New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed 9780815369622, 9781351251860

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Community?
1 “Being Out, Out”: Ontological Exposure in Modernist Fiction
2 Unwelcome Visitations: Hospitality, Individual and Community in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes
3 Dwelling in the Body: Neuter Ontology in Gertrude Stein and James Joyce
4 The Search for “The Common Voice”: The Storyteller, Community and (Pre)Medieval Echoes in the Work of Virginia Woolf
5 “You, Too?”: Katherine Mansfield’s Community of Women Artists
6 Elitism, Classism and Cosmopolitanism: The Configuration of Community in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love
7 Inoperative Narratives and Relational Singularities in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Novels
8 Galactic Modernism: Distributed Individuality in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker
9 “Speaking No Language Which the Other Understood”: The Search for Acknowledgment in Faulkner’s South
10 The Seductions of Capitalism: Singularity versus Community in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
11 “Today I Have Left My Armor at Home”: Revisiting Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels after the Ethical Turn
12 James Baldwin’s Joy: Finitude, Carnality and Queer Community
13 “To Have That on the Imagination!”: Beckett and the Subjectivities of Literary Fiction
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject

New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed offers new approaches to the modernist subject and its relation to community. With a non-exclusive focus on narrative, the essays included provide innovative and theoretically informed readings of canonical modernist authors, including James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Stein, Barnes and Faulkner (instead of Eliot), as well as of non-canonical and late modernists Stapledon, Rhys, Beckett, Isherwood and Baldwin (instead of Marsden). This volume examines the context of new dialectico-metaphysical approaches to subjectivity and individuality and of recent philosophical debate on community encouraged by critics such as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice ­Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida, among others, of which a fresh redefinition of the modernist subject and community remains to be made, one that is likely to enrich the field of “new Modernist studies.” This volume will fill this gap, presenting a redefinition of the subject by complementing community-oriented approaches to modernist fiction through a dialectical counterweight that underlines a conception of the modernist subject as finite, singular and exposed, and its relation to inorganic and inoperative communities. Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas is Associate Professor of English at the ­University of Granada (Spain). He has published on literary theory and twentieth-century women’s fiction (Mansfield, Hurston, Stein, Frame, Carter, Bird) and is a specialist in New Zealand and Australian Literature. He is the author of three books on Katherine Mansfield (the latest by Edwin Mellen Press, 2012) and co-editor of Community in Twentieth-­C entury Fiction (Palgrave, 2013). His most recent articles/ chapters have appeared in Continuum, Australian Literary Studies, FEMSPEC, JASAL, Bilingual Review, Atlantis and Meanjin. Paula Martín-Salván is Associate Professor of English at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her current research focuses on the representation of communities in modernist and postmodernist fiction, in the light of

theorizations by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and J. Hillis Miller. Her recent publications include the edited volume Community in ­Twentieth Century Fiction (Palgrave 2013, co-eds. Julián Jiménez and Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas) and the monograph The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene’s Fiction (Palgrave, 2015). María J. López teaches in the English Department at the U ­ niversity of Córdoba (Spain), where she received her PhD in English Literature in 2008. She has published Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. ­Coetzee (Rodopi, 2011), has co-edited the special number “J.M.  C ­ oetzee and the non-English Literary Traditions” in EJES (2016), and has published in journals such as the Journal of Southern African Studies ­(Terence Ranger Prize 2010), the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, English Studies and English in Africa.

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Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

33 Poetry as Testimony Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-century Poems Antony Rowland 34 Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction William Vesterman 35 James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture “The Einstein of English Fiction” Jeffrey S. Drouin 36 British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire Sam Goodman 37 Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation Silvia G. Dapía 38 Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature Time, Narrative, and Modernity Katherine Fusco 39 Situationist International in Britain Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde Sam Cooper 40 Surreal Beckett Samuel Beckett and Surrealism Alan Friedman 41 Modernism and Latin America Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange Patricia Novillo-Corvalan 42 New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject Finite, Singular, Exposed Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López

New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject Finite, Singular, Exposed Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-0-8153-6962-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351–25186-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Community?

1

G erardo Rodr í guez - S alas , Paula M art í n - S alvá n and M ar í a J . L ó pez

1 “Being Out, Out”: Ontological Exposure in Modernist Fiction

21

J uli á n J im é nez H effernan

2 Unwelcome Visitations: Hospitality, Individual and Community in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes

43

Paula M art í n - S alvá n

3 Dwelling in the Body: Neuter Ontology in Gertrude Stein and James Joyce

59

T ram N guyen

4 The Search for “The Common Voice”: The Storyteller, Community and (Pre)Medieval Echoes in the Work of Virginia Woolf

74

M ar í a J . L ó pez

5 “You, Too?”: Katherine Mansfield’s Community of Women Artists

90

G erardo Rodr í guez - S alas

6 Elitism, Classism and Cosmopolitanism: The Configuration of Community in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love M ercedes D í az D ue ñ as

108

viii Contents 7 Inoperative Narratives and Relational Singularities in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Novels

128

Aude H affen

8 Galactic Modernism: Distributed Individuality in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker

146

B rian W illems

9 “Speaking No Language Which the Other Understood”: The Search for Acknowledgment in Faulkner’s South

164

G reg C hase

10 The Seductions of Capitalism: Singularity versus Community in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

181

B onnie Roos

11 “Today I Have Left My Armor at Home”: Revisiting Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels after the Ethical Turn

199

C arolina S á nchez - Palencia C arazo

12 James Baldwin’s Joy: Finitude, Carnality and Queer Community

213

G reg F orter

13 “To Have That on the Imagination!”: Beckett and the Subjectivities of Literary Fiction

231

D oug B attersby

List of Contributors Index

247 251

Introduction Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Community? Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López1 Community and the Modernist Subject The debate on the commitments, directions and critical implications of modernist literature is far from over. In fact, as David James and Urmila Seshagiri have argued, the field of modernist studies is probably right now characterised by more self-scrutiny than ever (88), a critical phenomenon that obeys to two main reasons: on the one hand, the incredibly persistent legacy of the modernist mythos in contemporary arts and letters; on the other hand, its “unprecedented geographical, temporal, and cultural diffuseness” (88) – the term modernism, pluralised into modernisms, has come to embrace a wide range of cosmopolitan, transatlantic, regional and diasporic movements and names. In their coinage of the term “New Modernist Studies” (2008), Mao and Walkowitz already pointed to temporal, spatial and vertical expansion as the main transformation in recent modernist literary scholarship, in particular what they call “the transnational turn.” We would also like to claim the necessity to reread and reassess the meanings and methods of modernism. Yet, instead of endorsing the centrifugal and expansive fashion of most recent modernist studies, we intend to operate in a centripetal fashion, by revisiting one of the central concepts in traditional understandings of modernism: the individual. The old concern with the solipsistic and isolated modernist individual has been partly replaced and complemented by new scholarly approaches that put the emphasis on the different cultural, political and historical contexts out of which modernist works and their characters arise, many of them with a special focus on the relation between modernism and colonialism, imperialism and global transactions. The myth of the modernist individual is still operative in many ways, though. The reading of what we could call Anglo-American canonical modernism still depends, to a large extent, on the oppositions of self-versus-reality and self-versus-society, a reading that does not do justice to the dialectical and metaphysical complexities of the modernist individual and its communal affiliations.

2  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. In the context of inquiry into subjectivity and community by thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot – and others such as ­Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler – a fresh re-assessment of the modernist individual remains imperative. As the essays collected in this volume intend to prove, the categories of singularity, exposure and finitude may prove an appropriate lens through which to approach the modernist subject’s agonistic exploration of interiority, together with its permeability to non-conventional and non-­ essentialised external forms of community. The possibility of community understood as any form of collective affiliation was categorically ruled out by George Lukács in his interpretation of modernist fiction, which very much determined later critical readings. In the realistic novel, as seen by Lukács, the chasm between subject and world is replaced by the illusion of totality granted by narrative closure, thus keeping a principle of unity which seeks to re-establish in formal terms the totality of a lost identification. In modernism, according to Lukács, such totality becomes impossible, even in formal terms, with the illusion collapsing into a literature of the fragmentary and the dislocated. The negation of the outside world in favour of interiority as the only representable space takes place then. Whereas in realism, individual existence is inextricably linked to its social and historical context, in modernism the subject appears as naturally isolated and unable to fit into a community. In “all great realistic literature,” Lukács argues, the “individual existence” of characters “cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment. Their human significance, their specific individuality cannot be separated from the context in which they were created” (19). On the contrary, in modernist literature, “man is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings” (20). Lukács’s construal of the modernist novel as an anomalous form bound to stage the individual “confined within the limits of his own experience” (21) became an article of faith for various generations of critics, especially those belonging to a Marxist tradition, and even still today remains an implicit influence behind much of what is written and taught about writers such as Conrad, Joyce and Woolf. A case study is Terry Eagleton, for whom in modernist works, “the human subject is at once adrift, cast off, yet shaped to its roots by forces he can never quite control or summon entirely to the light of consciousness” (“Contradictions” 40). A critic like Raymond Williams, who explicitly engages with the concept of community, espouses a similar view. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) is a study of realism in terms of what Williams calls a “knowable community”: “the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (14). As opposed to the nineteenth-century novelist’s ability to articulate a full and meaningful range of social relations, the modernist writer – according to Williams’s view in Politics of Modernism

Introduction  3 (1989) – adopts a much more restricted world view. Modernist fiction is characterised by “isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss” and “the lonely, bitter, sardonic and sceptical hero” (35). Given the postmodernist appropriation of modernism’s formulae, Williams can only hope for an alternative tradition that may address itself “to a modern future in which community may be imagined again” (ibid., emphasis in the original). These readings of modernist fiction depend on a series of Lukácsian dualities, explicitly embraced by Eagleton in his study of the English novel: “fact and value, objective and subjective, inner and outer, individual and society” (English 19). The modernist novel becomes, thus, the site of conflict and misalliance – emotional, moral, perceptive, cognitive, spiritual or epistemological – between the internal self and external reality, hence the associated themes of isolation, solipsism and self-­destructiveness commonly identified as central to modernist fiction. The rupture between the subject and his/her external reality is epitomised by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), who joins a long list of extreme individualities populating early twentieth-century novels, from Joris-Huysmans’s Des Esseintes in Against Nature (1884) to Marcel in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927) or Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1912). Certainly, Stephen Dedalus’s desire to fly by the nets of “nationality, language, religion” (Joyce 203) in order to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (252–253) makes us see to what extent it was modernist writers themselves who promoted the idealistic-romantic version of the artist’s conflict as one against not only established and conventional forms of community, but also against ­external reality in general. The movement away from the external world, both in sociological and epistemological terms, is substituted by an immersion into interiority that critics have repeatedly described as the modernist “inward turn” and that Virginia Woolf somehow formulated in her well-known essay “Modern Fiction” (1919), a sort of manifesto of literary modernism in general. In her opposition between Edwardian writers – “materialists” – and modern writers – “spiritualists” – Woolf is implicitly relying on an outside-inside opposition, rejecting the former term in favour of the latter. Materialist writers are concerned “not with the spirit but with the body” (7), whereas for the moderns, “the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (11). The task of the novelist, then, Woolf famously claimed, must be to convey the “myriad impressions” and the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” as they fall on the mind (9). Harold Bloom has argued that in her perception of the self, “Woolf’s sensibility essentially is Paterian” (2). In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf’s emphasis on the sensations and impressions received by the mind strongly recalls Walter Pater’s celebrated conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), where he defines individual experience in very similar terms:

4  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. (119) As numerous critics have argued, Paterian sensibility influenced not only Woolf, but also many other writers from Oscar Wilde to Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad or Ford Maddox Ford, being central for the configuration of the intellectual genealogy we are tracing: Pater’s definition of each mind as a “solitary prisoner” makes clear that his aestheticism is one that concerns the isolated individual. As put by Robbins, the passage before is “virtually a statement of solipsism, the belief – or fear – that the world has no objective existence outside the mind of the individual” (14). According to Levenson, Pater was very much responsible for destroying the previous equilibrium between subjectivity and the large world beyond it, “acknowledging the primacy of the subjectivity but denying its necessary connection with extrasubjective concerns” (Genealogy 17). The origin of modernist subjectivism and psychologism, however, cannot be located in a single source. Going back to “Modern Fiction,” Woolf’s defence of a new kind of fictional form that focuses on the “ordinary mind” (9) makes her part of a wider, early twentieth-century movement in which writers like Woolf herself, Joyce, Mann or Proust, and philosophers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and William James radically transformed the way we narrate and think of the workings of the human mind, giving place to the much-discussed “crisis of the subject.” This dialogue between literature, psychology and psychoanalysis was central for the critical emphasis on the “inward turn” that Eric Kahler traced in his seminal 1970 study, which presents the history of the novel as a growing tendency to represent interiority: “an increasing displacement of outer space by what Rilke has called inner space, a stretching of consciousness” (5). As argued by Eysteinsson, this inward turn, which has become one of the modernist paradigms, is “widely held to have ruptured the conventional ties between the individual and society” (26). In the way it has been read and interpreted by thinkers like Lukács, Eysteinsson explains, “modernism is built on highly subjectivist premises: by directing its attention so predominantly toward individual or subjective experience, it elevates the ego in proportion to a diminishing awareness of objective or coherent outside reality” (27). This shift in perception, from the objective to the subjective, entailed the transformation of narrative form, with the subsequent – at least partly – rejection of realism 2 and the use of techniques such as free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness. Herman summarises this

Introduction  5 tendency by saying that “the modernist accent falls less on fictional worlds than on fictional-worlds-as-experienced” (243). Lewis also analyses the “­Copernican revolution” that modernist writers carried out in the form of the novel, pointing to the modernist emphasis on the perceiving subject and the tendency to make the narrator into the character, with the aim of underlining the difficulty of arriving at a shared, intersubjective account of reality (213). Our concern is with how this critical emphasis on modernist subjective experience and individual perception has entailed the negation of collective and communal projects or concerns. This is the case of Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane as they define modernist art as “art consequent on the disestablishing of communal reality”: “The communal universe of reality and culture on which nineteenth-century art had depended was over” (27). There are critics, on the other hand, that focus on characters’ resistance to collective forces and ultimately escape from them. Thus, according to Levenson, a repeated movement in many modernist novels is “the portrayal of a dense webs of social constraints followed by the effort to wrest an image of autonomous subjectivity from intractable communal forms” (Fate xii). Levenson’s critical stance is close to a standard account of Anglo-American modernist fiction, according to which exteriority takes the particular form of rigidified and conventional social forms and collective affiliations, often dependent upon national identity, but also upon other inherited traits such as social class, ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality or language. In the face of such constraints, especially that of national culture, a common predicament is exile, one that we see in fictional characters, but again, also in modernist artists themselves: writers, as Steiner has argued, “unhoused,” detached or alienated from a native language, a national identity or any form of established community3 (14). The critical negation of community in modernist fiction is, then, based on a particular communitarian conception. Lukácsian readings tend to oppose the modernist representation of self-absorbed subjectivities to earlier realist representations of a social totality for which the character metonymically stands. The modernist dissolution of reality and of personality is a symptom of the reactionary lack of commitment to the social and historical environment. This reading of modernism, then, assumes the pre-existence of an earlier stage – the realm of the realist novel – in which there is indeed coherence between the self and its environment, a harmonious experience of the individual in the world. The departure point for this view of modernism, therefore, is a state of loss, some nostalgia for totality and community, which is precisely what JeanLuc Nancy describes in the first part of The Inoperative Community. According to Nancy, community in the modern era has always been thought in terms of loss: “always it is a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious and infrangible bonds” (9).

6  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. The longing is for a community characterised by “its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy,” one in which there is not only “intimate communication between its members,” but also “organic communion with its own essence” (9). This model of community is defined as institutionalised and transcendental, based on notions of shared identity and common purpose provided by stable discursive and ritual practices. It is the dreamed community – the Gemeinschaft in Tönnies’s terms – humans have allegedly lost, the utopian community they seek to reconstruct, a cultural chimera that stems from the ideological saturation of human society – the Gesellschaft. We certainly believe that modernist fiction repeatedly traces a movement away from organic and operative forms of community. Thus, we share with other critics, like Levenson, the perception that the modernist novel would come to express the exhaustion of traditional communal models as the satisfactory sources of social interpellation and of the articulation of individual identity – particularly the nation as a political horizon or institutionalized communities qua ideological state apparatuses, such as the church, family, school and others. Community, however, does not disappear. As Levenson argues, the diverse fortunes of individuality in modern English fiction – “its changing verbal aspect, its historical limits and symbolic resources, its political dispossession, cultural displacement and psychological self-estrangement, its uneasy accommodation of mind and body, its retreat from the world and its longing for community” (Fate xi) – are inseparable from the fate of community. Thus, exile in modernist novels frequently leads “not to an escape from the community, but to a withdrawal to its interstices” and to the “attempt to construct a figure of individuality from within the rigid confines of community” (xii). Our view, then, is distanced from the common perception that literary modernism only finds a way out of the failure of traditional communal projects in self-absorbed individualism. We hope to demonstrate that in the modernist self’s quest of interiority, there is also a search for alternative collective bonds, which, as depicted in modernist fiction, very much resemble community as thought by Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot.4 An inoperative community is based on its members’ constant recognition of otherness, finitude and death. Both Nancy and Blanchot take cue from Bataille’s notion of “the community of those who have nothing in common” (Blanchot 1). This is proposed as a tentative, unstable model of community formulated as the momentary encounter of singular beings having nothing in common but their own mortality (Nancy, Inoperative 26–27). According to Blanchot, a community is what “exposes by exposing itself” (12) to an “exteriority” otherwise branded as “death, the relation to the other, or speech” (12). For Blanchot, this kind of community is defined by its spontaneity (30), all-inclusiveness (31) and the sense of its imminent dispersal (33). It is an eventual community,

Introduction  7 which “happens” (32) only momentarily, without duration and without a projection or aim. It does not aspire to communal fusion, for it is “a being-together without assemblage” (Nancy, “Confronted” 32). A quick look at some of the best-known modernist depictions of the individual and its relation to others will reveal the striking similarity with Nancy’s and Blanchot’s communitarian model, which makes highly surprising that there has not been a more thorough application of this theoretical framework to the study of modernism. Modernist fiction is pervaded by situations in which the individual detaches him/herself from socially accepted functions, laws, determinations or exigencies (Blanchot 33), establishing instead an enigmatic communitarian bond, determined by the experience of death and finitude. That is the case of Gabriel in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mrs Dalloway’s inexplicable identification with Septimus Warren Smith when she hears about his suicide or Laura’s intense connection with her brother after having seen a dead man, in Mansfield’s “The Garden Party.” Our contention, then, is that the distinction drawn by Nancy and Blanchot between operative and inoperative communities may prove useful to visibilise recurrent dynamics in modernist fiction, of opposition to some kinds of community and allegiance to or search for others. The essays included in this volume show that many modernist narratives are built on the tension between organic, traditional and essential communities, on the one hand, and precarious, intermittent and non-identitary ones, on the other. Thus, in his analysis of Faulkner’s fiction, Greg Chase formulates the opposition between what he calls communities based on “narratives of knowledge” – stories used to define and control ­individuals – and communities based on “narratives of acknowledgement” – stories that enable a shared understanding of finitude, ­simultaneously inviting and thwarting acknowledgement. Modernist fiction may even depict a longing or nostalgia for traditional forms of community, associated with a lost age and a communal intimacy impossible in modern times. That is the case of Virginia Woolf, as analysed by María J. López, who focuses on Woolf’s depictions of the (pre)medieval English village as a closeknit community, governed by natural cycles, ancient rites and Anon’s storytelling. In Woolf’s concern with a communal linguistic expression that may last throughout English history, we see the nation as modernist communitarian reference, often with the aim of questioning an operative and organic conception of it. In this sense, we agree with Pericles Lewis’s contention that modernist writers use the novel “to rethink the values and institutions associated with the sovereign nation-state” (3). In the hands of many critics, however, the ethnical, political and/or cultural nation has been hypostasised as the only realm of exteriority the individual may confront, thus precluding the functional mediation of

8  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. intervening communities such as the family, the church, a gendered collective, a social class, political party or subnational ethnical group. Thus, the concept of community has tended to suffer from neglect in critical and literary discourse. This has gone together with another tendency discernible in accounts of English fiction – manifest from Ian Watt through Nancy Armstrong – which places an inordinate emphasis on the somewhat synchronous emergence of individualism and the public sphere. The stress on the consolidation of the public sphere, and by extension society – an innovative critical trend largely bolstered by English versions of decisive studies by Habermas and Koselleck – has also had the negative effect of sidetracking the role of community, admittedly a more specific notion than Öffentlichkeit and/or Gesellschaft. There are exceptions to this prevalent tendency, as is the case of Kim Worthington in Self as Narrative (1996), where she analyses the dialectic between subjectivity and community in the work of John Banville, J.M. Coetzee and Margaret Atwood. Worthington considers the modernist “division between self and others” as constituting “an impassable gulf” (4). She rightly traces the modernist tendency to solipsistic alienation back to the “Romantic celebration of inwardness,” but she fails, in our view, to see how the possibility of self-construction via “intersubjective discursive processes” was already at work in modernist fiction. If we are right in our suggestion, the gap “between individual autonomy and communal constructivism” (10) is significantly narrowed not only in the postmodernist fiction she analyses, but also in that of its modernist precursors. Thus, Craig A. Gordon carries out an illuminating account of the relation between modernism, body and community. Examining the interrelation of literary and bioscientific cultures in early twentieth-­century Britain, he focuses on “how the comprehension, representation, and manipulation of the human body becomes crucial to the imagination, formation, and maintenance of different forms of community” (3). Explicitly drawing on Nancy, Gordon sheds light on the different organic communities depicted by modernist texts, while in search for alternative subjective and communal forms focused on what he calls “impossibly material bodies” (16), bodies that resist intelligibility, discursive inscription and cognitive appropriation. As it has already been mentioned, Michael Levenson is one of the scholars who has most strongly pointed at the problematic relation between individual and community in modernist fiction. In Modernism and the Fate of Individuality, Levenson points at the inescapable nature of community, here mostly understood in sociopolitical terms as either national community or the Althusserian ideological state apparatuses. His readings of the modernist novel persistently identify an understanding of subjectivity as communal, but his interpretation of it follows a sociological rather than an ontological line of argumentation. In Modernism, Levenson traces the development of the thought of collectivity

Introduction  9 from realism to naturalism and then to modernism, pointing to the emergence of mass culture and the motives of masses, crowds and mobs as indexes of a shift in the writers’ representation of the individual against the background of the collective (63–69). Using Zola’s Nana as paradigmatic case, Levenson perceives the opening of a gap “between individual and society” (69) to be symptomatic of modernist narrative, in which “the extreme is true.” The Lukácsian interpretation of modernism as the enactment of the rupture between individual and community is here identified with the choice between two extremes, the deviant individual or the irrational mass: “The attempt to comprehend modernity produces not merely the statistics of mass society but also, repeatedly, a portrait of the special case, the singular instance” (71). It is precisely the need to overcome this “either/or” understanding of the modernist novel that triggers our own articulation. Jessica Berman is probably the critic who has most strongly defended the presence of community in modernist fiction. She contends in Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (2001) that “in much high modernist fiction we can already see community being imagined over and over again” (2). Dealing with the work of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Berman argues that these writers’ texts “return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, especially in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality” (3). As she focuses on the relation between community, narrative and historical discourses of social identity and nationality, Berman opposes both liberal political theory and various trends of current communitarian thought, like Charles Taylor’s or Amitai Etzioni’s. She also critiques discourse-based theories of community, like Habermas’s, which present utopian versions of affiliation in the public sphere. Berman argues that the discursive versions of modernist communities are “not predicated on direct communicative speech or the transparency of the intention of the speaker,” but rather show the “difficulty” of “the constant making and un-making of human inter-connections” (6). Berman also finds support in Nancy’s theory of community, especially in the way it allows for the possibility of a political community that goes beyond the consensual public sphere, opening itself to marginal voices that seem to speak outside of politics in general (14–15). Her use of Nancy, then, is quite restrictive and is very much in the service of the social and political analysis she carries out. While we find Berman’s and Levenson’s ideas highly inspiring, this volume works in a different direction, with many of the chapters following much closer Nancy’s – and Blanchot’s – communitarian proposal, which makes a straight political reading problematic. 5 The individual’s fate, furthermore, is fairly absent from Berman’s analysis. Our aim, on the contrary, is to reassess the fate of the modernist individual in the light of new communitarian

10  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. approaches. Thus, López argues that, as opposed to traditional understandings of the modernist writer as an isolated and solipsistic figure, Woolf’s understanding of literary creation is based on the necessary connection between writer and community. In his analysis of the community of women artists in Katherine Mansfield, Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas makes a thorough revision of the modernist understanding of the artist in relation to an aesthetic and political community, drawing on Jacques Rancière’s critical reappraisal of modernism in The Politics of Aesthetics (2006). Rancière speaks of an “aesthetic revolution,” a cultural transformation started at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which led to the emergence of what he calls an “aesthetic regime.” He distinguishes the “representative regime of art” – corresponding to heavily regimented forms of cultural production – from “aesthetic art” – a historically contingent form of art with a political potential because of its ability to shift the aesthetics of politics, or what he calls “primary aesthetics” (13). The promise of political emancipation that Rancière detects in his “aesthetic art” is further developed in Levenson’s conception of modernist writers not as solipsist, but as perceiving themselves to be engaged in forms of “creative violence” (“Introduction” 2). Levenson sees their narrative as strategic: rather than considering them as “elite purists,” they can be painted as artists who were “sharply conscious of their historical entanglements” (ibid.). Some chapters included in the book are more specifically focused on modernist individuality or subjectivity. That is the case of Doug Battersby’s analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said. In his emphasis on the narrator’s desire to inhabit the enigmatic subjectivity of the text’s old woman and on the readers’ epistemological and affective engagement with fictive subjectivity, Battersby points to the importance of imaginative empathy in order to fully appreciate the complexities of the Beckettian subject. Battersby, then, shows the intersubjective nature of Beckettian fictional subjectivity, confirming Castle’s contention that even in the case of modernist “radical solipsism,” such as the one we find in Beckett, there is a vertiginous sense of time and space in which multiple voices create the din of a community – a confused sense of belonging … that, for all its failings, constitutes a new narrative dynamic for character development and the consideration of human action. (4) Tram Nguyen, for her part, deals with the wandering body in Joyce’s Ulysses and Stein’s Ida, exploring the relation between dwelling, identity and sexuality. According to Nguyen, both Joyce and Stein construct an architectonics of bodily dwelling that is open and permeated by the world. Drawing upon the relational aspect of singularities, Nguyen

Introduction  11 investigates a neuter ontology and its connection with corporeity – an aspect further developed in this collection by Carolina Sánchez-­Palencia Carazo. Nguyen f­ ocuses on Heidegger’s formulation of ontological dwelling to examine the strategies employed by Joyce and Stein that germinate the possibility of a primordial being and its neuter sexuality and explores the characters of Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses and Ida in Stein’s eponymous work as case studies to reconsider an alternative perception of singularities. Bonnie Roos explicitly aims to overcome modernist solipsism in her study of Djuna Barnes. Roos’s starting point is that Euro-­A merican modernist criticism has implicitly favoured the individual over the communal. In Nightwood, Barnes highlights the contrast between the conflicted US American capitalist desire for individualism and the belief that true aid for the working classes only results from community, aligning with “red-breasted” or Communist leanings. Barnes’s project, Roos suggests, is not only to underscore the way individualism/capitalism undermines a communal peace process and true security for the working classes, but also to critique even leftist journalism. Roos illuminates this tension between the communal and individual in Barnes’s work by focusing on a character from Nightwood, Jenny Petherbridge, and her ­real-life Parisian counterpart, Marthe Hanau. In the case of those chapters with a more clearly communitarian approach, Mercedes Díaz Dueñas’s and Brian Willems’s contributions delve into the cosmopolitan and transnational concern traversing Berman’s analysis.6 Díaz Dueñas explores how the notions of elitism, classism and cosmopolitanism combine in D.H. Lawrence’s novels The Rainbow and Women in Love to expose different kinds of (operative and inoperative) communities, as defined by Nancy. This approach shares Berman’s argument that “community becomes linked to a cosmopolitan perspective” in response to “the threat of totalitarian models of national community” and that community must be seen as a narrative process (Modernist Fiction 3). Díaz Dueñas highlights the tension of Berman’s and Appiah’s cosmopolitanism and Friedman’s notion of planetary modernisms with Nancy’s communitarian revision, which proves illuminating in the analysis of Lawrence’s novels. Willems explores Berman’s and Levenson’s cosmopolitanism in Olaf Stapledon’s novels, which challenge assumptions about the way modernist subjectivity is created through the tension between individuality and community. The community is not a passive tapestry on which individual identity is weaved; rather, it actively participates in the formation of subjectivity. In a modernist context, this view challenges the ways in which the individual is seen as a reaction or abstraction in relation to cosmopolitan communities. Willems contends that individual subjectivity is actively involved in the cosmic community in a way that Blanchot denies.

12  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. Other contributions deal with an openly communitarian approach that materialises in a community of two, having as reference Blanchot’s community of lovers or friends, which he offers as example of the unavowable community: “the strangeness of that antisocial society or association, always ready to dissolve itself” (33). As pointed out before, Rodríguez-Salas’s focus is on the dual community of women artists. His starting point is Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisation of the artistic community in its relation to modernism, as developed in Rules of Art (1992). Bourdieu contends that the artistic autonomy of the modernist ghetto was a mirage, since it never fully separated from the “field of power” (215). ­Rodríguez-Salas argues that, unlike Woolf, Katherine Mansfield never belonged formally to any artistic community. Her dissatisfaction with the strict “Order of the Artists” but simultaneous need for artistic rapport might have led her to become a “resistance figure” (Badiou 6) against the bourgeois dominant field and the self-appointed modernist groups of artists. Rodríguez-Salas investigates Mansfield’s artistic resistance, an idea further developed by Haffen in her chapter for this collection. Paula Martín-Salván deals with the importance of the pair of male characters in Joseph Conrad’s fiction, arguing that the relationship established among them is never sanctioned by institutionalised forms of community and is not based on the sharing of identitarian individual traces, but rather established against the will of the characters themselves, who are thrown together in asymmetrical relations of non-­ reciprocal confidence and forced hospitality, invoking the logics of host-parasite relations.

Singular, Exposed, Finite In the final passage of “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy conveys an enigmatic communitarian vision, according to which “the living and the dead” are joined together by the falling of the snow. After contemplating the body of a dead man, in Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” Laura experiences an intense connection with her brother Laurie, based on something “she couldn’t explain,” but that “[h]e quite understood” (261). In Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, it is the threat of the Second World War, the threat of death, that creates a bond between characters. As William Dodge puts it, it is “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” (103). In all these texts, what emerges is a community that “differs from a social cell in that it does not allow itself to create a work and has no production value as aim” (Blanchot 11). It is traversed by the experiences of death and otherness. Like the kind of community envisioned by Nancy and Blanchot, it does not have as a goal the establishment of an identity, communal or individual, for its members. Other thinkers, such as ­Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, have also insisted on an idea of community that is free from demands of commonality and is based on

Introduction  13 the identity of its members. Agamben talks about “an inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence” (Coming 18), whereas Esposito defines community as “the totality of persons united not by a ‘property’ but precisely by an obligation or a debt” (Communitas 6). In all cases, they are going back to Bataille’s “community of those who have nothing in common.” In our view, the modernist self unworks the existing relations of operative communities so as to authorise a mode of communal life based on the recognition of and exposure to finitude, contingency and singularity. The tentative expression of this inoperative community, therefore, involves the abandonment of a conception of the subject as rational agent, in possession of a self-constructed identity, in favour of a notion of singularity whose precondition is an exposure to the outside: “communitas is that relation, which in binding its members to an obligation of reciprocal donation, jeopardizes individual identity” (Esposito, Bios 50). As mentioned by Julián Jiménez Heffernan in his chapter for this volume, the intellectual dialogue established around Nancy’s philosophical ideas on individuality and community has reinvigorated a vocabulary inherited mostly, although not exclusively, from Martin Heidegger. Thus, the terms singular, exposed and finite refer to metaphysical and ontological realms as readapted by Nancy. Singularity. The inoperative community is not made up of individuals or subjects, but of singularities: “singular existences that are not subjects and whose relation – the sharing itself – is not a communion, nor the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication” (Nancy, Inoperative 25). The common meaning of “singularity” refers to a single instance of something or a separate being. The etymology of the term, however, already contains the inevitability of the plural, according to Nancy: In Latin, the term singuli already says the plural, because it designates the “one” as belonging to “one by one.” The singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also with and among all the others. The singular is a plural (Being 32) This is the key aspect of Nancy’s take on the concept: “An immanent totality, without an other, would be a perfect individual” (32). The singular, by contrast, “is indissociable from a plurality” (ibid.) in the sense that the term marks a separation, a bringing apart from what was previously together: “The concept of the singular implies its singularization and, therefore, its distinction from other singularities” (ibid.). Singularity is always “plural singularity”: being towards death with others (88). Nancy develops a social ontology inherited from Heidegger: being

14  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. is being with others in that one’s being is only in as far as it is not other beings, a separateness that refashions the Cartesian relation between the self and the res extensa and turns the relational (being with) into the essence of being: “if Being is being-with, then it is, in its being-with, the ‘with’ that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition” (Nancy, Being 30). Nancy insists that the relational – the being-with – is the primary category of existence, rather than a secondary or additional one springing from Being (as individual subject).7 It is precisely this relational aspect that Aude Haffen highlights in her chapter for this collection. She claims that, in his Berlin novels, Christopher Isherwood reshapes the personal, the subjective and the communal into fluid, loosely relational communities of characters, a new approach matched and authorised by unartistic narratives foregrounding the singular, the idiosyncratic and the contingent. Haffen largely relies on Nancy, for whom literature suspends and interrupts the completion of its message or representation – it does not “work” or “operates,” it “plays.” What literature – or “the singular voice of interruption” – communicates (i.e., offers to the community) is “an infinite reserve of common and singular meanings” (Inoperative 193). As Haffen aptly argues, Isherwood’s Berlin novels are only committed to the relational and the singular and detached from sociological or political use. Nancy thus traces a distinction between singular being and subject that points to the former’s lack of self-presence in a Cartesian sense: “The singular is an ego that is not a ‘subject’ in the sense of the relation of a self to itself” (Nancy, Being 32). In Blanchot’s articulation, the traditional understanding of individuality as independent consciousness in a romantic sense and the subject as a “full being,” then, is replaced by a “principle of incompleteness” at the root of being (5). Bataille’s “principle of insufficiency” (ibid.) is precisely what allows the unavowable community to emerge: the “impossibility” of being “a separate individual … summons the other or a plurality of others” (6). “Insufficiency” and “incompleteness,” then, do not disappear in the inoperative or unavowable community. On the contrary, as we are exposed to the “incompleteness” of the other, we recognise the “incompleteness” in us. In such a community, there is “neither the Hegelian desire for recognition, nor the calculated operation of mastery” (34), but the interruption of self-­consciousness and mastery (19). Nancy’s take on the notion of singularity couples it inextricably to the plural: “There is no singular that is not placed in plurality and reciprocally, no plurality that is not always singular” (Devisch 103). In Nancy’s own words: “Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists” (Being 4). The interruption and suspension of singularity prevents “production” and “completion” (Nancy, Inoperative 31), and hence the permanent links of a society: “Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate any bond of belonging for

Introduction  15 which they seek recognition” (Agamben, Coming 86). The temporary nature of inoperative communities has been particularly highlighted by Blanchot: “Inert, immobile, less a gathering than the always imminent dispersal of a presence occupying the whole space and nevertheless without a place (utopia), a kind of messianism announcing nothing but its autonomy and its unworking” (33). The Cartesian subject is replaced by the exposed singularity: “Ego sum expositus” (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Exposure. Community is nothing, except exposure: exposure to an excess, exposure to an outside and ultimately to death. In the first chapter included in this collection, Jiménez Heffernan carries out a thorough analysis of the omnipresence of exposure as an attribute of existence not only in twentieth-century, but also in nineteenth-century fiction, tracing the intellectual archaeology of this concept in ontology and metaphysics and linking it to Heideggerian and Sartrean frameworks. Exposure is, in Blanchot’s terms, “what puts me beside myself” (9). In Agamben’s articulation of the homo sacer, “life exposed to death” is the crucial element for the political. Exposure of singularities to an outside constitutes a central concept for the understanding of the communal and the political. For Agamben, the space of the community is “the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside” (Coming 68). Exposure replaces fusion and communion. It is the sharing and dislocation characterising singular beings: Sharing comes does to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself. … Community does not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself, in sum, is nothing but this exposition (Nancy, Inoperative 26; emphasis in the original) Blanchot links this conception of exposure to “the possibility of a major communication” (25) and depicts it in the following terms: “Now, the ‘basis of communication’ is not necessarily speech, or even the silence that is its foundation and punctuation, but the exposure to death” (25, our emphasis). This conception of the singular being as ontologically exposed to the other is very far from the Paterian conception of each of us as locked up within ourselves. It is probably this paradoxical state that many modernist characters inhabit. On the one hand, they are entrapped by their intense inner life and individual perceptions. On the other hand, they are exposed to the otherness of the world and of other others. By virtue of being exposed, singularities become vulnerable. Agamben coins his notion of “bare life” to refer to the vulnerable condition of those singularities who are exposed to the extent of losing rights and protection (Homo 133). In her analysis of Jean Rhys’s heroines, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo certainly shows these instances of “bare life”

16  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. as presided by patterns of vulnerability – starvation, alcoholism, exile, prostitution, homelessness – and by their very exposure to the limits of (in)humanity. Following Judith Butler’s idea of vulnerability in Precarious Life (20) – and in line with Blanchot’s perception that exposure leads to communication – Sánchez-Palencia Carazo states that vulnerability in Rhys’ characters reveals the condition of interdependence that lays the foundations for reimagining the possibility of empathy and community. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, in turn, links vulnerability with corporeity in the understanding of exposure. For Kristeva, the primary source of the abject reaction is death – because it traumatically reminds us of our own materiality and dissolves the boundaries between subject and object (4). Hence, the connection with our third term in this collection: finitude. In Nancy’s words, the state of being-alongside affirms the fundamental nature of existing as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed (Inoperative 28) Finitude. According to Devisch, Nancy thinks of finitude from the position of finitude itself, in opposition to a Christian thought that would define the human being as finite in opposition to the infinite divinity (29–30). “According to the Cartesian schema,” Anne O’Byrne writes, infinity forms a pair with finitude: there is the infinite thinking substance (God) and the finite thinking substance (the ego). Finitude on this model is a state of lacking the scope of the infinite; it is the state of having boundaries beyond which lies all that infinity has and finitude lacks (86–87) In this sense, Nancy leaves behind the negative quality of the term as a limitation set on infinitude: “it does not consist in a limitation (sensible, empirical, individual, as one would like) which sets itself up dependent upon infinity and in an imminent relation of sublimation or of recovery in this infinity” (“Sharing” 246). Moreover, he claims that it “does not mean a limitation which would relate to man – negatively, positively or dialectically – to another authority from which he would derive his sense, or his lack of sense” (Nancy, “Heidegger” 70). This is the point of departure for Nancy’s thinking on community as unworked and on the individual as no longer self-present – a singularity rather than a subject. His understanding of finitude connects but also

Introduction  17 differs from Jean Paul Sartre’s, who made it a central element in his understanding of ethics and freedom by pointing to how “freedom is interiorization of finitude” (60) in as far as “choice is choice of what I am to the exclusion of all the rest” (60). It connects with the Heideggerian articulation of Being-towards-death as “a prior orientation to temporality govern[ing] any attempt to understand being” (Schalow 30). In Nancy’s articulation, then, finitude indicates an opening, an exteriority or otherness in being, precluding it from self-presence or immanence to itself. The ultimate experience of exteriority for human beings is death, which is omnipresent in modernist fiction. Whereas it is hard to sustain a sense of community based on death from a sociological or political point of view, modernist writers again and again suggest an enigmatic bond between characters whose origin is their shared mortality. It is here, then, that the critical value of Blanchot’s, Nancy’s and Agamben’s communitarian proposal for our understanding of modernist fiction emerges most strongly, given the surprisingly similar terms in which they present the relation between subjectivity and death. Agamben considers death as the negation of “petty bourgeois” individuality: “In death the petty bourgeois confront the ultimate expropriation, the ultimate frustration of individuality: life in all its nakedness, the pure incommunicable” (Coming 64). A common point in Blanchot, Nancy and Agamben is the contention that death is at the centre of the inoperative community, as the ultimate expression of inassimilable experience: “Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself …. A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth” (Nancy, Inoperative 14–15). This death, however, is not transfigured into “some substance or subject – be these homeland, native soil or blood, nation, a delivered or fulfilled humanity, absolute phalanstery, family, or mystical body” (Ibid.). Death remains unassimilable alterity. Greg Forter’s chapter revolves around the notion of finitude. His essay focuses on James Baldwin as a late modernist whose internationalism and cross-ethnic identifications enable an especially trenchant critique of the psychosexuality of white racism. By placing Baldwin in dialogue with Faulkner on one hand and contemporary theories of transnationalism on the other, Forter pays particular attention to Baldwin’s exilic consciousness – his experience of the black-modern self as intrinsically homeless and inhabited by other people’s ghosts – and shows how this estrangement is, for Baldwin, an echo of the foundational estrangements and intimations of finitude so central to poststructuralist theories of the subject. Yet, he is also concerned with historically “surplus” forms of alienation, estrangement and finitude – those that are produced by specific social organizations of power. His attentiveness to the interplay between these enables a unique kind of modernist “knowledge” about racism and desire.

18  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. The writers selected for this volume respond to the recent kaleidoscopic vision of modernism and its cosmopolitan impulse, as theorised by Berman or Levenson. Canonical – and not so canonical – names in British modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Stapledon) are interlaced with central writers in American modernism (Faulkner, Barnes), as well as others who, also canonical, reflect mixed geographical origins (­Mansfield, Rhys, Isherwood). Our focus is on the period of high modernism, but we stretch the movement to consider its evolution to late modernism (Beckett, Baldwin). The present selection of writers aims at exploring modernism from different angles, including gender, class, race and nation. We believe that the ongoing field of modernist studies can profit from communitarian theory, particularly if we focus the lens on the three terms that vertebrate our volume – singular, exposed, finite. It is from this standpoint that the present collection aims to offer its contribution.

Notes 1 Acknowledgment is due to the Spanish Ministry of Economy for the funding received for the development of the research projects FFI2012-36765 (Individual and Community in Modernist Fiction in English) and FFI201675589-P (Secrecy and Community in Contemporary Narrative in English). 2 See Herman (252–253) for a review of the different critical accounts of the purported modernist break with realism. 3 See Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community for an analysis of the contradictions and complications of modernist detachment (16, 27). 4 Our theoretical inspiration, then, comes from the so-called “Nancy debate,” the set of theoretical interventions and responses around a seminal essay, “The Inoperative Community,” published by Nancy in 1983. Both Nancy and Blanchot were very much influenced by Bataille, working in a post-­Nietzschean and post-phenomenological tradition. Roberto Esposito, ­A lphonso Lingis and Giorgio Agamben are some of the authors who have also contributed to this intellectual debate. Since the early 1980s, these thinkers engaged in an intellectual dialogue – Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (1983), followed by Agamben’s The Coming Community (1990), Lingis’s The Community of those who have nothing in common (1994) and Esposito’s Communitas (1998) – which has greatly energised the theoretical status of the notion of community. For a detailed account of communitarian thought, see Heffernan’s “Introduction: Togetherness and its Discontents.” 5 On the difficulties for articulating a political theory out of Nancy’s philosophical ideas, see Esposito (“Community”: 84): “By removing community from the horizon of subjectivity, Nancy made its political ramifications extremely difficult to articulate – starting from the obvious difficulty of imagining a politics that stands entirely outside subjectivity – thus retaining it in a necessarily impolitical dimension.” 6 In her more recent work, Modernist Commitments, Berman further explores modernist transnational and communitarian aspects, focusing on the interrelationship between ethics and politics. 7 On the Heideggerian origin of this idea, see Nancy (Being 26): “Heidegger clearly states that being-with (Mitsein, Miteinandersein, and Mitdasein) is essential to the constitution of Dasein itself. Given this, it needs to be made

Introduction  19 absolutely clear that Dasein, far from being either ‘man’ or ‘subject,’ is not even an isolated and unique ‘one,’ but is instead always the one, each one, with one another.”

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt, U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-­ Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998. Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics. Translated by Jason Barker, Verso, 2006. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism. Columbia UP, 2011. ———. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge UP, 2001. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris, Station Hills P, 1988. Bloom, Harold, editor. Modern Critical Views: Virginia Woolf. Chelsea House, 1986. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Artistic Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford UP, 1995. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. “The Name and Nature of Modernism.” Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930. Edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Penguin, 1991, pp. 19–55. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. Castle, Gregory, editor. A History of the Modernist Novel. Cambridge UP, 2015. Devisch, Ignaas. Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community. Bloomsbury, 2013. Eagleton, Terry. “Contradictions of Modernism.” Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernism. Edited by Manuel Barbeito, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2000, pp. 35–44. ———. The English Novel: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2005. Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell, U of Minnesota P, 2008. ———. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of the Community. Translated by Timothy Campbell, Stanford UP, 2010. ———. “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 18, no. 3, 2013, pp. 83–90. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Cornell UP, 1990. Gordon, Craig A. Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Heffernan, Julián Jiménez. “Introduction: Togetherness and Its Discontents.” Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Edited by Paula MartínSalván, Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas and Julián Jiménez Heffernan, Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1–47. Herman, David. “1880–1945: Re-minding Modernism.” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Edited by David Herman, U of Nebraska P, 2011, pp. 243–272. James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA, vol. 129, no.1, 2014, pp. 87–100. Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Seamus Deane, Penguin, 1992.

20  Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas et al. Kahler, Erich. The Inward Turn of Narrative. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston, Princeton UP, 1973. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982. Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism. A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge UP, 1984. ———. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Edited by Michael Levenson, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1–8. ———. Modernism. Yale UP, 2011. ———. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. Cambridge UP, 1991. Lewis, Pericles. Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge UP, 2000. Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Indiana UP, 1994. Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated by John and Necke Mander. Merlin P, 1963. Mansfield, Katherine. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. 1945. ­Penguin, 1981. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 3, 2008, pp. 737–748. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne, Stanford UP, 2000. ———. “The Confronted Community”. Translated by Amanda Macdonald, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2003, pp. 23–36. ———. “Heidegger’s ‘Originary Ethics’”. Heidegger and Practical Philosophy. Edited by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, SUNY P, 2012, pp. 65–86. ———. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, U of Minnesota P, 1991. ———. “Sharing Voices”. Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From ­Nietzsche to Nancy. Edited by Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, SUNY P, 1990, pp. 211–259. O’Byrne, Anne. “Nancy’s Materialist Ontology”. Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense. Edited by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin, SUNY P, 2012, pp. 79–93. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Oxford UP, 2010. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2006. Robbins, Ruth. Pater to Forster, 1873–1924. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Truth and Existence. Translated by Adrian Van Den Hoven, U of Chicago P, 1995. Schalow, Frank. “Freedom, Finitude, and the Practical Self: The Other Side of Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant”. Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, Ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, SUNY P, 2012, pp. 29–41. Steiner, George. Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. Faber and Faber, 1972. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. Chatto & Windus, 1973. ———. Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Verso, 2007. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Oxford UP, 1992. ———. “Modern Fiction.” Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 6–12. Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in ­C ontemporary Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.

1 “Being Out, Out” Ontological Exposure in Modernist Fiction Julián Jiménez Heffernan

Being in the Bad Air Though perhaps not universally acknowledged, the fact that Jane ­Austen’s young women show an uncommon predisposition to catch colds is well attested. The atmospheric and seasonal circumstances that prompt this contingency are assiduously observed by the novelist. In Emma, for instance, we read a lot about weather, about good and bad air and about the contrast between sickly London and the healthy countryside. In Chapter 12 of the novel, Mr. Woodhouse and his daughter talk about the prevalence of colds during the autumn. When Emma mentions cases of influenza, the father retorts that colds have not been as heavy as in November. The situation, he opines, bears no comparison with the permanent “sickly season” one finds in London, where no one is healthy “and the air so bad” (27). The daughter is bound to agree: ‘No, indeed – we are not at all in a bad air. Our part of London is very superior to most others! – You must not confound us with London in general, my dear sir. The neighbourhood of Brunswick Square is very different from almost all the rest. We are so very airy!’ (97, emphasis in the original) An exchange rich in topographical discrimination – between the South End and Crommer, between different sea-bathing places – meticulously follows. Rambling in appearance, the conversation never loses its grip on a central theme (air) and on characters who “thoroughly [understand] the nature of the air” (101). Although it may appear far-fetched to state that Emma is about the nature of the air – the special quality of social air, the invisible substance that is (esse) between (inter) its people and objects blowing through (perhaps mapping out) the novel’s circuits of ­interest – the truth is that Emma’s fierce rebuttal – “we are not at all in a bad air” – is laden with sociological and metaphysical implications. It helps, for one, to strip down the novel’s onto-drama to a scenario of human bodies that “are very airy,” thus stipulating a very specific (and somewhat exclusive) condition for human existence, that of being exposed.1

22  Julián Jiménez Heffernan But, human existence is not a one-sided experience. Inside the openly allegorical frame set up by the references to an unhealthy London, this existence is predicated both upon biological and social-moral terms. This way, human existence is reconceptualised as a radical mode of ­exposure to a multilayered toxic outside. Admittedly, Jane Austen construed prose fiction as an imaginative bubble-making craft designed to ensure socio-moral protection from the “outside.”2 It is therefore no ­coincidence that exposure should turn into one of the central conditions of the novel’s action. We hear about epistolary charades “exposed … to the public eye” (69); of bodies “exposed” to “the dews of a summer evening” (195); of agitated “feelings … exposed” to neighbors (225); of Emma herself “exposed to odious suspicions” (271); to “degradation” (331); to “ill opinion” (352); and of Jane Fairfax “exposed to danger” (340) or a “thousand inquietudes” (393). But, exposure is not, in the novel, an isolated contingency. It is rather etymologically bound up with a constellation of connected terms like composure, position, imposition, posture, imposture, disposition and indisposition. These notions work jointly to suggest a broad set of moral liabilities and psychosocial affordances. They are, moreover, tropically derived from the root verb ponere. A master fable suggests itself: exposed (ponere) to the related dangers of the physical and social outside (bad air, ill opinion), the individual struggles to retain identity by deploying a defence strategy made up of moral impositions, social position, emotional composure and ­psycho-intellectual dispositions. It all amounts, at bottom, to a dynamics of position. Arguably, this ground dynamics organises the plot logic of high English fiction since its true inception in Pamela and Clarissa. It remains at work, the positional dynamics predictably untouched, in novels of the modernist period. By stressing the irreparable morbidity of the external, modernist novels attest moreover to the rise of the clinical in Western culture, an ascent Michel Foucault links to the vertigo of unbound scrutiny within an infinitely open domain: The space in which the doctor had to operate became an unlimited space [espace ilimité], made up of isolatable events [événements isolables] whose form of solidarity was of the order of the series. The simple dialectic of the pathological species and the sick individual, an enclosed space [espace clos] and an uncertain time, was, in principle, dislocated [dénouée]. Medicine no longer tried to see the essential truth [le vrai essential] beneath the sensible individuality; it was faced by the task of perceiving, and to infinity, the events of an open domain [domaine ouvert]. This was the clinic. (97–98)3 Foucault’s lucid observation is potentially all-inclusive, as it spills over the boundaries of the medical onto other domains, like the sociological,

“Being Out, Out”  23 where a radical widening and internal differentiation of the field were also underway during the long nineteenth century. Les événements d’un domaine ouvert: Balzac and Dickens would have concurred in ­upholding this open field of experiential – and virtually pathological – occurrence as the privileged pragmatic stage where the action of the new sociological novel should be played out. Fears of exposure to the ills of societal cohabitation – the ills of reality unmasked as society (Jameson) or even ideology (Žižek) – can be felt in nearly all prose fictions of the post-­ Richardson era, regardless of whether they are influenced by Rousseau or not. Even the most radically Rousseauian, in their willingness to embrace natural authenticity, betray allegorical responsiveness to societal over-determinants. Take, for instance, this early description in Emily Brontë’s novel: Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house. (1, my emphasis) This description should be placed alongside Elizabeth Gaskell’s account of the unhealthy atmosphere to which the Brontë sisters were exposed while lodging as interns at Cowan Bridge School, with “windows [that] do not open freely and widely” and narrow and tortuous passages that forced “smells [to] linger about the house” (54) with damp clinging to it.4 The effect that these and other impending confinements had in the tragic destiny of Anne and Emily is well known. Another notorious instance of symbolic investment is Dickens’s use of the East Wind in Bleak House, a novel signally informed by the risks of premature social exposure. 5 In this essay, exposure will be construed as an attribute of existence. By thus bringing these two ontological categories into joint focus, my argument deliberately falls back on a mode of interpretation that is now distinctly unfashionable. By rehearsing a passé Lukácsian perspective and deploying, at my own peril, a post-Hegelian perspective burdened with ontological jargon, I intend to capitalise on such dubious distinction. ­Unlike epic verse and tragedy, two textual modes tormented by questions of essence – “How can life become essence?” (Lukács, Theory 30) – and many strands of classical-realist fiction that remained addicted to ­immanence, modernist fiction placed its emphasis on what Lukács called “the gravity of existence” (120).6 This sounds, I am aware, grandiosely pretentious. But, I shall not refrain from adopting this historiographic commonplace and its attendant speculative categories, for they faithfully

24  Julián Jiménez Heffernan capture the pathos of a cultural moment bound to choose between makeshift, histrionic, transcendence (James, Proust, Dostoievski, Lawrence) and discreet contingency (Musil, Kafka, Beckett). Those gesturing towards transcendence were anxious to enforce that “there is not … any exterior, any ‘otherness’ for the soul” (Lukács, Theory 30; “kein Aussen, kein Anderes für die Seele”, 22). For those moored in contingency, there was, instead, little more than a “rough weather outside” (Joyce, Ulysses 145). The conceptual framework resulting from my use of these categories will be brought to bear on the reading of three modernist novels: The Awkward Age, Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway. Since the conceptual clarification will be demanding and take much space, my engagement with the novels, of necessity allusive and incomplete, should be taken less as a comprehensive interpretation than as an invitation to reading.

Existence and Exteriority In his 1986 essay on community, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy facilitated a reactivation of an ontological vocabulary that had been originally launched by Martin Heidegger in 1927. Finitude and singularity are the two most important notions in the essay, and both have roots in the lexicon of traditional ontology and metaphysics. By contrast, the concept exposure, or exposition (the French term is exposition), lacks this scholastic pedigree. Yet, Nancy resorts to it in a crucial moment of his essay, when he defines communication in terms of com-parution or compearance and exteriority: Communication consists before all in this sharing and in this compearance (com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of ­being-in-common – precisely inasmuch as being-in-common is not a common thing. The finite being exists first of all according to a ­ artes – division of sites, according to an extension – partes extra p such that each singularity is extended (in the sense that Freud says: ‘The psyche is extended’). The finite being is not enclosed in a form – although its whole being touches against its singular limit – but it is what it is, singular being (singularity of being), only through its extension, through the areality that above all extroverts it in its very being – whatever the degree or the desire of its ‘egoism’ – and makes it exist only by exposing it to the outside. This outside is in its turn nothing other than the exposition of another areality, of another ­singularity – the same being. This exposure, or this ­exposing-sharing, gives rise, from the outset, to a mutual interpellation of singularities prior to any address in language (though it gives to this latter its first condition of possibility). Finitude compears, that is to say it is exposed: such is the essence of community. (Inoperative 29)

“Being Out, Out”  25 In this fraught passage, Nancy argues that community occurs in the mutual partition-enhancing exposure of finite singularities. It may be worth recalling, at this particular juncture, that Jacques Derrida avouched, with etymological bravado, that “Finnegans Wake répresente déjà ce partage, ce depart et cette partition de toute la culture, de toute l’histoire et de toutes les langues qu’il condense” (Ulysse 25, my ­emphases).7 Thus, necessity and contingency meet in an ontological scenario made of ever-separating singularities, a Weltbild or world-picture (Heidegger) with roots in classical existentialism. Indeed, Sartre had already adduced “the necessity of existing as an engaged contingent being among other contingent beings” (309; “la nécessité d’exister comme être contingent engagé parmi les êtres contingentes,” 356). Mutual engagement determines exposure, and this exposure or exposition is notionally bound up with other concepts like exteriority, extroversion, extension and, more importantly, existence.8 What all of these notions share is the morphological tattoo of the ex-, a prefix that glances to the spatial outside where community occurs.9 To be sure, only to critics with real stakes in existentialism – i.e., scholarly readers who are willing to claim their lineage back to Nietzsche, Marx or Heidegger – would the designation of literary characters as existers make any sense, an exister being, in plain Lacanese, the being who works to be included out.10 As Fredric Jameson has astutely noted, the rationale of such in(ex)clusion is to be sought in the fact that what is really “modern about the [Cartesian] cogito turned out to be, not subjectivity, but extension” (44–45, my emphasis). I want to remark that the sense of impending threat brought about by the simultaneous co-presence of subjectivity and external extension is not necessarily to be inflected in ethical terms, as the agon of infinite irresponsiveness paralyzing the “self” when it “confronts a Faktum that places an overwhelming demand upon it” (Critchley 37, emphasis in the original). There is as yet no room for moral impasse in the ontological field crisscrossed by existers. This kind of pre-ethical, strict-ontological approach to the literary text is rare, especially today, when Levinasian affectation remains still alarmingly widespread. An interesting exception is Agnes Heller, not casually a disciple of Lukács, who, in her fine book on Shakespeare, speaks abundantly of existers. Though pertinent, this category would prove decidedly more apropos in discussions of modernist fiction, applied to characters like Ulrich, Lily Briscoe, Gregor Samsa, Mattia Pascal, Lord Jim, Robin Vote, Jakob von Gunten, Hyacinth, Ursula and their likes. Jean-Luc Nancy has much to say about the prefix ex-; in his essay Être singulier pluriel (1996), he elaborates on the idea of an exposure of ­singularities. Interestingly, in this essay, he also establishes a connection between existence, exposure and disposition. The lexical set thus obtained forces us to look at the morphological constituent parts of the term exposure or exposition, made up of ex- and -position. As in his previous

26  Julián Jiménez Heffernan essay, Nancy seeks to strike a balance between communal com-parution and existential exposure, between la mesure de l’avec (coming into being with) and la mesure de l’ex (coming into being out). All too visibly, this Heidegger-Nancy dialogue rehearses, with sheer modernist gusto, the conceptual possibilities of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism in order to frame a realistic narrative of human existence, equally open to individual isolation and communal life. Nancy first submits the figural potential of the verb s’exposer when averring that we make sense (“nous faisons sens”) not by conferring prices or values, but rather “by exposing the absolute value that the world is by itself” (4; “en exposant le valoir absolu que le monde est par lui-même,” 22). World (monde) in this sentence means the absolute value “as the being-with of all that is itself bare and impossible to evaluate” (4; “comme l’être-avec de tout ce qui est, lui-même nu et inévaluable,” 22, emphasis in the original). He drops a preliminary conclusion: “It is neither meaning (vouloir-dire) nor the giving of value (dire-valoir), but value as such, that is, ‘meaning’ which is the meaning of Being only because it is Being itself, its existence, its truth. Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists” (4)11

Existence and Position Existence, in short, is with, or nothing exists. So far, both the notion of the world as hermeneutic realm of significance (le sens) and the idea of being-with (Mitsein) are unmistakably Heideggerian in tone and outreach. This “rudimentary ontological attestation” (6) proves, then, that existence exists, in a primary and irreducible way, as “an exposition of singularity” (9).12 The etymology of the term (exposition) is indirectly borne out by reference to Kant: “Being” is neither a state nor a quality, but rather the action according to which what Kant calls “the [mere] positing of a thing” takes place (“is”). The very simplicity of “position” implies no more, although no less, than its being discrete, in the mathematical sense, or its distinction from, in the sense of with, other (at least possible) positions, or its distinction among, in the sense of between, other positions. In other words, every position is also dis-position, and, considering the appearing that takes the place of and takes place in the position, all appearance is co-appearance (com-parution). (Nancy, Being 12)13 Following, then, an insight that is lifted from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, probably through the mediation of Heidegger’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Nancy first assimilates being to position and then goes on to suggest the equivalence between position and disposition. No sleight of hand there, if only a Heideggerian gusto for homophonic

“Being Out, Out”  27 association and etymological slipperiness. Also indebted to the German thinker is the insistence on an access to the truth of the origin that is inescapably shrouded in the jargon of un-concealment ­(Unverborgenheit): “L’accès est le ‘venir en présence’, mais la presence elle-même est la dis-position, l’espacement des singularités” (32, my emphasis). To sum up: existence exists means that presence is dis-position. But, how, or from where, can a new presence (a creation) position itself in a world that presumably owes its existence to an identical occurrence of ex nihilo positing? Nancy rhapsodises with strained conviction: Not only is the nihil nothing prior but there is also no longer a “nothing” that preexists creation; it is the act of appearing (surgissement), it is the very origin insofar as this is understood only as what is designated by the verb “to originate.” If the nothing is not anything prior, then only the ex remains—if one can talk about it like this—to qualify creation—inaction, that is, the appearing or arrival (venue) in nothing … The nothing, then, is nothing other than the dis-position of the appearing (la dis-position du surgissement). (16)14 In Finnegans Wake, we find a confirmation of this explosive, ­dis-positional creationism in a passage where marital sex is reduced to positional harmony: “Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position of harmony. Say!” (559). Joyce, who savoured the verb to exist and its unlikely cognates (existents, existencies, existings, existers) as much as he revered the ob-scenics of love-making, also gave us a counter-creationist – more literally, a birth-dogged or birth-bitched – version of existence that prefigures Vladimir’s demonstration of the existence of God in Waiting for Godot: In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that en-tails the ensuance of existentiality. (Finnegans 18) It is perhaps worth noting that Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, only four years before the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le néant (1943), admittedly the vademecum of scholastic existentialism. Both works, I’d argue, provide simultaneously the exhaustion point and the climax to discursive practices largely urged by the tropical intensities and argumentative demands of the prefix ex-. These intensities and these demands, more than the discursive practices themselves, can rightly

28  Julián Jiménez Heffernan be called modernist. There are similarly excessive texts in other traditions and in other historical periods. But, few are so overwhelmingly haunted by the anxieties of in-dis-position or so inexorably drenched in an aura of paranoid individual vulnerability to the outside – by the certitude, in short, that one exists in the ex-. In the remarkable chapter of L’être et le néant titled “Le Corps comme Être-Pour-Soi: La Facticité,” ­Sartre risked, through a plain grammatical infraction, a rather memorable statement: “la conscience existe son corps” (“Consciousness exists its body,” 378). By thus transforming the intransitive verb to exist into a transitive one dependent on an invisible subject (consciousness), Sartre contrives to furnish this subject with a horizon of visible spatial ­extension – the res extensa of the body. This brings to mind the obscure Freud apothegm, “Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon” (psyche is outstretched, without knowing it), glossed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida.15 In both statements, the inference is that the existence of consciousness or psyche is contingent on its prior positing: existence is position, and position necessarily involves both a bodily articulation and a spatial orientation – perhaps, both are the same thing. Sartre elsewhere describes the self (“ce que je suis”) as “le surgissement contingent d’une orientation parmi l’infinie possibilité d’orienter le monde: il est cette orientation élevée à l’absolu” (365). Nancy similarly argued that being involves an embodied, space-opening clinamen: being is both dis-­position and separation (écartement). Alain Badiou has likewise resorted to the lexicon of positional dynamics in order to stipulate the specificity of Heideggerian ontology, where being is predicated both upon thrownness ­(Geworfenheit) and disposition: “Il y a un être-là, il y a un jeté-là, il y a un disposé-là de l’expérience humaine” (124, my emphasis). It is this background analytic that explains Badiou’s preference for a concept like “dispositif de sujet” (126), translatable as subject-device. For what is a posed, posited, exposed, disposed subject, if not a dispositif? Who, if not the “unsearchable dispose” (Samson Agonistes 1746) of providence, decided to disperse these dis-posited and post-lapsarian subjects across the secular chessboards of existence? All the same, what is striking about Nancy’s and Sartre’s parallel statements is their similar readiness to rest on absolutist claims – ­Nancy’s “valoir absolu” and Sartre’s “élevée à l’absolu.” No social law (no restraint, no constraint) obtains in this grounding ontological realm where the absolute nature of the externalised, embodied, posited ­existent is established. To explain this, we must regress to their shared source in Heidegger. As I suggested earlier, Nancy draws on Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant. In a footnote in Être singulier pluriel, he acknowledges this debt: “on presuppose ici La these de Kant sur l’être de Heidegger” (30). Still, there is a greater indebtedness to the early chapters in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), where the

“Being Out, Out”  29 German philosopher examines Immanuel Kant’s claim that existence is not a real predicate, but rather an “absolute position.” While being is described as a relative position – as the effective actuality of the totality of determinations included in a concept – existence is the absolute positioning of those determinations. Thus, the absolute position of existence is outside (ex-) the concept.16 If we inflect the position of existence with its enabling prefix or mark of exteriority (ex-), what we get is exposition, or exposure. Heidegger begins quoting Kant’s definition of being in his 1763 tract The Only Possible Basis for the Demonstration of the Existence of God: “Das Dasein ist die absolute Position eines Dinges” (Grundprobleme 45) (“Existence is the absolute position of a thing”). An important conceptual equivalence is later suggested between the Latinate term Position and the Germanic Setzung (Grundprobleme 50–51). I call attention to this lexical equivalence because its shared valence does some significant work in the tropic underground of German idealist speculation, especially in Fichte, and it resurfaces with new impetus in the modernist-­ existentialist staging of the isolated Dasein, a sacrificial positioning of bare existence – ecce corpus homini – best epitomised in Eliot’s Kafkaesque line: “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.”17 ­Nietzsche will later describe figural work – the quasi-autonomous agency of tropes – in terms of positioning (Setzung), a choice not overlooked by Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading (122). If the Belgian critic’s determination to reduce existential position to tropological positing is anti-humanist, then we might have to revise the chronology of anti-humanism. I am not saying that for Kant the human being is as defenceless as a contingent, sliding trope. I am merely saying that he lays down the speculative conditions where human original exposure can be asserted. Kant’s radical thesis that “being is only the position of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves” is first glossed by Heidegger in the following way: First of all, what is meant by the negative thesis that being is not a real predicate or, as Kant also says, that being is not at all the predicate of a thing? That being is not a real predicate signifies that it is not the predicate of a res. It is not a predicate at all, but mere position. (Basic Problems 33, emphases in the original) The Latin etymology of the term Position (position