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I will be posting regularly on this blog once again in order to share research notes. My research has gone in new directions, and I feel it’s a good idea to post my ideas here in order to draw on your collective intelligence in the form of comments. The orientation of this blog is now less etymological, but still quite philological. I am fascinated with the idea that Western philosophy and tradition is the product of mistranslations. E.g. Heidegger says that the Latin translation of to be was a mistranslation of the Greek (ref. G. Steiner). Inspired by Heidegger, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben frequently uses such mistranslations to dig up the genealogies of Western thought. There are some brilliant examples in The Man Without Content (1970, 1999), for instance, which it turns out Agamben wrote 2 years after meeting Heidegger (not in 1994: see Leland de la Durantaye’s great critical introduction to Agamben, Chapter One, p. 26- and 396, n. 1). Much earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé, in Les Dieux antiques, says that the gods were the result of errors in language.

My favourite philosopher (right now) is F. W. Nietzsche, and his work and works on him have preoccupied much of my time lately. He was trained not as a philosopher, but as a philologist, much like Mallarmé and many European thinkers in the 19th century. Alexis Philonenko (Nietzsche, le rire et le tragique, LGF, 1995) says that, by philology,

Nietzsche means not only the study of foreign languages and of their lexical structures, but also that of the main arteries [nervures saillantes] of the civilizations they manifest: collective representations materialised in works of art, visions of the world incarnate in poetry, music and theatre. (23, my transl.)

My work is Nietzschean in that it will be examining questions of laughter and the tragic from Romanticism and Modernism and beyond, or what I am calling the post-Enlightenment in this context. It’s a complete coincidence that Philonenko’s subtitle has “le rire et le tragique”, as I had developed these notions before discovering Philonenko’s book. However, there are many books about both these questions in Nietzsche, starting as early as Lev Shestov’s The Philosophy of Tragedy, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (1903); and laughter and the tragic are two terms frequently associated with Nietzsche, though most often separately.

What interests me is how these questions can help elucidate the problems of post-Enlightenment thought in/on/and aesthetics. For example, how does the (philosophical rather than aesthetic) notion of the tragic help us reconsider Mallarmé’s poetics and thought? Here’s a proposal I made (accepted) for a collective on Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French
Poetry (ed. by Joseph Acquisto):

Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’ and the Tragic ‘Acte’

Mallarmé’s ambiguous, loaded term “salut” refers to humanity’s salvation through art’s openness. The term can also be linked to the Aristotelian notion of “sotêria” (salvation, preservation), a concept transmuted by philosophers like Hegel. This concern continues today, such as in Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that Remains or Potentialities. Sotêria, employed in reference to tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics, is a preservation of the potential in the actual. In the Nineteenth Century, tragedy was associated equally with lyrical poetry and drama, especially with the German Idealists like Hölderlin and Schelling. For Schelling, the tragic implies a paradoxical expression of free will precisely through a sotêria; for Hölderlin, it is the very weakness of the tragic that is its freedom (Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic). For Agamben, sotêria‘s preservation implies a radical otherness in which it is the “impotential” that is retained in the actual, thereby changing the way we think of actuality, and thus of freedom and determination. This can realign our understanding of the tragic. Nevertheless, a full development of the tragic is apparently of secondary or indirect concern for contemporary philosophers in dialogue with modernist poetics. Rethinking the tragic in Nineteenth-Century lyrical poetry can help us reevaluate contemporary philosophy. Looking at the way this poetry has been appropriated in contemporary thought shows that what Mallarmé called an “Acte,” which is a linguistic-poetic preservation of impotential, reflects the hitherto unthought relationship between subjectivity, language and the tragic as drama — drama as “acted,” as the mimesis of action, and modern subjectivity as identified with agency — and belies a redemptive logic in contemporary philosophy.

When I wrote this, I wasn’t thinking about Nietzsche, except perhaps indirectly. A philological bent is clear in this proposal, with my looking at sotêria and “salut”, and drama as “acted” in connection with agency. The tragic is a focal point of Western (especially modern) notions of salvation. Nietzsche interests me because his definition of the tragic is life-affirming, whereas Western, specifically Judeo-Christian, morality has erected metaphysical systems which are effectively nihilistic in their denial of life. Nietzsche, commonly misconceived as nihilistic, turns the tables on metaphysics and their handmaidens morality, religion etc. by seeing them as the real nihilism (see a long quote by him on nihilism) in that they deny the value of life for itself, turning instead to afterlives and redemptive ideals. For Nietzsche, the tragic is the joyous affirmation of will. Nietzsche’s joyous message (no doubt modifying the “Good News”): “Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called” (Zarathustra II, “On Redemption”, quoted by Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, 41). This leads to a philosophy or theory of laughter, that for Russian critic Mikhael Bakhtin upsets the hierarchy imposed by church authority; and such laughter reflects an impersonal universality that posits a different way of thinking about the subject. For Bakhtin, and for many others, the Enlightenment was destructive in its invention of the individual subject. Laughter was the cure, so-to-speak.

I am therefore concurrently working on the question of laughter. This idea came to me whilst writing my dissertation. It occurred to me that the anguish in Mallarmé, such as in his famous Sonnet en -yx is actually funny, with the possibility of self-parody (for a hilarious parody/rewriting of Mallarmé, see Raymond Queneau’s “La redondance chez Phane Armé”). Not to mention that the use of “angoisse” and “agonise” in the Sonnet en yx allude to the tragic agôn, or contest/combat/rivalry/joust. Nietzsche has a great early piece contemporary to The Birth of Tragedy on this, “Homer’s Contest” (Homers Wettkampf), again, discussing themes of affirmation and play vs “our morality”. The self-parody is only latent, and Mallarmé is certainly not “Nietzschean”; however, Nietzsche’s thought can help us develop a proper critique of such agonistic phenomena that are related to the subject’s self-destruction or depersonalisation. George Steiner, in the article referenced above, notes that Jacques Derrida’s work might be optimally seen as comic, perhaps from this perspective. The personal struggle (another synonym of agôn) and agony (fr. Gk. agonia), perhaps related to angoisse (anguish), is that of the poetic subject coming to terms with his own nihilism, his impotence as poetic subject; and this is tragic in that the sacrifice of the self is a type of depersonalisation (“céder l’initiative aux mots”, “to relinquish the initiative to words”), and it becomes a sublimation and a redemption of the poetic “Acte” through the creation of poetic space. But this happens to a nauseating degree in Mallarmé, and when you write a dissertation on him, you go nuts or you start to laugh, and then you publish a book.

Consequently, it occurred to me that humour has a large part to play in the gestures of Modernist poetics—the sort of violent, dislocative humour in Rimbaud or Hélène Cixous, for instance. I followed this up and found that laughter is a major theme in the 19th century, beyond Nietzsche, as with Hugo’s famous essay on the topic in conjunction with the grotesque (see also Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais that takes up, in possibly Nietzschean terms, laughter and the grotesque, and who takes apart Hugo), or Baudelaire’s essay on laughter. Then in the 20th century, there’s Henri Bergson, Bakhtin and, perhaps most famously, Cixous’ “Rire de la méduse”. My concurrent work therefore looks like this:

The Maladies of Reason and the Ethics of Laughter in Modernism

This paper will explore how Nietzsche and Bakhtin’s post-subjective philosophies of laughter can contribute to a reconsideration of Modernism. From this perspective, I will examine theories of laughter in late Romanticism (Hugo), early Modernism (Baudelaire) and after (Bergson, Freud, Cixous), and see to what extent Modernism can be redefined with respect to dislocation, fragmentation and multiplicity. I will demonstrate that an ethics of laughter has provided an inverse, affirmative and co-dependent model of Modernist dislocation that critics have hitherto undertaken through melancholy and mourning (Benjamin, Derrida, Kristeva), in what I argue we can call the subjective, negatively theological maladies of Reason. (This is soon to be submitted)

So what I seem to be doing is digging up the bones (or outlining the “nervures saillantes”) of post-Enlightenment thought and aesthetics.