Here are some rough notes in my attempt to define tragic-poetic Modernism. More will follow, with development and unpacking of what is here. This is an outline. Part 2 will also deal more with concrete examples, and perhaps the addition of further elements.
1. Elements towards redefining tragic-poetic modernism must perhaps begin with the question of the subject, to which any aesthetic or poetics are unfortunately bound; they are determined by subjectivity, even if negatively (cf. Ricœur, for instance, in Soi-même comme un autre). This is most often expressed through the impersonal or depersonalization, whether in Baudelaire and his wake, Rimbaud’s “JE est un Autre”, T.S. Eliot’s attack of personality, Barthes “death of the author” and so on. A truly post-subjective turn needs to be careful of this negatively reoccurring subject, even or especially when it is supposedly destroying subjectivity. Why was it important to destroy the subject? Once this subject is effectively destroyed, its primal status can be set aside, as an unnecessary error that helped us understand the next step. A poet like Mallarmé took this step, but looked back as Orpheus did to his subjective other the Notion-Eurydice whilst exiting the underworld, and she died. Let us say that he is haunted by this loss.
2. This destruction also needs to be thought of in terms of its violence. Is this a sacrificial violence, like the tragic? Is it a founding violence, and if so, is it legitimate to associate Modernism with such violence? I am thinking about Walter Benjamin’s work — and reactions to it by Dominick LaCapra — or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Derrida-inspired work on the literary absolute and on Heidegger, for instance. A sort of constellation emerges around responses (starting with Benjamin’s) to Carl Schmitt‘s theories of sovereignty: in particular, Jacques Derrida’s Force de loi and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer, both of which deal with Schmitt and with Benjamin’s text on the latter. The important question is to see how art connects to originary violence and the form of power that it takes, or the type of violence that is required to unsettle power. Another important text is a very little-known, untranslated article by Agamben on Benjamin’s and/on Georges Battaille and the Collège de sociologie (which can be seen as a part of the avant-garde — associated with Modernsism). Agamben sees the potential for fascism in the Collège’s very anti-fascist configuration (“Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità”).
3. There is also the notion of désœuvrement (or inoperativeness), a concept developed by Jean-Luc Nancy that Agamben associates with “decreation“, in The Coming Community, related to the notion of potentiality. As we have seen in my previous post, the tragic is important for this, and which is related to the violence and negativity of postsubjective aesthetics.
4. In thinking of decreation and violence, aesthetics comes to mind. On must however get past the notion of the tragic as genre (theatre) or as primarily an aesthetic (i.e. perceptive) category. Several references come to mind, starting obviously with the ur-text on the matter, that of Aristotle, whose Poetics discusses tragedy as the ultimate form of mimêsis. Mimêsis is the imitation of things — of nature; it is the unveiling (aleitheia) of truth, and poetics (poiêsis) is the creative part of this. Tragedy is the ultimate form of imitation because it confronts the audience with the problem of human freedom and destiny. How is Oedipus is fated to do certain things, and how much freedom does he have against such a fate? Such questions traditionally refer to redemption. German Idealists and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard etc. have changed the way this question can be seen (generally ignored in the “Anglo-Saxon” world). Szondi (Essay on the Tragic) distinguishes between tradegy as genre and the tragic, a philosophical question: “Since Aristotle, there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic.” (Szondi, p. 1) This means that Aristotle subsumed the tragic under the umbrella of poetics. From Schelling on, the tragic is seen in and of itself, requiring a theoretical-philosophical approach. Yet even an Idealist and contemporary of Schelling, Hegel, still insists upon genre when talking about tragedy. Wagner will of course do so as well when he elaborates and creates what has been attributed to him as Gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork” (which for him is the tragic opera).
However, despite this separation of aesthetic questions and the outlining of a theoretical conception of the tragic, we have to bear in mind the relationship between literature and thought, so that we see that poetics come back into the question through the back door, so-to-speak. For since the 20th century, it has been unacceptable to separate the literary and the philosophical. This is what Derrida insists upon in Dissemination, when talking about the problem of mimesis precisely in terms of the literary history of philosophy, something echoed in David Farrell Krell’s introduction to his Tragic Absolute (a book about German Idealists Schelling, Novalis and Hölderlin, and the post-Idealist Nietzsche). It is important here to qualify the rhetorical/literary (distinctions will have to be made, but for now let’s conflate them) if we are trying to delimit the definition of the tragic as genre; yet it is equally important to recognize that the literary and the philosophical (i.e. reason) are inseparable. Nevertheless, poetics cannot be there to limit the object of the tragic. The tragic is of many genres and takes many forms — not just drama or Wagnerian opera.
5. Furthemore, redemption is hitherto a “poetic” question in that it is bound to the problem of technê (a broader term for art that encompasses all human productive potential), and thus poiêsis (pro-duction) and physis (nature). We have Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art”) and Agamben (The Man without Content) to thank for this. Let’s not take these considerations lightly, but let’s not take them as given, either. The problem of redemption is poetic in that form has overtaken content, and the “emptying” of depersonalization can be seen as a type of kenosis (purifying) and eventually a resublimation and a soteria, a Mallarmean “salut” (salvation, salvaging). Modernist redemption occurs thus less through content (still it does) than through form. Western culture is saturated with redemptive ideals, even when it is critical (I would include Rancière’s in this =>below).
We therefore have to include the “poetic” when dealing with the tragic. Hence my use of “tragic-poetic” when trying to rethink Modernism.
6. The question of joy or jouissance or plaisir: these can be used interchangeably. They lead to the problem of politics. Deleuze’s multiple can resist domination, Kristeva’s view of poetics makes of it a revolutionary poetry, Rancière says that modernism offers new ways of interpreting and seeing, and that this is radical, etc. But, Žižek offers a criticism of this perspective, in that it is the new form of capital: post-Fordist, decentered, postmodern. The distinction between postmodernity as a condition and postmodernism as an aesthetic is no longer so easy. Benjamin saw this allegorized by/in Baudelaire (essay on Paris and the 19th Century). To what extent does a radical postmodernism participate in capital, even when it is decidedly opposed to it? Nevertheless, we tend to exaggerate the power of art. Art is anticipatory in that it provides the form of capital; or does it simply reproduce formally its logic, in a kind of mimesis as reproduction of the process of production. This can offer a different way of approaching Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. It certainly helps to think of Benjamin’s notion of history/witnessing because it is clearer for us to see how art and capital function, thereby leading the way to a sharply articulated notion of resistance. If you look at dominant culture, it has assimilated some of Post/modernist aesthetics and postmodernist ethics. Yet has the main thrust of it been reterritorialized? Democracy in contemporary digital culture: thus, in the rush to critically respond to this threat, the answer seems to be “everyone has a voice, therefore no one has a voice” (cf. Jodi Dean). This is pessimistic of digital culture: nowadays, people can be mobilized much faster, and the forms that mobilization takes are frequently very disruptive and at least allow us to think in new ways. The irony that is so stereotypical of contemporary postmodernism is still quite effective e.g. the London Slut Walk. Furthermore, videos can witness more effectively; Republicans can fall because of Youtube. Though we are as far as we could be from living a digital paradise, opposition simply takes on new forms and is not total; it is more the work of bricolage. The obscene underside of Jodi Dean is Stalin — even Žižek will admit this — where there would be some perfect, total system of resistance. The critique of postmodernism — which I will collapse into Modernism more generally (more on that later) — is based on its form, its structure. I am afraid that the contemporary left is simply repeating the logic of structuralism in negative terms by focussing on the digital or institutions as superstructure, and losing sight of the immanence or irreducible singularity of resistance.
7. Joy and the tragic? Is Nietzsche thus the prototype of postFordist capitalism? This is as ridiculous as saying that he is a Nazi. Still, what Zizek says about Deleuze and Guattari (20th-century Nietzscheans) has some weight. What if the capitalist today is Deleuzo-Guattarian? Still we are a far cry in Nietzsche from the idea of “enjoying our symptom”. What would be better thought through is the Nietzschean acceptance of life and his rejection of politics as partaking in slave morality. Yet Nietzsche’s tragic is an acceptance of chance as necessity (cf. Deleuze): this is the joy of the tragic; there is no need for redemption because all eventualities are accepted as they are in and for themselves. What is life denial in contemporary radical criticism? Exhibit A: Terry Eagleton, Exhibit B = Žižek, C = Dean.
8. It may seem that I use “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” interchangeably, and to a certain extent, this is possible. Aesthetically, there is very little difference between Joyce’s Ulysses, Kandynski’s paintings, Duchamp’s toilet or Schoenberg’s music on the one hand, and the nouveau roman, Godard’s Le Weekend or Pop art on the other. The attempts at distinguishing the two seem to me to be arbitrary, and reflect themselves their own institutional constructs. It is more and more apparent that it is rather a question of continuity. Philosophically speaking, the concerns of Derrida, Deleuze or Baudrillard rely heavily on questions that were already present in the 19th century, even in Hegel, and certainly in Mallarmé reflecting on philology, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud in his correspondence and in his poetry. Where we cannot conflate Modernism and Postmodernism is at once obvious and less so: historically, it is post-world war II, and critically, there is a clear demarcation. But that is precisely the point — historically means institutionally. The rub is where culture and thought meet society and power. Power is becoming more and more “postmodern”, but only in specific ways: fluidity of markets, capital, consumer identity, the work force and so on. Nevertheless, as I argue above, this is only really in certain ways. I fail to see the possibility of a truly Nietzschean society and social structure — and let’s say for the sake of argument that Nietzsche provides us with the best way to live in secular modernity (be it modernist or postmodernist) —, given that he was so anti-social. Unless it were governed by the ethos of the agôn — the joust, the struggle, the contest (see my previous post).
Filed under: Etymologies, Laughter, Mallarmé, Nietzsche, philology, Poetics, Tragic
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.
