What disturbs Hartman is not that Poulet somehow reduces the sheer multiplicity of cogitos, but rather that he does so in an arbitrary way. Poulet, that is, fails to perceive the essential connection between form and human content. This is also apparent in Poulet’s interpretation of Henry James: Poulet fails to appreciate the “differential relation of form to consciousness,” and therefore fails to understand that the “difficulty of representation” he observes is at the same time also “a difficulty of being” (553). The point of Hartman’s correction of Bateson’s definition of formalism is precisely to cast issues of form and representation as questions of human existence. James’ problem is not, as Poulet has it, “that of facing as a writer the plenitude of things and having arbitrarily to limit it”; rather, it is “not to be able to think of consciousness as disinterested,” and therefore consciousness has to be curbed by a formal decision, “by the self-imposed convention of point-of-view” (554). Because Poulet assumes “too optimistic a view of the Progress of Consciousness,” he cannot fathom how precarious and conditional James achievement is and prematurely promotes it as “a stage in the history of consciousness” (555). Hartman is not so much interested in pointing to particular problems in Poulet’s work, but rather in underlining the fundamental differences between Poulet’s conclusions and his own conception of the relation between form and consciousness. His own position clearly echoes crucial elements of his early work, and therefore also of his interpretation of Wordsworth; and while it makes eminent sense to show how Brooks’ and Bateson’s interpretations of Wordsworth fail to capture essential elements of Wordsworth’s poetical achievement, Hartman’s discussion of Poulet merely serves to underscore the specificity of Hartman’s own Wordsworthian notion of literary form and its difference from Poulet’s notion. It is, in other words, an ontological rather than a critical argument. Together with the remarkable consistency of the three essays from 1966, this indicates that Hartman’s confrontation with the dominant— or, in the case of structuralism, emergent—paradigms in American criticism

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already reveals a consolidated critical position. This position is not only characterized by an emphasis on literature’s capacity to serve as an exemplar for criticism, but also by its insistence on the essential connection between literary form, the life of the mind, and the structures of existence, as well as on the need for some kind of order and orientation that can persist after the demise of the metaphysics of presence. Hartman’s work no longer depends on a transcendent organizing power, but it still believes that exemplary objects can—and should—organize and orient the relations between minds and things. This need for a minor and subdued form of semi-transcendence is reflected in Hartman’s revision of his English ideology as a poetics of the evening star.

3. Toward a Substellar Poetics: England’s Evening Star The essay “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum” from 1969 offers an experimental reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost that allows us to observe Hartman’s shift from a metaphysical, heliocentric system to a more modest framework that replaces the sun with a less grandiose celestial object—or, initially, a revised version of the sun. The essay clearly revisits the moment of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity, and it does so in the very oeuvre that already signaled that passage in The Unmediated Vision. Hartman characterizes his reading of Milton as a “belated and pale” “imitation” of “a more adventurous hermeneutical tradition”—the reference is to the Jewish interpretive tradition of Midrash— that focuses its self-consciously diminished interpretive powers on only “one place in Milton” (“AG” 169). The essay “[s]tart[s] with the sun,” and it reminds us that the sun also casts a shadow at “the inaugural moment of human consciousness” (168). Human consciousness, in other words, is not the condition of Frye’s “virile man standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets” and remaining unaffected by this shadow—it inevitably operates in the shadow and in time. Hartman’s essay focuses on Adam, who is still untainted by delusions of virility and “wakes out of the hand of God” only to discover “his first perception” to be “of the sun in relation to himself” (168). “Adam on the Grass” can be understood as a barely disguised restatement of Hartman’s critique of Frye’s solar politics. The difference between Frye and Hartman is coded in the essays’s organizing opposition between Satan and Adam, and tied to their different interpretations of the sun’s place: Satan, “in his Sun-bright Chariot,” solipsistically denies that his “puissance” is not self-generated but derives from the sun, which is, for him, “absolutely selfcontained” (182); Adam, in contrast, “wakes to a world in which the sun is a creature (res creata)” that exists in relation with other creatures (170). Satan and Frye hold to a “demystified theory of participation,” in which man can without any problems become “a partner of divine vision” (“GD” 116, “AG” 172). Adam, for his part, is more self-conscious, and rather than naïvely believing in participation, he observes “the very image of desire for participation,” which situates

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him at a saving distance from the desire to transcend relation (173). Instead of Satan’s denial of relationality and dependence, the relation between Adam and the sun is that of a “cooperative hierarchy” between two creatures, which, because they exist in the same realm of creation, instigates Adam’s “need for a participatory knowledge” (172). The result of this dynamic is a series of different economies of sympathy. At first, the image of the sun suggests “an entirely unhurtful, sympathetic, even symbiotic relation: what one creature takes from another benefits both”; the sun and the self, in other words, mutually reinforce one another. This harmony is distorted, however, when “Eve part-takes from [Adam] and leaves a scar,” a rupture that instigates the “desire for knowledge” that threatens to turn into a “horrid sympathy,” into a relation that attempts to deny the hierarchical distinction between sun and self (174). Such a sinister integration would amount to a denial of the fall, to a “denial of creatureliness” (176). This error—or rather, this sin—is clearly if implicitly associated with the methodological hubris of Frye and structuralism. In an exceptionally dense passage, Hartman describes the task of resisting the denial of creatureliness in semiotic terms; it is also an attempt to transfigure the sun and turn it into a sign: The sun is but a sign clarified by a series of awakenings. Emphasis falls on the interpreter, on the mediation of both natural light (consciousness) and supernatural light (dreamvision). Adam’s first sight is already an interpretive leap which transforms perception into vision and makes us intensely aware of the difference between truth in its ordinary and its transfigured form. The image falls apart, into nature as we know it, and a glorified superstructure . . . Yet, though in Adam’s image, there is a quiet cooperation of nature and imagination, sign becomes symbol so proleptically, imagination so imposes on nature, that an intrinsic discontinuity appears . . . The imaginative distance between nature and vision is so great that halving it is like halving infinity. The continuity between them is discontinuous enough to appear unbridgeable. (176–7) Many things are happening in this passage, and as few of them are self-evident, a bare paraphrase may be useful. The passage notes the tendency of Adam (and a whole metaphysical tradition with him) to overinterpret the sun as the divine source of significance. As such an overestimation merely leads to a devaluation of the created world and the excessive glorification of an imaginary “superstructure,” Hartman underlines that the sun does not exist in splendid isolation; it is not a self-contained symbol, but a sign that exists in relation to other signs that constitute it as a privileged sign, and on which it thus depends just as they depend on it. Only from this semiotic, post-theological perspective can the relation between minds and things appear as a manageable continuity, rather than as a forbidding discontinuity, even if the ontological discontinuity between presence and existence persists.

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However complicated this sketch of the human condition may be, we can yet recognize the contours of Hartman’s earlier revision of Lévi-Strauss in it: the ontological discontinuity between the realm of truth and the created world is, as it were, projected onto the hierarchical relation between different created things in order to generate a continuity that somehow remedies the ontological gap between presence and existence. Thanks to the redefinition of the sun as a sign to which we can relate, light does not just disappear from the world but continues to make it possible for order and meaning to flourish. To return to Derrida’s terms, Hartman’s sun-sign allows him to survive the demise of structure and to imagine a world that, because it is centered around the sun-sign that it has generated in its midst, ultimately remains closer to the old dispensation than to the feared reality of unbounded freeplay. Again, Hartman follows Derrida’s critique of structure, but he still responds to it with a nostalgic, humanist project in which real distinction remains possible. The framework that we see emerge in “Adam on the Grass” is not only a reaction to the challenge of structuralism, as this challenge is only one of the many forces that Hartman attempts to negotiate in his career-long attempt to make sense of our post-theological world in a way that allows the privilege of poetry to persist. In Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman’s solution was stage-managed by the discrete propaedeutics of Nature. This propaedeutics functions in a remarkably different way in Hartman’s interpretation of Paradise Lost. For Hartman, the infinite distance between nature and transcendent truth is reflected in Adam’s consciousness as the “small margin between vision and ecstacy,” which is also “the educable margin” (“AG” 177–80). Milton’s God’s program of education, like that of Wordsworth’s Nature, consists in “the gradual attuning of man to the consciousness of what he is” (180). Still, Milton’s God does not just operate invisibly: he explicitly mandates Raphael to guide and monitor the execution of this program. It is Raphael’s task to “interpret the sun” (184)—the very operation that turns the sun into a sign in the long quotation above. Raphael, that is, teaches by his own example: he teaches man to interpret the sun by himself exemplarily initiating that process of interpretation. We here see the same structure that we encountered in Hartman’s essays from 1966, as Raphael subtly shifts from being God’s envoy to instantiating an exemplary form of interpretation that serves as a semi-transcendent example for further acts of interpretation—just as poetry, in Hartman’s essays from 1966, has to teach criticism how to relate to poetry. As the downgraded sun is something that requires interpretation, Hartman also qualifies it as a hermeneutical challenge; it is the site of an excess that “brings language close to a limit of expression” (188). Hartman’s semi-transcendent points of orientation are typically sites of semantic overdetermination or indeterminacy, which again ensures that poetical language qualifies as a particularly adequate medium for providing such orientation; poetry is a form of language that is “radically oblique in terms of sign function” (“VS” 347). In “Adam on the Grass,” the crucial moment of obliquity is Adam’s recollection from Paradise

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Lost on which the essay opens: “I found me laid / In Balmy Sweat, which with his Beams the Sun / Soon dri’d, and on the reeking moisture fed” (VIII 254–6). Hartman does not cease to underscore that “[t]he key phrase is ‘Balmy Sweat’” (“AG” 187): he writes that the phrase “stands out,” that it is “emphasized,” that its “focus” is “reinforced,” only to end with the assertion that this intense focus “leaves us suspended between a simple and complex reading of the phrase” (187–8). For Hartman, these two readings do not cancel each other out: he duly notes that the phrase can both signify the blessings of a “‘sympathetic’ cosmos” (171) and indicate “the sweat of the curse” (188), but there is no need to decide between these two significantly different interpretations. Instead, the meaning of the phrase remains suspended in “the region between logos and mythos” (189). Milton’s phrase, and poetry more generally, can achieve a suspension of meaning because in poetry, the “same phonemic space . . . is competed for by opposite meanings” (188), and this achievement grants it a semi-transcendence that allows it to stand out among the more unequivocal things of the world. Poetical figures can serve as a point of orientation for the subject precisely because their obliquity inspires a situation of heightened interpretive demand— what Hartman in 1973, in a reading of Keats’ two Hyperions, will define as “spectral symbolism”: in Keats, “it is just this absence of a precise referent together with the heightened sense of self they produce, which make them [the spectres] ominous” (“SS” 2). The moment when this interpretive burden asserts itself in The Fall of Hyperion is unsurprisingly associated with another semitranscendent celestial object. Failing to solicit a response from Moneta, the poet has to bear “The load of this eternal quietude, / The unchanging gloom and the three fixed shapes / Ponderous upon my senses, a whole moon.” Hartman notes that the moon is “traditionally the symbol of the border between higher and lower, mortal and immortal realms,” and this makes it a perfect candidate for the function of the under- or overdetermined point of suspension that enables the subject to totalize the things of this world. The “whole moon,” that is, makes it possible to consider the “three fixed shapes” as a totality, a “whole”; the phrase “whole moon,” then, no longer only has a temporal meaning, but becomes another instance of enabling ambivalence (“SS” 9–10). Milton’s sun and Keats’ moon make it possible to avoid both a dangerous transcendence—which, for Hartman, is always associated with the threat of apocalypse—and a demoralizing leveling of the world. Such minor celestial objects allow Hartman to restate the valorization of temperance that was already apparent in the English ideology that we observed in his early work. The most elaborate instance of this valorization, and the most overt update of that ideology, is the 1971 essay “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’.” Hartman argues against a “formalist” interpretation that understands “To Autumn” as a “triumph of form . . . pure of content”; instead, “it is an ideological poem whose very form expresses a national idea and a new stage in consciousness” (“PI” 305–6).9 “To Autumn” illustrates what Hartman identifies as Keats’ “Hesperian”

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model, which constitutes a modest triumph over the “‘Eastern’ or epiphanic consciousness” that is essential to “the traditional type of sublime poem” (307). While this tradition involved “a philosophy of transcendence, and a formulary for the ‘translation’ of states,” Keats’ “nonepiphanic structuring” “tempers visionariness into surmise and the lust for epiphany into finer-tone repetitions” (310–17). Hartman explicitly reads Keats’ model as part of a national ideology when he notes that “‘To Autumn’ is a poem of our climate” (308). The essay brings together the main aspects of this climate: autumn its perennial season, evening the time of day, and the moon—or, soon, a “surrogate moon” (“ES” 87)— the celestial object that organizes its world. That this Hesperian ideology is not Keats’ alone becomes clear when we note that Hartman has to import the moon—which is missing in “To Autumn”— from Wordsworth’s poem “Strange fits of passion” (“PI” 318). Wordsworth and Keats are part of the same climate, and their differences are merely variations of that climate. Within this climate, Keats can even be said to fall short of the Wordsworthian ideal, as he fails to completely “humanize” Romance and to achieve “Wordsworth’s fulfillment of Miltonic tenderness” (319). Unsurprisingly, the distinction between Keats and Wordsworth amounts to different kinds of centering: Such qualities as decorum, impersonality, symbolic adequacy are a function mainly of the concenteredness of “To Autumn”: the poem turns around one image like a “leaf-fring’d legend.” Though Wordsworth’s poems may also have a center of this kind . . . it rarely appears as picturesque symbol or image. Wordsworth’s kernels are mysteries: charged spiritual places which confront and confuse a mental traveler who circles their enchanted ground . . . Keats’s experience is limited from the outset by Greek or picturesque example. What perplexes his imagination is a mysterious picture rather than a mystery. (325–6) Keats, in other words, relates to a somewhat different center than Wordsworth, and even if he relates to it in a fully adequate way, this mistaken reference point asserts itself as a limitation in his poetical practice. Keats and Wordsworth offer two variations of the relation between the subject and the semi-transcendent object that organizes its world and that, in Hartman’s work in the wake of structure, defines the specificity of the English climate. Two further essays in this period, “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’” (1969) and “Reflections on the Evening Star” (1971), offer further elucidations and variations of such a particular relation to a determinate indeterminacy. Hartman’s discussion of Blake is concerned with his “poems on the seasons” in Poetical Sketches (“BP” 193), which contain another “specific myth” about literary history, and more precisely about the future of “the poetical spirit” in England and the West (195–6). What makes Blake’s myth fall short of the Wordsworthian

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ideal is its refusal of the example of “the first significant way station in the Westering of the Poetical Spirit”: Virgil’s “method of mediation, the selfconscious acceptance of a secondary, ‘translating’ function” (198–9). Unwilling to accept the belatedness and secondariness of the climate in which he writes, Blake is unable to confine himself to the evening: “his are dawn and not evening poems” (“DF” 226–7). His refusal of “Hesperia” condemns him to “a lapsed Orientalism” (“PI” 328n16, “BP” 199). Yet the evening is not the only element of Hartman’s national ideology that Blake misses, as he also refuses to accept autumn as the perpetual postponement of winter. Blake does not accept winter as a realm that remains hidden from man, as “a force which man cannot humanize” (202). Rather than accepting winter as a season that transcends human life, he “seems to say to Winter ‘Thou hast thy music too’” (202). By abandoning a humanizing refusal of transcendence, Blake threatens to overreach the limits of the human condition. The result is that he lacks a point of orientation: for Blake, “[t]he poetical spirit is now seen to blow from all corners of the globe,” which leads to a “confused, if high-spirited” disorientation from which Blake’s poetry never recovers (202–3).10 Blake’s ambition to transcend his human limitations inevitably associates him with Northrop Frye—which is not surprising, given the importance of Blake for Frye’s critical career.11 As I noted before, in his essay on “the Anglo-American adventure” of structuralism, Hartman notes that structuralism and Frye fail to take into account a “discontinuity that is temporal (like winter) and logological” (“AA” 160). Hartman elaborates on this remarkable parenthesis by coding “the difference between Frye’s theory of literature and a true theory” as the distinction between two myths: that of Ceres and Proserpina, which he uses to characterize the position of Frye—and, implicitly, Blake—and that of Orpheus and Eurydice, which illustrates a “true” theory of literature and is associated with Maurice Blanchot. The Orpheus myth stages “the figure of a mediation that failed, of a presence not brought back,” and thus recognizes the discontinuity and secondariness that mark the human condition. The myth of Proserpina, for its part, celebrates a “natural cycle” in which winter is merely one element among others in an economy in which man plays no essential part (160–1). Frye and Blake commit complementary errors: Blake denies that “[w]inter really winters,” and insists “on immediacy, on a directness to the source which Virgil’s example and the body of classical tradition impede” (“BP” 199–202); Frye also fails to appreciate the vital importance of poetry’s lesson of secondariness, and his theory thrives too cheerfully on “the accepted loss of art’s temporal immediacy” (“WA” 29). To underscore the consistency of Hartman’s work in this period, we can note that, in an essay from 1973, Hartman refers to this “domain of the secondary” by the term “écriture.” Hartman writes that “[w]riting is living in the secondary, knowing it is the secondary. To be conscious is already to be writing. That is the curse, or the blessing” (“SA” 222–6). This secondariness defines Hartman’s

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consolidated response to the challenges of structuralism and the likes. Let us return one last time to the ending of Derrida’s essay “La Différance”: There will be no unique name, not even the name of Being. It must be conceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain dance. (1982a: 27) The essay on Blake ends with “a view of Blake as homo ludens,” “his maskings a gay science, an applied humanistic magic” (“BP” 205), a “conflagration,” to which Hartman opposes a “concordance mov[ing] closer to contamination”— “outside the myth of the purely maternal” language, which is, as we know, also the myth of Ceres (“AG” 179, 192). “La Différance” goes on to oppose the affirmation of the absence of the proper name to what Derrida calls “Heideggerian hope” (l’espérance heideggerienne), which is a “quest for the proper word and the unique name” (1982a: 27). Hartman accepts that there is “no unique name”; instead—and this is entirely characteristic of Hartman’s compromise between freeplay and structure—there is “the dual name of the star, Hesper (Vesper) and Phosphor (Venus), evening and morning star . . . symbolic of a continuity that persists within apparent loss” (“ES” 90). Venus is a planet that famously has two names: as such, it frustrates the Heideggerian hope for a unique name, but that does not render it incapable of functioning as a point of orientation. The evening star captures the logic of Hartman’s compromise between freeplay and orientation more adequately than Milton’s sun and Keats’ moon.12 The essay “Reflections on the Evening Star” from 1971 is the clearest example of Hartman’s grounding of a particularly English kind of poetical continuity in a substellar thematics. He describes the evening star as a “surrogate moon,” which makes possible “a vivid sense of hierarchy” that is the obverse of the “sublime” and “epiphanic” philosophies of transcendence that it displaces; he calls this obverse of transcendence a “descendentalism” (87–97). Hartman again conceives of the relation between subject and star as a semiotic one that comes to replace a metaphysical framework. He describes Hesperus as “the moon of its own twilight zone” which evokes “a spot of time in which a richly ominous signifier is all there is”: The star-signifier appears as a sign accompanied by signs, or leading to other symbols rather than to a sign-transcending reality. Since man cannot live by signs alone, the evening star poem rouses our reality-hunger and perplexes the very idea of development . . . The star cannot be more than a sign, given the intensity of the desire invoking it. The poem feeds the sign, even fattens it: it wants it to be, if not more than a sign, then more of a sign. (92–3)

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The evening star exists in an economy in which it needs to be recognized by agencies that are dependent on it, and this relation of mutual dependence prevents the star from definitively transcending its status as a sign. The idea of “fattening” the sign reminds us of the Miltonic scene of the sun feeding on Adam’s “reeking moisture.” Both scenes present a movement of accommodation that “brings truth down to earth . . . but in this way could gradually raise an earthly mind to heaven” (“AG” 178). “Reflections on the Evening Star” restates this tenuous equilibrium as a tension “between zoning (the star seen as inhabiting its own zone separated by nature’s or poetry’s magic from various continua) and zooming (a sympathetic or ecstatic movement of identification)” (“ES” 97). As always, the task is to find a tenable position in between identification and separation. Hartman notes that Wordsworth’s Lucy poems achieve such a position in relation to the “star-symbol,” because in these poems “the symbol stars”: Lucy “becomes the moon, love’s absorbing center” (101). Yet his literary history of the evening star does not stop there. It ends dramatically with a figure who, unlike Keats, Wordsworth, or even Blake, is “afflicted by secondariness as by a curse” (111). Samuel Taylor Coleridge almost invariably figures in Hartman’s oeuvre in association with the particularly charged moment in “The Ancient Mariner” before the fall of the albatross—which is apparently a less enabling celestial point of orientation than the evening star.13 Coleridge is afflicted by a “horror of stasis,” and he “leaves us with a depressing sense of hierarchy”; instead of thriving in an inegalitarian but mutually reinforcing economy, Coleridge’s poetry is a demoralizing work of sublimation that “always sacrifices to an origin stronger than itself” (115–21). Coleridge occupies an extreme position in the English climate: whereas Wordsworth makes do with a transcendence-surrogate, Coleridge stands transfixed under a surrogate he fatally mistakes for the real thing he cannot cope with. The evening star is the key term in Hartman’s revision of his theory of modern poetry in light of the challenges of structuralism, semiotics, and other competing critical approaches that threaten to erase the privileged place of poetry. Yet Hartman’s work increasingly begins to realize that the persistence of poetry does not depend on the fate of competing academic approaches alone. The consciously minor key in which Hartman develops his thematics of the evening star is not only an indication of Hartman’s refusal of a strong metaphysical framework, but also an expression of his awareness that the persistence of poetry is now even more tenuous than in the period that Hartman’s literary history covers. Hartman notes that the theme of the evening star “repeats in small the strange survival of poetry within the lights and shadows of historical circumstance” (125), yet he knows that such an enabling historical clair-obscur can no longer be taken for granted in the present. His work increasingly begins to emphasize poetry’s concern with the possibility of its own loss. An essay on Marvell from 1968 reads his poetry as “at once a lament and an acceptance of his situation as poet”; it is a “perennial monument of tears” in

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which “Spenserian allegory laments itself” (“NF” 118, 126–7). Hartman’s argument that English Romanticism survived the death of God by situating itself in relation to the evening star in no way guarantees that a similar feat of survival is still possible in the present. The question is whether poetry can itself become a kind of evening star for the present, and teach the world to preserve it in the same way that it itself learned to relate to the evening star. Hartman writes that the theme of the evening star managed to achieve two things: it limited the “fear of discontinuity, of a break in personal or cultural development,” yet it also limited “a vatic overestimation of poetry which, putting too great a burden on the artist, made this break more likely” (“ES” 123). It assured, in other words, that the world’s demands on the subject did not overwhelm it, and that poetry remained available as one strategy for coping with the world. It helped the subject to renounce its desire for a transcendence that would threaten the relations between the subject and the things of the world. So how can poetry itself occupy a position in our culture from which it can transmit the lessons of continuity and renunciation? And even if these lessons are successfully transmitted, how can they be recognized as specifically poetical lessons? At the beginning of the 1970s, these are the questions that Hartman’s work can no longer avoid.

Chapter 3

Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge

The search for a theory of modernity in which poetry would find a privileged place occupied Hartman’s early work and found a temporary resolution in Wordsworth’s Poetry. Still, the theoretical settlement of the question of poetry’s privilege amounts to very little when poetry becomes an increasingly marginalized medium in contemporary life. This realization moves to the center of Hartman’s critical activity in the early 1970s. While Hartman’s work earlier negotiated the relation of literature to such formidable competitors as philosophy, death, and logic, it is now “engaged in assessing the relation of art to life in a context that obliges us to consider the relation of art to culture.” Life is now emphatically “life in a culture,” and it is the task of criticism to take on the full density and complexity of such a life. At the same time, criticism must strive “to maintain some distinction between art and popular culture while characterizing art as a type of knowledge which is not against life” (“TR” 281–2). That Hartman writes that criticism must maintain art’s distinction is telling: it signals a certain resistance to the more forbidding observation that such a distinction may already be lost, that already, as Hartman will write only in 1975, “[l]iterature is so easily assimilated or coopted that the function of criticism must be to defamiliarize it” (“FR” 260). As I show in the first section of this chapter, Hartman’s resistance to this idea asserts itself as a blind spot in his earliest pieces of cultural criticism written around 1970. In the next section, I look at the difficulties besetting Hartman’s attempt to make a case for the vital role of poetry in contemporary culture. The rest of this chapter traces how Hartman manages to recuperate poetry’s failure to prevent its own demise by making poetry the medium that preserves the possibility of loss. This paradoxical affirmation of poetry’ vital cultural role goes hand in hand with a more realistic diagnosis of contemporary culture—a diagnosis that Hartman’s work at first resists and moderates.

1. Psychoesthetics and the Contemporary Sublime In “The Poet’s Politics,” an essay printed in Beyond Formalism from 1970, Hartman “start[s] with the assumption that ours is a political age”: our age is marked by

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the inescapability of “contemporary experience pressing against poetry and precipitating its meaning” and by the disappearance of the “threshold” “between art and its translation into immediate relevance,” which threatens “art’s very place in society” (“PP” 247–8, “HW” 80). Hartman’s explicit identification of this insistent contemporaneity as the threat of “politics” is obviously questionable, and the essay immediately limits the scope of the discussion by shifting the issue from “the relation of poetry and politics” to “the interdependence of great art and popular art” (“PP” 249). Instead of pursuing the problem of the interrelation between literature and society, Hartman replaces it with the question of the integration of two types of art. The answer to this—far easier— question is unsurprisingly found in Wordsworth. Hartman refers to the famous passage in the preface to Lyrical Ballads where Wordsworth asserts the “mark of distinction” that separates his poems, which exemplify the successful integration of great art and popular art, from “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” that are driving into neglect “[t]he invaluable works of our elder writers” (Wordsworth 1993: 248–9). Lyrical Ballads, according to Hartman, show us “how a poet can penetrate the crisis of his time without bold symbols or violent poetic effects” (“PP” 254). I insist on these admittedly rather facile argumentative movements because they allow us to see the structural limitations of Hartman’s early cultural criticism. It is remarkable that the part of the Wordsworth-passage that is not quoted is the one in which Wordsworth connects the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (“PP” 249), which corresponds to Hartman’s diagnosis of the contemporary pressures on art, with popular culture. The integration that Wordsworth achieves—and that Hartman celebrates—eliminates the connection between popular art and contemporary experience, and can thus hardly count as a solution to the problem of the interrelations between art and society. Hartman’s early cultural criticism can only assert the interdependence of great art and popular culture by bracketing the latter’s popularity. A second limitation emerges from Hartman’s routine gesture of turning to Wordsworth to solve the present crisis. Hartman consistently tends to translate the question of how literature can intervene in the present into the challenge of establishing or maintaining an adequate relation to the past. Wordsworth’s poetry managed to counteract the obsolescence of the “invaluable works of our elder writers,” and his example is invoked in order to preempt that his work is forgotten in its turn. Hartman constructs a rather wishful analogy between the present, when the relevance of poetry is under threat, and a time when Wordsworth successfully resolved comparable difficulties. Yet this analogy alone cannot assure that poetry will be able to save its skin a second time. While Wordsworth’s rescue operation for literature presents an exemplary strategy for accommodating the combined pressures of past and present, it is French Romanticism’s failure to integrate the past that singles it out as a more realistic model for the current crisis. In the 1970 article “Reflections on

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Romanticism in France,” Hartman exposes nineteenth-century France’s failure to develop an integrated society: unlike in Wordsworth’s England, “in France each political or intellectual principle developed separately and completely,” so that by the time Romanticism arrived “in the exploding 1820s” a fateful lateness separated it from the Revolution, and this made “a cultural apocalypse” unavoidable (237–9). In “the limbo of his ‘musée imaginaire’” the French poet lacked a continuity that could orient his “assimilative labor” on “a multitude of fallen gods” (245–8). While Wordsworth countered the deluge of second-rate literature with a poetry of his own, French poets overreached themselves in their lofty mission as “the bearers of an enlightenment that will flood the earth like the knowledge of God” (240). For Hartman, this French condition has been generalized in contemporary America. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the specter of Jacques Derrida, the envoy of French theory in America, was haunting Hartman when he was scripting this fateful cultural transfer. The terms in which Hartman formulates the failures of French Romanticism also describe the challenges that define the function of criticism at the present time. Hartman writes that “[t]he growth of the historical consciousness, its multiplying of disparate models all of which press their claim, amounts to a peculiarly modern burden,” which causes a “state of surnomie” in which historical difference is “suspended by a quasi-divine synchronism” (“HW” 75, “RF” 245, 239). The solution, which remained implicit in “Romanticism in France,” because it is so closely identified with the decidedly non-French name of Wordsworth, is art’s promotion to the status of “a genuine mediation: a wrestling with, and separating of, the dead” (“HW” 83). What limits the applicability of this solution is that the present day, with its “increasing accumulation of men in cities,” and its “craving for extraordinary incident” (“PP” 253–4; Wordsworth 1993: 249), tends to blur the distinction between the real and the virtual, between the present and the past, rather than to decisively separate the living from the dead. A return to the (Romantic) past is not an adequate response to the cultural condition Hartman diagnoses. In order to see what could constitute a more promising response, we need a better understanding of that diagnosis. Let me quote one more fairly typical piece of Hartman’s cultural criticism: Our “waste land” . . . is not a desert but a dump: we suffer from too much rather than from too little, from the rate of change and inexorable accumulation of cultural detritus . . . Actually there are two heaps between which we live: that of the signifiers, the outmoded signs, myths, allusions, and styles, and what the signifiers supposedly signify: reality, the Vietnam war, the war in our cities, all such immediate pressures that disable the signifiers from another angle. Our sense of existence, of being-in-the-world, is at once heightened and undermined by an endlessly inflowing contemporaneity. (“ST” 306)

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“Inexorable accumulation,” “disabling pressures,” “endless inflow,” “deluges”— these terms describe a phenomenon that can without too much difficulty be recognized as a species of the sublime. More specifically, they point to the first moment of Kant’s mathematical sublime. Neil Hertz describes the mathematical sublime as follows: There is, according to Kant, a sense of the sublime—he calls it the mathematical sublime—arising out of sheer cognitive exhaustion, the mind blocked not by the threat of an overwhelming force, but by the fear of losing count or of being reduced to nothing but counting—this and this and this—with no hope of bringing a long series or a vast scattering under some sort of conceptual unity . . . Professional explainers of literature have only to try locate themselves in the current intellectual scene . . . in order to experience the requisite mental overload, and possibly even that momentary checking of the vital powers. (Hertz 1978: 62)1 Hertz goes on to call this “feeling of the inadequacy of [the] imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole” “the reader’s or hermeneutical sublime” (72–3).2 He also refers to this mere accumulation that disables a meaningful synthesis (Kant 2000: 135, 142–3) as an “excess that cannot, in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, be brought back home to the father” (Hertz 1978: 75). As I suggested in my discussion of Hartman’s take on French Romanticism, the mathematical sublime offers Hartman the scheme to translate his disagreement with Derrida into a diagnosis of contemporary culture.3 This also means that Hartman’s cure for this cultural condition will look very much like his response to the challenge of Derrida. The mathematical sublime is a psychological version of Derrida’s freeplay, and to the extent that it makes possible a transcription of freeplay in psychological terms it already announces a nostalgic containment of it. The massive overload of signifiers may be overwhelming, but it can always be contained in the “ecology or interanimation of mind and world” (“DC” 166).4 Because this psychological ecology can resolve the crisis of culture, Hartman uses it as a framework in which he can affirm the cultural role of literature and art. Aesthetics, he remarks, “should really be called psychoesthetics” (157), and this is the name that Hartman’s effort to affirm the vital importance of art and literature intermittently receives.5 He coins the term in the 1973 essay “The Dream of Communication,” which was published in a Festschrift for I. A. Richards. Hartman defines Richards’ work as an earlier form of psychoesthetics, only to immediately declare this version obsolete on account of its “benevolent normativeness” and its unquestioned belief in the “‘premillenial’ perfectibility of the whole stimulus-response relation” (159). Richards has, in other words, failed to anticipate that the mathematical sublimity of contemporary culture would radically unhinge the interrelation of mind and world. Today, Richards’ “idealized stimulus and response pattern” has to make way for “an unbalanced ‘excess’ (of demand) and ‘defect’ (of response)

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model” (173). This disorder characterizes today’s cultural condition, and it defines the remedial role that art can play, as art’s “psychic function” consists in “either limiting a demand or reinforcing a potentiality of response” (174). Hartman’s claim for art’s capacity to restore the balance between world and mind after the unsettling experience of cognitive exhaustion does not simply repeat the familiar recuperative two-step scenario of the sublime. Understanding Hartman’s difference from this tradition can help us appreciate the peculiarity of his position. In Neil Hertz’s reading, the Kantian sublime presents a “drama of collapse and compensation,” in which the “intervention of reason” after the experience of exhaustion recuperates the “sacrifice” of the imagination in order to “consolidate a reassuringly operative notion of the self” (Hertz 1978: 70–4). The ultimate victory of reason raises the suspicion that the initial failure of the imagination was merely a ruse of reason: the emphasis in this triumphant story shifts from “the failure of empirical imagination . . . to reason’s project in requiring this failure” (Weiskel 1976: 41). In Thomas Weiskel’s words, “[t]he cause of the sublime is the aggrandizement of reason at the expense of reality and the imaginative apprehension of reality” (41). Bearing in mind the terms in which Hartman has earlier described the decidedly worldly achievement of Wordsworth, it is clear that he considers the (apocalyptic) sacrifice of reality too high a price to pay for the survival of the subject. In his discussion of art’s curative capacity to limit our demands upon the world, Hartman writes that this “may raise the specter of a further limitation: of something more properly called a sacrifice” (“DC” 174): The sacrifice feared by one who has internalized demand is simply that of the whole principle of mimesis: of a magical correspondence of internal action and external effect, of a mimetic aiming at “The Real Thing.” In semiotic terms, of wishing to convert symbols into signs with real, immediate reference. (174) Art restores the ecology of mind and world—which in the Kantian scenario is the function of the imagination—by limiting our demand upon the world. Its work of renunciation preserves our capacity to maintain a mimetic relation to the world, and it limits what Hartman calls “the anxiety of demand itself ”: an anxiety “rooted in the fear that everything that can be used can be used up; that demand creates the danger of depletion” (176). Hartman reinscribes art in the sublimity of contemporary culture by having it affirm the mimetic communion between mind and world, which he emphatically refuses to sacrifice in the service of the assertion of reason. Still, we must note that the articulation of this solution requires a reformulation of the problem to which it is meant to serve as a solution: poetry does not so much penetrate a sublime cultural crisis, but rather comes to correct a comparatively mild unbalanced ecology of mind and world. Hartman’s avoidance of the radicality of this condition also becomes evident when his psychoesthetics ends up redefining

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the sublime threat of “inexorable accumulation” as the much more familiar fear of loss and depletion, a fear that the experience of art can allay. The problem is that Hartman can only ascribe this vital role to art by mitigating the condition it is supposed to intervene it. The question that remains unanswered is how the operation of art or poetry can be translated into a lesson that can penetrate the cultural crisis without sacrificing the essential connection between that lesson and the medium of poetry, and without requiring an unhelpful redefinition of this cultural condition that underestimates its radicality. I now turn to two contemporaneous interpretations of poetry in which Hartman attempts just such a translation.

2. “As the snow men do it”: Stevens, Hegel, and Poetic Prescription The last section of “The Poet’s Politics” turns to Wallace Stevens’ famous poem “The Snow Man.” Hartman writes that the poem manages “to depict by one exemplary movement (which is the poem) this defense against overthink, against our relentless mental pollution of nature” (“PP” 256). While our minds tend to be too “eager for thought,” and “to pollute our environment by ‘meanings,’ by pathetic fictions” (256–7), the poem’s “mind of winter” teaches us how to limit our design upon the world through its exemplary gesture of renunciation. According to Hartman, “Stevens asks us . . . to reverse ourselves and become what we see instead of seeing what we are” (257).6 Stevens’ poem begins with the lines “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pinetrees crusted with snow” (1971: 9–10, ll. 1–3) Hartman’s decision to read “The Snow Man” as a poem “about” the “indulgence of the pathetic fallacy” (Bloom 1977: 54) is plausible (and common) enough. What is less obvious is his decision to interpret this “aboutness” as a poetic lesson. Indeed, how can we understand the poem—or any poem for that matter—as a piece of advice for the contemporary snowlands? The most obvious answer would be to derive this imperative power from the poem’s opening line (“One must . . . ”). Yet in this reading, the whole poem becomes one long prescription, and it is hard to see how its status as poetry would be essential to this message. However laudable the message they convey, Stevens’ words would hardly need the medium of poetry to make their point. Hartman precisely needs a lesson that is essentially connected to the medium of poetry. He locates the poem’s imperative force in its “exemplary movement” of renunciation: the poem consists of one propositional sentence that, in fulfilling itself, also cancels itself out. Complete in line 7 (at the semicolon), the proposition ironically does not suffice the mind which proposed it and which now, running on, begins to defend itself by a “structured and mounting negation” . . . This kind of poetry does not wish to become thought or afterthought. (“PP” 256–7)

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“This kind of poetry” wishes to cancel the statement it makes, and thus to exemplify the erasure of our pathetic impositions on the world. For Hartman, poetry’s example delivers a lesson as well as “the cleansing power” that allows this lesson to intervene in the present (256). In this reading, the poem is produced by a “wintery” mind, by a mind that is capable of the movement of renunciation that it exemplifies in the poem. This wintery mind is then also the “listener” that the poem’s last stanza evokes: “ . . . the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (ll. 13–15). This “listener” has successfully reduced his being to a “nothing himself.” Yet as the incongruous gender marker in this last phrase indicates, the mind that produces the poem is not the disembodied abstraction Hartman must want it to be if the poem is to play the cultural role he has is mind for it. Hartman’s reading of the poem in fact relies on a category mistake. It is obvious that a negation can cancel a proposition; but when Hartman introduces the “mind which proposed” this proposition into the picture, we are reminded that this negation is itself also a proposition made by this mind.7 While a negation can retract the meaning of an earlier proposition, it is impotent to cancel its own— and the earlier proposition’s—status as, indeed, a proposition. Before poetry’s power of negation can begin to cancel the pollution of nature, it must contribute to it. Importantly, this is not a failure of Steven’s poetry alone: the failure is generic, as it derives from the status of poetry as a man-made fiction, as a work. Hartman’s attempt to formulate the essential connection between the lesson of renunciation and the medium of poetry ends in poetry’s demonstration that it is generically incapable of fulfilling this role. If we take poetry’s fateful compulsion to contribute to the pollution of the world into account, Stevens’ poem makes, if anything, more sense than in Hartman’s reading of it. “One must have a mind of winter” then expresses the necessity of the fiction of an individuated (“one”) and anthropomorphized (“mind”) prop for the movement of cancelling the pathetic pollution of nature. In this way, the poem reminds us that the withdrawal from the snowlands it evokes is only possible because its fictional mind has in advance been decreed to be “of winter.” The “mind of winter” is a man-made fiction, a pure device, a mere “nothing” that, in the terms of the last stanza, can behold the “[n]othing that is not there” (itself) and “the nothing that is” (winter); being “nothing himself,” and being designed with the sole purpose of disappearing into the winter it beholds, it has never been anything apart from this winter. The snow man is “a figure created from the landscape by a human being but who, once that human has departed remerges with the landscape” (Hoag 1979: 91). The poem itself is an imposition on the landscape, and the only way in which the human can depart from it is by ending the poem. The poem has by that point irrevocably taken place, and cannot itself be erased. Traditional interpretations of the poem state that “[g]enerally speaking, the poem has destroyed the pathetic fallacy” (Bové 1980: 195);8 generically speaking, it has demonstrated poetry’s incapacity to refrain from imposing its own “ideas and anxieties” on

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nature (“PP” 257). Poetry cannot exemplify the cancellation of a statement; as stating is the only action available to it, it can only ever state such a cancellation. I want to rephrase this problem in somewhat different terms, in order to underline its close connection to Hartman’s diagnosis of present-day culture, for which he wants to formulate a cure that is intrinsically connected to the medium of poetry. This cultural condition consists in an excessive semantic pollution of the external world, which Hartman earlier described in terms of the mathematical sublime, and which threatened to sacrifice the connection between mind and world. In fact, the snow man’s example of renunciation has a specific place in Kant’s analytic of the sublime. I am thinking of the passage where Kant notes that when we call “the sight of the starry heavens” sublime, we must not ground this judgment in ideas about the “purposively appointed orbits” of the stars or in “concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings”; rather we must “take it, as we see it, merely as a broad, all-embracing vault [ein weites Gewölbe].” In the same way, we must “not take the sight of the ocean as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge . . . for instance as a wide realm of water creatures”; instead, Kant writes, “one must consider the ocean merely as the poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], in accordance with what its appearance shows [was der Augenschein zeigt]” (Kant 2000: 152–3). According to Paul de Man, who commented extensively on this passage, the poet’s “pure aesthetic vision” when he considers the ocean is “previous to any understanding, to any exchange or anthropomorphism” (1996: 82). It is a “Bloße Anschauung ” which “merely sees” (83), and this resembles nothing so much as the wished-for outcome of the snow man’s cancellation of our “relentless mental pollution of nature” (“PP” 256). Hartman concludes his reading of Stevens by quoting the lines “You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye” (257). This “ignorant eye” severs the fateful connection between mind and eye that led to the subject’s excessive imposition of meanings on the nature it perceived. In Kant’s aesthetic vision, the eye “turns out to be completely dis-junct from any mind whatsoever” (Warminski 2001: 16). We can now understand Hartman’s attempt to assert the cultural relevance of poetry as the promotion of pure aesthetic vision, “as the poets do it.” Except that the poets don’t. De Man on two occasions differentiates Kant’s version of seeing “wie die Dichter es tun” from the way an actual poet, William Wordsworth, elaborates “similar intuitions” (1996: 81). The difference is precisely that Wordsworth does restore the economy of eye and mind (and as I have noted, this rearticulation is unavoidable in the medium of poetry). The disintegration of Hartman’s snow man is phrased most drastically in Andrzej Warminski’s remark: “what the poets do in Kant is not (like) what the exemplary poet Wordsworth does” (2001: 5).9 Wordsworth, Hartman’s exemplary poet in his campaign for the cultural relevance of poetry, does not perform the gesture of renunciation that Hartman observes in Stevens’ snow man, and that is yet supposed to describe poetry’s vital cultural role. The poetic lesson to be administered to the mathematical sublimity of contemporary culture is something

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poetry is not capable of delivering. So what does this mean for Hartman’s critical project? One theoretical option that emerges would be to redefine the vocation of criticism: criticism would then no longer labor to define and promote the vitality of poetry, but would become a testament to this incapacity, a rehearsal of that impasse, or even a methodical attempt to radicalize it. This will be the trajectory adopted by de Man, but it is not the road Hartman will take. As I demonstrate below, he takes up the challenge of the incompatibility between poetry’s linguistic operation and its cultural force and incorporates this dissociation in an entirely more paradoxical defense of poetry. I now turn to another of Hartman’s attempts to affirm the essentially poetic nature of his cure for the cultural condition he confronts. The 1972 essay “The Sublime and the Hermeneutic” takes on this challenge by turning to the poetry of that most unlikely of poets, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. While the threat of Hegel’s antihumanism hovered over Hartman’s early work, Hartman here confidently asserts that Hegel was “truly a humanist,” “concerned with defining the powers of man, with detaching the being called man from a divine or overshadowing matrix” (“SH” 153). In the light of Hartman’s earlier work on the evening star, it is not surprising that Hegel has been won over to poetry’s side through a confrontation with the stars. Hartman focuses on “Eleusis,” a poem that Hegel addressed to Hölderlin in 1796 and in which “the thoughtannihilating stars (Gestirn) become through the mediation of ‘Phantasie’ the sublime brow (Stirne) of monitory spirits” (149). Interestingly, the passage Hartman quotes from the poem stages a variant of the snow man, as well as of Kant’s “all-embracing vault.” When the speaker lifts her eye to “the arch of the eternal heavens” (des ewigen Himmels Wölbung, Hegel 2002: 312–17, l. 26), Der Sinn verliert sich in dem Anschaun, Was mein ich nannte schwindet, Iche gebe mich dem unermeßlichen dahin, Ich bin in ihm, bin alles, bin nur es. (ll. 30–3) The snowman-like “pure aesthetic vision” is followed by the sacrifice of thinking (Gedanken, l. 34) and the return of “the eternal” to a worldly reality: “Imagination brings the eternal near to sense [dem Sinne], / and marries it with form [Gestalt]” (ll. 37–8).10 According to Hartman, this “experience of the sublime,” vacillating “between nothingness and nothingness,” elicits “a counter-assertive, inward, humanizing power” (“SH” 150). This human power “allows Hegel to approach the mysteries of the historical past,” even as it dissolves “the distance between him and the mysterious heavens” (150). The poem removes the stars’ “taint of absoluteness” (151) so they can come to preside over “the aether in which consciousness expands its hermeneutic powers” (152). Hegel’s poetic excursion thus restores the correspondence between human sense and worldly form and affirms poetry’s vital role in keeping this “mimetic” connection alive.

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This “humanist” Hegel begins to look very much like Wordsworth. This connection is made more explicit in the essay “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth.” Hartman notes that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit does not end in the selfsatisfaction of a “moment of ultimate recollection,” but that, very much like in the passage from “Eleusis,” spirit returns to the forms of the world and “the mind starts fresh as if all were lost” (“EW” 182). This ultimate “change of what is known into Anschauung” delivers the mind from the burdens of history and religion and allows it to become “the very basis of human freedom” (“EW” 183–6, “SH” 152).11 Hartman explicitly presents the parallels between Wordsworth and Hegel as the lesson that philosophy has to learn from poetry. The point of Hartman’s discussion of Hegel’s poem is that the young Hegel had indeed learned that poetical lesson in 1796, before he again forgot it in his mature philosophical work. Hartman locates Hegel’s poem on “the threshold of the passage from Geister-geschichte to Geistes-geschichte,” the point where Hegel’s sublime distance from the Greeks turns into a merely “hermeneutic” distinction. Hartman quotes a passage following the speaker’s earlier “experience of the sublime,” in which the goddess Ceres is addressed (150): Begeisterung trunken fühlt’ ich jetzt Die Schauer deiner Nähe, Verstände deiner Offenbahrungen, Ich deutete der Bilder hohen Sinn . . . (ll. 45–8) Hartman wants to see in these lines the story of how contact with the goddess leads to understanding (Verstehen) through the interpretation (Deuten) of images. As such, the passage would illustrate the reduction of the sublime gap between man and goddess to a discontinuity that poetry can manage. The trouble with this interpretation is that the poem relates this passage in the past subjunctive, and thus underlines the irreality of this scenario, and therefore also poetry’s inability to achieve absolute insight.12 In fact, the rest of the poem makes it quite clear that Ceres has left not even a sign or a trace for the speaker to interpret: “there remained / no sign of your festival, no image’s trace [keines Bildes Spur]!” (ll. 65–6). What moves the poem even further away from Hartman’s intentions is that it goes on to consider the impossibility of expressing the divine mysteries inspired by Ceres in “dull signs” as evidence of these mysteries’ eminent value (ll. 68–9). Hegel’s poem does emphatically not advertise poetry’s powers to gain insight into divine truth, but rather condemns its own linguistic status for its failure to reduce a sublime separation to a merely hermeneutic one. Instead of asserting the superior capacity of the imagination in maintaining a meaningful connection between mind and world, poetry ends up lamenting its own linguistic limitations. The first part of Hegel’s poem still believes in the possibility to withdraw from “the day’s boring noises” and to find refuge in “memory,” “sweeter hopes,” or

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the imagination (ll. 8, 12, 25). By the time it arrives at the passages Hartman quotes, the hope of ultimately reconnecting the imagination with the particulars of a “slower reality” has already been destroyed (l. 22). The invocation of “the arch of the eternal heavens” immediately follows this disappointment, and serves as a compensation for the inability to relate meaningfully to the world. The rest of the poem rigorously maintains the separation between the divine and the earthly phenomena that fail to incarnate it. The linguistic sign is just one such phenomenon, and the poem knows all too well that it is incapable of connecting the sensuous with the intelligible (Nägele 1985: 28). Because it situates the linguistic sign on the side of the sensuous, and at a remove from the intelligible, the wordplay in the shift from the stars (Gestirn) to the human brow (Stirn) is not, as Hartman wants it, an expression of the humanizing work of poetic language, but instead a symptom of the disappearance of the human in the freeplay of signifiers. Ten years after the composition of “Eleusis,” Hegel returned to the mysteries of Ceres in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at the moment in the development of spirit when sense-certainty gives way to perception (Wahrnehmung). Here the “Eleusian mysteries of Cerus and Bacchus” are credited with being “the most elementary school of wisdom,” because they have taught the nullity of “sensuous things,” of mere particulars when they are not understood in relation to the universal (Hegel 1977: 109). Hegel restates this lesson as a theory of language: “those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of senseobjects . . . if they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This [das sinnliche Diese] that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal” (109–10). While poetry in “Eleusis” had to remain silent in the face of the truth, language has here become “inherently universal.” Language has captured the power of silence, and the universal is no longer consigned to the realm of the unsayable but now lodges within speech itself. Language can marry sensuous objects with significance, and the capacity to relate the internal to the external, the mind to the world, is not the privilege of poetic language alone. Indeed, Hartman’s ambition to single out one privileged form of language is subject to Hegel’s analysis of sense-certainty: in the attempt to state the distinction of poetry as well, “each and every bit of paper is ‘this bit of paper,’ and I have only uttered the universal all the time” (Hegel 1977: 110). What Hartman believes to be Hegel’s true humanism is not the triumph of poetry Hartman wishes it to be. According to Hegel, the lesson of the nullity of sense-objects is one “[e]ven the animals are not shut out from”; indeed, they “show themselves to be most profoundly initiated” into it. In cruel contrast to the example of the snow man, and in total disregard for Hartman’s depletion anxiety, “they do not just stand idly in front of these sensuous things . . . they fall to without ceremony and eat them up” (109). The lines from “Eleusis” that Hartman mobilizes to demonstrate poetry’s capacity to assure man’s meaningful

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continuity with history and with the world not only end up condemning poetry as a cause of discontinuity, but they also point forward to Hegel’s uncharacteristically graphic depiction of a world that is marked by the indifferent multiplicity and interchangeability of all sensuous things and in which man is merely, in Alexandre Kojève’s words, an animal “of the species Homo sapiens” (Kojève 1980: 159n6). This bleak picture makes a curative intervention all the more urgent, but it does not make it any more likely that poetry will be the medium in which this cure arrives. It may be time for criticism to admit loss, or at least to admit loss as part of the solution.

3. The Loss of Loss: Freeplay, Mimesis, Noninheritance When poetry fails to promote itself as the proper cure for the crisis of culture, how can criticism yet help it intervene in that crisis? It cannot just rephrase the lesson it wants poetry to carry in nonpoetic terms. Nor is Hartman content to ascribe to poetry a privileged insight into the utter impossibility of the coincidence of such a lesson and poetic materiality—a project that is in the early 1970s rigorously pursued in the work of Paul de Man.13 In these scenarios, criticism would effectively concede, if not aggravate, the decline of poetry’s distinctiveness. For Hartman, this distinction must be preserved at all cost; poetry’s force must be asserted, even if that force can no longer automatically be identified with the lessons that Hartman wants it to hold. Hartman’s case for poetry in the 1970s resumes a number of elements from his earlier work, while it also introduces a crucial reversal. Recall that from The Unmediated Vision on, Hartman affirmed poetry’s “distinctive mode of knowledge” in relation to the dominant discourses of logic and philosophy (UV ix). Hartman’s early work insisted on poetry’s material obliquity, its irreducibility to transparent conceptual elucidation. In the early 1970s, as Hartman’s work increasingly begins to engage with contemporary culture, it discovers that the real threat to poetry’s distinction has not taken the form of a general transparency and excessive clarity, but that the cultural leveling process—for which Hartman had been prepared by Auerbach’s influence—has instead led to a situation of radical obliquity, and to a mathematical sublimity that “cannot be economized” (ST 111). In this context, it makes no sense to insist on poetry’s equivocality and its resistance to clarity, as these features have come to characterize the culture as such. So how can poetry remain a distinct force in such a dismal condition? In the contemporary situation, things are neither so stable as to lend poetry’s work of destabilization any critical value, nor is their instability such that it can be definitively stabilized in Hartman’s psychoesthetic economy. Things are at the same time absolutely unmovable and perfectly fluid; they can neither fully materialize nor definitively disappear, but only ever present themselves in a spectral state of half-presence. This state in which no firm distinction between

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life and death or between past and present is possible instills the fear that the event of loss itself may be threatened. In the course of the 1970s, Hartman’s commitment to maintain literary distinction and his diagnosis of contemporary culture combine in what Alan Liu has referred to as “an anxiety that may be called the fear of the loss of loss” (1996: 558). For Liu, this anxiety is a particularly postmodern phenomenon, and it sets the agenda for critical practices such as the New Historicism and also, as I argue, for Hartman’s defense of poetry. The task of such projects is that of “rehears[ing] loss,” of “verifying the ‘lostness’ of the lost object” (558). Because this critical work intervenes in a “historical chaos where nothing is definitely obsolete” (“CD” 211), it at once tests the very “possibility of loss in an otherwise closed, lossless, post-historical world” (Liu 1996: 558–60). For Hartman, poetry’s distinctive virtue is that it can demonstrate the continuing viability of experiences of loss. Because this demonstration takes place in a cultural situation where such experiences are no longer available, poetry becomes the placeholder for the possibility of loss as such. Poetry’s cultural power consists in its affirmation of the possibility that things can still withdraw from the compulsive half-life of the present, and therefore of the hope that they can yet be restored to a condition that is more than that of an indifferent half-presence. Through its affirmation of the possibility of loss, poetry holds out the promise of a future correction of culture’s current condition. I noted before that Hartman’s account of this condition was informed by his reception of Derrida: Derridean freeplay corresponds quite closely to the uncontrollable multiplicity and interchangeability of things in contemporary life. It is then at least remarkable that from 1975 on, Hartman will devote a number of essays to Derrida’s work (later collected in the 1981 book Saving the Text) that enthusiastically advocate Derrida’s work as a vital model for criticism—for the very criticism, that is, that is supposed to aid poetry’s intervention in a culture that the same Derrida’s work had prefigured. How are we to understand Derrida’s double role in Hartman’s cultural criticism? Liu’s analysis of the postmodern “loss of loss” begins to suggest a solution to this problem. For Liu, the “critical work of mourning” is “able to acknowledge that the poetry itself is a work of mourning,” and that as such it registers “not just the loss of particular history but . . . the fact that history considered universally is loss. History, as it were, is the perpetuation or retention of the process of loss” (559). When nothing can be lost, there can be no meaningful distinction between past, present, and future, and therefore no history. Poetry’s affirmation of loss restores the possibility to structure the chaotic present by relating it to what no longer belongs to it. In terms of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” this recreation of a point of orientation signals a nostalgic longing for a centered structure, in which the center serves “to orient, balance, and organize the structure . . . but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure” (1972a: 247–9). For Hartman, history, as “the perpetuation or retention of the process of loss,” is the organizing

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principle that poetry can resurrect in order to limit the freeplay of the chaotic present. Hartman’s defense of poetry under the banner of loss thus undeniably invests in a suppression of the condition of freeplay;14 at the same time, within the domain where all hope of an alternative to the current crisis is stored—the domain of poetry and criticism—Derrida’s vocabulary of non-presence, traces, and dissemination, as well as his own exemplary exegetical practices, can help to describe and demonstrate poetry’s (and criticism’s) disruption of the disoriented status quo. Hartman’s enthusiasm for Derrida, that is, operates within the carefully insulated domain of literature, where it can help bolster poetry’s claim as a cultural force.15 Hartman welcomes Derrida’s work as an event “in the history of commentary” (ST xv, “IS” 92), and his contribution to the revival of loss makes him “a conservative thinker” (ST 24). We yet need to understand how poetry’s work of verifying loss relates to the ecology of literature knowledge that Hartman proposes in his psychoesthetics, and in his affirmation of mimesis, understood as the correspondence between the internal and the external world. Alan Liu notes that Freud’s version of the work of mourning presupposes the prior verification “that the loved object no longer exists”; only on the basis of this verification can the self slowly let go of its attachments to the loved object and begin the actual process of mourning. In the “closed, lossless, post-historical world” that we inhabit, however, “‘reality’ itself is . . . the lost object and so cannot serve as the testing principle for its own loss” (1996: 560). In this situation, the confirmation of the possibility of loss implies the restoration of a stable reality that can again serve as the testing ground for future mourning. In “The Dream of Communication,” the essay that inaugurates his project of psychoesthetics, Hartman invokes this moment in the Freudian protocols of mourning when he hints at Kant’s mathematical sublime, in which the self fears the sacrifice “of the whole principle of mimesis,” which is the very possibility of relating the self to the world (“DC” 174n33). We can now appreciate that poetry’s verification of the possibility of loss, and thus of restoring the possibility of reality-testing, is also an affirmation of the principle of mimesis, and of the close association of self and world. Poetry’s mimetic operation assures the possibility of losing (mourning) the mourned (lost) object, and in this way limits “the anguish involved in turning away from a mourned object toward its substitute or the mourning self” (174). Poetry counters the infinite substitutability of things that cannot escape our “relentless synchronicity” and restores us to the reality of irretrievable loss (Christensen 1994: 454).16 Poetical mimesis reminds us that things are not simply interchangeable, and that therefore loss still matters. Tom Huhn has noted that mimesis need not be understood as a mere matter of imitation, but instead “occurs by way of a particular relation to substitutability” (Huhn 2004: 6). For Huhn, mimesis is a mode of emergence out of indifference: it is “the name of the attempt to come to appearance without falling prey to the confines and exclusions of conceptuality” (6). For the Kantian sublime and the Hegelian dialectic alike, the particulars of nature appear as insufficient,

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and are therefore assumed to be in need of (conceptual) completion. Mimesis, in contrast, does not aim to override “the constitutional insufficiency of sensuousness,” nor does it “offer itself as the substitution for an incomplete nature.” Instead, “[n]ature, or, if you like, sensuous particularity, is posited as a source for potentially faithful, affirmative reiterations rather than something . . . requiring substitution” (7).17 Mimesis restores the potential for creative and productive repetitions, which also means that it restores the possibility of working through loss, and thus of mourning. Hartman’s claim for poetry’s capacity to preserve loss is essentially an affirmation of such a memorial mimesis. Hartman writes that “Wordsworth’s originality does not lie in his ideas as such,” as that would locate his genius on a conceptual plane and force him to fight a philosophical battle that poetry can never hope to win; instead, “it has to do with the way they emerge from the depth of felt experience” (“WR” 9)—a mode of emergence that does not demand things’ completion or facile substitution, but merely affirms the reality of their loss: Fiction treads as gently as on the grave of people whose lives were unconsummated. It should not be a false completion but rather a requiem acknowledging the unsatisfied nature of their lives and the restlessness of their ghost . . . if stories give events an afterlife, it is because they enable the dead to haunt the living. (“WL” 400) Poetry’s memorial mimesis offers a solution to the problem Hartman encountered in his earliest attempts to promote poetry as a cultural power, and which I traced in Hartman’s readings of Stevens’ and Hegel’s poetry. Poetry there proved itself incapable of transmitting its lessons of renunciation and continuity to culture; now poetry does not so much wish to convey a message, but rather directly takes on the crisis of culture—in which reality and the possibility of loss have disappeared in a sublime multiplicity of interchangeable things—through its poetical work of affirming loss—which, as I explained, at the same time restores reality as a ground for mourning. For Hartman, it is the task of criticism to create the conditions that allow poetry to undertake such an operation. The critic, Hartman writes, is “incurably a redeemer” in the “spirit-embedding sense,” because he “materializes us” by salvaging the possibility of history (“SP” 508). When this understanding of the work of poetry and the office of criticism is consolidated, Hartman can accept—as he did not in an earlier phase of his cultural criticism—that literature “is today so easily assimilated” by “a pluralism verging on indifference . . . that the function of criticism must often be to defamiliarize it” (“FR” 260). This work of defamiliarization, for which the example of Derrida is eminently suitable, affirms poetry as a distinct force: interpretation, Hartman writes, “literally ‘preserves’ art by allowing it to persist like a separate stream or vortex in what surrounds it” (“SA” 221).18 In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how Hartman objected to the critical posture of methodical detachment he encountered in the work of Northrop

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Frye. In order to see how this objection relates to the critical work of preservation that Hartman begins to advocate from the 1970s on, I want to briefly focus on Hartman’s 1975 critique of Michael Riffaterre’s reading of Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees,” in an article entitled “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis” that was published in the pages of New Literary History. In 1973, Hartman had already restated his earlier criticism of Frye by referring to the ease with which Frye finds a substitute for a determinate loss: the critic is always “late” in relation to the work of art, and Frye, according to Hartman, “refuses to get excited about this”; for Frye, “[a]rt has already ‘substituted’ itself for experience” (“WA” 28). Hartman compares this position unfavorably to the work of Harold Bloom, which emphatically “does not accept substitution as a principle of order” (28), and maintains the anxious relation between art and experience. In the first part of his reading of Wordsworth, Riffaterre recommends precisely a virile refusal of the experience of loss as part of the process of interpretation. Riffaterre calls the error of what Hartman would call the principle of mimesis “the referential fallacy”: for Riffaterre, “the literary phenomenon is limited to the text-reader relationship,” and as “a poem is self-sufficient,” interpretation “is sufficiently informed by a consideration of the two possible (and in no way mutually exclusive) organizations of that lexicon: semantic . . . and rhetorical” (1973: 231–6). Riffaterre states that “[i]nterpretation should never go beyond that in the text which is within the reach of just about any sensible reader” (249). Against this flaunting of an unperturbed common sense, Hartman asserts poetry’s capacity to make the reader experience the limits of the reach of sensibility, and thus to sense the possibility of loss. Hartman praises Riffaterre’s reading for achieving “one of the highest aims of commentary”: local illumination “together with the foregrounding of a structure that provides a skeleton key for other poems” (“UA” 167). Yet Hartman demonstrates that this focus on structure, and thus implicitly also on spatiality, goes at the expense of the temporality of poetic experience. He proposes to slow down the poem’s progression towards a “United worship” (l. 31) by offering what he calls a “Yewnited” reading: “Slowing the reader makes him aware that the forms of language, like those of nature ‘have a passion in themselves’ . . . The slowing of reading also makes him aware of time” (“UA” 174). The rest of Hartman’s essay demonstrates that this temporal awareness implies an acknowledgement that the finitude of poetic language is inseparable from the finitude of the referents of poetry, and that one cannot survive without the other. Hartman writes that Wordsworth’s poetry “is in many ways the most ghostly poetry ever written: one in which speech itself is near to fading out; like echo, or the voice of genius that dies with the tree it inhabits” (186). “Words need saving only as much as the things they stand for” (181)—and this “standing for” does not refer to the substitution of words for things, but rather to things’ properly mimetic mode of emergence in the conservational medium of poetry. A logical consequence of poetry’s capacity to create a space in which things can emerge is that every

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description becomes a peculiar kind of speech act: “the very phrase ‘There is a Yew-tree’ . . . is a perpetuation wish rather than a descriptive statement” (183). Poetry not only asserts its capacity to allow things to emerge, and thus to preserve their tenuous mode of existence, it also allows the reader an experience of the possibility of loss. The upshot of this is an acute “reader-responsibility”: the reader “must decide how much darkness is to be developed” (176), as the perpetuation of sensuous particulars now depends on whether poetry’s power will be perceived. The result in Hartman’s work is an increasingly moralized program for critical reading: “criticism has to decide what ‘presence’ to give to the text . . . a critic has to decide what his language is supposed to do” (“FR” 268). While poetry still failed to place a demand on the reader in the reading of “The Snow Man,” it now manages to do so through the mediating agency of experience: Wordsworth’s “grounding of allusion in experience—in the personal and mortal experience of time” places “the burden of responsiveness directly on the reader.” Just as poetical mimesis restores historical difference in a world of generalized indifference, it also rescues the critical and historical agency of the disoriented selves that inhabit that world: “The verse adjures [the reader]; demands grace of him; and no poet who reads so easily at first puts as resolute and lasting a demand on the reader” (“TH” 290–1). “Resolute and lasting”: in light of Hartman’s awareness of the increasingly tenuous place of literature in contemporary culture, it is tempting to apply Hartman’s own analysis of Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” to these words and read them as “a perpetuation wish rather than a descriptive statement.” Hartman’s intermittent insistence on the continuity of literary power is an anxious attempt to connect to the fantasy of transmission that his earlier work celebrated as a “peculiarly English relation of new to old” (“FT” 67). In his book Sustaining Loss, Gregg Horowitz assesses the peculiar modernity of modern art along lines that apply here. In all past art, for Horowitz, “we can locate an implicit conception of generations as bound together through representational and affective practices . . . The making of art was a culture’s way of making its future by tending its past, of receiving from its past a mandate and license to preserve that past and pass it on” (2001: 13). This dispensation dates back to “those times when we humans still had a history” (5). Now that such a history has been superseded by the chaos of the present, the function of art has to be redefined accordingly: instead of cementing the connection between successive generations, art now plays a central role “in making vivid—in experiencing” the loss of transmitted norms. In modern art, according to Horowitz, our noninheritance of the struggles of previous generations is figured as a living fact for us . . . the past is presented in its nonanimacy, its mortificiation, such that the nonanimacy can be grasped as a relation to a still active past . . . the experience of nontransmission and noninheritance, the experience to which the phrase “sustaining loss” refers, is the experience to which a reflective philosophical aesthetics must now be beholden. (6)

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What Horowitz asserts of philosophical aesthetics also goes for Hartman’s practice from the mid-1970s on. Horowitz coins the term “cool modernity” to refer to the refusal of the experience of noninheritance; cool modernity is “an historicism of the present in which all history is equally present and equally past at the same time.” This “cool indifference” relies on a false idea of transcendence, on the idea of the successful “transcendence of the past.” Poetry’s memorial mimesis counteracts this self-congratulatory fantasy, and helps us to acknowledge “that the past, while dead, is not gone, and that we coexist with it not as its afterlife but as its survivors” (22). Just as poetry resists the sacrifice of the correspondence between the internal and external world, it salvages our attachment to the past—not as a substantial continuity, but through the affirmation of the loss of such a continuity. Stories “enable the dead to haunt the living”; they are “a ceremony to evoke and at the same time appease the perturbed spirit” (“WL” 400–1). This conception of poetic form as the “haunt” of the dead (401) delivers the “ghostliness” that Hartman asserts in the face of Michael Riffaterre’s cool “positivism of the word” (“UA” 185). In the preface to his 1975 collection of essays The Fate of Reading, Hartman writes that one of his aims is to “reinvigorat[e] the theory of art as mimesis or representation” (FR xiii). In this section, I have demonstrated how mimesis can be conceived as a form of mourning, and how this allows poetry to restore a sense of history, and even to serve as a connective experience. Hartman writes that “[t]he askesis of style” can “exert itself on a recognizably sensuous content which survives it” because it no longer considers it its task to substitute for sensuous particulars (233). Poetry persists as the placeholder of loss, while its own survival must be guaranteed by criticism. As I show in my last chapter, this task of preservation will lead Hartman to promote a form of “creative criticism,” especially in his 1980 book Criticism in the Wilderness (and Hartman’s diagnosis of the present is a good indication of what this wilderness might refer to). At this point, Hartman’s work has decisively shifted from its earlier project to preempt the collapse of poetry to the attempt to deal with an anxiety about the loss of connection to the past. While this problematic focuses on the fate of poetry throughout the 1970s, it will later turn to the memory of the Holocaust when Hartman will increasingly begin to be occupied with the possibilities and poetics of Holocaust testimony.

4. Toward a Theory of Representation In the preface to The Fate of Reading, Hartman reminds us of the close connection between the poet’s care for the sensuous particulars of nature and criticism’s responsibilities to art. “The demand for contemporaneity on the one hand, and endlessly competing formal options on the other, pressure the reader as much as the artist”; for that reason, the critic “owes the great poem or novel an ‘answerable style’” (FR xiii). The artist’s and critic’s concern for things is always

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threatened by the risk that they may overburden these things—what Hartman earlier called the danger of depletion, and what he in a 1974 article on the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart refers to as the fear that “our appetites—including that for presence—put a demand on the order of things which that order may not be able to satisfy” (“CS” 433). The self’s dedication to sensuous particulars, and to the medium in which this care finds expression, always exists in tension with “the inevitability of self-assertion” (“FR” 258), and the point of Hartman’s psychoesthetics is that art must strive to maintain the tenuous equilibrium between proper concern and excessive imposition. This psychological dimension of Hartman’s defense of poetry is part of a “restored theory of representation” that, he writes, “should acknowledge the deconstructionist challenge as necessary and timely, if somewhat self-involved” (ST 121). Hartman generally uses the notion of “voice” to indicate the tenuous presence of the self in linguistic representations, and to refer to the “magic in the web” of signification (“FR” 254). The idea of voice “contains both the idea of expression and that of representation” (“TR” 280). It serves the same function in Hartman’s theory of representation as the affirmation of loss in his diagnosis of contemporary culture, as it allows us to structure and orient a chaotic multiplicity of signifiers. The notion of voice allows readers to make sense of the multifarious paradoxes and difficulties they encounter in the texts they confront by structuring them as reflexes of the tension between the self’s “desire for visibility,” which threatens to go at the expense of the world, and the imperative to take care of that world and the medium in which this visibility must find a place (ST xxii–iii). Voice is thus as much a methodological device as an expression of the same literary humanism that we earlier encountered in Hartman’s double take on Derrida. The strong, undeconstructed notion of subjectivity that informs Hartman’s idea of voice is a methodological fiction, and should not be mistaken for an ideal that we should strive to actualize (“FR” 255).19 Hartman notes how Wordsworth’s poetry emphasizes “the conceptual disharmony between self and character”; between these two moments, “[t]here is no easy progression; the structure, in fact, is that of an interrupted pastoral” that is itself nothing more substantial than “[t]he path that leads from invocation to echo to mute reflection” (“TH” 287–91). Wordsworth’s characters convey the impression “of voices overheard in the dark . . . individuated yet merging back into night”; “In Wordsworth, voice is ghostly because it is a wandering sound in search of character or completion.” The self is forever imperfectly individuated, and the notion of “character” therefore maintains “a link to the question of mimesis,” which, as I demonstrated in the previous section, also renounces completion as a way of allowing things to emerge in their capacity to be lost (“WL” 404). The dedication of Saving the Text, Hartman’s book on Derrida, reads “for the subject.” This “subject” not only refers to Derrida himself (the book’s subject), but also underlines Hartman’s ambition to salvage a form of subjectivity,

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however tenuous and incomplete, from his confrontation with Derrida. This dedication to the subject recurs in Hartman’s objections to the work of I. A. Richards. “The two paths not taken by Richards,” Hartman writes, are those of “a theory of symbolic action” (as it was pursued in the work of Kenneth Burke) and “a theory of speech-acts” (“DC” 162). Richards, like Freud, “fails to connect the drive for representability with the drive for presentability” (172). Hartman’s psychoesthetics thus requires the idea of a “communicationcompulsion,” a “vis representativa,” which allows us to understand the restored notion of representation as composed of both “the social-ethical [notion] of presentability (Vorstellen) and the expressive-aesthetic one of representability (Darstellen)” (172). Art is a form of representation that “‘represents’ a self which is either insufficiently ‘present’ or feels itself as not ‘presentable’” (173), and thus allows this self to find a place in culture. Hartman’s theory of the relation between representation and individuation is fully consistent with the project of the affirmation of loss and the containment of the contemporary sublime: the explicit focus on the individual merely rephrases Hartman’s commitment to the persistence of humanism that also informs other aspects of his project. In my next chapter, I demonstrate how Hartman’s extensive critical work on Wordsworth in the late 1970s and early 1980s locates a tight articulation of the issues of individuation, representation, and loss in Wordsworth’s poetry. Yet before this intense reengagement with Wordsworth, it is in Hartman’s 1974 essay on Christopher Smart’s Magnificat, subtitled “Toward a Theory of Representation,” that his complementary concerns for the self, for natural phenomena, and for the medium of language are most clearly brought together. To conclude this chapter, I briefly turn to this essay in order to illustrate a crucial problem in Hartman’s project in this period, to which his imminent return to Wordsworth will attempt to find a solution. The essay on Smart opens with the psychoesthetic issue of the “difficulty of self-presentation,” of the “separationanxieties” that the self experiences in “seeking to ‘emerge’” (“CS” 431) and that can only be moderated through the operation of (poetic) “re-presentation” (430–1). These separation anxieties are complemented by the (by now familiar) anxiety of depletion (433). While language is the medium in which our “demand on the order of things” is formulated, the problem is that it is also part of the order to which this demand is addressed: Hartman writes that “in Smart the very medium of representation—visionary language itself—has become questionable . . . The anxiety for survival has associated itself with an anxiety for language-source, liturgy, and the entire process of representation” (433). “[I]n seeking to ‘represent’ the creature, the poet discovers that language too is a creature in need of reparation” (438). What is remarkable here is that Hartman, by emphasizing poetry’s concern to guarantee the survival of the linguistic medium, attributes to poetry the preservational task that he earlier ascribed to criticism. Poetry has adopted criticism’s mission of preservation, a task that criticism had only assumed when it became increasingly clear that poetry was no longer capable of taking care of its own persistence. By locating

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criticism and poetry within the same realm of mimesis and representation, Hartman can endow poetry with the conservational capacities that he earlier ascribed to criticism—and that were, more specifically, ascribed to it in order to preserve a disempowered poetry. So what form does poetry’s care for its own medium take in the case of Smart? The form it does most emphatically not take is the one Hartman earlier tried to read into Stevens’ “The Snow Man”: the limitation of demand and the assertion of continuity. Hartman’s catalogue of Smart’s rhetorical devices reads as follows: The “economy” of language-use arising from depletion anxiety ranges from such devices of conservation as double-entendre, hermeticism and classical restraint, to the complementary if opposite ones of revivalist forgery, radical innovation and homeopathic promiscuity. (“CS” 433–4). We may well ask what has enabled the shift from Hartman’s earlier advocation of the Snow Man’s posture of renunciation to his celebration of Smart’s “accumulative, additive” method, and his “spirit as playful as that of the creature portrayed” (440–2). The key is what Hartman calls the “homeopathic” nature of Smart’s promiscuity. The trope of homeopathy will become central to Hartman’s later cultural criticism (SS 116, 208), and is there defined as the idea (borrowed from Adorno) that “art can stand in opposition to modern society only by identification with that against which it rebels” (FQ 85). In Hartman’s project, art always occupies a position of cultural correction, and it can unproblematically identify with the culture it opposes, as such identification will not interfere with its oppositional potential. Art’s opposition to culture is a central tenet in Hartman’s work, and this means that it can even adopt a Nietzschean “affirmation en jeu” (“CS” 452n19) as its local strategy of identification with— and correction of—the freeplay that reigns in the chaos of contemporary culture.20 It is not hard to see that this is another version of Hartman’s double take on Derrida: Derrida can both describe a postmodern cultural condition and prescribe a strategy to oppose it, because that strategy is only deployed within the one domain that resists the dictates of culture. The recurrence of this issue in the Smart-essay allows us to appreciate the problem it poses for Hartman’s project. In this project, Smart’s method of “add-oration” (443) is as much a “device of conservation” as any other stylistic device would be. As Hartman’s project has already decided what the task of poetry and criticism ought to be, they cannot but play that role, and the differences between various poets and various critics threatens to become as irrelevant as that between poetry and criticism. Smart’s poetry will do as well as that of Stevens, or indeed as the work of Derrida. Hartman’s concern to assert the distinctiveness of poetry, in other words, has led to the impossibility of meaningfully distinguishing different poetical and critical projects. His celebration of “the perpetual motion machine of Smart’s poetry” (445) is only possible

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because the issue of the distinctiveness of a particularly English and a peculiarly Wordsworthian poetry has been sidelined. Wordsworth’s renewed centrality for Hartman’s project from the late 1970s on can then be understood as Hartman’s attempt to bring the singular importance of Wordsworth back in line with his defense of art and poetry. The last passage of Hartman’s essay on Smart restates the essay’s focus on Smart’s “comforting” of language and on the persistence of representation, and it establishes an explicit connection between Smart and Derrida: Derrida moves within a philosophical context of his own, and it is confusing to juxtapose his theory and Smart’s poetics. I apologize for this “perspective by incongruity,” as Kenneth Burke would call it, but I see no better way of suggesting how complex yet encompassing the concept of representation may become. Even if one acknowledges that Derrida’s very aim is to empty this concept, at least of its psychological and metaphysical pathos, the “nature” of representation remains a puzzle. (“CS” 452)21 Once we realize that it is not so much the confusion as the smoothness of the juxtaposition that is striking, we may begin to suspect that the confusion is only admitted in order to make room for an apology in the name of Kenneth Burke. Burke is elsewhere in Hartman’s work explicitly claimed as part of an “AngloAmerican” critical project (“AA” 151, BF ix, CW 30–101). The unsolicited nod to Burke may suggest that what Hartman finds missing in the smooth shift from poetry to Derrida is, precisely, the distinctive mediation by an Anglo-American consciousness.22 The essay goes on to confirm this suspicion by immediately turning to “an intermediate figure, more congruous with Smart, and exerting through Proust some influence on French thought,” to John Ruskin—said to be “a less problematic exponent” of “the theory of representation” (452). When Hartman writes that Ruskin’s “prose may be the best nature-poetry in the language” (453), it becomes clear that the more “problematic exponent” of the theory of representation who is never named is indeed William Wordsworth.23 While Wordsworth has inspired Hartman’s case for the cultural role of poetry in the first place, Hartman’s campaign has enlisted the help of the likes of Derrida and Smart, in whom the image of Wordsworth is hard to recognize. The task Hartman faces is then that of restoring Wordsworth’s undisputed centrality to his project.

Chapter 4

Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss

“Was not” was all the statement. The Unpretension stuns— Perhaps—the Comprehension— Emily Dickinson

The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory that Hartman presented at UC Irvine in 1992 put forward a thesis that, if it had not been delivered with Hartman’s characteristic care and circumspection, would immediately have revealed itself as scandalous. In the introduction to The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), the book in which these lectures are published, Hartman phrases his central claim as follows: “I argue that Wordsworth, writing near the beginning of the industrial revolution, achieves a precarious cultural transfer (translatio) of English rural life”; Wordsworth’s poetry “gives representation to what in English culture was previously unrealized or semi-articulate, a potentiality only”; by shaping this potentiality as “a particularly English culture,” Hartman continues, Wordsworth “saved English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue, which led to serious ravages on the continent” (FQ 7). While it may not be entirely fair to excerpt only a few phrases from a dense and difficult book, it is hard to avoid the enormity of Hartman’s thesis: in the words of one commentator, Hartman’s claim is that “it is thanks to Wordsworth that England witnessed the emergence not of National Socialism but of the National Trust” (de Graef 2004: 25). Wordsworth’s poetry helped England to resist the very temptations that had genocidal consequences on the continent. The Fateful Question undoubtedly offers the clearest indication of Hartman’s ambition to mobilize Wordsworth’s poetry as a remedial power in contemporary culture and of his commitment to the exceptionality of English culture. This chapter sheds some light on the features that Hartman foregrounds in Wordsworth’s poetry and that sustain his claim for its momentous cultural impact. Hartman writes that Wordsworth’s poetry achieved “the transmission of a potentiality whose realism and idealism can no longer be distinguished and

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that we reclaim, whether it actually existed or not” (FQ 16n13). It conveys “the still unmediated, accessible, and integral—yet barely so—presence of a halfperceived and half-created mode of life,” of “a pastoral culture, which fades into memory before it has emerged into maturity, like the twilight presence of Lucy” (FQ 72–6). In order to understand what we have to make of this potentiality whose actuality does not seem to matter and this life that is never complete and even fails to emerge into maturity, I turn to a series of seven remarkably consistent essays, all published between 1977 and 1985, in which Hartman develops his definitive understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry. This account will inform Hartman’s efforts to promote Wordsworth as a vital remedial force in the lossless wasteland of postmodernity—a cultural condition I have extensively diagnosed in the previous chapter. Collectively, these essays give us what Hartman will later call, in the title of the book in which the essays are collected, “the unremarkable Wordsworth.”1 This “unremarkable” poetry is a cultural force that, precisely because it is decidedly slight and unobtrusive, can make a genuine difference in an overcrowded and media-saturated present. I begin by looking at the first of these essays, “A Touching Compulsion,” in order to understand Hartman’s claim for Wordsworth and to give it a place in Hartman’s critical project. In the second part of this chapter I turn to the way this claim organizes Hartman’s other contemporaneous discussions of Wordsworth in order to complete the picture of Wordsworth that Hartman is promoting in The Fateful Question.

1. Potentiality, Invulnerability, Loss “A Touching Compulsion,” first published in 1977, presents itself as a contribution to Hartman’s “psychoesthetics,” and thus as an attempt to determine the place of literature and art in the mental ecology that connects us to our cultural and natural environments. While Hartman has earlier undertaken a correction of I. A. Richards’ “managerial scientific model” (“DC” 163), this essay stages a confrontation between Wordsworth and Freud, in “an attempt to lessen our dependence on the applied science model of psychoanalytic inquiry” (“TC” 19), a model that like the work of Richards fails to appreciate the place of literary form in psychic life. Hartman situates Wordsworth’s difference from Freud at the moment of the “transition from the first (and lost) love object to object love” (21), the moment when, in Wordsworth’s own words, “The props of my affections were removed, / And yet the building stood, as if sustained / By its own spirit!” (qt. 21). Hartman is especially interested in the exclamation mark and the hint of incredulity that lingers in these lines; they seem to convey that the “troubled astonishment” at the fact of survival has not completely disappeared by the time the poet looks back on these moments. While the poet’s knowledge of “why the world survives the mother as an object of affection” smoothly “harmonizes with Freud’s understanding of how the lost object becomes by internalization a constitutive part of the self that has lost it,” the

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persistence of that astonishment in the moment of tranquil recollection points to a certain hesitation. This moment of hindered progression will be Wordsworth’s correction of the Freudian scenario. Wordsworth’s astonishment amounts to an inability to buy into the psychoanalytical fiction of the self-sufficiency of a world that exists “as if sustained / By its own spirit.” In the young Wordsworth, this difficulty registers as what Hartman calls a “touching compulsion”: Wordsworth writes that “often unable to think of external things as having external existence . . . many times while going to school I have grasped a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality” (qt. 20). This experience of irreality and the compulsion to verify the reality of nature have an important analogue in Hartman’s work: they correspond perfectly to the postmodern losslessness that I described in the previous chapter, which brings on the anxious need to verify whether things can ever be definitively lost. The problem Hartman locates in the young Wordsworth is the very same condition the postmodern self is suffering from. Wordsworth’s poetic overcoming of his touching compulsion will then serve Hartman as the model for art’s curative intervention in contemporary culture. So how does Wordsworth analyze and overcome his youthful compulsion? Hartman writes that Wordsworth acquires a knowledge that is avowedly “regressive rather than progressive” (21–2). Wordsworth knows that his touching compulsion is incited by a ghostliness in nature deriving from two related sources . . . The fixated or literally animistic mind feels that if nature remains alive when what gave it life (the mother) is dead, then the mother is not dead but invisibly contained in nature. On the other hand, if the mother is dead, then the affective presence of nature is but a phantom-reality that must dissolve just like the illusion it has replaced—the illusion of permanent Dasein (the mother’s). Wordsworth’s touching, then, is a kind of reality testing: it wants to undo the spell, or make contact with the “one dear Presence” in hiding. (22) The ghostliness that the young Wordsworth experiences is a spell that cannot be undone by touching alone; there is no empirical evidence that would be sufficient to assure him of the stability of nature. What troubles him is his inability, or his refusal, to accept that nature can live while the mother is dead. Wordsworth refuses to give up the “regressive” belief that if nature is alive, then the mother cannot be dead. The vertiginous logic of the difficult passage that I just quoted is then as follows: if nature is alive (and it is), then the mother is not dead. If the mother is dead (and she is), then nature is not alive, and this opens “the abyss of idealism” that compulsively draws the poet back to a reality that, once it is confirmed to be tangibly there, cancels the assured absence of the mother, and returns us to her ghostly undeadness. Nature is both alive and not alive, while the mother is both dead and undead, and all that reality testing can do is extend the poet’s frustration with the immovable law of the excluded

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middle, which here as elsewhere makes it impossible to have your cake and eat it too. In a move that is typical of Hartman’s work, the laws of logic are only brought in so as to allow literary language to transcend them and to create a space where human life can neutralize the forces that threaten it. Wordsworth’s particular mode of “artistic representation” indeed creates such a space that can accommodate the poet’s regressive belief in the persistent undeadness of the mother. This mode of representation must not be understood as a “re-presencing” of what is lost (28). Wordsworth’s poetry does not aim to reanimate the dead. Instead, his is a poetry “that fixes so constantly, retentively, on bare markers,” which at the same time are “strangely individuated” and “seem to point to what has departed” (24). These markers give a determinate, tangible shape to “a deepened awareness of loss,” and this allows them to interrupt the restless cycle of compulsive touching (26). In Wordsworth’s mode of representation, “the absent one remains absent,” and what is depicted is merely “the legacy of this absence” (29). Importantly, such a presentation of absence does not mean that Wordsworth, for reasons of decency and tact, avoids to confront a loss that would be potentially verifiable. Instead, the relevance of this kind of representation for the contemporary condition is precisely that it is also fully effective in a situation in which no verification is possible because reality itself has disappeared as a testing ground; Hartman writes that “[t]hings remembered or imagined are viewed as absent not because they are lost (though they may be) but because their ‘trace’ is hard to substantialize as a noun or name” (29). This mode of representation carefully refrains from answering the question whether the absent thing (or mother) is actually lost, and it therefore merely affirms things’ (or mothers’) capacity to be lost. Wordsworth’s poetry gives a determinate shape to, and thereby affirms, a mere potentiality. The logical trick it plays is that it presents things as neither dead nor alive, and therefore as both not dead and not alive. Instead of remaining transfixed to the ghostliness and to the logical impossibility of a nature that is both alive and not alive, Wordsworth’s poetry reshapes nature into a compound that is at the same time (verifiably) not dead and marked by its preserved potentiality to not-be (alive). The mother, for her part, is palpably not alive, but is represented as “absent rather than dead” (29). Poetry affirms both her preserved potentiality to not-be (alive) and her actual absence, but this absence is not the same as her death; it affirms her, in the most paradoxical way, as both not alive and not dead. Wordsworth’s poetry is a medium that makes this absence palpably present, and this literary magic creates a space for a situation that the laws of logic rigorously exclude. The spell of ghostliness is undone in a “capable negativity” (“BT” 197); such is Wordsworth’s poetry’s peculiar strength, “the sort of strength,” Hartman writes, that “we are not yet fit to perceive” (“WO” 213). In order to make poetry’s capable preservation of the potentiality to not-be more perceptible, we can turn to Giorgio Agamben’s work on the notion of

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potentiality. While this may not be the most familiar part of Agamben’s oeuvre—that prize undoubtedly goes to his work on the homo sacer—it presents an elegant formulation of the paradoxical power that Hartman observes in Wordsworth’s poetry. Agamben’s work on potentiality mainly consists in a powerful reconceptualization of potentiality as “not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality” (1999: 180). This different kind of (im)potentiality does not disappear in its actualization but rather “maintains itself in its own privation” (182). Impotentiality becomes constitutive of all potentiality and of its actualization, and thus “there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such . . . it preserves itself as such in actuality” (183). If, for instance, I happen to be a writer, I have the potentiality to write, but I equally have the potentiality to not-write, and this different potentiality will continue to haunt the book that I will end up writing with the possibility of its own nonexistence. This impotentiality, as a preserved capacity to not-be and to be lost, is the same thing Wordsworth’s poetry, for Hartman, manages to affirm. For Hartman, the affirmation of the persistence of impotentiality assures that the “progressive” knowledge—which Wordsworth shares with Freud— that nature is alive while the mother is not is compatible with Wordsworth’s “regressive” belief that nature cannot possibly be alive while the mother is dead. This is something that reality-testing and compulsive touching could never pull off. Wordsworth’s poetry restores reality as an “affective presence,” as “an object of desire rather than an aversion to be overcome” (“TC” 22, SS 84). The ghostliness that troubled the young Wordsworth is undone by the poetic preservation of the “regressive” belief that incited that ghostliness in the first place. But how does this structure constitute an advance over Freudian psychoanalysis? Hartman appends a reference to Freud’s essay “Die Verneinung” (“(de)negation”)2 to the paragraph in which he presents Wordsworth’s logical conundrum. This short text neatly brings together the progressive knowledge of logic and the regressive investment in retained affect that Wordsworth’s poetry so uniquely manages to connect: Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated [daß er sich verneinen lässt]. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting [Aufhebung] of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. We can see how in this the intellectual function is separated from the affective process . . . The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists. (Freud 1975 :373–4/1984: 437–8) (De)negation (Verneinung) has the structure of an Aufhebung, a Hegelian term Freud uses to indicate that we have to do with a merely “intellectual acceptance” that fails to overcome—or, alternatively, manages to retain—an “affective”

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investment in the very thing whose demise is being accepted intellectually. The process of (de)negation thus seems to bring along a split that allows consciousness to accept a painful loss while at the same time holding on to the very reality that it knows to be lost; as such, it represents an incomplete stage in the ego’s renunciation of affect and its acceptance of a new and less satisfying reality. In order to understand Hartman’s exact relation to this split, it is useful to linger on Freud’s essay a little longer. The dissociation of sensibility that it introduces can easily be seen as part of a story of individuation, and even as the very birth-scene of consciousness, which in the passage quoted above “learns” to separate itself from its affective relations to the world. Freud’s essay has in fact been interpreted in this way by Jean Hyppolite, the Hegel scholar we already encountered in the first chapter.3 It will come as no surprise that Hyppolite gives Freud’s essay a decidedly Hegelian twist. Hyppolite reads Freud’s Aufhebung, in which the repression persists, as the self’s first properly Hegelian “negation of negation” (1971: 390). This Aufhebung offers the first instance of the intellect’s capable suspension of affect, an operation that will be repeated at each stage of the progress of consciousness in the famous Hegelian narrative of self-actualization. This separation between intellect and affect asserts itself in Freud’s essay, according to Hyppolite, as a dissymmetry between “a process of affirmation based on the unifying tendency of love, and the genesis, on the basis of the destructive tendency, of a negation whose function it is to give rise to the intellect, and even to the very place of thinking” (389). For Hyppolite, the process of negation brings along a distinction between two kinds of affirmation: on the one hand, a simple affirmation of a given reality, and on the other, a process of negation that negates a given reality only to ultimately negate itself, and so affirm that reality in a properly intellectual way. For Hyppolite, this “higher” affirmation is much more important than the basic kind of affirmation: “Primordial affirmation is nothing other than affirmation; negation, on the other hand, is more than just wanting to destroy” (391). What negation can do more, Hyppolite explains, is to “suspend content” (388). This suspension creates a “margin of thought, an appearance of being in the form of non-being” (395). This “margin” in being creates a separation between inside and outside, between subject and world; the achieved inside (the subject) then returns to the outer world in order to verify “whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception (reality) as well” (Freud 1975: 375/1984: 439). Two possibilities arise here: if the inside presentation is found to exist in reality as well, this reality is now affirmed in a more than primordial way; if it is not, the loss of that reality has been duly verified, and the ego can begin to learn to adapt to an impoverished new reality. In Hyppolite’s progressive scenario, the ego realizes intellectually that it has lost something, and it manages to cope with that loss without being hindered by its affective attachment to the reality it has lost. Returning to Hartman’s claim for Wordsworth, we can appreciate that this is the reason that Hartman is unsatisfied with what he calls Freud’s progressive knowledge.

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As Hyppolite’s discussion makes clear, in Freud’s progression the affective attachment to a lost reality (say, the mother) is inevitably abandoned in favor of the lucid acceptance of a world bereft of the thing that has been lost. The distinctive virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry is that it allows for a “progressive” insight in the survival of nature without the necessity of giving up the “regressive” belief that the mother was not dead: “It cultivates a refusal to leave behind something deeply relational, something fundamental to the imaginative life rather than its negation” (“WM” 198). Freud’s and Hyppolite’s accounts of the genesis of the ego, in contrast, imply that the ego surrenders the primordial affirmation of the love for the mother and that it accepts to go on living in a fundamentally impoverished reality. The ego must accept the loss of the belief in the continuing love of the mother. Moreover, this bereavement cannot be mourned, as it is only once this primordial loss has been accepted that reality is constituted as a ground where loss can be verified, and where mourning can begin. I quote Freud again: The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there . . . But it is evident that a precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction. (375–6/440) Freud’s and Hyppolite’s scenario condemns human development to a false consciousness that remembers to forget the irremediable loss of the possibility of true enjoyment; it forces the ego to forget the “incommensurable abyss between love, understood as true enjoyment, and its possibility” (Soto-Crespo 2000: 441). In his mature critical work on Wordsworth, this is precisely the impoverished state of things that Hartman is unwilling to concede. Wordsworth’s poetry offers a rejoinder to this scenario by demonstrating that the enjoyment of nature does not require the sacrifice of a more primordial relatedness. Wordsworth, that is, maintains that both true enjoyment and motherly love are possible in this world. For Hartman, the peculiar strength of Wordsworth’s poetry is that it preserves the mother’s potentiality to not-be in the actuality of nature, and that nature is thereby established as the ground for reality testing. Wordsworth allows us to evade a structural loss in order to empower us and to equip nature for the “infinite task” of future mourning (“TC” 30). Making the undead mother part of nature, Wordsworth’s poetry’s “eliding (subliming) of the referent” also “elides the grave and suggests that poetry is a work of mourning that lies ‘too deep for tears’” (“TU” 48n4, “TC” 28). This poetic elision establishes nature as a ground for reality-testing, and thus for mourning. Hartman’s interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry from the late 1970s on always emphasize that Wordsworth’s mode of literary representation accomplishes two things simultaneously: first, his poetry instigates a deepened awareness of loss, of the fact that things can disappear, and as such it can be called upon to make

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a vital contribution to a postmodern culture where the possibility of loss has become uncertain; second, Wordsworth’s poetry simultaneously affirms the reality of something that remains untouched by loss—of what Wordsworth himself called a “lasting life / From all internal injury exempt” (qt. “TC” 24–5). Wordsworth’s poetry conveys the assurance that underlying all the losses life incurs, a dimension of experience persists unscathed. In the essay I have been concerned with here, Hartman writes how “mother nature, or the motherin-nature, is the guardian of something invulnerable, which is either the mother-child relation itself or an ideal of psychic development” (25). Wordsworth’s poetry affirms both “a deepened awareness of loss” and “human invulnerability,” and it insinuates an oblique relation between the two, which Agamben also established when he writes about the uniquely human experience of (im)potentiality: “human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality” (1999: 182). Hartman’s position is not only different here from Freud and Hyppolite (and through him also from Hegel), but importantly also from Heidegger.4 For Heidegger, as I have noted before, the exposure to one’s own death, and therefore to the possibility of one’s own impossibility, is a necessary condition of every project of human individuation. In Wordsworth also, “the abyss of human impotentiality” opens up with the “transition from the first (and lost) love object to object love” (“TC” 21), and thus also at the moment of individuation. Still, Wordsworth’s scenario emphatically does not consist in an anxious face-to-face with the possibility of one’s own impossibility: the self only faces its impotentiality as it is presented in a poetic actuality that simultaneously guarantees its ultimate invulnerability. The confrontation with the possibility of its own nothingness, in other words, is lined with the assurance of invulnerability, and this strengthens it for future casualties and confrontations with particular moments of loss. Just as the Wordsworth of Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman’s mature Wordsworth combines an insistence on the unhindered continuity between man and nature with a rhetoric of death, negativity, and loss. Again, such invulnerability is only possible by avoiding the traumatic encounter with one’s own separation from nature, which is yet a fundamental condition for the constitution of the self in some of Hartman’s most important intertexts—in Freud, Hegel, and Heidegger. To conclude this section, I want to add that Wordsworth’s victory over his own touching compulsion also reflects Hartman’s consolidated response to one more insistent intertext, the work of Paul de Man. Early in Allegories of Reading, de Man defines the paradigmatic deconstructive scenario as an interpretive situation in which two incompatible readings are equally possible, even necessary. Recall the logical impasse the young Wordsworth found himself in when he was faced with the simultaneous assurance that nature is alive (and the mother is not dead) and that the mother is dead (and therefore nature cannot be alive); what is this if not an experience “whose grammatical structure is devoid of ambiguity,” in which Wordsworth’s compulsive touching generates “two entirely

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coherent but entirely incompatible readings” which cannot “exist side by side,” and indeed “have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it” (de Man 1979: 10–12)? The young Wordsworth’s situation is also a confrontation with undecidability. The mature Wordsworth’s poetic capacity to master that impasse and to hold these two experiences together without having them undo each other must then also be seen as a victory over deconstruction—as the creation of a properly undeconstructible poetic fact. In his earlier Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman traced the development of Wordsworth’s career in order to show how Wordsworth managed to achieve a progressive integration of incompatible elements, which resulted in the formidable marriage of imagination and nature. In Hartman’s later work on Wordsworth, the repeated encounters with incompatible elements are not integrated in a developmental account, but their successful resolution is predicated as a virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry as such. This is most evident in the ease with which Hartman’s different essays in this period move from an initial discussion of a particular textual complexity to statements of Wordsworth’s achievement, not by way of a meticulously traced progression (as was the case in Wordsworth’s Poetry), but instead through a generally rather underdetermined accumulation of excerpts from Wordsworth’s corpus that all serve as so many pieces of evidence for Wordsworth’s achievement—for, as Hartman calls it, the “fact Wordsworth was able to create” (“UW” 327). Wordsworth’s achievement is not so much read as a way of coping with the challenges of a Freud or a Hegel, but it is instead posited as a full-blown alternative to them. Wordsworth’s mature poetry appears as a catalogue of “partial and contradictory structures of unification” that share a common undeconstructibility (“PR” 173).

2. Wordsworth’s Blessing of Impotentiality Hartman’s essays on Wordsworth time and again return to the short lyric “A slumber did my spirit seal,” one of the so-called Lucy poems, which collectively mourn the death of a girl called Lucy. A Slumber did my spirit seal I had no human fears: She seem’d a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees! (1993: 164)

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It is not difficult to see why this poem would be of particular interest for Hartman: it evokes the transition from a Lucy untouched by “earthly years,” and thus by loss, to a Lucy who has become part of nature, which chimes only too well with the combination of loss and invulnerability that is central to Hartman’s work on Wordsworth.5 Hartman’s numerous discussions of this poem typically focus on the transition between the two stanzas. Hartman observes a nonprogressive succession from the first to the second stanza, which correspond quite closely to the two moments he distinguished in “A Touching Compulsion”: what was there the regressive belief in the continued existence of the mother is here described as “an inward, unconscious power of idealization that deludes the poet into thinking Lucy is immortal” (in the first stanza), and the consoling articulation of that belief with a “progressive” form of knowledge is described as “a consciousness of death” that is subsumed in “a language of nature too deep for tears” (“WW” 148–9). It is crucial that the first moment of illusion is not denied in the second stanza, but is instead “preserved . . . within the elegiac form” (“EW” 189). Hartman writes that the relation between the two kinds of consciousness depicted is “more like image to afterimage than illusion to the shock of disillusion” (“TC” 27, “IF” 146); the poem’s closure “leaves that illusion its moment of truth” (“IF” 146), in the same way that Lucy’s passage from life to death leaves intact, or even fulfills, “the immutability attributed to her” (“TC” 28). Again, this experience of loss is compensated for by a simultaneous awareness of invulnerability—Wordsworth’s poetry “removes an object of love by moving it beyond touch” (“IF” 147, “RM” 10). Lucy’s life and death never quite emerge into full actuality, as she moves from being withdrawn from fatality and contingency in the first stanza to a removal from the world of motion and force, of seeing and hearing, in the second. As such, Lucy is emblematic of what AnneLise François has called “the figures of non-emergence structuring Hartmanian thought” (2006: 19).6 For Hartman, Wordsworth gives a poetic shape to Lucy’s impotentiality by preserving that which “resists foregrounding” (François 2003: 58): Wordsworth’s poetry of impotentiality constructs an underdetermined relation between a stanza depicting “hope against time” and one depicting that hope’s “particular fulfillment,” and this poetic construction gives shape to a statement of immutability. “The link remains inarticulate, like nature itself”—and yet it links (“PR” 170). This version of Wordsworth remains a constant in Hartman’s work from the late 1970s on. This longevity can be explained by pointing to its advantage over Hartman’s earlier account of Wordsworth’s poetry. That earlier interpretation was a response to the Hegelian verdict of the ends of history and art. Wordsworth’s trajectory served as a demonstration that historical meaning was still possible in the absence of a transcendent principle of significance. Still, this lesson was not intrinsically connected to the medium of poetry, and this realization informed Hartman’s attempt to tie Wordsworth’s lessons to the cultural force of poetry, an effort I discussed in the previous chapter. The remarkable thing about this

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later version of Wordsworth is that its preservation of loss is at the same time a poetic structure and a (basically ontological) statement that can compete with the insights of a Freud or a Hegel. Moreover, these two aspects are irrevocably connected: the ontological lesson has no existence except as a poetic structure. Poetry thus becomes a genuine alternative for philosophy. Perhaps the clearest indication of this spectacular claim for poetry can be found in Hartman’s essay “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth,” where Hartman proposes “elation” as a new translation for Hegel’s notoriously complex term Aufhebung, which is normally translated as “sublation.” In the previous section, we saw how Hyppolite picked up on this word in Freud’s definition of the process of (de)negation. In the “Elation”-essay, Hartman appropriates this term for Wordsworth’s poetry. Hartman’s redefinition of the term suggest that elation needs to be thought of as an essentially poetic structure. It functions “like a hymen over consciousness,” as “an elated, unclosured form of mourning that . . . resists premature burial”; elation gives shape to a particular loss, “if only in this tomb or crypt of words” (“EW” 189–90). In the case of Wordsworth’s poetry, Hartman writes, “[t]he form of dealing with death is now drawn as if directly from language” (189). Wordsworth’s creation of this particular poetic structure counts as an undeconstructible fact. In several articles, Hartman refers to Wordsworth’s particular mode of language as an encompassing “euphemism.” While a euphemism is normally “simply a figure of speech covering up naked truth,” and thus all too easy to demystify, Wordsworth’s poetry embodies an “underlying and resistant euphemism” that heeds language’s “inbuilt commitment to avoid silence” (“IF” 148–53). Wordsworth’s poetry gives shape to something that does not have to emerge, while “the aphasia it circumscribes remains perceptible” (148). Its particular mode of representation does not repress the moment of loss, but encrypts it in a literary creation that makes the poetic process “difficult to psychoanalyze”; this poetry “resists overconsciousness and demystification” (“RA” 215, “UW” 325). Wordsworth’s poetry affirms its referent’s capacity to be lost, while it in the same movement lends this referent a “nonspecific quality” that saves it from becoming the target of deconstruction or demystification (“TU” 38). It is a form of closure “with healing effect” because it “phantomizes presence” by creating “limits that prove to be liminal” (“WW” 121, 150). That Wordsworth’s poetry presents its referent in such a way that it cannot be demystified, analyzed, or denied gives an additional meaning to the epithet “unremarkable” that Hartman puts in the title of the volume in which most of his essays on Wordsworth are collected. In Wordsworth’s poetry, according to Hartman, “it is hard to describe in a rigorous manner the relation between marked and unmarked features” (“CI” 266), and this elevates it to the status of a “signpost or marker, which intimates a state of quasi-divine impassiblity” that makes it immune to “semiotic analysis” (“UW” 331–2). As such, it sets a definite limit to the “process of remarking” (321) and manages to be truly “unremarkable,” which has to be understood as another name for the “undeconstructible” I mentioned before.

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Yet for all the self-confidence Hartman displays in his claim on Wordsworth, we may well ask from where Wordsworth’s “euphemia” derives its power? After all, Hartman’s work on Wordsworth is written in an age that has, by Hartman’s own admission, almost reduced poetry to utter powerlessness. Hartman always situates Wordsworth’s capable euphemisms in contrast to less benign forms of linguistic power, which is of course a neat way of avoiding the more fundamental question of whether it indeed has any power at all. The distinction Hartman introduces is always that between “[b]lessing and curse, euphemism and slander, praise and blame” (“WW” 132). Wordsworth’s poetry is “a transfiguration of the cursing principle,” a conversion of “bad omens . . . into blessings” (“WW” 132, “TU” 44, “UW” 330). But what is it that these blessings achieve? As Wordsworth’s mode of representation recovers an affective relation to nature and to historical reality, poetry’s blessings constitute an act of “care for the extraordiness of the ordinary” (“WW” 156), and thus affirm “the actualizing or performative relationship between words and things” (“PR” 175). The gesture of blessing does not aim to correct or complete nature, but it instead restores natures as what Tom Huhn has called “a source for potentially faithful, affirmative reiterations” (Huhn 2004: 7). In a “consciously minor” repetition of the grandiose marriage of imagination and nature that organized Hartman’s earlier work on Wordsworth, these blessings give a shape to things’ non-emergence, thus preserving “the negative gap between promise and fulfillment” (“WO” 185; François 2003: 54). Poetry, Hartman writes, “is a marriage-covenant” with nature, the performative institution of “the contract between word and thing” (“TU” 42, ST 19). Wedding vows and contracts are of course textbook examples of speech-acts. And again, nothing is more uncertain in the cultural context in which Hartman makes these statements than poetry’s performative power. The rest of this chapter shows how Hartman’s work reflects on the question of poetry’s power, and how it addresses this difficulty by adding a religious dimension to poetry’s linguistic magic. More specifically, it establishes a close, and far from self-evident, relation between poetry’s capacity to bless, and the divine speech-act par excellence. In the essay “The Poetics of Prophecy” from 1981, Hartman tells the story of Wordsworth’s famous ascent of Mount Snowdon. The poet here “climbs through darkness to ‘see the sun rise’,” only to be confronted with the moon that “takes over in a kind of silent harmonization”; this “sound of harmony” leads the poet back from the effect (“and there was light”) to the cause, to “the scriptural text” that first gave rise to this harmony (“Let there be light”) (“PR” 172). “Let there be light” is the divine speech act that Wordsworth, like a Moses of poetry, will bring down with him in order to profit from its immense performative power. Wordsworth not only adopts (the contents of) the wish “for the return of light,” but more specifically also “that wish in the form of God’s first words” (“TU” 47). This wishing power, this “fiat power working tacitly and harmoniously” (“PR” 178), underlies the particular performative power of Wordsworth’s verse, even when it does not rise to its thematic surface. Wordsworth’s verse are an actualization in which the “ur-fiat” is precariously preserved (198).

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Wordsworth’s poetry shelters this ur-fiat in the same unique way that it shelters its other referents: while it gives an audible form to the source from which it borrows its assured power, it is also aware of the possibility that this capacity may at all times be lost. And because this particular loss would immediately mean the end of his poetry’s own effectivity, Wordsworth’s use of his borrowed powers “turns on and around the consciousness of change and instability” (“BT” 201). This explains a certain reticence in uttering the convergence of the “primordial speech act” and the “primordial wish” (“WO” 199),7 because, when passing into actuality, “its very success, its potential fulfillment, might go against nature by confirming the omnipotence of wishful thinking” (“TU” 46). Wordsworth preserves this unuttered proto-fiat in its “silent yet all-subduing aspect” (“PR” 178). It is clear that this religious dimension is not unproblematic, and especially not when Hartman will later call upon the poetic achievement that this divine link makes possible in order to intervene in contemporary culture. For now it is important to see how Wordsworth’s relation to the divine wish is again structured in terms of non-emergence and of the precarious conservation of potentiality, which recurs throughout Hartman’s work on Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s power only exists as a response to something more original, something that forever precedes it. Wordsworth’s achievement is in this sense always “late.” An essay Hartman published in PMLA in 1978, entitled “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style,” provoked the irritated response of Spencer Hall, who not only objected to Hartman’s interpretive liberties in the essay, but also correctly pointed out that for all his stylistic bravado, Hartman had failed to distinguish Wordsworth’s “later style” from an “early” style (Hall 1979: 140). This omission becomes explainable (but not therefore excusable) when we note that Hartman often ascribes a particular lateness to Wordsworth’s style as such. For Hartman, Wordsworth’s poetry is an “antiphonal” response “to the phoné of a prior experience”; phone is here defined as “voice or sound before a local shape or human source can be ascribed”; Wordsworth’s poetry then locates this previously unlocalized voice in nature, and this turns nature into “something that speaks ‘rememberable things,’ as something that textualizes a phantom voice” (“WO” 193–4).8 Because this phone is always referred back to the inaugural “let there be voice,” the poetic response to it can be “both a minor poem and a considerable text” (213). Every celebration of nature occurs under the sign of a preserved impotentiality; the act of connection is always secondary to a moment of non-integration. As Hartman writes, “no easy, integrating path leads from absolute or abrupt image to the mediation that preserves it” (185–6). The privileged example of Wordsworth’s constitutive lateness is the poem “A little onward lend thy guiding hand.” This poem opens with a quotation of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a device that indicates the usurpation of Wordsworth’s mind by a foreign voice (“DD” 205). Milton’s unintegrated lines are the intertextual grounding of an even more alien phantom voice that determines

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poetry’s general “condition of quotation, attenuated allusion and paraphrase” (“WO” 185). Hartman submits that poetry is “the working-through of such ‘voices’,” and that it is the ghostliness of these voices that implores the poet to work them through in his poetry (“DD” 207, “WO” 191). Hartman notes that the lines from Milton are themselves an “echo” of Oedipus at Colonus, and that they thus indicate “the felt though repressed power of pre-Christian literature” (“DD” 207, “WO” 181). He further compounds the ghostliness of this echo through the suggestion that Milton figures in Wordsworth’s poem as “a screen” for “the real block” called Shakespeare (“DD” 215). Whatever the complexity of these intertextual references, and however brilliant Hartman’s interpretive work is here, what is vital is that Wordsworth’s quotation from Milton “acts as a boundary that limits and even admonishes our desire for self-inauguration” (211). Wordsworth’s poem embodies the belatedness and secondariness of human existence as such. At the same time, Wordsworth’s euphemisms only acquire their performative power by being a belated response to a divine ur-fiat. There is one crucial difficulty besetting this reliance on a divine speech act. We generally tend to think of language as being inevitably removed from the source of meaning and from an authenticating origin—that is, after all, what the difference between reality and representation amounts to. Yet the divine speech act that Hartman invokes is both linguistic and absolutely originary. The metaphysical fiction of an originary speech-act has the peculiar power of making the prime mover already a part of language, and it thus grants language an inherent link to divine transcendence, and liberates it from its fateful removal from the fullness of being. The position of transcendence is already linguistic, and even if Hartman asserts its ghostliness by pointing to the voices of Shakespeare and Milton, it is only if we assume the reality of God’s “superperformative” that the linguistic power of euphemism can be understood as a power at all.9 The problem with this is that this new crypto-theological picture is used to account for a paradoxically powerful euphemism that will be used as essentially a cure for a cultural condition, and most obviously so in The Fateful Question of Culture. The previous chapter traced how Hartman’s work since the 1970s has moved from ontology to culture, and has come to look for a way to promote literature as the preserver of historical experience within culture. In Hartman’s extensive body of work on Wordsworth, however, we see that this cultural role of poetry is ascribed to Wordsworth only by returning to a far from self-evident metaphysical scheme. This return is perhaps not all that noticeable, as it is described in terms of speech-acts and of the “relation between textuality and referentiality” (“WO” 193), but it is an integral part of the Wordsworth that Hartman promotes in The Fateful Question and elsewhere. To conclude this chapter, and to further explain Hartman’s uneasy acknowledgement of a religious dimension, I home in on another important theme that his work elaborates in the period we are concerned with, his theory of the “specular name.” This theme is developed in what Hartman calls his

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“counterstatement to Derrida,” the essay “Words and Wounds” (1980), which is printed as the last chapter in Saving the Text (1981), and in “Psychoanalysis: the French Connection” (1978), the penultimate chapter in that book, which addresses the work of both Derrida and Lacan. Taking his cue from the work of Walter Benjamin, Hartman here speculates about the existence of a so-called specular name, which is conceived as “a correlative in language” of the famous “specular image” of “coordinated being” that Lacan locates in the mirror phase, and which offers the child an illusory image of his or her wholeness. It is no surprise that Hartman models this specular name as a speech-act: it is an “act of vocative designation” that “strikes inward as a divine apostrophe” and through which the self is “defined totally” (“FC” 88–94).10 Hartman writes that “the scene of nomination . . . is bound to be ‘accusative’ as well as ‘nominative’” (94). It is, quite precisely, the speech-act of “pure signification”—having “only a referent . . . but no concept or signified” (“WW” 126). The association of Hartman’s coinage with speech-acts may alert us to his ambition to present his claim on Wordsworth as a correction of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet the suggestion that the specular name can serve as “a correlative in language” for Lacan’s specular image seems to forget that for Lacan, language is an essential part of the same story in which the specular image is an episode, and can thus never serve as an alternative for that story. According to Lacan, in the mirror phase, the child encounters an integrated image he or she can assume as his or her identity. This identity is, however, in Lacan’s twist, revealed to be only “an illusory modification,” because the corps morcelé, “the fragmented or coordinated body image prior to the mirror phase,” is only suspended (and not abolished) in this spectral image. In Hartman’s interpretation of Lacan, fragmentation is not abolished because it “‘remains active in the domain that Lacan names the verbal or symbolic in contrast to the nonverbal or imaginary” (“FC” 92–3). For Hartman, there is a strict distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic (or linguistic) domain; while the specular image belongs to the former, Hartman coins the specular name to take its place in the latter. What Hartman here conveniently forgets is that the symbolic and the imaginary are always “coexistent, coimplicated, and intertwined” rather than simply “in contrast” (Argyros and Flieger 1987: 61).11 Pulling the imaginary and the symbolic apart, and equating the latter with language as such, has a clear advantage for Hartman: it allows him to isolate the symbolic realm as the domain that receives the persistent activity of the body’s fragmentation and that has the power to correct the story that led from the specular image to fragmentation. This correction is then Hartman’s theory of the specular name, which offers a considerably less bleak story than Lacan’s hard lesson that an integrated identity remains forever impossible.12 Hartman does admittedly point out that the specular name is equally illusory as the specular image that it replaces: he writes that it corresponds to “the concept of Word or Logos” in religion, and thus belongs to “a logocentric phase of development,” and is as such complicit with “a desire for reality-mastery” that

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Lacan and Derrida oppose in “Western philosophy” (“FC” 86–93);13 the specular name is explicitly identified as a “fantasy” that is “at once degraded and recalled in the wounding word” (“WW” 139). Yet in spite of these protestations, as a specular act of naming, it again ascribes a privileged role to language and to poetry, and is thus indispensible in making possible Wordsworth’s attempt to identify “naming and blessing” (“BT” 201), as well as Hartman’s own related attempt to reorient Derrida’s position that we are “wounded” by language in the direction of the “affective” issue of words that can also “heal” (“WW” 121–3). Our linguistic wound can only be sealed “with healing effect” when language has been empowered by a specular speech-act (150). It is remarkable that these vaguely religious themes in Hartman never receive (any of) the name(s) of the divine. In Hartman’s mature work, the religious dimension is never made more explicit than in frequent statement about false claims to religiosity—thus phrases like the “quasi-religious” (“NW” 104), “ersatz religions” (“AC” 101), the “cultural evangelism” of the “saints of secularization” (“CC” 379), an uninvestigated “residual religious pathos” (FQ 155), and so on. These scattered reproaches become somewhat less incidental when we observe how consistently they are levelled at Hartman’s most important intertexts: so Derrida’s work is “only occasionally reflective of analogies to its own project in religious writing” (“WW” 121); Benjamin, who serves as the main illustration of Hartman’s speculations on the specular name,14 “continued to look . . . to the origin of all names in the Garden God had planted eastward of Eden” (“FC” 112), while his socioeconomic interpretation of Baudelaire is regrettably marked by “the unspoken vigor with which it excludes a rival perspective, the religious” (CW 64); Freud, for his part, “was always distrustful and demystifying towards eudemonic feelings,” while he yet, unbeknownst to himself, held sacred the dream of “a purified language that remains uncontaminated” (“IF” 151, 154); Lacan’s purported secularism, finally, remains indebted to the ambition to “build a new communitarian model on the basis of psychiatric experience” (“FC” 89). So what to make of these statements? Alexander Argyros and Jerry Aline Flieger have suggested that Hartman’s attribution of an often unacknowledged religiosity to these thinkers can be understood as “a symptom of Hartman’s own cathexis to theology,” an investment in theology that “stems from his stake in literature as pathos” (1987: 62). While the preceding discussion has made clear that they are definitely on the right track, a more subtle analysis is nevertheless possible here. Looking closely at Hartman’s statements above, it is clear that they all state in one form or another that the subjects of these statements (Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Benjamin) are more religious than they know, and that because they do not know it, they are not religious enough. Put differently, they suggest that unacknowledged religion is all too secular, and not religious enough, and in a strange twist, they at the same time imply that the secular is unacknowledged religion. Considering this concern with unacknowledged religion together with Hartman’s continued reticence in avowing his own theory’s—or

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Wordsworth’s—religiosity, this suggests a close connection between the religious and the unacknowledged in this part of his work. Hartman quietly corrects intellectual positions that claim to do without religion, and he holds that lack of awareness against them because they are “not reflective or dialectical enough” (“IF” 150). The religious, or the sacred, seem to be simply (and minimally) that which threatens to go unacknowledged, and which yet cannot be denied; the religious appears to be connected to a certain care for “what we do not know, or what does not require our knowing” (François 2003: 68). Hartman’s own theoretical interventions are never more “Wordsworthian” than when they turn to those things that, because they do not allow themselves to be known, or do not need our knowing, threaten to go unacknowledged in projects that are all too intent on conceptual knowledge. If it is not too fanciful, we could say that this care for the unremarkable and the unobtrusive is the reason why the religious never moves to the foreground of Hartman’s theoretical work, but instead inheres in it in the same way that regressive knowledge inheres in Wordsworth’s euphemism—unactualized, yet acknowledged in its quiet persistence. Argyros and Flieger are correct to foreground Hartman’s “stake in literature as pathos,” but this statement can be made more specific by giving that pathos the name of William Wordsworth. Hartman’s speculations on the specular name are also applied to Wordsworth’s poetry. Hartman defines the “absolute vocative” (another term he uses to refer to the specular name) as “the fiat itself: the power of the logos to produce, out of itself as it were, a present and immediate response,” only to go on to ask the question whether the work of art can “let the let-there-be be, suspend the absolute vocative in the system of language” (ST 92). Considered in light of the specular name, literature is the work of mourning “the death of the proper name”: the death knell of the proper name “signifies the birth of the literary text” that “reaffirms [the proper name] in time” (ST 77, “WW” 94). Poetry is then “the elaboration of a specular name” (108). “A Touching Compulsion,” the essay I began this chapter with, ends with the observation that “[i]n Wordsworth’s poetry mourning and memory converge as an infinite task” (“TC” 30). As my discussion has made clear, Wordsworth’s poetry has also assured that this infinite task can take comfort in the certainty of an essential invulnerability. Poetry creates this invulnerability through its work of affirming potentiality, although other elements in Hartman’s theoretical and critical work indicate that the power of such a gentle affirmation can, in the last analysis, hardly exist without a divine warrant. In the next chapter, I follow Hartman in his effort to transport Wordsworth—and, inevitably, the tensions that I have indicated in the construction of this “unremarkable” Wordsworth—to other domains.

Chapter 5

“Darkness makes abode”: Mourning, Testimony, Community

1. Communities of Mourning: Anderson, Nancy, Wordsworth The clearest indication of the centrality of Wordsworth in Hartman’s mature work is the fact that the logic of Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth—the subject of the previous chapter—organizes his interventions in other fields. This chapter traces the ways in which Hartman’s understanding of Wordsworth informs his thinking on media, community, Jewish identity, and the memory of catastrophe. The result is a remarkably cogent and consistent position that still has an important contribution to make to current debates on these topics, if only because Hartman’s position has until now not always been recognized in these debates. Wordsworth’s poetry combines an affirmation of the possibility of loss with an assertion of invulnerability, and this paradoxical capacity structures, most notably, the notion of community that surfaces intermittently in Hartman’s work. Of course, the assertion of the relevance of Wordsworth’s peculiarly empowering mode of mourning for a thinking of community—and therefore also, if only indirectly, of politics—immediately invites two objections: first, that the importation of this—or any—model of mourning into the realm of politics reveals that model’s essential conservatism, and second, that the very movement from poetry to politics constitutes a suspect species of aesthetic ideology. If I begin by addressing these objections, it is because this approach also allows me to begin sketching Hartman’s unique position. The first objection is rooted in a widespread suspicion that a successful process of mourning is by definition a normalization strategy that affirms the status quo; it castigates mourning as what Eric Santner has referred to as “an ultimately adaptive strategy to the governing reality principle” (2006: 89). It holds that mourning all too easily overcomes particular losses and redirects its liberated energies to new love objects that unproblematically substitute for the ones that are lost. Such an outright dismissal of mourning often either implicitly or explicitly embraces mourning’s counterpart: melancholia. It understands melancholia as an ethically and politically commendable practice that resists surrendering the memory of loss to a public space that all too often fails

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to honor the memories of non-dominant groups. It remains unconditionally attached to particular losses, and considers melancholia as “the only affective posture that can maintain fidelity to those losses that the reigning ideological formation would like to disavow” (Santner 2006: 89). The second objection, which considers the importation of Wordsworth’s literary achievement into the realm of politics as a form of aesthetic ideology, is hard to avoid in the case of Hartman, who has recently rather cheerfully confessed to what he calls “the cardinal sin of aesthetic ideology” (“PE” 454, “PS” xxiv). The critique of aesthetic ideology has been a staple of literary and cultural criticism since the 1980s, both in historicist and in deconstructionist (or poststructuralist) approaches. Basic to this critique is the assumption that the operation of the aesthetic can be characterized as a “process of ideological deformation of the material, the real, the sociopolitical” (Kaufman 2000: 682). The self-imposed task of critique is then to reverse that deformation, and to restore the material and historical reality that the aesthetic has allegedly deformed. It is not difficult to appreciate the affinity between this critique of the aesthetic and the melancholic critique of mourning: both approaches distrust processes of formalization and mediation, and both profess to remain faithful to the material reality that psychological, aesthetic, or conceptual mediations supposedly distort. Such a suspicion of the aesthetic and of mourning has arguably been the dominant critical posture in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the last three decades or so; indeed, the realization that it can so easily be invoked against Hartman is an unambiguous indication of his gradual removal from the critical mainstream in the same period. In whatever field it operates, Hartman’s work is rooted in the conviction that an unmediated and uncompromising attachment to loss and to historical reality is impossible, and that a measure of mourning and of aesthetic mediation is also preferable on ethical and political grounds. A minimal process of monumentalization that loosens our melancholic attachment to loss is not an objectionable act of betrayal, but is in fact a prerequisite if our fidelity to loss is to acquire a sustainable and rememberable shape. Moreover, for Hartman a moment of mediation is essential in making possible “the thinking of history and historicity themselves” (Kaufman 2000: 684). Against the critique of aesthetic ideology and of mourning, Hartman’s work insists that history, and especially the traumatic history that he engages in his work on Holocaust video testimony, “surfaces not only in but also because of an aesthetic medium” (Goodman 1996: 572). Hartman’s conviction that it is impossible to confront reality in a pure and undistorted way or to expose ourselves to a radically unmourned loss is counterbalanced by the realization that a fully restitutive mourning or a fullscale aestheticization of reality are ethically and politically unacceptable. The importance of Wordsworth’s achievement is that it mediates loss in a way that avoids both fallacies: it is a form of mourning that counteracts mourning’s tendency to abstract from the particularity of loss, while simultaneously recognizing

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the essential role of mourning in the construction of psychic memorials that make loss rememberable at all. This chapter shows how this different mourning, which can be conflated neither with melancholia nor with traditional notions of mourning, assures the often unacknowledged relevance of Hartman’s work for overly polarized debates on community, nationalism, identity, and the memory of trauma. So how does Wordsworth’s poetry articulate a more ethically attuned kind of mourning? The reading of “A slumber did my spirit seal” made clear that Wordsworth’s poetry does not remain melancholically attached to Lucy’s death, but instead suspends it in a perpetuated state of impotentiality that preserves Lucy’s immutability. It avoids exposing us to the brute fact of Lucy’s death in a way that is too direct to absorb or assimilate, and instead provides a minimal monumentalization in a poetic form through which we can experience our removal from her death. This loss is too extreme to confront directly, and it is only when we can experience our removal from the trauma that it can be assimilated as a determinate reality. Wordsworth’s aesthetic operation, in other words, makes possible an experience of non-experience, and it is only through this mediation that the reality that we cannot confront directly is created as an object to be (indirectly) experienced. In this sense, Wordsworth’s poetry “directs us to objects that are clearly there, clearly human, and clearly finite” (“CD” 220). Against the prevailing idea that mourning and aesthetic mediation constitute a betrayal of particular losses, Wordsworth shows that mourning, far from hastening the forgetting of the lost object, is a prerequisite for giving it a form we can experience and remember. Wordsworth’s poetry is “the equivalent in words to communal tombstones” that yet remains “penetrated by contingency” (“WH” 31, 34). The peculiarity of this kind of mourning is that it manages to make loss and contingency a palpable part of the experience that the work of aesthetic mediation makes possible. This aesthetics of mourning frequently but unsystematically informs a particular thinking of community in Hartman’s work. In order to understand the contribution that this form of community can make to contemporary debates, it is useful to situate it in relation to two more familiar conceptions of community. The most conspicuous of these is the most widespread form of modern community, the nation. Benedict Anderson, among others, has shown how the nation relies on a particular stylization of death—a “cult of the dead” and a beautification of heroic death that Hartman consistently denounces (FQ 191, “AE” 137).1 Such blatant examples of aesthetic ideology often underlie totalizing and exclusionary forms of community, and it is in reaction to these that a radical re-thinking of the notion of community emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s at the crossroads of ontology, ethics, politics, and literary theory. The most famous instances of this line of thinking are probably Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. These critiques of traditional notions of community in their different ways also target the aestheticization of death

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and propose a more mindful relation to death. In the rest of this section, I focus on Benedict Anderson’s account of the nation’s aesthetics of mourning and Jean-Luc Nancy’s very different take on the place of death and mortality in order to let the singularity of Hartman’s position emerge.2 Hartman proposes an aesthetic mediation of loss that does not abstract from the particularity of death, but that rather understands its own aesthetic operation as essential to the emergence of a particularity that it cultivates as a precarious ground of community. Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities proposes to study the nation as “an imagined political community” (1991: 6). By calling this type of association “imagined,” Anderson means that this community can only be imagined, that is, that it cannot be perceived in a concrete and readymade shape anywhere. For Anderson, the nation is a particular “style” in which community is imaged, and an essential component of that “style” is the nation’s stylization of death. This stylization must affect the citizen in a way that has made it possible, “over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7). Death is given a shape and significance that inspires citizens to desire rather than fear it. Anderson’s account of this aesthetics comes in a famous description of a particular kind of communal tombstone, which occasions a scene of mourning that is emblematic of the culture of nationalism. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who “discovered” the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (9). The cenotaph functions as a technology of community that enables a scene of mourning, a display of “public ceremonial reverence,” that impresses the citizen with the inevitability of the reality of a community she cannot perceive, only imagine. The cenotaph can instill a sense of community because it presents the death of the Unknown Soldier as an anonymous death; it successfully abstracts from the particularity and irreparability of the deaths of those who have in effect died in wars and battles that the nation claims as elements of its history and as constituent parts of its identity. The national aesthetics of mourning consists in the construction of an affective economy that thrives on a “peculiarly absolute abstraction of death” (Redfield 1999: 68). In the cenotaph, death is figured as “aestheticized anonymity” (68),

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and the power of this figuration is such that it renders death available as an experience that can be shared by all citizens. Death becomes a potentially generalizable experience, and the citizen is constituted as a national subject precisely by sharing in this experience. By surrendering the singularity of death, the cenotaph provides the occasion for the citizen’s identification with “the nation as formalized anonymity” (69). It presents the citizen with the prospect that her own death, when it comes, will be “instantly assimilated into the common death for the sake of the collective” (Glowacka 2006). The nation’s aesthetic ideology depends on the complete erasure of the inassimilable singularity of finitude and loss; the cenotaph’s work of monumentalization must fence off “death’s resistance to its own universalizability” (Redfield 1999: 68). The nation’s abstraction of death is also an erasure of death; it is a form of mourning that simply forgets the particular losses on which it thrives. Still, Anderson’s account also indicates a place where the ideological recuperation of death can be interrupted: the cenotaph’s operation is threatened by the always imminent possibility that the “real bones” of the dead can still be gathered or that their names can still be recalled, and that it will become clear that the dead resist the anonymity of aesthetic figuration. The nation’s aesthetics of mourning is always in danger of being interrupted by the return of a death that can still be named and exposed and that can no longer be enlisted for a collective experience of belonging. This means that a form of community that is founded in a different mourning and that refuses to erase the memory of loss has to resist the cenotaph’s work of neutralization; it has to find a different “style” for its aesthetic mediation of loss. For Hartman, poetry can serve as a “communal tombstone” that does not hide the “real bones” or the names of the dead. To return to Hartman’s privileged example, Wordsworth’s poetry emphatically preserves the name of Lucy, and it remains firmly grounded in a particular memory that can neither be rendered anonymous nor be recuperated as the reader’s own. Wordsworth presents Lucy as withdrawn from every claim upon her, both when she was alive and now that she is dead. Because it gently resists the desire to identify with the death it represents, poetry interrupts the operation of the cenotaph; by taking on the role of Anderson’s “busy-body” who refuses to forget the real bones and the names of the dead, it renders the neutralizing operation of the cenotaph inoperative and intimates a form of community that does not rely on the fateful alliance of forgetful mourning and aestheticization that grounds the nation. While Hartman’s community rejects an aestheticization of death that denies death’s singularity, it yet depends on a moment of aesthetic mediation in its effort to shape and preserve that singularity. In order to appreciate Hartman’s difference from other forms of community that are critical of the nation’s aesthetic ideology, it is helpful to briefly relate his work to the way Jean-Luc Nancy inscribes death in his theorization of the inoperative community, the radically critical model of community that has been most influential in literary and cultural studies. As nationalism’s aestheticization of

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death forecloses the possibility that death is ever encountered as an event that exceeds every frame that aims to impose a meaning on it, attempts to imagine community differently have to find another way to relate to the death of the other. The experience of the death of the other is at the heart of Nancy’s attempt to re-think community in The Inoperative Community. This notion of community is explicitly opposed to so-called immanent forms of community, which for Nancy constitute nothing less than “the general horizon of our time,” and thus also include the nation as the dominant form of modern community (1991: 56). What is typical of such immanent communities is that they effect themselves as their own work; they actualize themselves as the development and the accomplishment of their own given essence, without being affected by anything external to themselves (3). Nancy ascribes a different meaning to the term “community” than that of a shared identity or essence. For Nancy, community “names a relation that cannot be thought as a subsistent ground or common measure” (Fynsk 1991: xiv); it refers to an existence “in common” that resists “fusion into a body” (Nancy 1991: xxxviii). This relation reveals itself in the exposure to the death of the other. Nancy writes that while millions of deaths may be justified “as insurrections against social, political, technical, military, religious oppression,” these deaths are not for all that successfully “sublated” (13). While operative communities attempt to promote death as “the infinite fulfilment of an immanent life” and to make the dead productive for the communities’ immanent (self-)development, “the unmasterable excess of finitude” that is revealed in death always exposes the community to its outside. The singularity of death obstinately insists on death’s “senseless meaning,” a meaning that cannot make sense within the terms of an established community and that always exceeds these terms (13–14). Death and loss, for Nancy, are not reabsorbed in the immanence of an imagined community, but rather make possible “the crystallization of the community around the death of its members, that is to say around the ‘loss’ (the impossibility) of their immanence” (14). A more responsible and more faithful relation to the death of the other becomes possible by insistently refusing to “operate the transfiguration of [the] dead into some substance or subject” (15). In this sense, Nancy’s inoperative community is grounded in a melancholic refusal to hide from the excessive character of the death of the other, and to all too successfully overcome grief and recuperate death for the promotion of collectivity. The exposure to the death of the other can bring about what Dorota Glowacka has called “the interruption of the myth of communal death by death” (2006).3 Remarkably, Nancy not only links his notion of community to death, as is also the case in Anderson and Hartman, but he also explicitly grants a place to literature in the “interruption” of immanent communities, which makes it possible to compare his work to Anderson’s cenotaph and Hartman’s Wordsworth. The second and third chapters of The Inoperative Community, which are entitled “Myth Interrupted” and “Literary Communism,” offer an elaborate and idiosyncratic discussion of literature. Nancy here develops the idea that the immanent

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community engenders itself by figuring itself through myth. Myth is, for Nancy, a structuring power that gives the community its purpose and legitimacy; it legitimizes the community’s immanence, that is, its capacity to generate itself without being affected by anything external. Critical notions of community must then strive for “the interruption of myth.” Importantly, this interruption does not itself constitute a new myth, but rather “a movement,” or what Nancy calls “the propagation, even the contagion, or again the communication of community itself that propagates itself or communicates its contagion by its very interruption” (1991: 58–60). The “name that has been given to this voice of interruption” is literature (63). Literature is a singular, punctual, interruptive event that explodes the immanence of the community. In literature, “the passion of and for community propagates itself, unworked, appealing, demanding to pass beyond every limit and every fulfillment” (60). Nancy underlines literature’s status as a critical event that interrupts the operation of aesthetic ideology in order to reveal a more genuine form of community, which we also encounter in our exposure to (the other’s) death— an experience that aesthetic ideology aims to neutralize. Literature is “the indefinitely repeated and indefinitely suspended gesture of touching the limit” (67). What Nancy tends to underemphasize is the fact that literature is not only a singular power, but is also necessarily a representation and, indeed, an aesthetic mediation.4 Hartman joins Nancy in promoting literature as a force that can interrupt the neutralization of experience exemplified by the nation’s cenotaph and that intimates a different form of community; he does so, moreover, by also linking that literary power to loss and death. Still, Hartman diverges from Nancy in seeing the experience of literature not as an equivalent of our exposure to the death of the other, but rather as an aesthetic mediation, as a minimal moment of monumentalization that makes possible a different form of community by giving shape to a remove from that trauma. The reason Hartman grounds his sense of community in a consciously mediated and mitigated experience of remove rather than in a particularly intense exposure to trauma is his fear that this very intensity will make it impossible for this trauma to be absorbed and assimilated, or indeed to be experienced at all. For Hartman, traumatic exposure is unwittingly complicit with aesthetic ideology’s neutralizing operation in that it also endangers the possibility of experience. In Hartman’s work on Holocaust memory, to which I turn in the third section of this chapter, this concern returns in the attempt to articulate Holocaust video testimony as a genre that preserves the possibility of genuine experience in a world saturated by visual media that endanger the possibility of experience. As always in Hartman, experience is understood as an experience of non-experience, of a mere potentiality or latency. Poetry, for Hartman, preserves the exposure to the death of the other within the linguistic tombstone it erects. By introducing a moment of mediation between us and that death, it makes that death experienceable for the first time. Poetry refuses material or melancholic purity, because such purity makes

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impossible the distance and reflexivity that every commitment to community requires. The notion of community that can be derived from Hartman’s Wordsworth is characterized by a somewhat paradoxical commitment to experience, on the one hand, and reflection and distance on the other. In Hartman’s work on Holocaust memory, this contradictory position is given a shape in the figure of the “intellectual witness” (“HT” 260). Yet before we turn to Hartman’s work on video testimony and on Jewish identity—two issues that are not necessarily connected in Hartman’s oeuvre—we need to address a problem that besets Hartman’s notion of community in the very field in which it originates, that of literary studies. The fact that Hartman’s work on mourning and community offers an adequate response to the charges of aesthetic ideology and forgetful mourning does not mean that it can find a hearing in a critical climate that has increasingly been dominated by “melancholic” and “anti-aesthetic” positions in the period in which Hartman’s mature work has taken shape. Indeed, how can an approach like Hartman’s that offers a defense of literature on the basis of the merits of experience—rather than, say, of an all too familiar set of vague humanist values—find a place in a field that has increasingly begun to consider literature as a cultural object or as an object of theoretical knowledge, rather than as an occasion for experience? How, moreover, can a literary experience that is necessarily open and indeterminate be promoted as a determinate vision? It is at least remarkable that the two domains in which Hartman’s work continues to figure centrally are trauma and Holocaust studies.5 There are obviously complicated institutional and intellectual reasons for this state of affairs, but we cannot fail to note that the two signature movements of Hartman’s late work—the preservation of potentiality, the experience of non-experience—are almost definitional of the objects with which these fields concern themselves, that is, the afterlife of trauma and the memory of catastrophe. The fact that these experiential structures are not, or no longer, linked to the objects of literary studies underlines the difficulty of finding a hearing for potentiality and experience in this domain. Two of Hartman’s most straightforward pieces of cultural criticism, his essays “Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics” from 1992 and “Public Memory and its Discontents” from 1994, offer a good place to observe his attempt to promote literary (and artistic) experience as a determinate “countervision.” “Public Memory and its Discontents” locates the privilege of art in its ability to be “more effective in ‘embodying’ historically specific ideas than the historywriting on which it may draw.” Art is both more personal and more indeterminate: it is “more personal and focused than public memory yet less monologic than the memorializing fables common to ethnic or nationalist affirmation” (“PD” 104, 107). Literature, moreover, is neither a neutralization nor a re-animation of the past: in literature “creative activity is often carried out under the negative sign of an absent memory,” “as if the link between memory and imagination had been lost” (107). Literature, in other words, enables an experience of removal.

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In a closely related essay, Hartman writes that literature assumes a vital role in the “struggle for experience, for a more than abstract sense of the past, or virtual sense of the present” (“PM” 264). Literary experience is a power that can resist hegemonic tendencies toward abstraction and neutralization. The question remains how that capacity can take shape as an alternative social or political vision. The essay “Art and Consensus” recognizes the need for a “countervision” that is “all-encompassing but free of religious excesses and desperado politics” (“AP” 281). The experience of art, that is, must be packaged as a decidedly non-apocalyptic political vision aiming for consensus. It is an index of the difficulty of articulating what this consensus should be about that the essay does not manage to put forward more than the importance of a consensus about, precisely, the need for a particular kind of consent. The essay opens with the assertion that “what turns commentary into criticism, what gives it critical edge and focus, is, above all, its concern for the quality of public agreement about works of art” (272). Criticism aims “less at consensus than at quality of consent,” and this quality is cultivated in the experience of literature or art. Hartman underlines the importance of “close reading,” which he defines as “a form of exegetical bonding that does not deprive us of quality of consent” (273). This position is entirely in line with what Hartman’s notion of community makes us expect: it relies on a moment of experience that does not disable a moment of critical distantiation and reflection. This particular experience defines art’s relevance for the public realm: art stages a “drama of individual assent—art’s demand on each of us and our response or resistance to it,” which “should carry over and influence . . . the quality of our consent in public and political matters” (274). The experience of art, that is, wakes citizens up to their freedom to make up their own minds. Hartman’s articulation of the vision that art fosters does not become any more specific than this assertion of freedom. He is careful to distinguish it from a complete “liberty of interpretation” (274)—after all, this freedom is the effect of art’s demand on us. The experience of art “demands some bonding” (274), and not just any bonding: the experience of art interrupts the default affirmation of “a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” (FQ 102); it interrupts the unconscious submission to the neutralizing operations of aesthetic ideology and televisual culture, and opens up the possibility of a “qualitative” consent that is not just instilled by seductive propaganda that “can effectively bypass questions of consent” (“AP” 276). In passages such as these the mixed loyalties of Hartman’s politics are unmistakable: Hartman criticizes the anonymization that culture and politics promote in order to automatize the affirmation of the status quo and to neutralize the possibility of dissent; yet he calls on the experience of art to raise people’s consciousness, and therefore the possibility of dissent, only to ask them to consciously assent to the necessity of assent, that is, to the fatality of “some bonding.” In a move that is entirely characteristic of Hartman’s work, a radical claim for the critical force of art and literature is raised, but instead of keeping this “opening . . . for a redemptive

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act” (281) resolutely open and undetermined, Hartman forecloses this excessive dimension by streamlining it with a more sober and realist agenda. Hartman writes that we “write criticism” because “we are moved not only by the work of art itself but also by a vision of art’s attachment to the cause of liberty and democracy” (276). Art wakes citizens up to their freedom to consent, and as Hartman’s political imagination remains restricted to the tension between liberty and consensus, this automatically means that art is essentially linked to freedom and democracy. What is missing here and elsewhere in Hartman’s mature cultural criticism is a more fine-grained account of how art operates within contemporary society, and how it relates to other social institutions. One of the reasons for the lack of attention to alternative institutions is probably that such a more nuanced account could challenge the radical privilege of art and literature—after all, we can easily imagine other sites where citizens can be reminded of their freedom to consent. As I will show, Hartman does recognize the genre of Holocaust video testimony as one such site, but he remains uncompromising on the privilege of literature and art. Both “Art and Consensus” and “Public Memory and its Discontents” end with an assertion of their persistence: Hartman underlines that “[w]e still have the arts,” that there is “an actual artistic heritage” (“PD” 111); even if the effectivity of Shakespeare’s drama is no longer assured, “[t]here is some comfort . . . in knowing that his work has survived” (“AP” 282). The conviction that literature has the inherent capacity to foster a particular kind of experience has to compensate for the doubts about whether that experience can still find a place in contemporary society. The one thing Hartman’s work refuses to mourn and to which it remains stubbornly—indeed, melancholically—attached is the “scandal” that “the formalism of literary language persists” (“HH” 241), the “fact that texts exist” (ST xv), and the “plain presumption of the text” (“CI” 274).6 Hartman’s eloquent claim for Wordsworth’s peculiar capacity to mourn is propelled by his own inability to get over Wordsworth.

2. Aesthetic State Solution: The Jewish Question In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1969: 256). This statement reflects the insight that what we think of as culture and civilization are in fact reflections of the values of dominant groups, whose domination was only made possible, and can only be maintained, at the cost of massive violence and dispossession. This insight has oriented the major critical tendencies in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the last three decades or so; it also informs the critique of aesthetic ideology and the critical melancholia that I discussed in the previous section. In his book Aesthetic Democracy, Thomas Docherty proposes a different reading of

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Benjamin’s dictum. He suggests we take the double-sidedness of the statement seriously, and also entertain the slightly perverse possibility that there is no document of barbarism that is not also a document of civilization. The result is that the politics of aesthetic documents are truly undecidable, “neither intrinsically civilised nor intrinsically barbaric.” Indeed, “the document manifests itself as the merest potentiality for either civilization or barbarism,” and the promise of aesthetic democracy would then hinge on the capacity to inhabit that potentiality (2006: 70). This “inhabiting” corresponds to Hartman’s notion of the literary experience of a mere potentiality, an experience that refuses a premature decision about its status as either a document of barbarism or a document of civilization. Yet such a moment of experience and of potentiality can matter only as long as no decision about its status has been made, and because it is the one-sided and not the radically open-ended reading of Benjamin’s phrase that most aptly characterizes the major critical tendencies Hartman’s work has had to confront, such a “premature politicisation” is often hard to avoid (71). When the chief occupations of literary criticism are “ideology critique” and “identity affirmation” (SS 216), the understanding of the literary text shifts from that of a practical object or an object of experience to that of an object of theoretical knowledge—a knowledge that can then be affirmed or critiqued (Comas 2006: 44–54). The point of all this is not to bemoan this state of affairs, or even to defend Hartman against the charge that he fails to engage with contemporary politics, but rather to account for the fact that Hartman’s investment in literary experience as it has taken shape since the 1970s has failed to make a difference in the field of literary studies. When its only potentially excessive and radical moment—the moment of experience—is overwritten in the construction of the text as an object of knowledge, it has no resources to defend itself against its widespread misinterpretation as an uncommitted aesthetic ideology, or even as an unconscious piece of propaganda for the victors of history. This account not only makes clear why Hartman’s case for literature cannot but be misperceived; in this section, it also makes it possible to correct some received ideas about Hartman’s engagement with the issues of Jewish identity and Jewish history. Indeed, the main difficulty in understanding that engagement is that it does not fit customary forms of identity affirmation. At the end of this section, I focus on a little-known and remarkably nasty exchange between Hartman and Edward Said in the pages of Critical Inquiry that highlights the misfit between Hartman’s and Said’s positions on ethnic identity and critical practice. The first thing that needs to be remarked about Hartman’s approach to the Jewish question is the reluctance and circumspection with which he proceeds. Before Hartman’s essays on Derrida in the mid-1970s, only the 1969 essay “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum,” which deploys Midrash techniques in an intensely focused reading of Milton, could have suggested Hartman’s interest in these issues (“LL” 15). When the essays on Derrida are collected in Saving the Text, it is again Hartman’s reluctance to address issues of Jewishness that is

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remarkable, especially when we realize that Saving the Text is for a great part a commentary on Derrida’s Glas, which is in its turn for almost half its length—or, bearing in mind the book’s infamous layout, half its width—a commentary on Hegel that explicitly focuses on Hegel’s conviction that “Christianity is the Aufhebung of Judaism” (Critchley 1998: 204). Sure, there is Hartman’s textual and stylistic celebration of the fact that “Glas is of the House of Galilee” (ST 19), but those who may be tempted to read this as an identitypolitical mobilization of Derrida should consider that Hartman writes that Heidegger also belongs there (xiv). Hegel’s take on the Jews later becomes the subject of two eminently equitable considerations (“JT” 90–2, “JI” 204), yet even on the many occasions when Hartman, in the wake of his well-publicized work on Holocaust testimony, has been called upon to address the question of Jewish identity, it is still his careful refusal to claim this moral high ground as the firm common ground of a Jewish identity that is striking. Indeed, such reticence and moderation are central aspects of the Jewish identity Hartman only reluctantly articulates. One example of such a reluctant address comes near the end of the essay “The Longest Shadow,” published in 1989, in the middle of the First Intifada. Hartman notes that “Israel is a state like any other and must defend itself,” especially since the possibility of “the destruction of the Third Temple” has become especially palpable in the light of “the 1967 and 1973 wars” (“LS” 26). This statement is immediately followed by a seemingly defensive non sequitur: “Where else, within a context of such danger, do you find maintained a culture of argument and a system of values that prize study so much and do not see faith demanding a sacrifice of intellect?” (26). Of course, the most obvious way to understand this question is to consider it as a rhetorical question, that is, as a statement that merely uses the rhetorical device of a question in order to emphasize the actuality of what it seems to question—in this case, the uniqueness of Israel’s via media. In this interpretation, Hartman’s question is reduced to an unambiguous statement of ethnic and national privilege, and as such rendered available for either political condemnation or affirmation. What is lost with this interpretation is the possibility of taking this question literally, that is, as a question rather than a statement. In this literal reading, Hartman’s question expresses a genuine interest in the capacity of culture and intellect to persist in an Ausnahmezustand that all too often aims to do away with thinking, in Israel or elsewhere. In order to understand Hartman’s position, we need to consider both of these readings together: Hartman’s position on Jewish identity is both an affirmation of Jewish privilege and an expression of a more general investment in the values that he associates with this privileged position. While it is not wrong to read Hartman’s position as “barbaric” support for the victors in the triumphal procession of history, such a condemnation is incomplete to the extent that it fails to factor in Hartman’s characteristic reticence in formulating that position. His decision to phrase the idea of Israel’s national privilege as a question makes it possible to understand his approach to the Jewish question as

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less a firm position than a reflection “that manifests itself as the merest potentiality for either civilization or barbarism” (Docherty 2006: 70). Hartman’s question acknowledges the strategic usefulness of “[t]he movement encouraging ethnic affirmation” (“LS” 20) for the promotion of Jewish identity without therefore restricting the capacity of culture to survive a state of exception to Israel alone. In the last paragraph of “The Longest Shadow,” which immediately follows this question, Hartman explicitly links this potentially generalizable model to its essentially textual nature: It was the Jews’ textual, not their territorial, ambition which united them . . . Yet this very people was taken out of its place and transferred—raus, raus— to that ultimate Umschlagplatz, the death camp, in a matter of days and hours. We were like a great tree that had weathered the centuries and in a day is uprooted, dismembered, and thrown to the flames. (26, first and last italics mine) This short passage is organized by two very different narrative movements: on the one hand, it traces the destruction of communal (Jewish) experience, while on the other, the succession of grammatical subjects—from Jewish ambition over “this very people” to “we”—indicates a narrative that offers textual compensation for that disintegration. The result is a shift from a form of community that is bound together by a shared territory—what Nancy would call an “immanent” community—to a different form of community that is essentially “uprooted,” but that still survives through a textual bond. Textuality grounds a form of community that survives the absence of territorial continuity, and as this condition marks Jewish experience, this form of community is recognizably Jewish; yet precisely because it defines itself through its refusal of all territorial claims, it cannot possibly be confined to the Jewish example alone. In the same way that the Jewish experience has survived its uprooting and its dismemberment, the form of textual community that it exemplifies exceeds the Jewish example. Throughout Hartman’s work on the Jewish question, “textual dependence” and “imagination” are never merely Jewish constants—they invariably also pose the question of community as such. Thus “text-dependence is a way of living in secular time without rejecting a burden of greatness” (“JT” 97); it offers an opportunity “to unify rather than divide the community” (“RL” 31), and “[w]hether this is a typically Jewish or more general aesthetic structure is hard to say” (“JT” 102). In light of the earlier discussion of the relation between Hartman’s Wordsworth and the idea of community, it should be clear that this textual community is not just an Israeli export product. Indeed, it is rather the case that Israel is conceived as an—admittedly privileged— instantiation of a Wordsworthian community that is grounded in an experience of distance and discontinuity.7 That Hartman’s investment in the Jewish question is both very specific and part of a more general concern is also apparent in the introduction to the 1986

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volume Midrash and Literature, which Hartman edited together with Sanford Budick. The volume proposes to look at “both the historical, cultural, Judaic phenomenon of midrash itself, and the resemblances between midrash and similar critical phenomena . . . in contemporary literature, criticism, and theory” (“IM” x). Hartman’s turn to questions of Jewish identity and forms of Jewish interpretation such as Midrash “is not a matter of pride or ethnicity but of intellectual and spiritual equity” (“JT” 96). Judaism is what refuses “selfglorification” as “the basis for group consciousness” without therefore giving up the basic need for such a shared consciousness (“ME” 148). Hartman’s version of this is markedly different from other mobilizations of the Jewish experience in critical theory that promote this experience as a vehicle for “the idea of exodus,” “the exigency of uprooting,” and “the affirmation of nomadic truth” as “an authentic manner of residing” (Blanchot 1996: 230–2). These quotations from Maurice Blanchot’s short text “Being Jewish,” which is characteristic of this line of reception, offer examples of the all too familiar casting of the figure of the Jew as “the sublime Other of modernity” (Rose 1993: x), as the figure of a radical homelessness “recalling us to the exigency of strangeness” (Blanchot 1996: 234). For Hartman, such an “identitarian nonidentity” (FQ 81) is an idealization that remains blind to the need for a measure of mediation and normalization.8 In the terms of the previous section, the idea of the wandering Jew as an authentic nomad is a version of critical melancholia that fails to understand that the categorical refusal of mourning and mediation condemns the subject to a vicious circle of retraumatization and immobility. “Homelessness,” for Hartman, “is always a curse, not an ideal,” and using it to characterize one particular community is a way of cursing that community (FQ 158). So what does this mean for Hartman’s place in the critical landscape? By denying itself the purity of a melancholic position, Hartman’s imagination of community misses its main opportunity to be recognized as a viable critical position. And in the politicized domain of cultural criticism, it can easily enough be misperceived as a straightforward case of particularist ethnic self-promotion, as became apparent in a brief exchange between Hartman and Edward Said in 1989 (again, in the middle of the First Intifada). Hartman’s and Said’s failure to engage with each other’s work in any sustained fashion is itself remarkable, especially in the light of their shared allegiance to the heritage of Erich Auerbach (which Said first put in print with the 1969 translation of Auerbach’s essay “Philologie und Weltliteratur,” a text from which Hartman repeatedly quotes). In 1976, after the publication of Said’s book Beginnings, Hartman still hailed Said as a thinker “who share[s] the same concerns” as the Yale critics (“CD” 203). Moreover, Said’s overtly “non-identitarian conception of human community” depends, as has often been remarked, on “turning the very categories of the Jewish experience and applying them to the Palestinian case” (Hussein 2004: 17; Aschcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 130).9 As the possibility of such a transfer is explicitly inscribed in Hartman’s notion of community, it seems natural enough to assume that Hartman and Said could agree that

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a shared ethnic identity is irrelevant to the possibility of sharing the same concern. The one confrontation of Said and Hartman that has appeared in print, however, makes clear that the way in which Hartman voices his view of community—that is, as both specifically Jewish and potentially generalizable—could, in the critical climate of the 1980s, not be recognized by Said as a position that he can subscribe to. In that climate, Hartman’s circumspection could not possibly be perceived as anything more sophisticated than an instance of Zionist propaganda. As such, this exchange is emblematic of the misfit between Hartman’s notion of community and the critical climate in which it was coined.10 The occasion for Hartman’s response to Said in the pages of Critical Inquiry in 1989 is Said’s earlier response to an article in which Robert Griffin had attempted to refute Said’s alleged equation of Zionism with racism (Griffin 1989: 611). Said’s response to what he terms Griffin’s “spectatorial” stance displays, in the words of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, a “disturbing combination of bombast and self-pity” (2006: 128), and culminates in the rather startling surmise that “Griffin is actually ‘Griffin,’ an ideological simulacrum whose only purpose is to attack, defame, harass, Palestinians with the aim of stopping their irreversible progress toward self-determination” (1989a: 646). Said’s statement combines at least three all too familiar tropes: the object of his criticism is dehumanized; once dehumanized, it is presented as part of a conspiracy against Palestinian lives; finally, because this conspiracy aims to stop an “irreversible progress toward self-determination,” it is also cast as the backward other of the project of modernity. These accumulated tropes make it all too easy to identify the enemy of what Said calls “our people,” especially when he adds that Griffin’s response “is therefore the verbal equivalent of the Israeli occupation” covering up “the shameless killing and oppressing of Palestinians” (646). It is not hard to see what Said considers his own response to be the verbal equivalent of, as Hartman was to discover. Hartman’s short response finds fault with Said’s “barely concealed ‘Don’t mess with me, you nonentity’” (“LC” 199), and with Said’s decision to “merge with a community” “in the arena of a communal passion like politics and justice.” Whatever the notion of community that Said subscribes to may be, Hartman’s point is that his rhetoric in effect ends up confirming the stand-off between mutually incompatible identity positions. Said’s rhetoric reduces a verbal exchange to a conflict between different ethnic identities, which does not hold out any hope for reconciliation. For Hartman, as we have seen, ethnic affiliation is but one moment within a broader concern for a form of community that is not closed in on itself. This concern does not imply a strict neutrality, as Hartman explicitly states when he acknowledges that he “holds a position very different from Said’s on many points,” and that “dispassionateness on either side is not a possibility.” Yet this partiality does not preclude the hope, which Hartman expresses in his last sentence, that he “would have written the same letter had an Israeli literary scholar sought to discredit in this manner the intellectual capacity and personal identity of a less famous writer.” For Hartman,

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critical inquiry is one medium in which the possibility of transcending one’s own community should be cultivated. Still, when Hartman blames Said for reducing critical inquiry to a polarized confrontation between two fixed identity positions, we are reminded that such a premature politicization had become nearly automatic in the critical climate in which Hartman is intervening. Hartman’s complaint betrays a certain resistance on his part to accept the changing terms of discourse in the field of literary criticism. His failure to capture that what he considers to be Said’s personal fault is in fact a nearly automatic movement of politicization makes it all too easy to charge him not only with a barely disguised Zionism, but also with a somewhat unworldly aestheticism. Said’s response in effect amounts to an outright refusal to acknowledge Hartman’s critical position.11 Hartman’s position is described as a posture of “olympian detachment” that is “interested only in politesse.”12 In Said’s logic, not even this imputation of “evenhandedness” saves Hartman from being identified with the wrong hand: he writes that “[m]erging with a community is therefore quite a different thing if on the one hand the community happens to deploy an army of occupation, or on the other, if it is subject to that army’s brutality” (1989b: 200). This statement suggests that only an unconditional “merger” with the Palestinian cause would give Hartman the right to speak. As a rationale for his questionable rhetoric, Said adds that “There is a war on.” Hartman’s problem is that this Ausnahmezustand is not the exception but the rule in the critical climate of the day, and that Hartman’s Wordsworthian notion of community cannot find a hearing in these war games. Hartman is not with Said, and therefore against Said, and therefore against the Palestinians, and therefore with the Jews, and therefore with no one else: such is the reductive logic of identity politics that Said’s intervention remorselessly exploits.13

3. Television and the Ethics of Holocaust Testimony Said’s response to Hartman ends with the following judgment: “For a person whose recent stock in trade has been bearing witness to the horrible past of his own people, I find Hartman’s patronizing and hypocritical self-congratulation both tasteless and jejune” (1989b: 200). This sentence repeats two prevalent misunderstandings about Hartman’s project since the 1980s: first, there is the barely disguised suggestion that attention to one’s own people leads to “selfcongratulation” as the basis for group consciousness—an equation that I have dismantled in the previous section; second, it voices the idea that Hartman’s work on survivor testimonies is somehow directly related to his imagination of Jewishness. Most of Hartman’s work on testimony is produced in the context of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University that he co-founded in the early 1980s and that has been filming thousands of interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. As I show, this part of Hartman’s

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work is continuous with his cultural criticism of contemporary life. For Hartman, the domination of the visual media endangers access to history and to whatever resists full visualization, and it also contributes to the erosion of experience—as such, it is complicit with the operations of aesthetic ideology I presented in the first section of this chapter. Hartman proposes the genre of video testimony as a cultural force that can counter such neutralization and that can restore the possibility of a genuine experience of non-presence. That video testimony functions as an update of Wordsworth for a visual age is also evident from the fact that it is explicitly linked with a thinking of community. The issues of Jewish identity and of Holocaust memory are not intrinsically related in Hartman’s work; rather, they can be seen as two—admittedly privileged—areas of his work that are modeled on the example of Wordsworth’s poetic achievement and the form of community it intimates. Hartman’s case for video testimony is very similar to his case for the relevance of art and literature. He claims that art is particularly “effective in ‘embodying’ historically specific ideas,” and its way of mediating these ideas is both more specific and more indeterminate than in “the memorializing fables common to ethnic or nationalist affirmation” (“PD” 104, 107). Art has the capacity to introduce a rupture in the stifling continuity of homogeneous, empty time, and to oppose the erosion of experience and the spread of moral indifference. Testimony similarly opposes “a simplified and overcollectivized memory-image,” as it captures “a vernacular and multivocal dimension” that is “too diverse and specific to become institutionalized or sacralized” (“PM” 269–70). Hartman’s writings on the Fortunoff Video Archive develops a “poetics”—or an “optic” (“ET” 495)14—of testimony that is supposed to adequately engage in the struggle for experience. The first important characteristic of this optic is that it is, indeed, optic: it directly takes on the visual media, which are the main opponent in the contemporary struggle for experience. Hartman describes his optic of testimony as “counter-cinematic”: “our technique, or lack of it, was homeopathic: it used television to cure television, to turn the medium against itself, limiting while exploiting its visualizing power” (“TD” 9). Hartman sees a double problem with television. First, TV is simply too powerful a “form of communication”: its accumulation of ever more data has a “powerful, repetitive, everyday—and so potentially trivializing—effect,” until the information and images it keeps feeding the viewer can no longer be “assimilated,” “absorbed,” or even experienced (“ET” 499, 504; “HL” 175). Second, TV not only erodes experience, it also contributes to the “derealization of ordinary life” and to the “ghosting of reality” by emitting “a hyperbolic form of visuality” (“TD” 1–5). Unlike “a verbal or literary medium,” TV fails to “respect the absence of . . . absent things” but rather “conveys the illusion not of making absent things present but present things more present” (1). TV, in short, multiplies presences to the point where whatever resists visualization no longer finds a place and can no longer be experienced, and everything blends in a phantom space of hyperbolic visuality.

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Video testimony’s “counter-cinematic” operation, in perfect contrast, respects the reality of what resists foregrounding and visualization, and it attempts to make non-presence an occasion for genuine experience. It offers the most concrete occasion in Hartman’s oeuvre where non-experience can be directly experienced. Video testimony is essentially an effort to re-embody the different forms of ghostliness that the visual media inflict upon contemporary life. Hartman’s most concise formulation of the rationale behind the optic of video testimony leaves no doubts about the Wordsworthian inspiration of this enterprise: Video is important because the voice as such, without a visible source, remains ghostly. That is, when you take away the visual, when you just hear the voice, the effect is that of disembodied sound, as if from the dead, from an absence. Voice has its own affective quality, but we feel it essential to add a face to that voice, to reduce the ghostliness, even to re-embody the voice. (“ET” 494). The operation of video here resembles nothing so much as Wordsworth’s capacity to find a poetic embodiment for ghostly forces that resist actualization. Video uses television’s visualizing powers not in order to make present things more present, but rather to give a visible and experienceable shape to testimonies that by definition deal with memories that are themselves no longer accessible to experience. Hartman’s video optics, that is, is designed to enable an immediate experience of our distance from the catastrophe—a distance that is embodied by the witness who is being filmed. A crucial challenge faced by this optic is developing a way to convey the “immediacy” of the interview, the fact that it is “a one-time event” happening “on the spot” (496). This concern informs the Fortunoff Archive’s decision not to make the interviews available on the internet, but to force potential viewers to actually travel to Yale in order to see the video interviews there (“HT” 252, “WV” 223–4). The filming itself also aims to convey to the viewer the immediacy and uniqueness of the event: the interviewers only use one camera that consistently focuses on the witness, and they only rarely ask questions or prompt the interviewees. This minimalism contributes to the immediacy of the experience—that is, to an immediate experience of our non-experience of the memories that the witness recounts. Given that video testimony makes possible an experience of removal that is clearly modeled on Wordsworth’s poetic achievement, it is no surprise that Hartman explicitly connects his optic to the notion of community. Hartman repeatedly stresses the fact that the interviewers in the video testimonies “form a provisional community and become, for the survivor-witness, representative of a potentially larger community” (“TD” 10). Hartman uses Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of an “affective community” to characterize this “supportive group ready to be a ‘witness to the witness’” (“ET” 501). The act of witnessing witness provides the occasion for an experience that can ground a non-exclusive and non-identitarian form of community that is open to all who want to share this specific experience of a missed experience; it appeals “to a human commonality

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that does not imply uniformity” (“HT” 254). Importantly, this community cannot possibly be specifically Jewish, but is inescapably transcultural. Video testimony foregrounds a necessary removal from the experiences that the witnesses recount, and this makes these memories radically “un-claimable”— which is to say, equally available or unavailable to everybody who is willing to share that distance. The experience of removal can circulate and travel across cultural borders—indeed, it cannot help but transgress such borders, as the one thing it does not allow is being “claimed” as a sacred and exclusive possession. The genre of video testimony makes possible an experience that interrupts “a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” in a visual culture (FQ 102), and as such it also enables an escape from the identitarian and exclusionary forms of community that such worldliness so fatefully tends to promote. Video testimony can be understood as an aesthetic form that mediates a generational remove from the experiences that are being recounted in a way that makes it possible to absorb and experience that remove. As such, it generates the position of what Hartman calls the “adoptive or intellectual witness” (“HT” 260), who is “a bystander after the event who observes it from an ambiguous position” (“SI” 39). The intellectual witness is, on the one hand, “detached or belated” in relation to the event as well as separated from it by a “more constitutive distance . . . intrinsic to intellectual inquiry,” while he is also, on the other, unable not to be addressed by it and therefore called to “a more participatory state of mind” (39–40). Video testimony makes possible a complex combination of aesthetic mediation, intellectual distance, and generational removal that in its turn enables an active reception of the past. It emphatically refuses to exploit the visual media’s capacity to retraumatize the viewer, and to recreate the dissociation that is inherent to trauma. For Hartman, such shock therapies upset the tenuous balance between aesthetic, intellectual, and generational distance. In order to appreciate the stakes of Hartman’s claims for video testimony’s capacity to generate community, it is helpful to look at the potential ravages in response to which he develops these claims. Hartman considers video testimony as a technology that can prevent these calamities, and this explains why these dangers are in their turn connected to competing “optics” of memory. If video testimony is a mediation that makes it possible to directly experience one’s generational dissociation from the Holocaust in a way that ties the viewer to these memories without retraumatizing her, a first danger in the mediation of catastrophe is a failure to let that dissociation be experienced. Hartman observes this danger in Schindler’s List, which for him merely repeats television’s invisible assault on experience. Television has become “an intimate part of home,” and as such it “it becomes a treacherous servomechanism conspiring with a residual, delusory omnipotence of thoughts” (“TD” 4). Schindler’s List feeds the same illusion: Hartman writes that “the premium placed on visuality by such a film made me deeply uneasy. To see things that sharply, and from a privileged

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position, is to see them with the eyes of those who had the power of life and death” (“CA” 83). The film’s ambition to encompass the enormity of the events through visual means does not achieve the reality-effect that it intends, but instead leads to a film that is not realistic enough, as it fails to capture the texture of “the daily suffering in camp or ghetto” that the genre of the video testimony does pay attention to (“CA” 83–8).15 For this reason Hartman follows a broad critical consensus and prefers Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which does attempt to recover and communicate the details of how the Holocaust was implemented. Still, Lanzmann comes very close to the second danger involved in the mediation of catastrophe: not a failure to let the events be experienced, but a failure to emphasize the moment of dissociation that separates the viewer from them. Lanzmann’s approach sometimes risks a “vicarious overidentification with the victim” (“HT” 257). The main marker of Lanzmann’s desire for a quasi-“mystical correspondence” is that, for all his commendable attention to detail, he “does not appear to be all that interested in the survivors’ life or afterlife” (“DV” 44, “CA” 86).16 It is the third risk involved in the mediation of traumatic memory that really drives home the stakes of video testimony. This is a scenario in which the horrors of the past are merely presented, without any mediation of their distance from the viewer. In this case dissociation is forced upon the public in a way that makes it impossible to assimilate this remove as part of their identity. When it is impossible to meaningfully connect to the catastrophes from which the viewer is removed, she is abandoned to what Hartman calls “the vertigo of indecisiveness or nonidentity,” which can foster “by reaction even more dangerous . . . assertions” (“PN” 99). Hartman is thinking here not only of “the proliferation and dailiness of second-order images of trauma” in the media (FQ 130n12), but also of discourses of postmemory that describe how traumatic memory is passed on to later generations, and of aesthetic practices that rely on so-called secondary trauma—that is, on “producing rather than screening the effect of trauma” (M. Hirsch 2001: 8). For Hartman, the shocks of unmediated or unscreened traumas cannot be absorbed and assimilated and merely address us on an affective level—which gives rise to a lack of control that in itself generates frustration and, potentially, the desire for violent overcompensation. Hartman’s work on video testimony is emphatically a second-generation discourse that is primarily interested in the question of how to manage a factual remove from experiences that one yet cannot fail to be addressed by. The main dangers involved are processes of secondary traumatization, in which a factual “lack of memories and a lack of continuity” register as a “vertigo . . . in which suffering takes the place of inheritance” (van Alphen 2006: 477). For Hartman, video testimony, as well as other aesthetic mediations of the Holocaust, must embody the ghosts that trauma generates in a way that prevents such a vertigo of nonidentity. Such a “non-traumatizing mode of representation” should aesthetically refigure a generational remove as a manageable and tenable intellectual distance (“HA” 155).17 In the context of present-day memory culture, in which

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it is “no longer possible not to know,” yet where the accumulation of “positivities” has led to “an extraordinary and melancholy record” rather than to “appreciable ethical lessons” (“TD” 12), it generates the possibility of assimilating knowledge of the past in a way that neither retraumatizes the viewer nor forces her to deny her knowledge.18 Hartman’s refusal of secondary traumatization as a strategy to “reconnect and reembody [a] memorial fabric that has been severed by catastrophe” (M. Hirsch 2008: 110) ties in with his fear that a failed embodiment of the ghosts of the past will be followed by an identitarian vertigo that will in its turn generate a reactive overassertion of identity. This logic not only informs Hartman’s case for video testimony, but it also undergirds his ambitious claim for Wordsworth’s role in preventing an English Holocaust in The Fateful Question of Culture. Wordsworth responded to the phantomization and abstraction of life that coincided with the advent of industrialism with an adequate poetical embodiment of “what in English culture was previously unrealized or semiarticulate,” and this saved England from the virulent nostalgia that would ravage the European continent in the twentieth century (FQ 7). France and Germany failed to translate a pre-industrial sensibility into a modern idiom, and this led to the cultivation of an unprogressive and overidealized vision of the past as a fantastic alternative to a discontented modernity. Wordsworth’s mediation of the trauma of the transition to modernity, in contrast, made the rural past a nurturing force within, rather than a counterforce to modernity. The analogy between Wordsworth’s past achievement and video testimony’s present promise not only helps us understand the particular form that Hartman’s case for video testimony takes, but it also implies a close affinity between present-day afflictions such as retraumatization, identitarian vertigo, and the danger of overidentification, on the one hand, and some of the psycho-social conditions that failed to prevent the Holocaust on the other. It suggests that the deterioration of modernity was, among many other things, an effect of a disabling sense of vertigo and belatedness. This idea, which is merely implied by the structural analogy between Wordsworth’s poetry and video testimony that underlies Hartman’s mature work, is made more explicit in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s famous essay entitled “The Nazi Myth,” which locates the scenario of a failed embodiment leading to vertigo and then to an overassertion of identity at the origin of Nazism. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write that while Europe after the collapse of Christianity in the eighteenth century redefined itself through the historical imitation of classical models, Germany found itself in a particularly difficult position: they write that “[t]he drama of Germany was also that it suffered an imitation twice removed, and saw itself obliged to imitate the imitation of antiquity that France did not cease to export for at least two centuries. Germany, in other words, was not only missing an identity but also lacked the ownership of its means of identification” (1990: 299). Germany had no forms of its own to mediate the trauma of the collapse of Christianity, nor could the

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French forms that were available satisfy the desire for identity. Germany suffered what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy tellingly call “the vertigo of an absence of identity,” and this vertigo will fatefully panic Germany into an exclusionary and identitarian myth of purity. Once these implications of the barely disguised analogy that informs Hartman’s optic of video testimony are made explicit, we can see that it is important to underline—more emphatically than Hartman himself does—this optic’s potential to offer an alternative to traditional forms of Gemeinschaft and to intimate an explicitly transcultural form of community. In a recent essay entitled “The Humanities of Testimony,” Hartman once again underscores the vital importance of an adequate representation of the past. He argues that an appropriate depiction of the past can restore the “hopeful space for reflection and decision” that extreme conditions had closed off. Hartman writes: “That hope, defeated and bitter in retrospect, had suggested that a different decision was possible, a choice that could have saved a life. What is left of hope is the fiction of communion, of the revival of sympathy—and so of understanding—but only via the representation of such failed moments” (“HT” 256). What do we make of this argument for the capacity of artistic representation to redeem failed opportunities? The first place to look is certainly the work of Walter Benjamin, which has become an increasingly apparent intertext in Hartman’s work since the mid-1970s. An idea that informs the one voiced here occurs most famously in the second of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin’s unforgettable reference to “women who could have given themselves to us” (1969: 254). The most complete version of this idea is the dictum that “[r]emembrance can make the incomplete (happiness) complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete” (qt. De La Durantaye 2000: 17). It is the second part of this statement that is relevant in the context of the Final Solution. It affirms that acts of remembrance have the power to restore “a defeated potentiality” (CW 77). Remembrance is an act of “decreation” that manages to see such a defeated potentiality as not always already “under the sign of actuality, but in its own right” (De La Durantaye 2000: 19–21). This capacity for decreation is central to Agamben’s notion of potentiality. Remembrance is not a completion of what was or wasn’t, but is instead an affirmation of the sufficiency of potentiality, even if such a potentiality has never been, and will never be, actualized. I have earlier theorized this affirmation of potentiality as the structure of a form of mimesis that does not see the incomplete under the sign of its (conceptual) completion, nor the unknown under the sign of its full conceptual explanation. The position of the intellectual witness that the genre of video testimony generates is then part of a community that is grounded in this revised sense of mimesis. This community, which I earlier differentiated from aesthetic ideology and from a fully inoperative community, is neither resolutely post-mimetic nor mimetic in a traditional sense.19 And it is on this idea of community that Ronald Reagan declared war on May 5 of 1985 when he visited the military cemetery at Bitburg—where also members of the Waffen SS are buried—in order to

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commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s liberation from the Nazis. With uncharacteristic immediacy, Hartman edited a documentary volume entitled Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (1986), in which he decries Reagan’s visit as an attempt to “‘construct’ forgetfulness” and to effect a premature global “act of political absolution” (“BM” 60–4). For Hartman, the erpresste Versöhnung that Reagan’s act of amnesia promotes is part of an aesthetic ideology that recuperates death as the “work” of community: he writes that “the choice of Bitburg . . . gave the impression of wishing to recall nothing of the past except common sacrifices and a shared code of military honor” (64). Hartman also objects to Reagan’s evenhandedness: “That detachment in the president, that optimistic ability to overlook certain things in the past and so to counter drift by an appearance of mastery, is what everyone felt” (65). This objection resembles nothing so much as Edward Said’s attack on Hartman’s “olympian detachment,” which I discussed in the previous section, and in which Said also condemns detachment and evenhandedness as a refusal to acknowledge very real atrocities. As for Said in 1989, so for Hartman, in 1985, “there is a war on.” Still, these surprising similarities also throw into stark relief the reasons why Said and Hartman could not possibly find a common ground: for Said, the war targets the Palestinian people, and as such the dignity of our common humanity, while for Hartman, there is a war against Holocaust memory, and as such against the hope of a non-identitarian, non-exclusive form of community. The central gamble of Hartman’s politics of memory is that the latter kind of battle can have an impact on the former kind—or put differently, that the promotion of a particular kind of memory-work can make a tangible difference to real people in real situations. Hartman’s startling thesis on Wordsworth in The Fateful Question is the most explicit instance of such a commitment to memory. Indeed, his claim for Wordsworth is only a more spectacular version of a dedication to testimony, literature, or any other form of remembrance that undergirds the totality of his work. And because this claim can so easily be dismissed as an absurd idiosyncracy, it at once exposes the tenuousness of Hartman’s gamble to continue to fight the war of memory rather than enlist for a more exotic tour of duty.

4. Remembering Creative Criticism In an essay first published in 1989 and entitled “Criticism and Restitution,” Hartman lucidly registers the logic that underlies the projects of restitution and identitarian affirmation that were increasingly beginning to dominate the humanities. Even though attempts to open up the canon profess to be postmodern, Hartman recognizes a “diluted modernist ideology” in them that, in the very process of “deprivileging the acknowledged work of art,” ends up simply “privileging the yet-unacknowledged work” (“CR” 167). By countering dominant forms of identity with the assertion of a marginalized identity, such

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a logic ends up producing ever more identity and reinstating “once again the contested notion of privilege, as well as essentialist, and at worst racial, slogans that have bedeviled an era of catastrophic nationalism” (171). In a postmodern context, the proliferation of canonical works and of identities leads to an unmanageable multiplicity of “works that claim a share of greatness,” which makes “the process of restitution” appear “endless” (167, 170). The problem with this is not only that it fails to make room for a non-identitarian notion of community, but also that it can lead to disastrous consequences in contemporary visual culture. While it is not necessarily the case that every affirmation of identity will in its turn spawn a violent and expansionist regime, it manifestly is the case that the sheer ubiquity of such affirmations contributes to a climate of vertigo and derealization that may invite the reactive creation of fantasies of purity (172).20 “Criticism and Restitution” not only predates Hartman’s most extensive critique of identity politics in The Fateful Question of Culture by eight years, it also comes nine years after the publication of Criticism in the Wilderness, a book in which Hartman defends a form of “creative criticism” and opposes positions that see criticism as purely subservient to literature. One of the essay’s merits is that it allows us to appreciate the continuity between these two issues. Hartman’s worries about the effects of identity politics and his defense of a creative criticism are informed by closely related concerns: in the same way that the proliferation of identities might lead to a sense of derealization and to the erosion of experience, the reliance on privileged literary works—in which these identities can recognize themselves—can lead to a multiplication of literary objects that threatens literature’s status as a locus of experience. Hartman writes that “a lost masterpiece, once recovered, is like an objet trouvé” (168), an object that can be understood and judged, but that cannot, in an “era of restitution,” become an occasion for experience (SS 147–8). The objectification of literature not only occurs under the influence of identity politics, but is further intensified by a reorientation of the study of literature that no longer considers the work of literature as a “practical, pedagogical object,” but rather as “an object of theoretical knowledge” (Comas 2006: 44–54).21 Hartman’s plea for a creative criticism is, among other things, an attempt to counter this reduction of literature. Of course, Hartman’s campaign for a creative criticism in the late 1970s can to a certain extent be seen as simply a self-serving plea for the creative license of his own idiosyncratic critical practice. Still, in 1989 “Criticism and Restitution” looks back upon this campaign in terms that are remarkably continuous with Hartman’s analysis of postmodernity and his investment in experience. Creative criticism offers an alternative to what Hartman calls “a strange inertia in our progressive thinking” whose effort to rescue marginalized works of literature simply perpetuates a “modernist art-ideology” in which the artwork becomes “a sacrificial idol” (“CR” 167). This reduction of literature constitutes a profound limitation of creativity. Hartman opposes “a hierarchical prejudice which holds that creativeness can be achieved only in certain genres, to which other genres

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are subordinate” (166). Instead, he maintains that we should not restrict “the locus of creativity,” as a critical essay “can be as inspiring and nurturing as poem, novel, or painting.” Asserting and practicing the creativity of criticism is one way of opposing the fateful objectification of literature. Criticism in the Wilderness is essentially an extended argument for creative criticism. In its very first sentence it is called “a book of experiences rather than a systematic defense of literary studies” (CW 1). This emphasis on experience supports the book’s contention that “objectification may be a way of neutralizing the experience” of literature (31). Apart from a demonstration that something like a creative criticism actually exists in the works of Walter Benjamin, Kenneth Burke, and others, Hartman’s argument also contains a historical case. This part of the book recounts the story of “how the English critical tradition . . . consolidated itself as a via media institution,” which is the situation in which the book aims to intervene (“NW” 92). Hartman objects to the “teatotalling” “friendship style” and the “sublimated chatter” that has dominated this tradition (“TT” 32–3). Still, he emphatically situates his own work, and therefore also this book, in this Anglo-American tradition. His critique of the English tendency to disregard “a more intellectual ‘Continental’ tradition” aims to contribute to “an independent American perspective” that overcomes this English limitation by incorporating continental insights and materials (CW 4, 10). The creativity of this American creative criticism will not consist in a simple rupture with English examples, but rather in its creative critique of these examples’ disregard for a body of continental thought that it itself welcomes under the name of theory.22 “Critical creativity” names a more responsible and more challenging way of engaging with European and English legacies; it redefines the very notion of creativity and brings it close to forms of mediation and belatedness that are familiar from other parts of Hartman’s mature work. Hartman’s history of English criticism consists of three moments. First, there is what he calls the “Arnoldian Concordat,” which restricts the role of the critic to being the uncreative “herald of a new literature of imaginative reason,” which Matthew Arnold found wanting in his own age (“NW” 93). While Arnold still recognized the pervasiveness of the critical spirit, as well as the intricate relation between criticism and creative literature, the New Critics follow T. S. Eliot and hold that there is no such thing as a critical creativity; what Hartman calls the “New-Critical Reduction” (the second moment in his history) argues that “the significant work of art is indeed . . . intelligent but denies the obverse, that there could be a ‘creative criticism’” (93). Hartman situates himself in a third phase of modern criticism, which he terms the “Revisionist Reversal.” The revisionist opposes “those who abstract creative power from the critical essay”; she “acknowledges the intellectual element in art but reinvests criticism with creative potential” (CW 8). Hartman’s contention that there is such a thing as a medium that is both creative and critical must not only be read as a brief for the stylistic bravado of deconstruction, with which Hartman is routinely linked in the 1970s. It is also an attempt to correct “the falsification, even repression, of

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Romantic origins in Arnoldian and much New Critical thought” (CW 9). Arnold famously held that the Romantics, for all their creative force, simply did not know enough—that they were spontaneously and naïvely creative because they lacked critical insight. Hartman’s different defenses of Romanticism—from his anti-self-consciousness theory in the 1960s to the Wordsworthian preservation of potentiality since the 1970s and 1980s—amount to a demonstration of “the intelligence of the Romantic imagination,” a position that conclusively negates Arnold’s and Eliot’s pseudo-historical schemes by depriving them of the fiction of a naïve and unselfconscious Romanticism (“PS” xxiii). The title of the book refers to what Hartman calls Arnold’s “fiction of presence,” which was his belief “that our errand in the wilderness would end” and that “a new and vital literature would arise to redeem the work of the critic” (CW 15). For Hartman, “this wilderness is all we have,” and Romanticism has shown us how to inhabit this realm, even if no redemption is forthcoming. There is an obvious paradox in the combination of a defense of creative criticism and of a Wordsworthian Romanticism whose achievement is unobtrusive and unremarkable. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hartman uses a critical style that has been derided as the antics of a Hermeneutical Mafia (William Pritchard’s phrase), while his work promotes its most important critical object for its unremarkableness. How can the English via media be dismissed and promoted in the same critical oeuvre?23 A short answer can begin by noting that, in spite of the analogy between postmodern visual culture and the degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation in Wordsworth’s age that undergirds Hartman’s late work, these two moments differ radically in terms of the possibilities that they offer for critical and creative agency. Indeed, the analogy is constructed in the first place to allow Hartman to interrogate that difference, and to speculate what a critical update of Wordsworth’s achievement might look like. While Hartman can repeatedly note how the contemporary condition was accurately prefigured when Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface diagnosed the “fatal convergence of industrialization, urbanization, and journalism during the Napoleonic wars,” this does not mean that there is a contemporary equivalent for Wordsworth’s authoritative intervention in the Lyrical Ballads: their capacity “to retrain ear, eye, and imagination, to wean them from the age’s degrading thirst after ‘outrageous stimulation’” (“HL” 179). In the age of television, it is only a genre such as video testimony that can—however wishfully—be credited with the capacity to retrain its audience. Literary creativity only survives in the domain of literary criticism, a domain that has little or no access to the “ear, eye, and imagination” of a broad audience. In an essay from 2000, Hartman voices the suspicion that there is “a structural corruption which makes it ineffective to try to modify by discursive means (such as this essay) what goes on” (“TD” 2). This embarrassed marginality is a crucial aspect of Hartman’s paradoxical performance. Hartman’s critical practice remains oriented by a theory of euphemistic and unremarkable literary mediation that Wordsworth managed to introduce in the public domain in an age

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when literature’s force could still be experienced; in the present, poetry cannot possibly penetrate the popular imagination, and this motivates the criticism that still preserves that poetical achievement to promote itself as a site of experience by adopting a form that foregrounds its own creativity and complexity, in the hope of being able to resist indifferent absorption and to provoke a genuine experience in the reader. While much literary criticism in the 1980s openly displays its political awareness, often without acknowledging its factual removal from the places where it could actually make a difference, Hartman’s work is haunted by literature’s loss of public authority; it mourns that loss in its struggle to become an occasion for experience that, to the extent that it preserves the very possibility of experience, also keeps the memory of literature alive. Even if Hartman’s case for a creative criticism does not foreground this dimension, the rest of his output make it entirely unsurprising that the double emphasis on creativity and experience also indicates a concern with the mediation of the past, even with questions of mourning. Creative criticism is also a way of “keeping an ‘archaic’ endowment alive by inventing a new kind of dialogue with it” (FQ 190). The first part of Criticism in the Wilderness features three chapters that are titled “The Sacred Jungle,” and that present often rather idiosyncratic interpretations of six critics that help Hartman make his case for the viability of a creative criticism. These critics are Thomas Carlyle, T. S. Eliot, Harold Bloom, Walter Benjamin, Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke. It is not easy to infer Hartman’s motivation in deciding for this particular line-up—if he had intended to present a genealogy of his own critical practice, the inclusion of Eliot is at least surprising, and the absence of Derrida (who features prominently in other portions of the book) inexplicable; the inclusion of Benjamin, moreover, makes clear that neither does Hartman aim to have this line-up assert the viability of an independent Anglo-American perspective (CW 9–10). These six critical positions can most relevantly be related to each other when we focus on the way in which they connect their critical practices to the tasks of memory and preservation. Indeed, as soon as we bracket the book’s programmatic celebration of a recovered critical creativity, it becomes perfectly possible to read it as a catalogue of critical economies of mourning. I want to conclude this chapter by sketching the vague contours of this catalogue, which will allow me to restate one last time the paradox underlying Hartman’s creative criticism. Hartman writes that Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus deploys “a richer and rougher English . . . that pretends to be contaminated by German”; this decision is not just a curiosity but rather a “creative historiographical act,” because it conjures up “a fearful reality that hovers over English history” and its reliance on “via media institutions” (49–50). Carlyle’s critical preservation of the past opposes the tendency to privilege works of art over works of commentary, which “monumentalizes a dead man’s relics, turns them into the icon of a power that continues to operate its reversals and obliterations . . . by means of the very act—criticism—being downgraded” (103). In this conception, the present is simply overwhelmed by the force of the past, and criticism

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is unable to mediate that power in a way that energizes the present. A comparable sense of fatality informs Harold Bloom’s understanding of literary history— which Hartman took up before in a review of The Anxiety of Influence—which can only assert “a negating triumph of (past) art over (present) art, as well as of life over art” (105). While Hartman opposes such fatalism, he also considers Eliot’s attempt to escape from it through his famous impersonality thesis as an all too facile denial of the power of the past. Eliot tries to limit “the return of the dead” by flattering our capacity “to bear or recreate the past” (55): while he “does not deny our spiritual and intellectual burdens . . . he would like critics and poets to meet them as problems of craft, translation, and verbal digestion” (58), and not as an occasion for an experience of a past that is preserved through such an experience. Frye, for his part, fails to adequately redress that failure in his attempt to restore the “public ability to respond to mythopoeic art.” In Frye also, the “offensiveness” of poetry is denied through the excision of experience and the promotion of a conception of “art as knowledge”—a hygienic measure that Hartman dismisses as a false “redemptive purification” (61, 88, 90). For Hartman, Frye and Eliot lack one crucial insight: they fail to realize that, while a refusal of preservation through experience can certainly alleviate the burden of belatedness and avoid the fatalism that paralyzes the positions of Bloom and of a self-confessed uncreative criticism, such a refusal is powerless to make the insistence of the dead disappear. Instead, they survive every attempt to dispense with them and continue to require mediation if the present is to become inhabitable at all. Hartman introduces the work of Kenneth Burke to remind us that “the work of purification never consumes the evidence of its labors,” and that this evidence leaves “a residue called literature” (137, 142). The impossibility of dispensing with the past once and for all also takes a prominent place in the discussion of Benjamin. Commenting on Benjamin’s writings on Kafka, Hartman observes: What is transmitted, then, is the difficulty of dying, and the superficiality of all progressive schemes that cover up the old order, that try to lay it to rest. Eliot had the same trouble with the dead who could not be buried. He tries to honor them, by equating truth and tradition, but the psychic problem of incorporating the dead startles the economy of his prose. (81) Eliot’s refusal of critical creativity, and of an engagement with the unburied dead, ends up wrestling the pen out of his hand and incites the ghostwriting that his refusal was meant to forestall. The economy of mourning in Benjamin’s work is less deluded. For Hartman, it offers an exemplary site where the “split between truth (immediate, apodictic, iconic) and tradition (mediated, didactic, figurative)” is conserved as a problem (81, “MI” 212). Indeed, the long chapter on Benjamin in Criticism in the Wilderness presents an elaboration of the economy of mourning that we have come to

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expect from Hartman himself.24 This elaboration focuses on the famous angel of history from Benjamin’s ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History. Hartman reads this angel as a counterfigure to “philosophies of progress that discount the dead or vanquished”: “It is he who keeps the dead alive, that is deadly, who envisions for us their defeated force rather than their easy transumption by the latest political rhetoric” (75–6). This idea echoes the notion, formulated in the second Thesis and discussed in my previous section, that remembrance can render the complete incomplete, and that the decreation of the past makes it possible to consider potentiality no longer under the sign of actuality, but rather for itself. Benjamin’s angel informs the idea of a defeated potentiality or “retroactive force” which turns the true historian (identified by Benjamin with the historical materialist) towards those who are vanquished; not simply to represent or recuperate them by a gratuitous act of sympathy but because the vanquished are the volcanic pavement on which the victors march. It is they who give history its materiality, its uneven, unquiet subsistence. (77–8) For Hartman, Benjamin’s Theses perform a “chiasmus of hope and catastrophe”: catastrophe is situated in the drive for the future, it is “proleptic . . . it ruins time,” whereas hope is “located mysteriously in the past”: the “foundation of hope becomes remembrance; which confirms the function, even the duty of historian and critic” (77–8). It is in the same tenor that Hartman writes elsewhere that the critic is “incurably a redeemer . . . in the spirit-embedding sense” who “materializes us” (“SP” 508).25 The critic keeps the dead deadly by not restoring them to an indifferent availability through the latest realism; “the dead must be saved from the enemy . . . by escaping their equivalence as the dead and so the indifference of memory” (“BH” 201). This advertisement for creative criticism quite clearly echoes the terms of Hartman’s defense of video testimony. So does this mean that Hartman’s position, in regard to both video testimony and creative criticism, can completely be identified with that of Benjamin? The very fact that it is the medium of video in which Hartman’s ethos of materialization finds a concrete shape already warns against a total identification of this critical ethos with the position of Benjamin. A crucial aspect of Hartman’s optic of video testimonies is that the visual framing embodies the survivor’s voice that of itself would remain ghostly—a ghostliness that, Hartman notes, is still experienced in “still photos from the past” (“ET” 494). Hartman’s optic is both emphatically visual and undeniably anti-photographic. It is clear that Benjamin’s critical practice, in marked contrast, relies to a large extent on the shock of the experience and the act of the “photographic freeze-frame” (Comay 1999: 59). Eduardo Cadava, who has done more than anyone else to underline how photography is crucial to Benjamin’s articulation between history and criticism, has usefully

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summed up the “photographic event” that Benjamin’s practice provokes as an event in which “experience experiences itself as the vertigo of memory, as an experience whereby what is experienced is not experienced” (1997: 103). Hartman’s optic enables an experience that is the exact opposite of this event: an experience which avoids the vertigo of memory precisely by experiencing what is not experienced. Put in a different register, Benjamin’s hope in the decreation of the past is part of a program whose actualization relies on the effects of what Hartman would recognize and dismiss as retraumatization. This allows us to reformulate the tension between Hartman’s defense of an exuberant creative criticism and his commitment to a vision of quiet resilience. While Hartman adopts Benjamin’s economy of mourning in order to theorize the position of the critic as a redeemer and materializer, this position is never radicalized beyond the point where the critical activity of recalling “forgotten voices, arguments, artifacts, ‘things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed’” can still be harmonized with the achievement of Wordsworth’s poetry (“SP” 508). It is symptomatic of the Wordsworthian subtext of Hartman’s creative criticism that while he holds that “there is an identification of myself with Benjamin” (“MI” 213), this identification is arrested when it begins to threaten the preservation of the vision of untraumatic growth. If the storm called progress “irresistibly propels the angel of history into the future . . . while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin 1969: 257), the photographic freeze-frame that could arrest this certain catastrophe leads, for Hartman, to a secondary trauma that perpetuates the catastrophe it aims to prevent. This does not mean that Hartman gives up on the angel, but rather that he, instead of photographing this debris, gently allows Wordsworth to hold the camera and to film this picture. I want to end by speculating that for Hartman, the image of the angel perceiving “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” is always already overlain by a more benign scene of trauma. The “Boy of Winander”-passage from The Prelude is, together with the Lucy poems, Hartman’s privileged touchstone in his work on Wordsworth. This autobiographical passage presents a young boy communicating with owls, until he is confronted with the mild surprise of the owls’ silence. In this scene, the single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage is couched as “a gentle shock of mild surprise,” in which the pile of debris is shaped up as “Cliffs / And Islands,” and in which the image of irresistible propulsion becomes the extended arrest of a boy who “hung / Listening” (1985: 103–4). This passage, which conveys nature’s readiness to soften the blows it inflicts, marks the limit of Hartman’s identification with Benjamin; it pre-empts the “para-apocalyptic” idea that there is a radical schism between past and future, and presents a poetics that has “returned from revolutionary schism to the idea of a ground out of which things grew slowly, precariously” (“TH” 292). Wordsworth’s poetry may help us to cope with the shock of the radical rupture between past and

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present. As we know, in The Fateful Question and elsewhere, Hartman’s work does not resist the temptation of misreading this as evidence that Wordsworth successfully prevented such a rupture in England. This should not prevent even more Benjaminian materializers from gathering counterevidence to the idea of such blissful English continuities—in Iraq, Pakistan, the Cape, and other places where things grow slowly, precariously, if at all.

Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust

Over more than half a century, Geoffrey Hartman’s critical practice has assumed many different shapes, the most frequent of which have been the critical interpretation, cultural promotion, and theoretical contemplation of literature. In all of these (not so) different guises, his work has been marked by a consistent attempt to articulate literature with such notions as the human, memory, history, and natural reality. Even if his earliest work, The Unmediated Vision, still promoted literature’s capacity to neutralize the actuality of things and to directly access the reality that underlies them, this was soon corrected by the assertion of literature’s ability to immerse itself in historical reality. This position was in its turn modified by a countervailing emphasis on literature’s simultaneous capacity to keep a reflective distance from the reality in which it participates, a power that Hartman’s mature work theorized as a paradoxical capacity to affirm the actuality of things by preserving their potentiality. While this investment in potentiality constitutes a return to the concerns that motivated his earliest work, the crucial difference is that in Hartman’s mature work the affirmation of potentiality no longer requires the sacrifice of the mind’s relation to the reality of the things of the world. Throughout Hartman’s work, literature’s essential role in safeguarding the connections between the human mind and the particulars of nature and history has intermittently—yet systematically—been called mimesis. His defense of literature has explicitly or implicitly relied on the suggestion that interrupting the tenuous interrelations between man, nature, history, and literature would cancel man’s very capacity to relate to phenomenal reality. Literature alone stands “between us and the death of nature to imagination” by keeping us mimetically attached to the life of things (WP xiv). Yet there is an obvious irony in making literature the privileged placeholder of the connection between mind and things: the insistence on the exceptional powers of literature threatens to go at the expense of a more encompassing concern for phenomenal reality, while it is yet in the name of such a concern that literature is being privileged. This difficulty manifests itself on different levels and at different moments in Hartman’s work. In The Unmediated Vision, there is the theoretical embarrassment that literature’s capacity to preserve the multiplicity and materiality of things is actualized through the poetic neutralization of these things, while in

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the later work the literary care for particulars turns out not to be tied directly to the medium of poetry. If Hartman seems to sacrifice the distinction of literature in his work on Holocaust video testimony, his later work still refuses to abandon literature to the realities of our media-saturated present. In my last chapter, I have focused on another version of that refusal: the tension in Hartman’s mature work between the specificity of Wordsworth’s poetry and the exportation of Wordsworth’s achievement to different domains—those of memory, community, identity, the media, and criticism. I have repeatedly referred to the most overt display of Hartman’s unconditional commitment to Wordsworth’s poetry, his claim in The Fateful Question of Culture that it has helped prevent an English Holocaust. When we look at that book in some more detail, we can see that this explicit claim interferes with a more implicit, yet also more enabling, Wordsworthian subtext. As such it offers a culmination, rather than a resolution, of the tensions that have organized my account of Hartman’s career. The book is first of all a diagnosis of the contemporary condition of culture and of the notion of culture. Hartman already initiated an analysis of this notion in the introduction to Minor Prophecies, his 1991 collection of essays. The word “culture” there carried two meanings, which were clearly dictated by the culture wars in the aftermath of which the book positioned itself: thus on the one hand there is a sense of culture which stresses “intimacy and identity” with “a particular community,” and which in the final analysis amounts to “a new isolationism,” and on the other we have “the sum of those institutions that persuade us that knowledge is a good,” which creates an enlarged space for “play” and “secular grace” (MP 7–11). It is hard to see how these two senses of culture could ever be articulated with each other, yet this is precisely what Hartman achieves in The Fateful Question. Here, one sense of culture is again that of a “purely affirmative” “monolithic and complacent culturalism” that sees culture as “a collective and destined form of identity” (FQ 2, 10, 177). This “notion of ‘a culture’ as a distinctive and unified whole” is opposed to “‘culture’ as an ethos that guarantees the free play of ideas and the individual exercise of imagination in the context of tradition” (40–1). What these two notions share is that they both “keep[ ] hope in embodiment alive” in a cultural condition of generalized abstraction and “phantomization” (21–6). While “a culture” does this by demanding the unconditional fidelity of its members, and “culture” by situating freedom “in the context of tradition,” in both cases the appeal to culture aims “to redeem imagination from abstraction, to achieve . . . a more embodied and less alienated way of life” (180). These two kinds of culture are no longer opposed as an error and its correction; instead, they are related as different responses to “disembodied thought and unearned abstraction” (61). The shift from one to the other does not require a massive conversion; it merely demands a slight reorientation that makes “what seems intransitive transitive again” (38). So how can mutually intransitive, self-enclosed identities enter a medium that affirms their interconnectedness? And how can this interconnectedness

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prevent their dissolution in an indifferent multiplicity? The prototype of such a gesture in which the distinction of particulars is preserved through the affirmation of a totality that contains and connects them is, of course, the progression that Hartman scripted in Wordsworth’s Poetry from a fixation on natural spots to a reciprocal exchange between natural process and the imagination. If the scenario that The Fateful Question proposes for loosening our unconditional attachment to only one culture is convincing, it is so because Hartman’s work has already demonstrated Wordsworth’s successful weaning from his fixation on the particulars of nature. It is here that the notion of aesthetic experience enters Hartman’s argument: in the midst of immediacies that “demand consent to a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” (102), the experience of the potentiality of things, of their potential for loss, makes it possible to reconnect to history and to imagine a life in excess of those inflowing immediacies. Hartman’s analytic of culture, which is undergirded by a Wordsworthian structure of experience, makes a compelling case for the merits of a radically open notion of aesthetic experience that does not tell us where to go, but that reactivates a historical agency by making it possible to imagine a future and remember a past that exceed the limits of the reigning status quo. By identifying the transition from one form of culture to another with a radically indeterminate aesthetic experience, The Fateful Question successfully “restore[s] literature’s specificity as a focus for thinking about culture” and promotes “literature itself as cultural discourse” (2, 64). While the book has achieved its goals, it somewhat compromises that success by complementing its implicitly Wordsworthian case for literature with an attempt to explicitly identify the literature it promotes with Wordsworth’s poetry, most obviously through the infamous claim that this poetry “saved English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue” (7).While we can argue that this hypothesis is primarily a historical claim that does not interfere with the book’s cultural diagnosis of the present, it still detracts from the indeterminateness of the notion of aesthetic experience that the book promotes by associating that experience with a particular—and particularly English—ecology of mind and nature. At the very least, it suggests that Wordsworth’s poetry can offer a model for an aesthetic that can adequately confront the condition of contemporary culture. Still, the suggestion that Wordsworth’s successful prevention campaign makes it possible to prevent the repetition of the disaster overlooks the fact that an adequate intervention in the present must also address the fact that the disaster has already happened. This is the issue of what the book, in the title of its fourth chapter, calls “language and culture after the Holocaust.” Even if the book contains both a successful analysis of contemporary culture and a peculiar historical claim about Wordsworth, this does not solve its crucial problem: that of finding a contemporary and explicitly post-Holocaust perspective that embodies an ethic that can still be recognized as Wordsworth’s. So while Wordsworth, as we saw, managed to convey the “presence of a half-perceived and half-created mode of life” that preserves

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its “near-muteness,” his present-day counterpart must give shape to an “intelligible silence” by endowing “speech with a tacit dimension, a quality that, though fully verbal, cannot be reduced to either intentionality or phenomenality and so approaches silence” (73–5, 46). So where does Hartman find this post-Holocaust Wordsworth? The answer is at least surprising. In the introduction to The Longest Shadow (1996), Hartman announces the publication of The Fateful Question one year later and describes it as a book “on the idea of culture after two world wars and the Shoah” in which he hopes to engage “thinkers like Blanchot and Adorno” (LS 2). A careful consideration of Hartman’s work since the 1990s makes clear that these two figures are crucial in his effort to conceive of a post-Holocaust Wordsworthian ethic and aesthetic. Somewhat schematically, we can say that the resolution to this puzzle takes the form of the following analogy: what Wordsworth did to English culture in the face of industrialization, Blanchot does to Wordsworth in the face of Adorno.1 This point needs some explanation. While Adorno plays a complex role in Hartman’s mature work, in his direct confrontations with Blanchot he is generally identified with his statement that “[n]o word intoned from on high, not even a theological one, can be justified, untransformed, after Auschwitz” (qt. “WN” 34, “SL” 46, “FS” 221). For Hartman, Blanchot responds to this stricture—which seems to deny any possibility of salvaging a Wordsworthian ethos for the present—by hearing it as an imperative to “transform rather than abandon spiritual words,” and to go “in search of a post-Holocaust spirituality” (“FS” 227). In a series of remarkably intense engagements with Blanchot’s work, Hartman argues that Blanchot, like Wordsworth before him, manages to immunize particular things from any attack or claim upon them by rendering their existence merely potential and making it irrelevant “whether [they] actually existed or not” (FQ 16n13).2 Blanchot’s work opposes a “rhetoric of specificity” and resist the “sublime rhetoric” of specific dating used by a “histoire événementielle” (SS 232, “WT” 370, FQ 109). Writing introduces a “referential vagueness,” “a twilight of reference” through which historical specificity “disappears into an immemorial suffering” (“WN” 38, “FS” 222–4). Instead of a literalizing insistence on specific events, Blanchot’s work conveys “the consciousness of language as incorporating a void” that indistinguishably figures specific losses as well as those things that “language, as a condition of its possibility, passes over or sublimates” (FQ 111–12). Blanchot, in short, provides a post-Holocaust version of Wordsworth’s resilient euphemism. Even if the referents that Blanchot’s work renders merely potential are, among others, those of his own questionable politics before the end of the war, his achievement can be recognized as an update of Wordsworth’s. In an article from 1996 Hartman notes that “[s]oon there will be no version of pastoral; Wordsworth’s may have been the last viable one, at the threshold of modern industrialization and urbanization” (“TK” 552). One year later, in The Fateful Question, pastoral—understood as a capacity to look at the world “through the art of minimalized reference” (MP 6)—has crossed that threshold.

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Wordsworth’s “sensibility opens to the metasound of mute speech or nonevent,” to “rural nature’s range of quiet and quieting influences” (142), and passes them on by not making them manifest and by leaving them merely potential (FQ 142, 150). Near the end of a 2003 essay largely devoted to Blanchot, Hartman moves pastoral beyond another threshold, stating his conviction that “literature after Auschwitz will not be essentially different from literature before Auschwitz,” and that “the terrible beauty” born in the wake of the Holocaust is terrible and beautiful because it testifies to “an invincible pastoral or contemplative element” (“HH” 242). It is this “counter-spirit,” drawn from the same source as the kind of spirituality that it updates “yet antithetical to it” that Blanchot embodies in Hartman’s mature work (“FS” 224). Of course, it can easily be held against Hartman that what he celebrates as an exemplary meditation on the possibilities of post-Holocaust pastoral is in effect Blanchot’s self-serving refusal to own up to his own contribution to “an atmosphere that made persecution normal” (“SL” 62). Hartman emphasizes Blanchot’s literary achievements and fails to judge him as a moral agent. In the passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit from which Hartman has borrowed the title of his book Scars of the Spirit from 2002, Hegel remarks that such a judgment is always possible: “for the judging consciousness,” he writes, “there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet toward the agent” (1977: 404). This position—which Hartman refuses—is that of the “beautiful soul,” who is incapable of externalizing himself through action and instead impotently condemns the man of action’s confession by denouncing every act as serving only particular interests. That Hartman refuses this position of the beautiful soul—which he also does in the not unrelated case of Paul de Man— becomes understandable when we follow the progression of the Phenomenology. In Hegel’s account, the beautiful soul ultimately renounces the moral high ground and agrees to meet “the consciousness that made confession of itself” in the real world (407). Now everything is in place for spirit to move from the stage of morality to that of religion. It is here that Hegel writes that “[t]he wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scar behind” (407). Hartman’s conviction, “contra Hegel,” that the “wounds of the spirit do not heal,” can then explain why he declines to judge Blanchot, or indeed de Man (“SL” 61). The refusal of such a facile condemnation is the price he has to pay in order to keep the wounds of the spirit unhealed, and to keep the scars visible. The merit of Blanchot’s work of potentialization is that he does not need the anaesthetic of an erpresste Versöhnung in order to make sure that these wounds, while remaining unhealed, at least no longer hurt as much as they used to. *** Poetry is a power that allows us to resist the overwhelming immediacy of an all too present contemporaneity; it operates “through a sense of charged absence” that opposes “literal immediacy and full presence” and allows us to reconnect

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with history and imagine “a present in excess of what is available through extant social concepts” (Kaufman 2005: 205). The value of the aesthetic experience that poetry makes possible can be summed up in three theses: first, poetry can enrich our capacity for experience (“Erlebnismöglichkeiten . . . bereichern”); second, it enriches our capacity for expression (“Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten”); and third, poetry is an emphatically human activity that is both determined by history and determining history in its turn (“geschichtsbedingt und geschichtemachend”). This conception of poetry’s peculiar power is derived from a particularly intense encounter with the poetry of Wordsworth; the debt to Wordsworth is expressed in the further thesis that his poetry offers an alternative to the “nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue” that led to the atrocities of Nazism (FQ 7). While this continental “rural virtue” is obviously very different from the virtues of English “Kleinbürger” who heroically resisted Nazi bombardments by patrolling “Englands Felder” with shotguns and explosives, it is much more peculiar to attribute this English capacity for critical agency and resistance to Wordsworth’s poetry, which can “‘precisely in these dehumanized situations . . . awaken [wachrufen] the memory of situations more worthy of humanity.” The association between the experience of Wordsworth’s poetry and the emergence of critical and historical agency is certainly peculiar—but not totally unprecedented. The above theses on art and on the connection between Wordsworth’s poetry and the English resistance against a dehumanized present are not in the first place a summary of Hartman’s take on Wordsworth, although they are also that. They are recorded on 24 August 1940 in Bertolt Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal (1994: 417–18). Brecht, who was then living in Finnish exile, is brought to these thoughts after a quick perusal of Matthew Arnold’s edition of Wordsworth’s poems. Brecht is struck by Wordsworth’s poem “She was a phantom of delight,” and reflects that “this work so remote from us” shows “how varied the function of art is, and how careful one must be to lay down the law.”3 When we consider it carefully, we can see that Brecht’s record of his experience of Wordsworth already performs the claim that he is making about poetry’s capacity to help us exceed the limits of “what is available through extant social concepts.” Brecht’s experience of reading Wordsworth motivates him to express his appreciation for what extant concepts and political orthodoxy would want him to denounce as “kleinbürgerliche Idylle.” It is perhaps not less demanding to imagine the secret affinities between Hartman and an uncompromising Marxist like Brecht. And while the critical orthodoxy militates against a recognition of such affinities, it is yet undeniable that Hartman shares the conception of “aesthetic experience as a provisional, formal suspension-negation of extant ruling concepts” and therefore as the basis of an enriched capacity for history and for experience that Robert Kaufman has unearthed in the works of, among others, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht (Kaufman 2002: 66n33). There is a related affinity between Hartman’s Romanticism and a strand of Romantic criticism

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that, even if it is more willing to abandon the privilege of literature, still mobilizes “whatever the peculiarly edgy blend of aesthetics and critique once known as the literary . . . will be named” for an “ethos of the unknown” that can resist the dominant drive for information and innovation by restoring the history of “things destroyed in the name of creation” (Liu 2004: 8–9). What makes it particularly hard to appreciate such connections is that Hartman’s work time and again decides not to leave the radically open-ended dimension of aesthetic experience that it promotes resolutely indeterminate, but rather identifies it with a determinate vision of the achieved reciprocity between mind and world. This commitment to a particular form of mimesis and the parallel investment in aesthetic potentiality do not cancel each other out—they are the two halves that, even if they do not add up to a whole, constitute the singularity of Hartman’s Romanticism.

Acknowledgments

Ortwin de Graef’s generosity in sharing his understanding of Romanticism and postwar criticism with me has accompanied the writing of this book from the very first draft. Arne De Boever, Dirk De Geest, Elke D’Hoker, Vivian Liska, Bart Philipsen, Marc Redfield, and Frederik Van Dam read (parts of) the manuscript at different stages of completion. Geoffrey Hartman has been all I could have wished for in a subject: always willing to respond to my requests for information and texts, always offering much more than I requested, and expecting nothing. Mirjam has made the years in which I have worked on this book the happiest of my life so far. Our son Mats accompanied the months in which I wrote the final version of the manuscript as a mere potentiality. As he was born just two weeks before I finished the book, this ending carries the promise of more happiness to come.

Notes

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Douglas Kneale has shown that the “Short Discourse on Method” already brings together many of the concerns “that would be deepened and elaborated throughout Hartman’s oeuvre” (1996: 582–5). See Elam and Ferguson (2005: 6) for the claim that Hartman negotiates “the Hegelian enterprise” from his first book to his most recent work, and Balfour (2006: 16) for the crucial role of the relation between Wordsworth and Hegel for Hartman. See Roth (1988: 66–80) for a discussion of Logic and Existence as a Heideggerian revision of Hyppolite’s earlier Hegelian historicism. The vital difference between Kojève and Hyppolite is that Kojève reads the advent of absolute knowledge as a passage within human history, while Hyppolite perhaps too readily assumes that it is not part of human history at all. See also Butler (1987: 79–93). See Leitch (1988: 162) for this “bracketing” of everyday relations. Gerald Bruns’ remarkable essay on The Unmediated Vision emphasizes the book’s insistence on “the physicality, density, and self-subsistence of things themselves” (2005: 116). It is vital to underline that, for the early Hartman, these “things themselves” can only be perceived once our customary relations to them are successfully neutralized. See Timothy Bahti’s gloss on the figure of “incremental redundance”: “In more conventional terms, this figure involves a synecdochal procedure and is actually a kind of metonymy, whereby an effect (a ‘quality,’ or property) is posited as a cause” (Bahti 1979: 602). Hartman himself notes that “[t]he figure is more than a common ambiguity or a simple synecdoche” (UV 23). In Wordsworth’s Poetry, the distinction between “nature” and “Nature” is not systematic, as it is in a 1961 essay on Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (“DS”). See also note 18 for the gradual development of Hartman’s understanding of nature. See Arac (1987: 23–34) for a good sketch of Hartman’s conditional embrace of Heidegger in his “attempt at an anti-Hegelian historiography.” See Wohlfarth (1979: 70–2) for a brief demonstration of how The Unmediated Vision perpetuates the metaphysics of presence that it thinks it is overcoming. See Atkins (1991: 21–9) for a rather misguided attempt to show how the book is “proto-deconstructive in aim and strategies.” Significantly, the 1966 reprint of The Unmediated Vision adds a “Prefatory Note” in which Hartman acknowledges his debt to Auerbach, and in which he writes that Dante—the key figure in Auerbach’s work—is as crucial for the question of mediation “as Wordsworth or Nerval.” Even though the theory of modern poetry in Hartman’s first book is very different from Auerbach’s theory of realism,

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Irving Wohlfarth has remarked that they deal with the same problematic: “The Unmediated Vision was an appendix to Auerbach’s inner history of Western consciousness, one version among others of the modern artist’s metaphysical dilemma in a post-theological age” (1979: 70). Hartman’s decision to preface each chapter of his first book with a passage “that served as a springboard to an author’s entire oeuvre” was influenced by Mimesis (IJ 168). He sketches his relation to Auerbach in a long appendix to his memoir (IJ 165–80). The extent of Hartman’s identification with Auerbach cannot be underestimated. Both were German Jews who spent the Second World War in exile, and both dedicated their lives to the study of a European culture that this war seemed to have discredited. In order to appreciate the complexity of Hartman’s memory of Auerbach, consider the following two quotations. The first is from the 1999 “Polemical Memoir”: “He [Auerbach] once told me the story of a violinist forced to leave Germany and wishing to take up his profession in America. Alas, his violin no longer emitted the same ‘tone’ in the new country” (“MM” xiv). The second is from Hartman’s account of his own passage to England in March 1939 (first published in 1989): “My passage to England was uneventful. But during the long train ride to the port in Holland, the boys with whom I traveled . . . become restless; they fool about with the one family object I was able to take along, a violin. We all play on it, or rather with it; a string breaks. Later, in Waddeston, we play some more with it; another string breaks. Eventually the case cracks, we can see a label inside. On it there is a signature. It identifies the unrepairable instrument as a Stradivarius” (“LS” 15). Incidentally, Auerbach’s “Figura”-essay owes its publication in English by Meridian Books in 1959 (in a collection entitled Scenes from the Drama of European Literature) to Hartman’s “encouragement” (“MM” xv). Auerbach’s continued confidence in the possibility of refiguration, even after the demise of the Christian worldview, also betrays a metaphysical remainder in his work—which Hartman’s reception of Auerbach will, if anything, intensify. In his book on “the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God,” Mark Taylor discusses the principle of typological (or figural) interpretation—and quotes Auerbach’s definition of it—and submits that it always presupposes the “logos doctrine,” that is, an “interpretation of the logos as the creative principle of cosmic order” which ensures that the typological “association of events is not arbitrary”: “the relation between type and antitype is discovered rather than fabricated. As the primal ground and enduring substance of all created order, the logos is the principle of unity that underlies all experience” (1984: 59). While there are very real differences between Hartman’s earliest work and the rest of his first decade, his work continues to presuppose an underlying principle of significance, even if literature no longer can, or no longer has to, refer to this principle. Hartman’s interpretation of Milton as the first modern English poet is confirmed in the 1958 essay “Milton’s Counterplot,” in which Hartman begins the project of a literary history of English modern poetry. This essay brings Milton quite close to Auerbach’s Dante: Milton is said to celebrate “creation’s triumph” and “man’s free will,” and Hartman concludes that “Paradise Lost was written not for the sake of heaven and hell but for the sake of the creation” (“MC” 117, 123). Hartman repeats the hierarchical distinction between two senses of reality in “The Heroics of Realism,” an essay from 1963. While this essay again does not

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mention Auerbach, it focuses on the mixture of levels of style, which is a key motif for Auerbach. This mixture has, according to Hartman, led to a dictate of formlessness in the contemporary novel (which Hartman directly associates with Woolf): “Sense and nonsense are both admitted; little distinction is made between public matters and private; no restriction or insignificant event remain” (“HR” 61). Still, the contemporary novel manages to incorporate the tension between the ease of intimacy and the perceived “inauthenticity of every assumption of intimacy,” and this tension restores literature’s “power of making room for the strange, the different, and even the divine”—for, in other words, a less mundane reality (“HR” 64–70). See, as late as 1991, MP 199–202 for a critique of “the affirmative culture of everyday life” that is directly related to Auerbach’s practice. In his little book André Malraux, Hartman notes that “Auerbach’s Mimesis” is “not irreconcilable with Malraux’s ‘Antimimesis’” (AM 87). While mimetic theories of art “depict the artist in search of a style,” antimimetic theories depict “a style in search of its artist” (88). The dialectical notion of literary achievement that emerges in “Virginia’s Web” can be seen as the reconciliation that Hartman envisioned. See Lindenberger (1984: 19–23) on the persistence of mimesis, “less as consistently held theories than as expressions of a particular bias” that is “characterized by constantly recurring terms such as ‘life,’ ‘nature,’ ‘human’ . . .” (19). Lindenberger’s main example of this persistent bias is the reaction to the “antihumanism” and “anti-mimeticism” of “Barthes and other French critics” in the 1970s. It is remarkable that Hartman’s reaction to French theory (especially to Blanchot, Malraux, and Sartre) operates in the same terms and is already underway in his earliest work. It is no coincidence that Hartman’s distinction between akedah and apocalypse recalls Auerbach’s opposition between figura and allegory: in both cases the difference is between a movement that binds itself to nature or history and a movement of abstraction that aims for the supernatural. Wordsworth’s poetry, for Hartman, “always keeps below the level of allegory” (WP 55). While it has often been noted that Auerbach, as a Jew, promotes a Christian principle of interpretation (which has, moreover, played a crucial role in the history of Christian Antisemitism), Hartman also codes the opposition between akedah and apocalypse in Christian terms, that is, as the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism (WP 334). See, however, “JI” (1985), where Hartman describes an exemplarily Jewish binding to nature that he opposes to the Christian principle of figural interpretation. Hartman’s essay “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth,” written in the early 1970s, argues that Hegel’s signature movement of sublation (Aufhebung) is in fact a poetical (and basically Wordsworthian) movement of elation. By this time, Hartman has drastically turned the tables on Hegel: Hegel no longer constitutes a philosophical threat to art, literature, and religion; instead, Hartman starts from the observation that “both art and religion remain alive,” which shifts the burden of proof to the philosopher who “must deal with their persistence” (“EW” 190). See Griffin (2005: 135) for the point that Wordsworth’s relation to nature is, for Hartman, also “the relation between his and a prior text.” Donald Marshall’s comparison of Hartman’s two essays on Blanchot (the first from 1955, the second from 1960) focuses on the different accounts they offer of Blanchot’s relation to Romanticism (1983: 137–44).

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The fact that self-consciousness is inaugurated without a radical rupture with nature again shows that Liu’s interpretation of the the “heroic priority” of the apocalyptic imagination underestimates Hartman’s belief in the fundamental continuity between nature and the imagination. In the fourth chapter, I show how this belief also informs Hartman’s mature interpretation of Wordsworth. For further evidence that the idea of the priority of the imagination in Wordsworth was simply not yet available to Hartman in the period leading up to Wordsworth’s Poetry, we can compare Hartman’s 1962 article “A Poet’s Progress” to the chapter entitled “The Via Naturaliter Negativa” in Wordsworth’s Poetry. The book chapter basically repeats (and extends) the article, but with crucial substitutions that make clear that Hartman, at the time when he was writing the article, still conceived of nature as appearing in only two ways: nature is either an external object or an internal power. Because Hartman still lacked the idea that nature can also assert itself through the works of mighty poets, and that the activity of the imagination was therefore not necessarily opposed to nature, he still conceived of the imagination’s work of individuation as a transgression that needed to be corrected. Whereas “the purpose” of the 1962 article is to establish “that Wordsworth came to realize that Nature itself led him beyond Nature” and that this transcendence “is shown by Wordsworth as inherent in life” (“PW” 214, italics mine), in the later book version we read that “Wordsworth thought nature itself led him beyond nature” (WP 33, italics mine). The essay “Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope,” published in the same year as Wordsworth’s Poetry, offers another installment of such a Heideggerian history of English literature. Hartman discusses how Marvell’s initial desire to abandon the particulars of nature for “a vision of a world beyond this world” gives way to a valorization of the natural world as “both obstacle and mediation” (“MS” 152–3). Hartman reads Marvell’s poem “The Garden” as a morphology of “a tragic or ironic flaw” in the idea of hope itself (160), which comes very close to Wordsworth’s critique of the apocalyptic imagination. That this Heideggerian structure is not confined to the interpretation of Wordsworth underscores its importance for Hartman’s work. For Hartman, the complexity of the meaning of nature, the changes in the poet’s relation to it, and the undecidability that results from these difficulties are less problems to be worked through in an analytic way than occasions for the development of an extended narrative that manages to mediate often incompatible elements. Throughout his work, he considers narrative as a privileged device for the mediation and the humanization of moments of rhetorical, logical, or even existential crisis—which is connected to his conviction that literature can oppose the alleged anti-humanism of logic and philosophy. In the important essay “The Voice of the Shuttle” from 1969, Hartman defines a poetical figure as an indeterminate middle in between overspecified ends (“VS” 340), which has to do with the capacity of figures to undo fixed determinations and to create a space for narrative, and thus for man (see “IC” 642). Hartman notes that the phrase “The Voice of the Shuttle” is generated by a double metonymy: the substitution of effect for cause (“voice”) and of cause for effect (“shuttle”) significantly increases the distance between cause and effect (“VS” 339), and thus makes room for narrative. Marc Redfield has taken issue with Hartman’s interpretation, and has argued that “it is the trope of personification, not double metonymy” that

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does the work “through which unliving things take on a ghostly life and linguistic presence” (2006: 5). Still, narrative is this linguistic presence, and because Hartman’s double metonymy is also a minimal process of narrativization, this double metonymy is, for Hartman, a trope of personification. The importance of narrative for Hartman also marks an important distinction between his work and that of Paul de Man. Even though there are very real affinities between their respective interpretations of Wordsworth, de Man tends to dismiss narrative as a failure to sustain an authentic temporal insight (allegory), while Hartman sees narrative as a crucial process of humanization. See Rajan (1990: 355) for the argument that “the major difference between de Man and Hartman” can be glimpsed from the fact that Wordsworth’s Poetry is “the narration of a difference that is synchronically distributed into a diachronic rhythm of oscillation.” See Vermeulen (2007a) for my account of de Man’s and Hartman’s different rereadings of the “Boy of Winander”-passage from The Prelude. Hartman explicitly connects Heidegger and Wordsworth in these terms in the essay “Wordsworth Before Heidegger,” where Hartman writes that Heidegger’s work restores “the rule of metaphor”: “Heidegger discloses the prepositional values of a discourse which we have sentenced to a purely propositional mode. He is always prepositioning us” (“WB” 198–201). Hartman’s belief in literature’s power to neutralize the violence of a necessary position is related to his discussion of “the necessity or fatality of some primary affirmation” in “Virginia’s Web.” Hartman’s work differs drastically from that of Paul de Man on this point. For de Man, “the initial violence of position can only [ever] be half erased, since the erasure is accomplished by a device of language that never ceases to partake of the very violence against which it is directed” (de Man 1984: 119); for Hartman, literature is “a device of language” that can interrupt this cycle of violence. Hartman’s concern with the process in which poetic individuation occurs through a struggle with a poetical precursor predates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, which is routinely credited with coining such ideas, by almost a decade. Hughes (1981: 1139) and Chabot (1975: 427) misunderstand the relation between Bloom and Hartman. See Sprinker (1983: 49–52) for the more adequate thesis that Wordsworth’s Poetry “can be seen to anticipate Bloom’s troubled broodings over the situation of post-Enlightenment English poetry.” See Newlyn (1996: 616–17) for remarks on the differences between Hartman and Bloom; “‘WH,” Hartman’s own review of Bloom’s book, for Hartman’s take on these differences; and IJ for Hartman’s account of his personal relations to Bloom. See Johnson (1984) for further examples of Hartman’s insensitivity to gender. We can recognize in these solitary figures, whose solitude increases with their knowledge (“AS” 303), a version of Blanchot’s wordly solitude, which I discuss in the third section of this chapter. While Blanchot’s worldly solitude is interrupted by a moment of “essential” solitude, I show that Hartman, in his revision of Blanchot, promotes literature as a force that can help overcome worldly solitude—which is precisely what happens here. In a similar way, it can be said that the central themes and positions of Wordsworth’s Poetry are already prefigured in A. C. Bradley’s Oxford lectures on Wordsworth. The alignment of Bradley’s and Hartman’s interpretations of Wordsworth is almost a critical commonplace; see Arac (1987: 71–2, where Bradley and Hartman are opposed to the parallel pairing of Arnold and Adams),

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Bourke (1993: 62), and Chase (1993: 6–7); also Fry (1996: 541, where Bradley and Hartman are further situated in relation to Pater) and Johnston (1990). See Bourke (1993: 61–5) for the crucial role of Bradley in the shift in Wordsworth criticism from moral philosophy to a phenomenology of mind. The need to include Byron is a legacy of Wellek; see Peckham (1951: 21–2n12) and Wellek (1963: 187). See McGann (1992) for a different account of the special position of Byron in theories of Romanticism. Peckham will revise his theory of Romanticism on the first pages of the inaugural issue of Studies in Romanticism, and on a number of occasions after that. His first revision redefines Romanticism in terms of a particular kind of subjectobject relation; only in 1970 does he seem to have found a properly dialectical solution, a discovery he credits to Hegel’s Phenomenology, a book “all students of Romanticism . . . should read—repeatedly” (1970a: 218). See Peckham (1970b: 36–83) for two installments on Romanticism from 1964 and 1965, in which the influence of Hegel is not yet apparent. Daniel O’Hara notes that “Wordsworth’s Poetry marked the completion of a critical redefinition of romanticism” and that the advantage of this definition is that it allows us to see “dialectical and complex intertextual affiliations among the ‘Big Six’” (2004: 3, 8). While I am here focusing on the remarkable achievements of Hartman’s notion of Romanticism, it is clear that such a restriction to the “Big Six” is an important limitation. One consequence of the claim that Hartman’s Romanticism is decidedly more dialectical and more inclusive than Peckham’s is that M. H. Abrams’ important Natural Supernaturalism, which was only published in 1971, is then a step back to a more selective Romanticism. See Thorslev (1975: 564–7) for this point.

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For a recent reassessment of Derrida’s paper, see the symposium on 40 years of “Structure, Sign, and Play” in the pages of Theory & Event (Bishop and Phillips 2009). See Bové (1983: 3–5) for an overview of different versions of this continuity, and Norris (1985: 191–7) for Paul de Man’s and Hartman’s very different positions in this continuity. See O’Rourke (1997) for an excellent riposte to the claim that American deconstruction constitutes a “domestication” of Derrida. Even if Hartman seems to epitomize everything Lentricchia finds wanting in the so-called Yale School, he at least avoids the equation of Hartman with “Yale formalism” as such. In Christopher Norris’ authoritative publications on American deconstruction, the attempt to have Hartman (together with Hillis Miller) exemplify what he calls “deconstruction ‘on the wild side’” leads to the fiction of an amorphous group of unidentified critics who are united by their resemblance to Hartman, whose position is itself only defined in relation to this gang of lookalikes: thus we read about “critics like Hartman” (1988: 162, 216), “some, like Hartman” (213), or “those critics, like Geoffrey Hartman” (1982: 91). This approach saves Norris the trouble of describing the specificity of Hartman’s position and of identifying his relation to other critics.

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This was already noted in one of Geoffrey Bennington’s catalogues of misreadings of Derrida; see Bennington (1994: 49n7). See Derrida (1972b: 162–3) for another statement from 1968 that presents the two interpretations of interpretation as “the choice between two strategies.” Engström (1993: 199–201) discusses a similar problem with a comparable section in the work of Lyotard. See Fletcher (1972) for a patient and productive attempt to make sense of the structure of Beyond Formalism. See Angermüller (2000) for another version of the idea that Derrida’s comments on Lévi-Strauss could be perceived “as implicitly pertinent to Frye,” a claim that Hartman’s essays from 1966 confirm. Hartman’s decision to apply a historical consciousness to structure and to treat it as part of a phenomenological problematic comes remarkably close to the young Edward Said’s understanding of structure in his book Beginnings (1975). Said notes that “form, or structure, is always a difficult mixture of need, absence, loss, and uncertain appropriation. Structure is the sign of these things—as much a yearning for plenitude as a memorial to unceasing loss” (1975: 320). Said’s book is a magisterial study of how different kinds of “beginnings” can allow us to address this situation of lack, which comes very close to the way Hartman develops the theme of the evening star, as I show in the third section of this chapter. This essay was first presented at a 1966 Colloquium at Yale, which for the first time brought J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Hartman together at Yale. This colloquium has received nothing like the attention the Johns Hopkins Symposium has had, but the participation of these figures, and the fact that among the work presented there were papers on Auerbach, Curtius, Lukács, and Poulet make it a crucial moment in the intellectual history of American deconstruction. See Miller (1966) for a reflection on the colloquium. Hartman opposes the notion of ideology he uses here to Marx’s separation between the “material life-process” and its “phantom . . . ideological reflexes and echoes,” a separation he does not accept. He asks: “Is literature . . . the English ideology, or is it in its own way a ‘material premise’?” (“PI” 329n22). Hartman’s notion of ideology has less to do with the deformation of a material reality than with poetry’s capacity to function as—in Adorno’s phrase—a “geschichtlicher Stundenschlag,” a “philosophical sundial telling the time of history.” See Kaufman (2000: 690–1 and 2004: 360–1) for a discussion of Hartman’s remarks here, and the rest of Kaufman (2000) for a demonstration of how Hartman’s conception of the relation between literature and ideology yet comes close to that propounded in The German Ideology. In an essay from 1982, Hartman opposes Blake to Wordsworth and Coleridge, writing that “[i]n the imaginative ecology of the era Blake is on the side of supernatural imagination . . . there is a problem of navigation, or of readerly orientation” (“EM” 246). One year later, in a Festschrift for Northrop Frye, Hartman returns to his criticism of Frye and Blake in a reading of Keats (“RA”). See Hughes (1981: 1138–9) for good remarks on the close connection between Hartman’s reception of Blake and his view of Frye. See Terada (1993: 44–5) and Ferguson (1987: 38–9) for the career of the evening star in literary theory. For the first discussion of Coleridge in these terms, see “AS” (306–7). In the essays written in the period under discussion here, “CS” (430–1), “DC” (172),

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“ES,” “FR” (259), “NF” (123), “SS” (10–11), and “WL” (402) all present Coleridge in a similar way. See “BF” (553) for a somewhat different Coleridge. In Hartman’s later work, “The Ancient Mariner” will be revalorized because its understanding of trauma is, for Hartman, “more realistic” than Wordsworth’s, but not therefore to be recommended. See “HA” (168n41), “TK,” “TL” (269), and FQ (45) for this later Coleridge.

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Hertz’s paper originally appeared in a volume of English Institute papers edited by Hartman. See “RR” for Hartman’s acknowledged debts to Hertz. Hertz’s characterization of the state of literary studies in terms of the mathematical sublime was further popularized in the 1980s by Jonathan Culler. See Comas (2006: 27–30) for this. Hertz borrows the first phrase from Kant, the second from Thomas Weiskel. Marc Redfield has reminded us that one name for the successful sustainment of an embodied unity in the face of the generalized disorder that characterizes contemporary literary studies is “Harold Bloom.” See Redfield (2004: 231n23) for the suggestion that Hertz’s essay “may be taken as, among other things, an indirect critique of Bloom.” See Sprinker (1983: 49–54) for a comparison of the critical postures of Hartman and Bloom. Steven Helmling remarks on Fredric Jameson: “It also seems to me worth saying that of all Jameson’s successes, among the most startling, because it is, prima facie, the most implausible, is to have credibly and sustainably predicated ‘sublimity’ of the postmodern in the first place” (2001: 116). I argue that Hartman was there first. The connection between our postmodern contemporaneity and sublimity has not always been as obvious as it has come to seem after Jameson, and, as Helmling’s analysis makes clear, least of all for Jameson himself. It is remarkable that in The Prison-House of Language (1972), which yet notes “a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today” (ix), we find no association of structure and sublimity. The centrality of this concern in Hartman’s work makes it all the more remarkable that his work has not had a greater impact on the field of ecocriticism, especially in light of that field’s historical links to the study of Wordsworth. See Simpson (1999: 258) for an earlier version of this observation. See Bate (1991: 8) and Oerlemans (2002: 30–1) for ecocritical dismissals of Hartman’s Wordsworth criticism. See “RM” and “WG” for Hartman’s claim that Wordsworth was “the first eco-critic.” François (2003) is the most up-to-date claim for the ecocritical relevance of Hartman’s Wordsworth. See Goodman (2006) for an accurate review of the different installments of Hartman’s psychoesthetics; see also O’Hara (2004: 5–6). Hartman refers to Adorno to explain this distinction, and this allows us to appreciate that Hartman’s use of the term “mimesis” to denote the “magical correspondence of internal action and external effect” also derives from Adorno (“DC” 174). In the Dialektik der Aufklärung, Adorno and Horkheimer oppose “mimesis” to “false projection,” the difference being that between a mimetic

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assimilation to the environment and an assimilation of the environment to the domination of a subject that projects itself onto the world (1973: 167). See also Adorno (1970: 201–2). This was the crucial point of Hartman’s discussion of “the necessity or fatality of some primary affirmation” in the work of Virginia Woolf (“VW” 74). See the second section of my first chapter. One notable exception to this view, quoted by Harold Bloom because it is “[t]he worst reading possible,” is Stevens’ own comment: “I shall explain The Snow Man as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it” (qt. Bloom 1977: 63). See Jarvis (2007: 73–8) for a good discussion of de Man’s positioning of Wordsworth. This passage is eminently suitable for the “humanist” repositioning of Hegel, because it inverts the traditional scenario of the triumph of reason at the expense of the imagination, which we also encountered in the case of the sublime, into the triumph of “Phantasie” at the expense of “Gedanken.” Considering the possibility of such an inversion, Hartman elsewhere remarks that “[r]eason, through the dialectic, represents as something always already on the way to reason what remains subversive of it . . . Art represents as something on the way to art what is subversive of it” (ST 47). Hartman borrows the notion of “elation” from Bertram Lewin (Lewin 1951). See “SA” (226–7). For a similar misreading, see Alan Grose’s comment to his own translation of the poem (2002: 357). As in his earlier misreading of Stevens, Hartman is again misunderstanding the category of fiction. If these subjunctives had been deployed in a non-fictional context, they could be taken as a testimony to fiction’s distinctive capacity to imagine the unreal, and even of the necessity of fiction in establishing hermeneutic contact. Yet because they appear in a fictional context, which has already generically affirmed this capacity, such a reading is here strictly impossible. See the discussion of de Man’s Blindness and Insight in Melville (1986: 115–38) for a good exposition of the problems with this position, and for some of the grounds on which it would be entirely forbidding for Hartman. At the end of his essay, Liu introduces a distinction between “French postmodern theory” (which he characterizes as “manic”) and the “major Anglo-American and Germanic understanding of postmodernity” (identified with “a mourning so existential as to be comparable to melancholia”), while suggesting that “these two postures” may well be “the two faces of a single meditation on loss and history” (1996: 559–62). Although Liu does not make this explicit, these two positions can be read as a restatement of Derrida’s distinction between a nostalgic and an affirmative version of interpretation, which I discussed in the previous chapter. See Argyros and Flieger (1987: 64–9) for the double role of Derrida’s freeplay (or écriture) in Hartman’s work. My reference to the work of Jerome Christensen hopes to suggest the close proximity between Hartman’s position and Christensen’s definition of “the Romantic movement at the end of history” as “the willful commission of anachronism” that resists “the cure of historicization” (1994: 469). Christensen’s call to “now and again anachronize,” rather than to “always historicize” (476) is also

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quite close to the position of Alan Liu, especially as Liu has rephrased this position in terms that are increasingly remote from those of literary studies (see Liu 2004). Indeed, the Romanticism that connects Christensen, Liu, and Hartman has more to do with an investment in historical experience and in the recreation of past possibilities (Liu 2004: 378) than with a commitment to literature. See also Anne-Lise François’ pertinent question to Hartman as to “the relation between completion and supplement—how are we to distinguish the kinds of minimally confirmatory, all but redundant acts of finalizing affirmation . . . from potentially infinite supplementary reiterations?” (2006: 21). See Atkins (1991: 90–3) for an elaboration of this idea. Hartman’s refusal to complement his negotiation of Derrida’s work, especially his deconstruction of phonocentrism, with a dismissal of the concept of voice may seem like a self-serving inconsistency. The affirmation of voice must here be understood in the light of Hartman’s earlier use of the “still small voice” (from the motto of Wordsworth’s Poetry) as a marker of the persistence of the human in the face of the (Hegelian) machine of logic. See also Stanley Cavell’s gloss on “an intimacy and an abyss between the ambitions of the Anglo-American analytical settlement and the new French upheavals”: “A symptom of this intimacy and abyss is Derrida’s sense, or intuition, that the bondage to metaphysics is a function of the promotion of something called voice over something called writing; whereas for me it is evident that the reign of repressive philosophical systematizing— sometimes called metaphysics, sometimes called logical analysis—has depended on the suppression of the human voice” (1982: 17). Hartman’s adherence to the notion of voice is much less a sign of his attachment to the “metaphysics of presence” than an elaboration of “the fact that the appeal to the ordinary, as an indictment of metaphysics, strikes one, and should strike one, as an appeal to voice” (17). See the fourth chapter in Bruns (1982) for the same concern in terms of the opposition between “systems” and “tongues.” The reification of this homeopathic structure in Hartman’s project can also be described, in a (not very) different register, as an immunization of the contagious threat of Derrida’s pharmakon, the logic of which is sometimes described as homeopathic (Llewelyn 1986: 39). Such a fixed relation between art and culture will later be problematized as the question of “cultural causation.” See FQ 16n13 for Hartman’s most explicit attempt to address this issue. See de Graef (2004: 24–5) and Vermeulen (2006) for discussions of this note. See CW (138–44) for a closely related juxtaposition of Smart and Derrida. After all, Smart can hardly be described as a representative of Hartman’s English canon—which is why he can be described as “a great British extracanonical poet considered quite crazy by his contemporaries” (“HG” 347). See Liu (1985) for another treatment of Hartman’s invocation of Ruskin in this passage.

Chapter 4 1

These essays are “TC,” “BT,” “WO,” “DD,” “PR,” “UW,” and “IF”; “IF” is not reprinted in UW. The 2009 essay “WM” provides Hartman’s most comprehensive statement of his mature interpretation of Wordsworth.

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James Strachey, the English translator of Freud’s essay, decided to translate the German Verneinung as “negation” rather than “denial,” in order to avoid confusion with the German verleugnen (Freud 1984: 438n1). As the term “negation” has itself by now become pretty much an unmarked term in academic discourse, and as the phenomenon Freud describes is often referred to in English as “denegation,” I will use the term “(de)negation.” Page references are first to the German and then to the English version of Freud’s essay. See Macherey (2004) for a useful extensive contextualization of Hyppolite’s reading. While Macherey correctly notes that Freud’s short text does not necessarily invite interpretation as a full-blown theory of knowledge (an interpretation it receives in Hyppolite’s discussion), the note in which Hartman refers to Freud’s short essay leaves no doubt that Hartman, like Hyppolite, has entertained the possibility of reading it in this way (“TC” 223n2). This makes it possible to see “A Touching Compulsion” as an implicit rejoinder to the kind of interpretation of Freud’s essay that Hyppolite offers. See McQuillan (2005) for a discussion of my last quotation from Agamben in relation to Heidegger. See De La Durantaye (2000) for the best elaboration of Agamben’s notion of potentiality that I am aware of, which places it in relation to the work of Paul de Man in a way that is congenial to my discussion here. See also De La Durantaye (2009). See Marshall (1987: xvii–xx) for Hartman’s different discussions of this poem in relation to the readings of Paul de Man, F.W. Bateson, and Cleanth Brooks. The centrality of Lucy for the different moments of Hartman’s psychoesthetics has been remarked by Kevis Goodman (2006: 17). This structure was also noted by Kenneth Johnston: “All Hartman’s exemplary texts have the same structure of event-leading-to-elided-significance” (1981: 475). Compare this to Donald Marshall’s quite different (and rather misguided) observation that Hartman “could be called the critic of the ‘and yet’” (1990: 97n30). The most famous example of Wordsworth’s reticence in using the performative power to wish is found in the “strangely tentative” lines “I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”(see “TU” 46). One way of appreciating the fact that Hartman’s later Wordsworth presents a vision of the whole oeuvre, while his earlier work was concerned with Wordsworth’s poetic trajectory is by noting that while the essential touchstones in Hartman’s earlier work were such scenes of transition as the Simplon Pass and Snowdon-passages and the “Boy of Winander”-passage, the later Wordsworth can much more adequately be captured in such clichés as the binding of natural piety, “recollection in tranquility,” and “intimations of immortality.” See Rapaport (1985: 159–64) for a good discussion of this textual movement in Hartman’s work. See Warminski (2001: 22–8) for the notion of the “super-performative” in de Man, in terms that allow the difference from Hartman to emerge clearly. For the remarkable transitivity of the divine speech-act, consider Hartman’s comment on a passage in Exodus where God calls on Himself: “the formal effect of the apostrophe is to suggest that God constitutes Himself as a ‘Thou,’ renewing that mode of address for the watchers in the cleft who will bring this very cry to the ears of the community that repeats it in its own voice” (“JT” 107). We can phrase this issue in terms more congenial to the philosophy of religion, rather than in

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terms of speech-acts: what we witness here is the tension between the familiar topos of “an originary affirmation . . . that precedes and enables any subsequent discourse on negativity” and the (deconstructive) realization that “the conditioned” also “conditions the condition” (De Vries 1999: 141–2). See Hartman’s discussion of Jacob’s struggle with the angel in “SF” for an explicit meditation on the connection between our relation to the specificity of the Hebrew Bible and the belief in “a specific and authoritative act of designation” (“SF” 84). Robert Con Davis’ reading of “FC” makes a similar point (1985: 136–43 and 151–3). Davis, like Argyros and Flieger, argues that Hartman’s misreadings of Derrida and Lacan testify to his resistance to their radical import, although his claim that Hartman resists them in the name of “American formalism” (153) is ultimately less compelling than Argyros and Flieger’s case for Hartman’s adherence to “Kantian aesthetics and religious pathos” (1987: 53)—although I also somewhat modulate that case later on in this chapter. This correction of Lacan operates according to the same scenario as Hartman’s revision of Freud’s Verneinung in his theorization of Wordsworth’s euphemism. For another version of this scenario, see “TS,” an essay that supports its central claim “that spirit has become textualized” by overlaying Genesis 1 with Genesis 2: “The earlier depiction showed the spirit of God as a hovering force in the formless darkness,” while in the later picture, “the very art of description is friendly and naturalistic” (“TS” 168–71). See “FE” (157–8) for the claim that Lacan’s project itself strived for universality, for “a modern Latin of the intellect.” Indeed, Gershom Scholem’s essay “Walter Benjamin und sein Engel,” where the relation between Walter Benjamin and his angel is explicitly linked to the “Agesilaus Santander”-passage that is the cornerstone of the section concluding Hartman’s “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection,” may well have been a decisive motivation (and at the very least an inspiration) for Hartman’s revision of Lacan (Scholem 1972).

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This section aims to locate in Hartman’s work what Ortwin de Graef has called an “alternative supplementing both the extended family and the pathological sacrificial abstraction of extreme nationalism, powered as they both are by personally imagined sympathy” (2004: 48). De Graef’s discussion of The Fateful Question notes that Hartman is obviously aware of the need for such a supplement to sympathy, while he in the last analysis “refuses to abandon sympathy” and keeps returning to Wordsworth. I argue that Wordsworth offers Hartman an experience that is rather different from sympathy, and that he both enables and limits Hartman’s articulation of a supplement to sympathy. I confront Anderson and Nancy on their own terms in Vermeulen (2009). See FQ (119–20) for Hartman’s most emphatic remarks on the irrevocable “exteriority” of “unsublime death.” See FQ (18n18) for Hartman’s understanding of the difference between his own approach and Anderson’s.

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While Nancy in The Inoperative Community fails to emphasize that literature is not only a force that radically “un-works” community and has the capacity to offer a definite imagining of community, see Vermeulen (2009) for some instances of Nancy’s more nuanced approach to this problem in his later work. In order to appreciate Hartman’s removal from the critical mainstream in the 1980s, consider the following two statements. In a text written in 1981, Daniel O’Hara interprets the fact that such otherwise very different figures as Denis Donoghue and Michael Sprinker object to Hartman’s Criticism in the Wilderness on very similar grounds as proof that Hartman “has touched a nerve” in the foundations of critical practice and that “he represents the future of the profession” (1985: 97–101, 114). Only six years later, Donald Marshall’s foreword to The Unremarkable Wordsworth reports the decline of Hartman’s visibility in the field of criticism in a tone of resignation: “The appearance twenty-five years ago of Wordsworth’s Poetry marked an epoch in the study of that poet and of romanticism generally . . . Hartman’s essays . . . gathered here are once again revolutionary, though their character and importance are much less likely to be perceived and absorbed” (1987: vii). This explains the oddity of Hartman’s treatment of Gianni Vattimo in Scars of the Spirit. Hartman first sums up Vattimo’s case for a new “non-transparency” in a transparent society in a way that makes us assume Hartman’s full agreement, only to then take Vattimo to task for his “‘fortunate fall’ apology for the media,” that is, for not tying this claim for non-transparency to the privilege of art (SS 145–9). See also Michael Sprinker’s concise statement of Hartman’s politics: “Hartman is troubled by the politics of art, though more because he fears the degradation of art by politics than the aestheticizing of politics in the work of art” (1983: 59). For an even-handed consideration of Sprinker’s argument against Hartman, see Norris (1988: 205–12). In the mid-1980s, Hartman coins the term “fundamentalism’”to refer to the deliberate denial of the textuality of community. He writes that “secular fundamentalism” results from a failure to “acknowledge the otherness of a text” (“CC” 379–81), and that it is “a challenge to freedom of interpretation” (“AC” 87) that scorns “both normative Rabbinic exegesis and ‘deconstructive’ literary criticism” (“ME” 149). In Scars of the Spirit, fundamentalism is described as a failure to “respect a phenomenological blankness or indeterminacy at the heart of things,” which leads to an “assertive rhetoric” that “is often supported by the claim that Scripture has a univocal kind of transparency” (SS 142–9). Unsurprisingly, Hartman’s description of Islamic fundamentalists (in his “Epilogue” to Scars of the Spirit entitled “9/11”) casts them as very poor readers of Wordsworth indeed: “I find it impossible to respect a culture that in fact denies childhood . . . Or movements that wound secular time by seeking to end it” (234). See Santner (1993: 7–30) for a more elaborate account of the problems with such a “playful nomadism” that works through an inability to mourn yet overlooks the vital importance of a “‘good enough’ empathic environment.” See “LS” 19–20 for autobiographical remarks on how Israel appears “as an embodied dream” yet does not therefore restore an “organic relation to place,” and thus instantiates the very structure of community I have been elaborating here. In the introduction to The Power of Contestation (2004), which is co-authored by Hartman and Kevin Hart, we find an acknowledgement that in his thinking of community,

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“Blanchot comes close to allegorizing the Jews out of history” (23). Blanchot’s text was originally published in 1962, but it already points forward to Blanchot’s and Nancy’s work on community in the 1980s, most directly when we read that the “Hebrew . . . memorial of the origin . . . has nothing of the mythical about it” (231). See Zarader (2000: 64). My critique of melancholia, Blanchot, and this view of Judaism is indebted to the work of Gillian Rose. See Rose (1996a) for a critique of Blanchot’s “interminable dying” and its foreclosure of the polis; Rose (1993: ix–xi) for an unambiguous dismissal of a conception of the Jew as nomadic other; and Rose (1996b: 77–100) for the claim that Hartman’s “reference to Midrash as method may be distinguished from presentations of Judaism as the sublime Other of modernity.” Rose proposes to distinguish Hartman’s Judaica from “four other presentations of Judaism”: those of Harold Bloom, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, and Jacques Derrida (83). see Brisman (2005) for another assessment of Hartman’s take on Midrash. This affinity between Said and Hartman can at least in part be traced back to their interpretations of Auerbach’s “exile.” For a discussion of Hartman’s reception of this exile, see Vermeulen (2007b and 2007c); for Said, see Apter (2003), Marrouchi (1991: 64–5), Mufti (1998), and Said (2004). See Comas (2006: 31–41) for the argument that Said’s paper at the “Politics of Interpretation” conference from 1981 was the crucial event that “provided mainstream academic critics with an enunciatory position from which they could, without professional discomfort, write political criticism.” In a review of Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Said already remarked on what he perceived as “examples of ethnocentrism and of studied quietism quite as bad as Camus’s” in Hartman (1971: 940). Hartman remarks that Said’s “rhetoric is appropriate to satire rather than to critical inquiry. What is admirable in Swift and Pope is not so in this attack on someone who seeks—like Said himself—a voice in politics” (“L” 199). Hartman here claims for “critical inquiry” the freedom not to take a stand, a position to which Said already objected in his review of Beyond Formalism, and against which he invoked the example of, among others, Swift (1971: 940–2). Interestingly, Hartman also observes the tendency to reduce a nonpartisan position to a position of guilty partiality in the reactions to the de Man affair. For Hartman, the prevailing reaction to de Man’s disgrace consists in a reinterpretation of the alleged nonhumanity of de Man’s view of language, of his critique enunciated “not from a competing ideological . . . position but from the point of view of language itself,” as an “all too human” position (“JP” 139). Instead of maintaining the obvious tension between de Man’s early and late work, these reactions link up both parts in “a totalizing figure that claims to unify everything” (140). Hartman’s response characteristically refused the choice between “denunciation and defense” (147). See also IJ 80–5. To add insult to Hartman’s injury, the editors of Critical Inquiry, in a commentary to this skirmish, remark on Hartman’s “neutral criteria of propriety” that “[w]e may hope for the elevated disinterested discourse of angels, but we have to settle for the passionate, engaged voices of men and women in real historical situations” (203), as if Hartman had never acknowledged that “dispassionateness . . . is not a possibility,” and as if the compatibility of historical situatedness and the hope

Notes

13

14

15

16

17

153

of transcending that situatedness were not precisely the point of Hartman’s intervention. See “RH” for this logic that “divides humanity coldly into friend or enemy.” What makes Said’s reduction of Hartman’s intervention to a blind defense of Zionist politics both more understandable and more damning is the fact that in the period between Said’s response to Griffin (in the 1989 spring issue of Critical Inquiry) and Hartman’s response to Said (in the autumn issue), the former had provoked Edward Alexander to write his infamous “Professor of Terror”-piece (Alexander 1989). Alexander there refers to Said’s “double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism” and laments his association with Columbia University, “where Lionel Trilling once taught and exemplified the meaning of sweetness and light in culture” (49). Given that Alexander’s slurs appear positively subtle in comparison to many of the letters of readers in response to his readers (in the December issue of Commentary), Said’s impatience with Hartman can plausibly be understood as an effect of this heavily polarized situation. See also note 22 below. Hartman coins this term in an interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay, while he at the same time refuses to call this “optic” an “aesthetic,” most likely in order to distinguish it from what the interviewers had just referred to as “the Spielberg Aesthetic” and “the Riefenstahl aesthetic” (“ET” 494–5). See Ferguson (1996: 516–23) for a good discussion of Hartman’s argument against Spielberg. This lack of attention to the fact of survival also informs Hartman’s criticism of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project. Hartman writes that Agamben’s “desire not to exclude the muselman and, by extension, the wretched of the earth . . . neglects, when it comes specifically to the Holocaust, thousands of survivor testimonies that actually exist” (SS 90). Agamben substitutes “an eloquent generalization for close, empirical study” (90), and as such offers “a quasi-theological response to questions raised about authenticity in a media age” (“ET” 508). For Agamben, the Muselmann is the only truly authentic witness, a position that rests on Primo Levi’s influential definition of the Muselmänner as “those who saw the Gorgon” (qt. Bernstein 2006: 33). As I explain in my first chapter, this fateful confrontation with the Gorgon informed Hartman’s figure of the “New Perseus,” which functioned as the emblem of heroism and authenticity in The Unmediated Vision, a position that Hartman soon recognized as a deeply problematic temptation. See Bernstein (2004 and 2006) for a critique of Agamben’s strategy of deepening rather than dissolving the aporia of the impossibility of witnessing that runs remarkably parallel to Hartman’s remarks. See Chare (2006) for a contextualization of Hartman’s and Bernstein’s reservations (along with those of Dominick LaCapra). The distinction between Hartman and Hirsch can also be phrased in terms of the cinematic vs. the photographic. For Hartman, “in still photos from the past—as against the cinematic or the video/visual—you still experience something of that ghostliness [of a disembodied voice],” which means that photos retain a potential for retraumatization that the cinematic counteracts (“ET” 494, “AI” 77, “IC” 643). For Hirsch, in contrast, photography has a “privileged status” as a “medium of post-memory” precisely because Holocaust photographs “resist the

154

18

19

20

21

Notes

work of mourning” and hold the capacity to retraumatize, and thus to connect the second generation to the first (2001: 13, 28). See “HA” (153–7 and 165n10) for Hartman’s most explicit refusal of strategies of secondary traumatization. This emphasis on the way in which knowledge can be assimilated to experience, rather than with epistemological issues per se, can be seen as a belated answer to the question Hartman had raised on the very first pages of The Unmediated Vision— the question of how literature can be a distinctive kind of knowledge. Only in 1995 will Hartman advertise this move “from epistemological baffles to an underconsciousness deeply involved in story, speech act, and symbolic process” as a specifically literary kind of knowledge (“TK” 545). For the most explicit knowledge-claim on behalf of literature, see “BS” (5–7) on “a specifically literary coming-to-knowledge” that “is an energy as well as a form of knowledge.” See the remarks on “knowing well” in “WE” (40–1) for the repetition of this claim in the name of Wordsworth. Jones (1993) locates Hartman’s refusal to “produce knowledge” in his different readings of Lucy in the reception history of the Lucy Poems and in the development of the profession. The cognitive bias of Hartman’s earliest work is noted in Elam (1996) and Bruns (2005). For Hartman’s abdication from epistemological issues, see Frances Ferguson’s brilliant sketch of Wordsworth’s Poetry. Ferguson identifies Hartman’s method as a form of phenomenology that epistemologizes ontology only to arrive at “the renunciation of claims of knowledge” (1991: 487–90). In the traditional mimetic logic of aesthetic ideology, the “‘type’ functions in a rhetorical capacity as a prefiguration of its own fuller realization” (Redfield 1999: 25). In such a mimetic community, “[t]he formation or fiction of the polis . . . is the mimesis and the fulfillment of nature” (23). As I noted before, the revised sense of mimesis does not consider culture as the fulfillment of an incomplete nature. See Anne-Lise François’ gloss on Hartman’s concept of nature: “the figure of ‘Nature,’ when it appears here and elsewhere in Hartman’s work, is not the name for that which is to be conserved or saved from destruction at the hands of humans, but on the contrary a trope or figure for a saving act of disappearance . . . such that discontinuity may occur with the minimum of rupture, or conversely, continuity itself . . . appear a minor miracle” (2006: 21). Hartman’s occasional suggestions that every culture that is “purely affirmative in its ideology . . . is simply not yet expansionist or domineering” (FQ 10), which easily lead to the conclusion that for Hartman “[m]ulticulturalism is reduced to a form of tribalism implicitly analogous to Nazi philosophy” (Goffman 1998: 1068; also Foley 1985: 115–18), always need to be read against the background of the cultural condition that incites such pure affirmation in the first place: “because there are so many of these cultures and subcultures . . . no single culture will be secure enough to give up identity politics . . .” (FQ 148). See SS 197 and 198 for two concise statements of the dialectic of cultural retrieval and compensatory affirmation. See FQ 177 for a restatement of the same issues in terms of culture: “political idealism—what is left of it—has taken refuge in a representation of culture: culture as a collective and destined form of identity. Unfortunately, this development not only sins against the inner dynamics of culture, its creative and unpredictable potential, but allows cultural issues to become a political pawn in the ethnic wars besetting nation-states.”

Notes 22

23

24

25

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Which is not to say that Hartman’s challenge was not met by a counterassertion of American isolationism. Such a strengthening of one nation under God—a God which is decidedly not Hartman’s—is especially glaring in Helen Vendler’s review of Criticism in the Wilderness. Vendler’s essay consistently tropes the book as a merely annoying outsider-report on “our” institutions. It is the markers that define Hartman’s outsider-status that tell most about the critical scene Hartman is intervening in, when Vendler describes the book as “a passionate essay on American culture by a foreigner (Hartman is German-born, and teaches comparative literature at Yale)” (1988: 42). A comparison with Edward Alexander’s attack on Said is instructive. See note 14 above. Donald Marshall comes close to formulating this question when he writes that Wordsworth “makes the language of poetry continuous with the prose of the world,” and yet “[t]he transfer of Wordsworth’s spirit to prose is one step in the forging of an Arnoldian critical tradition which Hartman . . . began to break open in the fifties” (1990: 83–4). Paul Fry writes about the “inverted circumstances” whereby in our twentieth century, “the inferior lights of Wordsworth must be welcomed as antidotes to the inflammations of the times” (2006: 26). If only because, in Michael Sprinker’s memorable description, this essay “affords the curious spectacle of a mind in the act of replicating itself in another” (1980: 228). For Michael Sprinker’s objections to Hartman’s self-professed materialism here, see Sprinker (1983: 58–62).

Coda 1

2

3

The centrality of Adorno in The Fateful Question is noted in reviews by Terry Eagleton and David Simpson (Eagleton 1998; Simpson 1999). Still, Hartman on two occasions locates the limitations of Adorno’s work in the fact that “he has little to say about the romantic reaction” (FQ 17n15, 97n48). See, apart from the introduction to The Power of Contestation, which is co-written by Hartman and Kevin Hart, “FS,” “HH,” “SL,” “WN,” “WT,” and, of course, FQ. Kaufman (2005) drew my attention to this passage in Brecht. I am partly drawing on Kaufman’s excellent discussion of it.

Works Cited

1. Works by Geoffrey Hartman This list collects only those items that are cited in the book. I have generally referred to the first published version; in cases where I have used a reprinted (and sometimes altered) version, the reference to that version is preceded by an asterisk in the list below. The items are ordered by year of first publication. 1954 The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Repr., with a “Prefatory Note to the Harbinger Edition,” New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. 1955 “The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature.” Yale French Studies 16, 63–78. 1957 “The Taming of History: A Comparison of Poetry with Painting Based on Malraux’s The Voices of Silence.” Yale French Studies 18, 114–28. 1958 “Milton’s Counterplot.” ELH 25.1, 1–12. Repr. in *BF, 113–23, and in CJ, 109–19. 1960 André Malraux. Studies in European Literature and Thought. London: Bowes & Bowes. “Camus and Malraux: The Common Ground.” Yale French Studies 25, 104–10. Repr. in BF, 85–92. 1961 “Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of the Poet’s Mind.” PMLA 76.5, 519–27. “Virginia’s Web.” Chicago Review 14.4, 20–32. Repr. in *BF, 71–84. “Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist.” Chicago Review 15.2, 1–18. Repr. in BF, 93–110, and as “Maurice Blanchot” in *The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935–1960. Ed. John Cruickshank. London: Oxford UP, 1962, 147–65.

Works Cited

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1962 “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’.” Centennial Review 6.4, 553–65. Repr. in *BF, 298–310, and in GH, 180–90. “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa.” Modern Philology 59.3, 214–24. 1963 “The Heroics of Realism.” Yale Review 53.1, 26–35. Repr. in *BF, 61–70, and in GH, 156–63. 1964 Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. *4th ed., with a new essay “Retrospect 1971,” 1971. “Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope.” ELH 31.2, 175–94. Repr. in *BF, 151–72. 1965 “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Eds. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 389–413. Repr. in BF, 206–30, and as “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry” in UW, 31–46. 1966 “Beyond Formalism.” MLN 81.5, 542–56. Repr. in BF, 42–57. “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure.” Yale French Studies 36–7, 148–68. Repr. in BF, 3–23. “Ghostlier Demarcations.” Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism. Ed. Murray Krieger. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia UP, 109–31. Repr. in BF as “Ghostlier Demarcations: The Sweet Science of Northrop Frye,” 24–41. 1968 “False Themes and Gentle Minds.” Philological Quarterly 47.1, 55–68. Repr. in BF, 283–97, and in CJ, 120–33. “‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: A Brief Allegory.” Essays in Criticism 18.2, 113–35. Repr. in BF, 173–92. “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci.” The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History. Eds. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 289–314. Repr. in BF, 311–36. 1969 “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum.” ELH 36.1, 168–92. Repr. in BF, 124–50. “The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature.” Review of Metaphysics 23.2, 240–58. Repr. in *BF, 337–55, and as “The Voice of the Shuttle” in CJ, 52–68, and in GH, 223–37. “Wordsworth.” Yale Review 58.4, 507–25. Repr. as “Wordsworth Revisited” in *UW, 3–17. “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown UP, 57–68. Repr. in *BF, 193–205.

158

Works Cited

1970 Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. “The Poet’s Politics.” BF, 247–57. “History-Writing as Answerable Style.” New Literary History 2.1, 73–83. Repr. in FR, 101–13. “Reflections on Romanticism in France.” Studies in Romanticism 9.4, 233–48. Repr. as “Reflections on French Romanticism” in EP, 17–37. “Toward Literary History.” Daedalus 99.2, 355–83. Repr. in BF, 356–86. 1971 “Theories on the Theory of Romanticism.” Wordsworth Circle 2.2, 51–6. Repr. as “On the Theory of Romanticism” in *FR, 277–83. “Reflections on the Evening Star: Akenside to Coleridge.” New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia UP, 85–131. Repr. as “Evening Star and Evening Land” in BF, 147–78, and in GH, 50–78. “Signs of the Times.” Review of books by Richard Poirier, Paul de Man, and Robert Langbaum. American Scholar 41.1, 146–58. Repr. as “Signs of the Times: A Review of Three Books” in *FR, 303–14. 1972 “The Sublime and the Hermeneutic.” Mouvements premiers: études critiques offertes à Georges Poulet. Paris: José Corti, 149–57. Repr. as “From the Sublime to the Hermeneutic” in FR, 114–23. 1973 “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis.” New Literary History 4.2, 213–27. Repr. in FR, 3–19. “The Dream of Communication.” I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor. Eds. Reuben Brower, Hellen Vendler, and John Hollander. New York: Oxford UP, 157–77. Repr. in FR, 20–40. “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’.” Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt. Eds. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 305–30. Repr. in FR, 124–46. “War in Heaven.” Review of Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Diacritics 3.1, 26–32. Repr. in FR, 41–56. 1974 “Christopher Smart’s Magnificat: Toward a Theory of Representation.” ELH 41.3, 429–54. Repr. in FR, 74–98, and in GH, 29–49. “Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats’s Hyperion.” Essays in Criticism 24.1, 1–19. Repr. as “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats’s Hyperion” in FR, 57–73. 1975 The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P. “The Fate of Reading.” FR, 248–74. “Self, Time, and History.” FR, 284–93.

Works Cited

159

“Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas.” Georgia Review 29.4, 759–97. Repr. as “Monsieur Texte” in *ST, 1–32. “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History.” New Literary History 6.2, 393–413. Repr. in BF, 179–200, and in UW, 58–74. “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’.” New Literary History 7.1, 165–89. Repr. as “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis” in UW, 129–51, and in GH, 93–117. 1976 “Literary Criticism and Its Discontents.” Critical Inquiry 3.2, 203–20. Repr. as “Past and Present” in CW, 226–49. “Monsieur Texte II: Epiphony in Echoland.” Georgia Review 30.1, 168–204. Repr. as “Epiphony in Echoland” in *ST, 33–66. 1977 “A Touching Compulsion: Wordsworth and the Problem of Literary Representation.” Georgia Review 31.2, 345–61. Repr. as “A Touching Compulsion” in *UW, 18–30, and as “Wordsworth’s Touching Compulsion” in CJ, 134–48. 1978 “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style.” PMLA 93.2, 196–204. Repr. as “Blessing the Torrent” in UW, 75–89. “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection.” Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Selected Papers from the English Institute, New Series 2. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 86–113. Repr. in ST, 96–117, and (partly) as “Lacan, Derrida, and the Specular Name” in GH, 398–412. 1979 “A Short History of Practical Criticism.” New Literary History 10.3, 495–509. Repr. in CW, 284–301. “Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth.” Harold Bloom et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 177–216. Repr. as “Words, Wish, Worth” in UW, 90–119. 1980 Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. 2nd ed., with a new “Preface to the Second Edition” and a foreword by Hayden White, 2007. “Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony.” CW, 265–83. Repr. in What Is Criticism? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1981, 113–25. “Diction and Defense in Wordsworth.” The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will. Ed. Joseph H. Smith. Psychiatry and the Humanities 4. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 205–15. Repr. as “Diction and Defense” in *UW, 120–8. “Words and Wounds.” Medicine and Literature. Ed. Enid R. Peschel. New York: Watson Academic, 178–88. Repr. (with variations) in *ST, 118–57, in CJ, 223–50, and in GH, 273–90. “Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979.” Interview by Robert Moynihan. Boundary 2 9.1, 191–215. Repr. in Robert Moynihan. A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man. Hamden, CT.: Archon Books, 1986, 51–96.

160

Works Cited

1981 Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP. “Communication, Language, and the Humanities.” ADE Bulletin 70, 10–16. Repr. as “The Humanities, Literacy, and Communication” in *EP, 172–87. “Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.” Yale Review 71.1, 13–27. Repr. in *EP, 93–107, and in CJ, 182–94. “The Poetics of Prophecy.” High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams. Ed. Lawrence Lipking. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 15–40. Repr. in *UW, 163–81. 1983 “The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos.” Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities. Eds. Ihab and Sally Hassan. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 87–110. Repr. as “Reconnoitering Chaos: A Statement on Contemporary Criticism” in EP, 199–218. “Reading Aright: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’.” Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye. Eds. Eleanor Cook et al. Toronto: Toronto UP, 210–26. Partly repr. as “Romance and Modernity: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’” in GH, 118–27. “The Weight of What Happened.” Review of Yosef Yerushalmi. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory and From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry. Eds. and trans. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin. New Republic 3599–3600 (January 9), 30–4. Repr. in *LS, 27–34. 1984 “The Culture of Criticism.” PMLA 99.3, 371–97. Repr. in MP, 17–56. “The Interpreter’s Freud.” Raritan 4.2, 12–28. Repr. in *EP, 137–54, in CJ, 207–22, and in GH, 384–97. 1985 Easy Pieces. New York: Columbia UP. “The Unremarkable Wordsworth.” On Signs. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 321–33. Repr. as “The Unremarkable Poet” in UW, 207–19. “On the Jewish Imagination.” Prooftexts 5.3, 201–20. “Meaning, Error, Text.” Yale French Studies 69, 145–9. Repr. in MP 149–54. “‘Timely Utterance’ Once More.” Genre 17.1–2, 37–49. Repr. in *UW, 152–62, and in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Norman, OK: Oklahoma UP, 1985, 37–49. 1986 “Introduction: 1985.” Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1–12. Repr. in *LS as “Bitburg,” 60–71. (With Sanford Budick) “Introduction.” Midrash and Literature. Eds. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, ix–xiii. “The Struggle for the Text.” Midrash and Literature. Eds. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 3–18. Repr. in CJ, 71–85. “Envoi: ‘So many things’.” Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley, CA: California UP, 242–8.

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“Tea and Totality: The Demand of Theory on Critical Style.” After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature. Eds. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller. Birmingham, AL: U of Alabama P, 29–45. Repr. as “Tea and Totality” in MP, 57–73, and in CJ, 3–20. 1987 The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Foreword Donald G. Marshall. London: Methuen. “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth.” UW, 182–93. “Wordsworth before Heidegger.” UW, 194–206. “The Discourse of a Figure: Blake’s ‘Speak Silence’ in Literary History.” The Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia UP, 225–40. Interview by Imre Salusinszky. Imre Salusinszky. Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller. New York: Methuen, 74–96. 1988 “Religious Literacy.” Conservative Judaism 40.4, 26–34. “History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man.” History and Memory 1.1, 55–84. Repr. as “Judging Paul de Man” in *MP, 123–48. 1989 “The Longest Shadow (In Memory of Dorothy de Rothschild).” Yale Review 78.3, 485–96. Repr. in *LS, 15–26, and in Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal. Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Times Books/Random House, 1989, 425–39. “Criticism and Restitution.” Tikkun 4.1, 29–32. Repr. as “The Philomela Project” in *MP, 164–75, and in CJ, 41–51, and repr. and revised as “Restitutive Criticism” in Bologna: la cultura italiana e le letterature straniere moderne. Ed. Vita Fortunati. Volume 2. Bologna: Universita di Bologna/Ravenna: Longo, 1992, 23–30. “The State of the Art of Criticism.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 86–101. Repr. as “The State of the Art” in MP, 90–109, and (partly) as “The Critical Essay between Theory and Tradition” in GH, 258–67. Letter in response to “An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference” in Critical Inquiry 15.3, 611–46. Critical Inquiry, 16.1, 199. 1990 “‘Was it for this . . . ?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods.” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Eds. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 8–25. 1991 Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1992 “Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics.” Yale Review 80.4, 50–61. Repr. as “Art, Consensus, and Progressive Politics” in *CJ, 272–82.

162

Works Cited

1993 “Jewish Tradition as/and the Other.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 1, 89–108. “Public Memory and Modern Experience.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2, 239–47. Repr. in *CJ, 262–71, and in GH, 415–31. 1994 “Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6.2, 135–55. “Public Memory and Its Discontents.” Raritan 13.4, 24–40. Repr. in *LS, 99–115, and in The Uses of Literary History. Ed. Marshall Brown. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996, 73–91. “Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’.” European Romantic Review 5.1, 90–100. Repr. as part of “Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005, 29–44. “Introduction: Darkness Visible.” Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1–22. Repr. as “Darkness Visible” in *LS, 35–59. 1995 “The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” Salmagundi 106–107, 127–45. Repr. in *LS, 82–98, and as “Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” in GH, 369–83. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3, 537–63. Partly repr. as “Reading, Trauma, Pedagogy” in GH, 291–9. 1996 The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP. “Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma.” LS, 151–72. “‘Breaking with every star’: On Literary Knowledge.” Comparative Criticism 18, 3–20. “The Reinvention of Hate.” Yale Review 84.3, 1–11. Repr. in *CJ, 251–61, and in GH, 355–64. “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” Interview by Cathy Caruth. Studies in Romanticism 35.4, 630–52. 1997 The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia UP. 1998 “Shoah and Intellectual Witness.” Partisan Review 65.1, 37–48. 1999 A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections 1958–1998. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. “Polemical Memoir.” CJ, xi–xxxi. “Benjamin in Hope.” Critical Inquiry 25.2, 344–52. Repr. as “Walter Benjamin in Hope” in *CJ, 195–203.

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Index

Abrams, M.H. 144n28 Adorno, Theodor W. 81, 134–5, 136, 145n9, 146–7n6, 155n1 and Maurice Blanchot 134–5 aesthetics 3, 5, 77–8, 150n11, 153n14 aesthetic ideology 100–4, 106, 107, 108, 121–2, 151n6, 154n19 aesthetic mediation 84–90, 116–20 aesthetics of mourning 102–4 aesthetic vision 68–9 and experience 102, 107–9, 133, 136–7 see also psychoesthetics Agamben, Giorgio 1, 2, 102 Homo Sacer 153n16 on potentiality 86–7, 90, 121, 149n4 akedah 33–4 and apocalypse 23–4, 26, 32, 141n15 Alexander, Edward 153n13, 155n22 Anderson, Benedict 102–4, 105, 150n2, 150n3 antihumanism 10, 42, 69, 141n14, 142–3n20 anti-self-consciousness 22, 35–6, 125 anxiety Angst (Heidegger) 28–9, 90 anxiety of influence 127, 143n22 depletion anxiety 65, 72, 80, 81 the fear of the loss of loss 73 separation anxieties 78–80 apocalpyse 28, 39–30, 31, 37–8, 46, 55, 63, 65, 108, 129, 142n18, 142n19 and akedah 23–4, 26, 32, 33, 141n15 Arac, Jonathan 139n6, 143–4n25 Argyros, Alexander 97, 98–9, 147n15, 150n11 Arnold, Matthew 136, 143n25, 155n23 and critical creativity 124–5 Atkins, Douglas 139n7, 148n18 Auerbach, Erich 9, 19–26 compared to André Malraux 141n14 compared to Northrop Frye 45 on Dante 20–1, 139–40n8, 140n12 and Edward Said 113, 152n9 “Figura” 20, 140n10, 140n11, 141n15

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture 9, 19–23, 45 on prose 21, 140–1n13 relation to Hartman 19, 139–40n8 on Virginia Woolf 23, 25–26 Aufhebung (Hegel) 27, 87–8, 93, 111, 141n16 authenticity 45–6, 48, 113, 140–1n13, 142–3n20, 153n16 autumn 55–7 see also winter Bahti, Timothy 13, 139n4 Balfour, Ian 139n1, 153n14 Barthes, Roland 39, 141 Bartleby, the Scrivener (Herman Melville) 1–2, 3, 7 and contemporary theory 1–2 Bate, Jonathan 146n4 Bateson, F.W. 50–1, 149n5 Benjamin, Walter 124, 126, 127–30, 136 and the angel of history 2, 128–9, 150n14 compared to Wordsworth 128–30 on Franz Kafka 127 on potentiality 109–10, 121, 128 and the specular name 97–8, 150n14 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 109–10, 128–9 Bernstein, J.M. 153n16 Bitburg 121–2 Blake, William 56–8, 59, 145n10, 145n11 Blanchot, Maurice 8, 17, 22, 38, 57, 102, 141n14, 143n24 on Hegel and Heidegger 28–9 on Jewishness 113, 151–2n8 politics before 1945 134–5 and Romanticism 29, 141n17 on solitude 28–9, 143n24 and Theodor W. Adorno 134–5 blessing 94–5, 98 Bloom, Harold 39, 76, 126, 146n2n, 147n8, 152n8 The Anxiety of Influence 127, 143n22

176

Index

Bradley, A.C. 143–4n25 Brecht, Bertolt 135–6, 155n3 on Wordsworth 135–6 Brooks, Cleanth 50–1, 149n5 Bruns, Gerald 139n3, 148n19, 154n18 Bürger, Gottfried 37 Burke, Kenneth 80, 82, 124, 126, 127 Byron, Lord George Gordon 36, 144n26 Cadava, Eduardo 128–9 Camus, Albert 22, 152n10 Carlyle, Thomas 36, 126, 136 Cavell, Stanley 148n19 Chaucer, Geoffrey 22, 37 Christensen, Jerome 74, 147–8n16 Christianity 11, 20–1, 22, 96, 120, 140n11 relation to Judaism 17, 11, 141n15 Coleridge, S.T. 36, 59, 145n10, 145–6n13 Comas, James 110, 123, 144n1, 152n10 community 108, 113–15, 132, 151n7, 151–2n8, 154n19 imagined community (Anderson) 102–4, 105, 150n2, 150n3 inoperative community (Nancy) 104–6, 112, 150n2, 151n4 and mourning 102–7 and textuality 112 and video testimony 116, 117–18, 121–3 consensus 107–9 contemporaneity see contemporary culture under culture creation decreation of the past 121, 128, 129, 147–8n16 God’s creation 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 52–3, 80–1, 140n12 creative criticism 41, 78, 123–30 and mourning 126–30 criticism, cultural 6, 61–4, 73, 81, 107–9, 113, 115–16 culture contemporary culture 61–6, 72–3, 77, 85, 95, 116, 133–4, 146n3 distinction between “culture” and “a culture” 132–3, 154n20, 154n21 English culture 5, 6–7, 32–3, 34–8, 83–4, 134 and nature 154n19 relation between art and culture 61–3, 73, 81–2, 89–90, 108–9, 115–17, 148n20 death 24, 26, 61, 91, 92, 122, 131 aestheticization of 33–4, 102–4

of God 60, 140n11 as indistinguishable from life 72–3, 86 and individuation 28–30 as a moment of life 14, 16 of the other 104–6 deconstruction 2, 3, 4, 8, 39–44, 79, 90–1, 101, 124, 139n7, 149–50n9, 151n7 and the New Criticism 41, 144n2 and phenomenology 43–4 and phonocentrism 148n19 and poststructuralism 43–4 and the undeconstructible 90–1 and the Yale critics 39, 40–1, 144n3, 145n8 de Graef, Ortwin 83, 148n20, 150n1 De La Durantaye, Leland 121, 149n4 Deleuze, Gilles 1 de Man, Paul 8, 143n21, 149n4, 149–50n9 and deconstruction 39, 41, 69, 72, 90–1, 144n2, 145n8, 147n13 de Man affair 135, 152n11 on narrative 142–3n20 on Wordsworth 68–9, 147n9, 149n5 democracy 108–10 denegation (Verneinung) 87–90, 149n2, 149n3 interpretation of Jean Hyppolite 88–90, 93, 149n3 Derrida, Jacques and American deconstruction 41–2, 43–4, 144n2 compared to Christopher Smart 81–2, 148n21 “Différance” 41–2, 58, 145n4 and freeplay 40–3, 45, 54, 58, 64, 71, 73–4, 81, 147n15 Hartman’s double response to 74, 75, 79, 81, 147n15, 148n20, 150n11 on Immanuel Kant 15 and phenomenology 43–4 and phonocentrism 148n16 relation to Hartman 3–4, 8–9, 38, 40, 43–4, 48–9, 54, 63, 74, 75, 79–80, 97–8, 110–11, 126, 151–2n8 on structuralism 41–3, 45, 48, 145n6 “Structure, Sign, and Play” 40–3, 45, 73, 144n1, 145n4 and two interpretations of interpretation 1–2, 40–4, 57–8, 73, 145n4, 147n14 Descartes, René 11, 20 dialectic 18, 24, 28, 36, 74, 99, 141n14, 144n27, 144n27, 147n10 Docherty, Thomas 109–10, 111–12

Index ecocriticism 146n4 ecology 2, 4, 66–7, 133 and mimesis 65, 74–5 and psychoesthetics 64–5, 74–5, 84–6 elation 70, 93, 141n16, 147n11 Eliot, T.S. 124–7 on Romanticism 124–5 England see English culture under culture and under Wordsworth, William Enlightenment 35–6, 63 the Wordsworthian Enlightenment 9, 27 epistemology 12, 45, 154n18 euphemism as a feature of Wordsworth’s poetry 93–4, 96, 99, 134, 150n12 evening star 9, 40, 69, 145n7, 145n12 and English literature 56–60 as a literary theme 56–60 experience and the aesthetic 102, 107–9, 133, 136–7 historical experience 17–26, 72–5 of non-experience 102, 106, 107, 117–18 Ferguson, Frances 37, 139n1, 145n17, 153n15, 154n18 Flieger, Jerry Aline 97, 98–9, 147n15, 150n11 formalism 19, 41, 50–1, 55, 144n3, 150n11 Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 4, 115, 116, 117 François, Anne-Lise 92, 94, 99, 146n4, 148n17, 154n19 freeplay 40–3, 45, 54, 58, 64, 71, 73–4, 81, 147n15 Freud, Sigmund 80, 91, 93, 98 on denegation (Verneinung) 87–90, 149n2, 149n3, 150n12 on mourning and reality-testing 74, 84–5 Fry, Paul 143–4n25, 155n23 Frye, Northrop 3, 40, 45–8, 49–50, 52–3, 75–6, 126–7 compared to Erich Auerbach 45 compared to G.W.F. Hegel 45 on John Milton 47, 52 and structuralism 45, 53, 57, 145n6 and William Blake 57, 145n10, 145n11 Fynsk, Christopher 105 Gasché, Rodolphe 30–1 ghostliness 103, 119–20, 127, 142–3n20 and media culture 116–7, 128, 153–4n17 in Wordsworth’s poetry 75, 76, 78, 79, 85–7, 96

177

Glowacka, Dorota 104, 105 Goodman, Kevis 101, 146n5, 149n5 Griffin, Robert 114, 141n17 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 114 Hartman, Geoffrey—biography doctoral thesis 9 and the Fortunoff Video Archive 115–16 relation to Edward Said 113–14 relation to Erich Auerbach 9, 19, 140n9 relation to Israel 111, 151–2n8 relation to Paul de Man 145n8, 152n11 response to Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg Cemetery 121–2 stay in Berlin 39–40 stay in England 6 time at Yale 4, 9, 19, 115, 145n8, 155n22 Hartman, Geoffrey—works André Malraux 8, 141n14 Beyond Formalism 34, 35, 37, 44, 61, 145n5, 152n10, 152n11 Criticism in the Wilderness 34, 78, 123–9, 151n5, 155n22 The Fate of Reading 34, 78 The Fateful Question of Culture 5–6, 9, 33–4, 37–8, 83–4, 96, 120, 122, 123, 132–5 The Longest Shadow 134 Minor Prophecies 132 Saving the Text 10, 39, 73, 80–1, 97, 110–11 Scars of the Spirit 10, 135, 151n6, 151n7 A Scholar’s Tale 6, 38 The Unmediated Vision 3, 8–17, 18–9, 20, 22, 26, 40, 42, 43, 52, 72, 131, 139n3, 139–40n8, 153n16, 154n18 The Unremarkable Wordsworth 3, 84, 151n5 Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 3, 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 26–34, 35, 40, 43, 50, 54, 61, 90–1, 133, 139n5, 142n18, 142n19, 142–3n20, 143n22, 143–4n25, 144n28, 148n19, 151n5 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 18, 26, 28, 74, 75, 87–8, 90, 91, 93, 111, 139n1, 139n2, 139n6, 147n10 compared to Wordsworth 26–7, 28, 90, 93, 141n16, 148n19 “Eleusis” 69–72, 147n12 and the end of art 3, 10, 11, 15, 21, 22, 26, 35, 38, 45, 48, 92 on individuation 28–9 The Phenomenology of Spirit 9–11, 27, 29, 70, 71–2, 135, 144n27

178

Index

Heidegger, Martin 12, 15–17, 19, 28, 44, 58, 111, 139n2, 139n6, 142n19, 149n4 on individuation 28–9, 90 and Rainer Maria Rilke 15–17 on Verborgenheit 15–16 and Wordsworth 27, 28–31, 32, 90, 143n21 hermeneutics 52, 54, 64, 69–70, 125, 140n11, 147n12 Hertz, Neil 64–5, 146n1, 146n2 Hirsch, E.D. 50 Hirsch, Marianne 119, 120, 153–4n17 historicity 18–19, 20, 42, 101 history literature and historical experience 17–26, 72–5 Hölderlin 69 Holocaust 4, 78 and aesthetic mediation 101, 106–7, 109, 115–22, 134–5 and belatedness 120–1 and England 5–6, 37–8, 135–6 and Jewish identity 111, 115 and Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg Cemetery 121–2 and Wordsworth 83–4, 116, 133–6 see also video testimony homeopathy 81, 116, 148n20 hope 21, 32, 33–4, 92, 121, 132, 142n19 in Martin Heidegger 44, 58 in Walter Benjamin 128–9 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 8, 11, 16 Horowitz, Gregg 77–8 Huhn, Tom 74–5, 94 humanism 19, 44, 54, 58, 79, 80, 107 and animals 71–2 and antihumanism 10, 42, 69, 141n14, 142–3n20 and G.W.F. Hegel 10, 69–72, 147n10 Hyppolite, Jean on denegation (Verneinung) 88–90, 93, 149n3 Logic and Existence 10, 139n2 identity politics 115, 122–3, 132, 154n20, 154n21 ideology 110, 114, 122, 123, 152n11, 154n20 aesthetic ideology 3, 100–4, 106, 107, 108, 121–2, 151n6, 154n19 English ideology 9, 34–5, 36–8, 40, 52, 55–7 and Karl Marx 145n9

imagination 3, 4, 23–4 dialectical relation to nature 5–6, 28, 30–3, 35, 36–7, 46, 94, 131, 139n5, 142n18, 142–3n20 and memory 107–8, 112, 132 and reason 26–7, 64–6, 69–71, 147n10 immanence 10, 14 and community 105–6, 112 in Erich Auerbach 21–2, 24–5 see also transcendence immediacy 10–12, 17–18, 22, 57, 117, 133, 135–6 impotentiality see potentiality incremental redundance in “Tintern Abbey” 12–14, 139n4 indeterminacy 54, 56, 107, 116, 133, 137, 142n20, 151n7 individuation 27, 28–30, 32, 78, 80, 88, 90, 142n18, 143n22 interpretation 32, 50–1, 53–5, 76, 108, 151n7 and expression 18, 19–20, 22, 24 Hartman’s early theory of 9–10, 12, 17 and indeterminacy 54–5, 90–1, 111–12 of poetry 33–4, 66–72 two interpretations of interpretation 40–4 see also Midrash; typology intertextuality 24–6, 29, 32, 95–6, 144n28 Intifada, First 111, 113 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 113–15, 122 James, Henry 51 Jameson, Fredric 146n3 Jarvis, Simon 147n9 Jewish identity 4, 107, 110–15, 116, 118, 141n15 Johns Hopkins conference, 1966 39 Jacques Derrida’s contribution to 40–4, 144n1 Johnson, Barbara 143n23 Johnston, Kenneth 143–4n25, 149n6 Kant, Immanuel 15, 64–5, 68–9, 74, 146n2, 150n11 Kaufman, Robert 101, 136, 145n9, 155n3 Keats, John 55–6, 58, 59 compared to Wordsworth 56 knowledge 127, 132, 143n24, 149n3 absolute knowledge 10–11, 18, 139n2 literature as a form of 9–11, 19, 34, 15, 61, 72, 110, 154n18

Index literature as an object of 107, 110, 123 regressive knowledge 84–5, 87, 88, 92 Kojève, Alexandre 10, 72, 139n2 Lacan, Jacques 8, 38, 39, 97–8, 150n11, 150n12, 150n13 and the specular name 96–8, 150n14 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 120–1 Lanzmann, Claude 119 latency 2, 5, 106 see also potentiality Lentricchia, Frank 41, 144n3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 39, 42–3, 48–9, 54, 145n6 Lewin, Bertram 147n11 literary history 17–18, 21, 29, 32, 34–8, 50, 56–60, 127, 140n12 Liu, Alan 137, 147–8n16, 148n23 on loss 73–4, 147n14 on Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 28, 142n18 logic as a threat to poetry 1, 10, 27, 61, 72, 86, 87, 90, 142n20, 148n19 loss 4, 133, 134, 145n7, 147n14 and community 102–7 Hartman’s rhetoric of 5, 6–7, 29–30, 32–4 and losslessness 72–4, 84, 85 and melancholia 100–2 and poetry 59–60, 61, 72–8, 84–90, 92–4, 100 and postmodernity 72–4, 84, 85 see also mourning Lovejoy, Arthur 35–6 Macherey, Pierre 149n3 Malraux, André 8, 17, 18, 26, 141n14 Marshall, Douglas 141n17, 149n5, 149n6, 151n5, 155n23 Marvell, Andrew 59–60, 142n19 materialism 75, 128, 155n25 McGann, Jerome 144n26 mediation aesthetic mediation 3, 46, 101–3, 104, 106, 116, 118–20, 142–3n20 in Claude Lévi-Strauss 48–9, 53 relation to the past 22, 57, 63, 126, 127 in The Unmediated Vision 8, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 139–40n8 melancholia 1, 100–2, 105, 106–7, 109, 113, 147n14, 151–2n8 Melville, Herman 1 Melville, Stephen 147n13

179

memory and imagination 107–8, 112, 132 postmemory 119 public memory 84, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8, 116, 118–22, 128 see also loss; mourning; trauma metaphor 30–2, 143n21 and Übersetzung 30–2 metaphysics 14, 16, 30, 46, 53, 58, 59, 139n7, 148n19 the end of 1–2, 8–9, 42–3, 48, 49, 52 as a temptation 17, 19, 22, 40, 96, 140n11 see also Derrida, Jacques; nostalgia Midrash 52, 110, 112–13, 152–3n8 Miller, J. Hillis 19, 41, 144n3 and 1966 Yale Colloquium 145n8 Milton, John 32, 36, 37, 56, 58, 59, 95–6, 110 compared to Dante 22, 140n12 “Lycidas” 47 Paradise Lost 52–5, 140n12 in The Unmediated Vision 20, 22 mimesis 4, 131, 137 and community 121–2, 154n19 in Erich Auerbach 19–20, 22–3, 141n14 and Immanuel Kant 15 and loss 74–5, 78, 121 as a mode of emergence 74–5, 77–8 and modernity 11, 14–16, 77–8 and the sublime 65, 69 in Theodor W. Adorno 146n6 modernity 1–2, 10–13, 17, 20–1, 77–8 alternatives to modernity 113, 114, 120, 151–2n8 and John Milton 20, 22, 52 and poetry 6, 10–13, 17–18, 20–2, 34, 61 and René Descartes 11, 20 mourning 1, 73–5, 78, 89, 91, 93, 99, 107, 109, 147n14, 151–2n8, 153–4n17 and community 100–5 in Sigmund Freud 74, 84–5 in Walter Benjamin 127–30 multiculturalism 122–3, 154n20 myth 28, 35, 37, 48–9, 55, 56–8 Ceres and Proserpina 57–8, 70–1 In Jean-Luc Nancy 105–6, 120–1 Orpheus and Eurydice 57 Perseus 17, 153n16 Nancy, Jean-Luc 102–3 The Inoperative Community 104–6, 112, 150n2, 151n4 “The Nazi Myth” 120–1

180

Index

narrative 27, 49, 142n20 nature 12–17, 85–7, 89–92, 94, 129–30, 133 and culture 154n19 dialectical relation to the imagination 5–6, 28, 30–3, 35, 36–7, 46, 94, 131, 139n5, 142n18, 142–3n20 and intertextuality 24–6, 37, 141n17 natural process (natura naturans) 14–17, 30–3, 54, 139n5, 142n18, 142n19, 142–3n20, 154n19 New Criticism 3, 40, 41, 50–1 and Matthew Arnold 124–5 New Historicism 73 Newlyn, Lucy 143n22 Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzschean affirmation 41, 42, 43, 44, 58, 81 nonhuman, the 9–10, 152n11 Norris, Christopher 144n2, 144n3, 151n6 nostalgia and the Holocaust 9, 83, 120, 133, 136 as a response to the end of metaphysics 1, 41–4, 48, 54, 58, 64, 73, 147n14 1 O’Hara, Daniel 144n28, 146n5, 151n5 ontology 22, 29–30, 44, 49, 51, 53, 54, 93, 102, 154n18 pathetic fallacy 66, 67, 147n8 Peckham, Morse 35–6, 144n26, 144n27, 144n28 pedagogy 27, 54, 60, 123 Pfau, Thomas 29–30 phenomenology 45, 145n7 phenomenological vision 11, 13, 14 and (post)structuralism 43–4 see also The Phenomenology of Spirit under Hegel, G.W.F. poetry compared to prose 21–6 as a privileged genre 6, 11, 17–20, 47–8, 54, 59, 61, 67–74, 136–7 postmemory 119 postmodernity 1, 3, 4, 122–3, 125, 146n3, 147n14 and loss 72–4, 84, 85 poststructuralism 4, 41, 101 and deconstruction 43–4 and phenomenology 43–4 potentiality and actuality 1, 2, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 90, 92, 95, 99, 102, 106, 107, 110, 112, 128, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137 in Giorgio Agamben 86–7, 90, 121, 149n4

and loss 87, 89, 99, 125, 133 in Walter Benjamin 109–10, 121, 128 Poulet, Georges 3, 40, 50–1, 145n8 problematics as a form of literary history 18 psychoanalysis 84–5, 87, 93, 96–7 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; Lewin, Bertram; psychoesthetics psychoesthetics 64–5, 72, 74–5, 79, 80, 84–6, 146n5, 149n5 and I.A. Richards 64, 80, 84 Rajan, Tilottama 10, 43–4, 142–3n20 Reagan, Ronald 121–2 realism 19–23, 24, 83–4, 119, 128, 139–40n8, 140n13–4 Redfield, Marc 2, 103–4, 142–3n20, 146n2, 154n19 religion 17, 35, 70, 94–5, 96–9, 135, 141n16, 149–50n9, 150n11 representation 17, 19, 51, 78–82, 106, 154n21 in Christopher Smart 80–2 of the Holocaust 116–22 and presentation 78–80 in Wordsworth 86, 89–90, 93, 94 see also aesthetics; mimesis restitution 34, 122–3 retraumatization see secondary trauma under trauma Richards, I.A. 64–5, 80, 84 Riefenstahl, Leni 153n14 Riffaterre, Michael 76–8 Rilke, Rainer Maria 8, 11, 12, 14–17, 27, 28 and Martin Heidegger 15–17 Romanticism 2, 6, 8, 9, 29, 125, 141n17, 155n1 and anti-self-consciousness 35–6, 125 critical misrecognition of 124–5 and England 22, 34–8, 60 as a form of memory 2, 4, 136–7, 147–8n16 in France 62–3, 64 theories of 35–6, 144n26, 144n27, 144n28 and Wordsworth 36–7 Rose, Gillian 113, 151–2n8 Roth, Michael 139n2 Ruskin, John 82, 148n23 sacrifice 59, 89, 111, 122, 123, 131 and akedah 33–4 of the imagination 65–6, 68, 69, 74, 78 see also akedah; mimesis

Index Said, Edward 110, 152n9, 152n10, 155n22 Beginnings 113, 145n7 discussion with Hartman 113–15, 122, 152n11, 153n13 Santner, Eric 100–1, 151n8 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 141n14 Scholem, Gershom 150n14 Shakespeare, William 22, 37, 96, 109 Simpson, David 146n4, 155n1 Smart, Cristopher 44, 79, 80–2, 148n22 compared to Jacques Derrida 81–2, 148n21 solitude 28–9, 143n24 specular name 96–8, 99 and Jacques Lacan 96–8, 150n14 and Walter Benjamin 97–8, 150n14 speech-acts 80, 94–8, 149–50n9 divine speech-act 94–6 and the specular name 97 Spenser, Edmund 22, 37, 60 Spielberg, Steven 118–19, 153n14, 153n15 Sprinker, Michael 143n22, 146n2, 151n5, 151n6, 155n24, 155n25 star see evening star Stevens, Wallace “The Snow Man” 66–8, 75, 81, 147n8, 147n12 Strachey, James 149n2 structuralism 3, 54, 59 in America 40–1, 43–4 and Anglo-American criticism 39–40, 48–50 Jacques Derrida on 41–3, 45, 48, 145n6 and Northrop Frye 45, 53, 57, 145n6 and phenomenology 43–4 sublation see Aufhebung (Hegel); elation sublime, the 56, 58, 64–6, 70, 80, 134, 147n10 mathematical sublime (Kant) 64–5, 68–9, 74, 146n1 substitution, logic of 33–4, 42 and mimesis 74–5, 76, 78 and mourning 74–5, 100 supernatural 23, 27, 35, 53, 141n15, 145n10 Taylor, Mark 140n11 television 115–17, 118, 125 testimony see video testimony textuality 91, 95, 96, 150n12 and community 112, 151n7 see also intertextuality

181

theology 16, 53, 54, 96, 98, 134, 139–40n8, 153n16 transcendence 92, 54 and descendentalism 58 in Hartman’s early work 11–14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 26, 40 and semi-transcendence 47–8, 52, 54–6 see also immanence transparency 73, 151n6, 151n7 trauma 32, 101, 102, 106, 107 Hartman’s rhetoric of 5, 6–7, 29–30, 32–4 and redemption 33–4 secondary trauma 106, 113, 118–20, 128–9, 145–6n13, 153–4n17 untraumatic continuity in Wordsworth 5, 6, 33–4, 36, 37–8, 90 see also loss Trilling, Lionel 153n13 typology 20, 140n11, 154n19 undeadness 85–7 Valéry, Paul 8, 11, 16 Vattimo, Gianni 151n6 Vendler, Helen 155n22 Verneinung see denegation (Verneinung) video testimony 4, 101, 106, 107, 109, 115–21 compared to Schindler’s List and Shoah 118–19 and Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 4, 115, 116, 117 relation to Wordsworth 116–17 Virgil 21, 57 voice 79, 95–6, 106, 117, 128, 142–3n20, 148n16 Wandering Jew, the 35, 113 Warminski, Andrzej 68, 149n9 Weiskel, Thomas 65, 146n2 Wellek, René 35–6, 144n26 winter 57 and Martin Heidegger 14–16 and Wallace Stevens 66 wishing 25, 66–7, 77, 94–5, 149n7 Wohlfarth, Irving 139n7, 139–40n8 Woolf, Virginia 21, 23–6, 140–1n13, 147n7 To the Lighthouse 26 Wordsworth, William “The Boy of Winander” 34, 129, 142–3n20, 149n7

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Index

Wordsworth, William (Cont’d) compared to G.W.F. Hegel 26–7, 28, 90, 93, 141n16, 148n19 compared to John Keats 55–6 compared to S.T. Coleridge 59, 145n10, 145–6n13 compared to Walter Benjamin 128–30 compared to William Blake 56–8, 145n10 as critical exemplar 46, 50–1, 61–3 and English culture 5–6, 35–7, 83–4, 133, 135–6 and the Holocaust 83–4, 116, 133–6 and Immanuel Kant 68–9 and incremental redundance 12–14, 139n4 and intertextuality 24–6, 29, 95–6 and John Milton 32, 95–6 “The Last of the Flock” 33–4 and late style 95–6 the Lucy poems 50–1, 59, 84, 91–2, 102, 104, 129, 149n5, 154n18

Lyrical Ballads 33, 62, 125 and Martin Heidegger 16–17, 28–32, 90, 143n21 and metaphor 30–2, 143n21 and popular culture 62 The Prelude 25–6, 34, 36, 129 and Sigmund Freud 84–90 “A Slumber did my spirit seal” 91–2, 102 “Tintern Abbey” 12–13 see also euphemism; nature; potentiality Yale critics, the 4, 39, 41, 113, 144, 145n8, 155n22 see also Bloom, Harold; de Man, Paul; Derrida, Jacques; Hartman, Geoffrey; Miller, J. Hillis Yale University 1966 Colloquium 145n8 Fortunoff Video Archive 4, 115, 116, 117 the Yale critics 4, 39, 41, 113, 144, 145n8, 155n22