Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan 0810147009, 9780810147003

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Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form McGuinn, Jacob

Published by Northwestern University Press McGuinn, Jacob. Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan. Northwestern University Press, 2024. Project MUSE.

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/126729.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/126729

Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form

Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan

Jacob McGuinn

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2024 by Northwestern University. Published 2024 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: McGuinn, Jacob, author. Title: Reading at the limits of poetic form : dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan / ​Jacob McGuinn. Description: Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 2024. | ​I ncludes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023058766 | ​ISBN 9780810146983 (paperback) | ​ISBN 9780810146990 (cloth) | ​ISBN 9780810147003 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–­1969—­Criticism and interpretation. | ​ Blanchot, Maurice—­Criticism and interpretation. | ​Celan, Paul—­Criticism and interpretation. | ​Poetry, Modern—­20th century—­H istory and criticism. | ​ Materialism in literature. | ​Poetics. Classification: LCC PN1270.5 M34 2024 | ​DDC 808.1—­dc23/eng/20231221 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023058766

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Poetry, Criticism, and Indeterminacy

vii

1

Chapter 1 Reading Indeterminacy: From Poetic Materiality to Materialist Aesthetics

25

Chapter 2 After Communication: Neutrality, Fragmentation, and Literary Politics in the 1960s

53

Chapter 3 Disastrous Materiality: Neutrality and the “Impossible Real” in Blanchot’s Fragmentary Writing

87

Chapter 4 Progressive Impossibility: Reading the Art Object in Adorno

111

Chapter 5 Something in Poetry: Reading Poetry’s Material-­I mmaterial

133

Chapter 6 The Figure of Snow: Elegiac Reading

165

Conclusion Legibility at the Limits of Materiality

191

List of Abbreviations

199

Note on References and Translations

201

Notes

203

Bibliography

227

Index

237

Acknowledgments

This book was written over a number of years, transforming through discussions with a number of people. At Northwestern, I would like to thank Faith Wilson Stein for her support of the project, and Maia Rigas and the rest of the editorial and production team for their careful and thoughtful work in turning it into a book. At Queen Mary and elsewhere, I would also like to thank Josh Cohen, Sophie Corser, Paul Hamilton, Mark Currie, Joel Grossman, Michael Gilbert, Niall Gildea, Hetta Howes, Ivan Juritz, Rosie Langridge, Monika Loewy, David Nowell Smith, Sophie Seita, Laura Tenschert, Calum Watt, and David Wylot, all of whom directly read, talked over, or critiqued aspects of the project. The book is dedicated to my father, Nick, my first teacher, for our ongoing conversation. The research from which this book emerged was generously supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council at Queen Mary, University of London.



vii

Introduction

Poetry, Criticism, and Indeterminacy

Materiality is in question in literature. Whether it constitutes the phenomenal level of the literary object—­the book or page, the surface of inscription and text, the marks of inscription—­the historical level of context, or the referential level of signification, reading literature means in some sense constructing or construing a materiality for that literary object. Located in these competing levels, the objecthood of literature is difficult to determine. The transformations of historical “matter” into the “materiality” of words are in question in critical materialism. Indeed, this book is interested in the ways this materiality of poetry resists attempts to substantiate it. This interest focuses on a body of work, the late poetry of Paul Celan, in which that material presence is identified with a resistance to presentation. Celan’s poems represent objects in terms of a dematerialization, as an unmaterializable material. The poetry is written through a similarly uncertain space—­a terrain of protesting streets, walls, windows, through places of transition where objects such as ash, glass, and snow are similarly provisional or transitory—­and written through an uncertain time, through a decade of protest that starts with the decolonizing insurrections of Algeria and closes with the student-­worker uprisings of May 1968. Poetic form, in this writing, is grounded in this limit space and provisional time. Instead of marking the substance or terminus of reading, materiality in this poetry constitutes its limit, what cannot be read. However, far from thus withdrawing from the world into an immaterial nothing, this poetry insists on the presence of this de-­substantiated material, this something: history’s and politics’ dematerialized realities. What we are reading, in Celan’s poetry, is an indeterminate object, material figured as the limit to reading, and poetry figured in a limited materiality. This book is concerned with how we read this something, this material-­immaterial, in terms of an objectivity that cannot be reduced to material presence. The central question of this book is therefore how dematerialization comes to frame this poetic writing. In the example of Celan, this means focusing on poems after his Meridian speech (1960), in which he articulates poetry’s “meridian,” its border or transformational position in relation to history and its objects. And this means also reading through the Parisian political turmoil

1

2 Introduction

ranging from the state of emergency of May 1958, to decolonization (Algeria, Vietnam), to the student-­worker uprising of May 1968. My intention is to show how Celan’s resistance to interpretation in this period is framed by a more central resistance in poetic representation. Celan’s significant illegibility, then, his resistance to reading, figures both a resistance of material in poetry to presentation, and a resistance to fundamental spatial and temporal conditions of reading, all of which track a decisively political indeterminacy. The world of Paris is represented as resisting poetic determination, but the poetry is also presented as resisting the determination of its own politics. Understanding this poetry’s resisting material will mean addressing politics, but doing so, again, not in terms of extending the reach of poetic representation, but in terms of a limiting dialectic. But this book also wants to register the ways this radical form of resisted representation constitutes not only a challenge to interpretation, but to the idea of critical form, too. This challenge to reading was registered by the two critics and writers who form the other main object of this work, Maurice Blanchot and Theodor Adorno. I read Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970) as developing an anti-­systematic response to a closure of idealist paradigms of both criticism and politics. Similarly, I read Blanchot’s late turn to fragmentation, from The Infinite Conversation (1969) to The Step Not Beyond (1973) and The Writing of the Disaster (1980), through his attempts to engage and disengage literature from both politics and criticism from the late 1950s to 1968. Both these writers, this book claims, offer parallel attempts to think criticism’s implication with dematerialization, the ways that reading means opening up a space in which materiality appears as the extreme limit or edge of that space. This triangulation of readers is opened, however, by a further triangulation. While this question of the indeterminacy of matter in literature comes into focus in my book around 1970, it develops a more fundamental question of literary objecthood that was introduced by Kant in the 1790s. This space, indeed, is the same terrain opened up by Kant’s aesthetic in his critical project. In Kant’s account, the object of aesthetic judgment—­the object under its aesthetic judgment—­is not only limited but indeterminate: it is neither determined by that judgment nor terminating in that judgment. This structure aligns with Kant’s account of the limits of matter in thinking as such, but it also opens up the possibility of thinking material, in the aesthetic, as both limited and free from determination. The dynamic, provisional, extreme materiality which emerges in Adorno and Blanchot can be routed through this aesthetic structure. In gathering this poetic and critical argument together, the claim I want to develop is not only that material is described in new or different ways in its poetic articulation, in poetic form, but that the material encountered in reading poetry is itself radically indeterminate. And reading that poetic material means giving experience over to a radically indeterminate form of experience. The question of what form might mean in this pressure (either poetic

Poetry, Criticism, and Indeterminacy

3

form, or the philosophical “form” that underwrites aesthetic experience and, even if cryptically, critical judgment) is in a sense the question of its limit: what is the form or condition by which something like poetry becomes legible? The intention here is to think about the conditions of reading material in poetry, rather than to make any claims about the exemplarity of its poetic articulation. But that limit space between reading and inscription, between “poetics” as an account of the formative conditions of making or production and “poetics” as a discourse on poetry, is under striking pressure in Adorno’s and Blanchot’s thinking. Celan’s incorporation of this space into his poetics is disturbing. What we will come to think of as his “exilic” writing challenges criticism to inhabit a space which is itself uncertain. When one reads Celan’s late poetry, one reads a space under negotiation. This is not only to say that the spaces Celan writes are indeterminate spaces—­though they are: Paris, streets, moors, Jerusalem, windows, snow crystals, are all spaces of mediation and movement; they are “inbetween” spaces, or “meridians,” to use Celan’s words. It is also to say that the space of reading is under negotiation. The ways in which readers are positioned by the poems, addressed by them, and the ways in which reading figures the poems’ space, are entangled here with the ways these poems imagine their own space, the ways they take up space. Celan’s poetry thinks through exilic spaces, but it also thinks through the exilic character of the space of reading. Reading his work, reading with Adorno and Blanchot, will mean occupying this indeterminate space. This book has two aims, and the rest of this introduction will cover their connection through the paralleled indeterminacies of politics, philosophy, and poetry. My aim, first, is to think dematerialization as a condition of materialization in poetry: that language, in poetic form, consists in patterns of manifestation which depend upon an erasure and deletion of space and time, the physical space of the page that writing takes up in inscription, or the ideal space of reading occupied by inscription. The object which emerges from this poetry is indeterminate in the sense of presenting a materiality which consists in its resistance to determination or apprehension. Developing this means also being attentive to the ways that such an emergence of legibility—­of material, historical, and political content—­is conditioned by an illegibility. Through my reading of Adorno and Blanchot, I therefore intend to consider a picture of materialist reading at and as the limits of materiality encountered in poetic form. The second aim, then, is to find a form of critical interpretation that is adequate to the indeterminate materiality of literary writing, as presented by Celan, both in its relation to historico-­political contexts, and in its relation to criticism as an organized procedure of interpretation. With Kant, we develop a picture of criticism’s aesthetic autonomy (its autonomy as both a disciplined organization of knowledge and its autonomy as an experience) which is predicated on a necessary non-­determination of its object, art. Adorno and Blanchot, figured in this book as readers of Kant, provide a way to think in

4 Introduction

this sense a shared indeterminacy between literature and criticism. Developing this “around 1970,” as I say, means locating the consequences of this setting of autonomy in indeterminacy at a crucial turning point in criticism and politics. I will develop this in some depth in this introduction, as well as in chapter 2, but for now it will suffice to suggest that reading this constellation of writers on materiality around 1970, through a Kantian aesthetic, offers an alternative route to our own present in theorizing criticism. In the body of poetry in question here, a poetic negotiation of the materiality of poetry’s materials entails a layering of their substantiality with politics and history. This layering exposes those dimensions to a poetic indeterminacy, but it also puts us readers at a limit. A critical task of identifying contexts, of bringing the literary object into alignment with these contexts, of substantiating the poem, is put under question by this positioning. How should criticism, placed in this extreme position, function in response not to its object’s presence, but to its present dematerialization?

Buffaloes: Politics, Poetry, Indeterminacy I have suggested above that reading Celan, in Paris, around 1970, means confronting a certain politics. This section focuses on a single poem of his, “Coagula,” which gives shape to the way poetic, political, and critical issues become entangled in the formal and material indeterminacies I have just outlined. In the poem, the poetic problem of the indeterminacy of address transforms into a political problem of determining political futures, which recurs on a critical level as a problem of how criticism also functions from a future which is not determined in the poem. In tracing this series of transformations, we are confronted by what I think are the political and critical stakes of reading such indeterminate poetic writing. “Coagula,” written between 1962 and 1965, can be read as an elegy, but one of only indeterminate reference. Indeed, the poem opens with a “wounded” space, “Auch deine / ​Wunde, Rosa” (Your wound / ​too, Rosa).1 It then adds to this wound a series of images: of buffaloes, of starlight and a “sandbed,” of an “alembic.” Rather than the closure of reference, in the poem’s alembic of images, this rose enters an open series of images, a series of images of open relation. There is something about this image, this object of address, “you”—­Rosa—­which is not determined, which does not terminate, which is wounded open. Is “Rosa” a rose, or Rose Ausländer, a poet from Celan’s home town of Czernowitz, or Rosa Luxemburg, herself a theorist of the politically uncertain outcomes of revolution (Bolshevik or Spartacist)? The latter might be suggested by the ways Luxemburg functions as an emblem of sorts for Celan’s own political topos: Jewish, from the east (Poland), and a victim of far-­right murder in Berlin.2 This is further suggested by the correspondence between the poem and a letter Luxemburg wrote from prison in

Poetry, Criticism, and Indeterminacy

5

Breslau in 1917, where, looking through the grill of her cell-­window’s bars, she saw buffaloes which she supposed were from Romania. But this “you” is not quite, even, a “you.” Celan does not address “you,” but “your wound,” the separation of “you” from yourself. This might be thought in the context of Martin Buber’s “I-­Thou,” in which he describes addressing an abstracted, eternal “you” which is not, however, an object of use.3 But Celan seems here to be addressing the not-­you, “your wound.” The object of address is one which disfigures the condition of address. There are two poetic questions here. First, how does the poem construct this “you” it addresses, this “wound”? And second, how does that alchemical, coagulating image terminate into something like the presence of its object? The poem imagines itself as an image too, an alembic, an alchemical “coagulation” of an image. Can the image of the “rose” contain, or alchemically distill, its elegiac object, “Rosa”? We do not have Rosa, we have “your wound;” we do not have the “buffaloes,” we have their “hornslight.” In invoking this image/Rosa in this way, Celan is asking a question about how images function when, instead of determining the presence of an object in reference, being an image is both the condition of being addressable, a “you,” and the erasure, in part, of what is addressed, your “wound.” The rose plays an important role in Celan’s poetic topos, most famously perhaps in “Psalm,” from Die Niemandsrose, or The No-­One’s-­Rose (1963). A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-­, the No one’s rose. Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-­, die Niemandsrose.4

“You” again functions as both a terminus—­what we “flower” toward—­and empty, “no one.” “You” is bound, in the image of the rose, to no one, nothing. The rose’s symbolic function is both enacted and emptied. But it is curious that this nothing is positive. In Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe’s reading, this “nothing” is the “nothingness of being” in Celan’s poetry, a sublime emptying of being which is the condition for Being around which Celan’s language turns.5 I shall return to this problematic reading in detail in chapter 5, “Something in Poetry,” but here I want to emphasize the ways being addressed means, as in “Coagula,” being in some manner negated, null, without recompense. The difficulty here is the entanglement of political and poetic modes. Who,

6 Introduction

indeed, is this “we” who address, addressing “nothing,” but itself “nothing”? Of what is this rose, organic bloom of nothing, an image? The image is also, recalling its tradition, an elegiac symbol of remembrance. The difficulty is that it does not bring to presence, does not re-­member, put back together, what it remembers; nor does it re-­member that nothing-­we into some determinate “us.” This no-­symbol does not re-­member, return to membership the “we” who say, or, in “Psalm,” “sing” it, because in addressing nothing, the “we” has no reflective object to determine itself—­a lack of ground which returns also to the we who read this non-­object. Rather than substantiation, we have the simulate Rosa, the simulate rose. We have the wound rose. This is the you the poem addresses: the wound where you are not identical with your appearance, the space of the image. Politics is not only a theoretical issue in this poem. We should note the way the image emerges in “red,” Celan’s mark, as we shall see in chapter 2, for socialist politics and its historical frustrations. The structure of the image recapitulates a political act of identification with some other. In her prison letter from Breslau, Luxemburg imagines the buffaloes’ journey from Romania to this yard—­which means elegizing them, measuring the distance between this present and their lost past through the loss which that present embodies. “How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-­green fields of Romania.”6 Here is exile, not Romania. This is not only the imaginative displacement of the objective scene, but also a subjective displacement through imagination, a self-­displacement. Luxemburg identifies with the animal, writing, “Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself; I am at one with you in my pain, my weakness, and my longing.”7 But identifying with the buffaloes means dis-­identifying from the self. “I stood before it, and the beast looked at me; tears were running down my face—­they were his tears.”8 She does not cry as herself, but as the buffalo; the “I” is displaced into the third person, “him.” Not only is “here” exile, but “I” am exiled by this here. Luxemburg becomes the space which marks or makes legible the animal’s suffering. “My face”; “his tears.” The space of the image—­like these prison bars, the Sprachgritte which comprise the title of one of Celan’s collections—­measures this displacement, this disconnection. In this image-­alembic, Luxemburg herself becomes the figurative space in which the buffaloes’ exile becomes legible, literally, in writing this letter, and in which figurative identification their exile is opened, indeterminately, to other identifications: first of all, Luxemburg’s own. In his redeployment of this letter, reinscribing it into poetry, Celan also no doubt draws upon his own self-­displacement, finding his exiled past reproduced there. Luxemburg’s displacement is an image in the poem. Celan’s history is drawn in, too, with the buffaloes and Romania, from which (writing now in the 1960s, in Paris) he was exiled. But Romania, a kind of homeland, is already a site of displacement for Celan. His own home country, before his time in Romania, Bukowina (Bukovina), was not only, like the buffaloes’

Poetry, Criticism, and Indeterminacy

7

Romania, lost for him, but lost entirely, subsumed after the war into Ukraine and Romania. “Home” means exile. Luxemburg, imprisoned in Breslau and eventually murdered in Berlin, was, like Celan, from the east (Poland), and so like Celan (as he writes in “Coagula’s” companion poem “Solve”) “De-­ easterned”;9 and as Jewish, in a different sense “de-­easterned” in exile from Jerusalem.10 But “Coagula” does not present such identifications. The poem rather marks the displacement of “you,” the exile of “you,” the displacement of orientation itself, of the east, of an object to mourn. “You” is a non-­object of poetic address constructed by those rhetorical procedures of address. It marks a loss of its subject as an identifiable object. This is the paradox of identification: that any identification proceeds from a displacement, a wound. And recognizing this form of displacement constitutes a kind of politics, a way of giving form to one’s relation to another. How would we recognize that displacement, without replacing it, without the poem standing aesthetically (symbolically, figuratively, or emphatically) for what is lost? The poem does not just mourn a lost object, or a lost homeland, or a lost friend, but a loss of loss, a loss of that capacity to identify effectively what is lost—­first of all to its own inscriptions. But if, as I suggest, there is a kind of politics in this poem, then can that politics be detailed in the teeth of this poetics of radical loss? For Luxemburg, advocating for revolutionary politics means advocating for a political spontaneity which defies determination. There can be no prior political determination of what form any properly revolutionary politics would take. Instead, if it is to open politics to its potential difference, a revolution must be “spontaneous,” indeterminate. Revolutionary politics requires thinking of a future which is possibly different from the present, and which therefore cannot be predetermined in the present. This is a question of form. Identifying with the buffalo as other to her means exercising such spontaneity in the self: becoming a transformative site for dis-­identification. Luxemburg’s attempts to give theoretical form to revolutionary praxis led her to the paradoxical idea of “spontaneity”: that revolution overturns, first of all, its own theoretical conditions. This is because the political outcomes of revolution, in a kind of intensified Marxism, are not determined by either its material conditions or its political means. Spontaneity thinks across this paradox: that the means of revolution are indeterminately related to their ends; that the ends of revolution are strictly indeterminate. So, Luxemburg argues, “revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.”11 Class consciousness cannot be adequately taught by theory, but must be learned “in the continuous course of revolution.”12 Any dialectical self-­consciousness of politics must be produced “in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight.”13 The relation of strikes to the 1905 Russian Revolution, to use her example, is indeterminate: “it is ceaselessly moving, a changing sea of phenomena.”14 Such politics must be thought in this dynamic space of organization, in which the revolution becomes a kind of organism, with strikes as

8 Introduction

its “living pulse-­beat.”15 When we judge the historical relation between means and end, cause and effect, we are asked to judge as if the former does not simply produce the latter.16 The “spontaneous stirrings of exploited masses and the various socialist theories”17 are connected spontaneously, constituting an inorganic form of organization—­one in which ends do not emerge from causes. Political praxis is connected with theory without that praxis offering a terminus for theory, or that theory determining the effects of that praxis. In what sense can we connect this politics of “spontaneity” with Celan’s poetics of “indeterminacy”? Hannah Arendt notes how, for Luxemburg, the expansion of capital into new territory is similarly “spontaneous,” in the sense that it is not a singular event but an “expropriation” that necessarily repeats “time and again”—­an elegiac repetition of what capital loses.18 There are two kinds of necessity in play here. There is the necessity that governs the expansion of capital in unanticipated ways, and there is the necessity that such expansion is, indeed, unanticipated, such that it is open to revolutionary intervention. The necessity of revolution is the necessity of indeterminacy. Developing a poetics of this relation—­an account of its forms of construction—­would mean accounting for the ways uncertainty configures not just the process of revolution, but the political freedom it invokes as end, too; for Jacqueline Rose, “the fallibility already at the heart of the revolutionary moment itself.”19 There is no necessary connection between revolutionary contingency and progressive causes. There is no actionable political teleology where means and end are collaboratively aligned. Hegel’s dialectical syntheses are the disclosure in speculation of a unity that preexists dialectical reconciliation. In actively reconciling its material, the dialectic shows how it was always unified in potential. And Marx’s dialectic envisions a future material liberation which will, in the dialectic’s future anterior, again be shown to have been inevitable.20 But in the spontaneous version of this dialectic, the outcome must always remain indeterminate. There is nothing inevitable about liberation. The dialectic is motivated only by its own spontaneous negations. Developing a writing adequate to such politics means engaging in the poetic problems encountered in Celan’s poem. That is to say, writing a revolutionary future means identifying a spontaneity in the present which is radically incompatible with or incommunicable in the present. Writing such politics is elegiac in the sense that, like elegy, it writes and addresses a “non-­object.” “Writing” politics means exposing politics to the baseless and groundless world of writing, in which language is, like the language of the image above, a space of the world’s non-­determination—­for Blanchot, the image’s “fascination,” for Adorno, the Bilderwelt, the “world-­as-­images.” But it also means exposing writing to political outcomes which it cannot hope to determine, an expansion into “new territory,” as Arendt notes. Understanding such political indeterminacy would mean negotiating between the groundless, spontaneous ground of politics and its articulation.

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For Walter Benjamin, indeed, “force” or “violence” (Gewalt) are the conditions of law, and of critique, which depend upon a sovereign suspension of law or critique itself.21 For Derrida, this returns us to an “undecidability” of means and ends in legal justification, where the means of critique (law) are also the object of critique (law).22 This implication leads Kevin McLaughlin to find a “poetic force” of the image which, “pressing through the boundary that separates space from time,” “makes time impartible in the form of an image.”23 The image gains a partibility, a communicability and shareability, through its force, through language’s “capacity to free itself of empirical content.”24 This condition of criticism is thus contained in the way poetry forces a space of legibility in historical material. In other words, the condition of critique is shared with politics, in the sense that it depends upon an interruption of space—­the space of the poem, the space of politics—­which cannot be identified with that space. This is what Christoph Menke calls law’s “irreducible” violence, its force.25 The pressing force of poetry’s non-­propositional form (its image form) is, like the force irreducible in law, a condition for reading that would rationalize it. Thinking political spontaneity, and thinking critical reading, means thinking across this indeterminacy which occurs outside the terrain of concepts, in form itself. It is striking, then, that Celan incorporates this Gewalt into his meta-­ poetic image of alchemy in “Coagula”: “rot-­ / ​aschengewaltigen / ​Kolben” (red-­  / ​ember-­mighty  / ​alembic)—­with gewaltig translated here by Joris as “mighty,” but meaning also “forceful,” forcing to “ashes” in the poem as Kolben, “alembic.” The poem imagines its own force through ashes: depleted material, wounds themselves. Their vexed socialist “red” above a “sandbed,” their abstraction of politics to mere image, color, is part of their imagination, their elegy, of Luxemburg. Abstraction is part of this poetic force: transformation is also a burning, destructive abstraction, ashes from stuff, sand awaiting its compression to glass, with the stars above describing a spatial geometry of incommensurable temporal distance. Reading Celan means reading through such abstraction, not against it. Reading the poem’s extra-­conceptual, formal materiality means reading ash, here, without the poem reimbursing or elegiacally compensating for it. Ash which is, of course, historically particular—­“your ashen hair Sulamith”26—­and the history of a particular erasure, the Holocaust. My question here is how poetry partakes of that history, and how it imagines its object. My general argument is that aestheticization is a historicization, that becoming poetic is also becoming historical in the sense of becoming legible. But what we are tasked to read in this historical legibility is an erasure, and moreover a coincidence of becoming-­legible with being-­erased, an erasure not containable in historical events because it is part of history itself. In these terms, reading must negotiate its own forceful condition in illegibility, in what it cannot read. Reading for history would mean encountering this condition. Criticism in this sense functions both at and as a limit: at that “boundary” of poetic force,

10 Introduction

in McLaughlin’s reading, and as the limiting, forceful, violent production of space within poetic form. My intention in this book is to think this limit space of poetry and reading’s encounter with non-­determining language, in order to think that connection between materialization and dematerialization as a condition of criticism and poetic representation. The layering of matter as referent (Luxemburg) and poetic material as language (the image, rose, Rosa) indicates a limited critical materialism, one which can make legible the indeterminate relation between these levels. There are two points to pursue here. First, a poetics of spontaneity, or of the indeterminate conditions of poetic articulation, the you in Celan’s poem, would stage this political negotiation as part of poetry’s own condition. Reading the political would mean reading the non-­ determined space that poetry might open up (imagine, address). But that is also the transformative, abstract, imaging-­in-­form of that politics. This is the space of reading as I will characterize it here: the ways the poem presents a certain reserve of determination that exceeds its own imagined control. Secondly, thinking Adorno and Blanchot in this conversation will allow us to see how the political both surfaces in poetry (how it becomes a legible surface for poetic writing), and disarranges that surface by a forceful suspension of poetic articulation. Becoming a legible surface will also mean becoming illegible. Reading’s negotiation with legibility, with the surfaces on which it is legible, becomes a measurement of the possibility of something being legible, material, and being spontaneous: suspended, disarticulated, interrupted. If we are to develop a poetics and not just a politics of revolution, with Rose and Luxemburg, then we should consider this form of measurement in language from which a revolutionary future might emerge for politics. In this reading, reading poetry is not a matter of determining the ways politics can manifest, but of making legible the indeterminate form of manifestation of the political. Reading a “wound” space of you, Rosa, means opening reading to a figurative space of address which is the condition of the poem’s own address. Reading means sharing that space, but also that wounding, that separation of space by which a “you” becomes poetically addressable and critically legible. Celan’s historical position—­writing across the events and spaces of midcentury Europe—­and his poetic position—­as, for Denis Thouard, the contemporary philosophers’ poet,27 in strained conversation with Heidegger,28 and, here, the elegiac subject of an emerging deconstruction around 1970—­ means that reading Celan takes us through a central problem of late-­modern criticism, as well as poetics: thinking about poetry’s position as a discourse for making legible political, historical, and indeed ethical erasures or gaps. However, the Celan which emerges here will resist precisely these terms of legibility, insisting on the continuity between presentation and erasure, and in doing so it will challenge our assumptions about what poetry might hope to articulate, how criticism might hope to use literature for political ends.

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11

Reading Celan here means, that is to say, theorizing a poetics of the spontaneity which for Luxemburg was a nonpolitical condition of politics, as a non-­legible condition of legibility. This book is interested in thinking that movement, and that space, and the ways poetic form might impart them.

Criticism and Limits There is a long history of associating form with the organization of matter (as reference) and material (as writing) in literary texts. But the limits of an organization model of form are evident in literary organization itself. How should criticism read texts that refuse organization? What model of organization could think the legibility of texts which resist communication? The problem of legibility just outlined is one of thinking literary form as not only a dynamic or static manifestation of materials, but as the production of dynamics—­of movement, of space, of materialization and dematerialization—­in that material itself. The elegy’s poetic problem (how to address a you) turned into a political problem (how the spontaneity of that “you” might be thought in relation to its historical and material context, Luxemburg, the Russian Revolution, and the Romanian buffaloes), and finally into a problem in criticism (how this provocation of space might enable reading). Tracing this transformation of issues from poetic, to political, to critical-­ philosophical is a way to arrive at the situation I want to think with form in Adorno and Blanchot. Reading the poetic image in Celan’s “Coagula” means thinking a certain critical limit space: not only the point at which critical reading might communicate with its poetic object as itself a material thing, but the material spaces exterior to the poem which that reading must inhabit in order to read them. Thinking critical limits, I am suggesting, means thinking this layering of space itself. With Adorno and Blanchot, this will mean variously thinking the neutral, the other, the nonidentical, the disastrous, and the elegiac corpse of literature through Celan’s images of neutralized space. Adorno and Blanchot adapt their theories of reading in fundamental terms to accommodate this peculiar materiality of poetry, of which Celan is not only the example and object of their reading, but in his own poetics a thinker of it. My contention is that this adaptation indicates a theorization of form: a poetics of form, but also its philosophical, historical, and sociopolitical modalities. This book stages a conversation around form in different attempts to respond to the ways poetry’s material manifests in immaterial and indeterminate ways, and the ways this manifestation disarranges those other contexts, not least, the formal terms of its own reading. Yet as I hinted in the opening of this introduction, Adorno’s and Blanchot’s thinking of this question of form through Celan around 1970 engages not only the particular historical and political contexts of that moment, but also a broader historical question about the procedural and disciplinary autonomy of literary

12 Introduction

criticism, or literary theory. To repeat, my second, parallel aim in this book is to demonstrate that reading Celan’s poetics of limited or indeterminate materiality results in a reconfiguration of critical form, too. In this section, I therefore introduce Adorno and Blanchot to contemporary debates around the question of form and the immaterial. But I also track the development of this question of the materiality of poetry (and its formal transformations) as a question of the autonomy of criticism. In order to see what possible alternative routes for criticism are opened by Adorno and Blanchot, it will be important to situate their thinking in this history. The necessarily selective and telegraphic account given here should serve only to indicate the scope and stakes of Adorno’s and Blanchot’s critical intervention, as I will develop it, and of the place of Celan’s poetry in that intervention. Limits, Periodization, and Critical History In several readings of the history of literary criticism, Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan are writing at what might be considered a change in epoch in critical procedure. As I will detail in this section, recent commentators have variously described the “death” or transformation of theories of criticism around 1970, understood in a basic sense as a change from a paradigm of literary (and thereby critical) autonomy to an examination of literature’s embedded, embodied presence in a fundamentally materialist analysis of the world. This transition of paradigms occurs across readings of Hegelianism and its transformation in a Marxist dialectic. Understanding Adorno and Blanchot, in this period, through an aesthetic paradigm of a minimal particularity of aesthetic experience seems to run counter to this history. But it is precisely their transformation of the aesthetic, and particularly the concept of form which underwrites it, that motivated a transformation in their thought of the concept of history in criticism. My broad argument is that they understand form, specifically aesthetic form, to mark an entrance to history, understood as a dynamic historicization of material not as presence, but as an indeterminate play with appearance and disappearance characteristic of the aesthetic itself. In this argument, as I will detail in chapter 1, it is Kant, not Hegel, who provides a paradigmatic account of the aesthetic as a non-­determination of material. But it is Adorno and Blanchot who articulate the historical character of this non-­determination. This transformation of the disciplinary institution of criticism “around 1970,” something like its deconstruction, emerges through the developing conception of literary history which emerges in the treatment of historical material in literature. In other words, part of the “history” of criticism turns on the referential status of “history” in criticism, in ways which—­rather than sidelining a deconstructive attention to textuality or form—­open up periodization to the question of reference. This hinges around the “ground” of criticism, in a Hegelian dialectical or Kantian aesthetic model. On the one

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hand, the period sees theorists of literary history understand criticism to consist in reading literary materials as continuous with other material contexts, resulting in what Terry Eagleton calls the “ideology” of the aesthetic, where the aesthetic marks the (obscuring) transformation of those materials in form.29 This is itself continuous with the marked Hegelianism of that history. While the inheritance (and negotiation) of idealist paradigms in the German tradition is explicit, Bruce Baugh shows that the French twentieth century, too, consisted of shifting negotiations of criticism with Hegelianism.30 For Andrew Cole, indeed, the Hegelian paradigm of criticism’s dialectical materialism itself marked the “birth” of theory. The synthesis of materials in first art and then philosophy underlies the transformative syntheses of theory. Dialectic is the mobilization of material which enables, through its work of speculative synthesis, critical analysis of its contexts.31 In this understanding, critical theory transforms aesthetic indeterminacy into a materialism of its contexts. Criticism’s task consists in identifying the ideological transformations of historical into aesthetic material. On the other hand, deconstruction, in this history, can be understood as the critical theory of this discrepancy. Deconstruction turned to the ethical core of language’s referential indeterminacy as an undecidability. In his essay “Limited Inc,” Jacques Derrida differentiates between indeterminacy and undecidability in these terms: thinking the “undecidable” becomes an exercise in just witnessing, and an ethical encounter, which is strictly not indeterminate.32 The structural level of such undecidability is, as Jonathan Culler puts it, “indeterminacy” as “the impossibility or unjustifiability of choosing one meaning over another.”33 At the end of this period, then, we see criticism adopting a model that transforms an aesthetics of indeterminacy (whether dialectically or anti-­dialectically) into a materialism of history, in which history is either the referent of criticism or critical reference itself. Hegelianism sets the terms of this transition. One way to historicize this transition is to think of it as rehearsing the shift in philosophical aesthetics in German Idealism. There, as chapter 1 will detail, the transition is from a subjective paradigm of aesthetic judgment in Kant to its objective synthesis in Hegel’s aesthetics. My motivation for turning to this point of critical history is in part to address the appearance in criticism of a “gap” which, earlier in this introduction, motivated my reading of Celan’s elegy. The paradigm of critical historicism rehearses the elegiac, poetic plot outlined above. The history of Hegelian criticism just outlined, then, might itself be historized. Hegel’s own place in philosophical history suggests reading his dialectic as itself operating to compensate for a “gap” in that philosophy. As Kai Hammermeister argues, this German idealist synthesis results from Kant’s failure to connect what he characterizes as a paradigmatically autonomous aesthetic to an autonomous science or morality.34 Idealism takes up at this point of failure another paradigm, the Hegelian totalization of the aesthetic—­where material in art is understood to be the developing expression of Geist itself—­precisely because, as

14 Introduction

Erckart Förster argues, this transition consists in mobilizing a “gap” in Kantian accounts of judgment.35 Where Kant allocates a certain autonomy to aesthetic judgment (though, as we shall see, a radically qualified autonomy) to consist in its non-­determining, “reflecting” mode of judging, for Hegel and the idealists this gap constitutes the merely negative moment which motivates the positive “totality” of the dialectic. The autonomy of the aesthetic becomes a moment which is overcome in a dialectical totalization of concept and material—­eventually passing from art, famously, to philosophy. Yet in my reading, Kant’s aesthetic judgment suspends a gap in determination: it suspends its object in representation as reflection, rather than subsuming it in determination under a concept. The subject’s autonomy is confirmed by the experience of the object’s own autonomy from the subject. This aesthetic mobilization of reflection in non-­determination (Kantian “free play” leading to the play of “aesthetic ideas”) can, I will argue, respond to the poetic suspension of identity in Celan’s poetic indeterminacy: his presentation of “your wound,” that “gap,” not you. Indeed, more polemically, if we are going to read this poem (paradigmatic for the late Celan that I will read throughout this book) on its own terms, then we cannot seek to identify or determine this moment of suspension with the history of which it is a dehiscence. And further, I would suggest that the political potential of that poetry consists precisely in its reserve of something like spontaneity as the condition of reading. Kant’s aesthetic provides a framework which can hold that suspension as it is. And in a sense, this means providing a framework for thinking the autonomy of art from our apprehension of it: its radical indeterminacy, and an indeterminacy which, counterintuitively, is also the mark of materiality in that poetry. In this sense, the late twentieth-­century transition from a focus on literariness or literary autonomy to a paradigmatic continuity between literary materials and other materials (and thereby from a literary-­critical materialism to other materialisms or historicisms) reprises the transition from Kantian to Hegelian aesthetics (and philosophy). For Galin Tihanov, as well as a “birth” of theory (as in Cole) there is therefore a “radical historicity” to theory, its “death.” This is because, for Tihanov, literary theory is premised on what he terms a certain “regime of relevance,” the idea, precisely, of literature’s autonomous “literariness” which dominated the critical understanding of literature in central and eastern Europe from World War I to the 1990s.36 In Tihanov’s history, the end of my period also marks the end of this dominant paradigm of literary and critical autonomy. Tihanov describes theory’s death as a turn away from the literary object to questions of method which extrapolate from methods of literary analysis into other discursive fields; and from the autonomy of literature to literature’s cultural continuity with other modes of expression or identity formation. Tihanov discerns a shift from attention to what we might call the formal base of literary studies—­literariness—­to its implication in historical contexts. The autonomy of literature on which

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Tihanov sees theory as premised is itself radically limited. It is an autonomy from history. This conception of the incompatibility of autonomy with history, however, might lead criticism to reflection on what, precisely, constitutes history in literature. This reflection is one version of what Joseph North advocates for at the end of his own story of the history of literary criticism in the twentieth century. For North, the transitory moment between a paradigm of New Critical “criticism” and a paradigm of historicist “scholarship” (understood as an enriching contextualization of literary with other materials in historicism, but also as a shift in attention from the literary object to objects represented in literature) occurred across the economic transition from a postwar Keynesian settlement to the financialization of the economy after leaving the gold standard in 1971 (what North calls neoliberalism).37 This financialization of the economy, we infer, coordinated the shifting priorities of criticism in its economic self-justification towards historical critique, and away from the self-sufficient, autonomous study of literature. In response, North calls for a return to an “incipiently materialist aesthetic” which can overcome this bad (or at least exhausted) choice, which he identifies with I. A. Richards. North’s argument is that this possible aesthetics is conditioned by “sweeping the field” of idealist aesthetics, rather than, as I have been suggesting Adorno and Blanchot do, returning to those idealist structures.38 Rather than turning to “a nostalgia for idealist aesthetics, or to the mysticisms of ‘nothing,’ or to the cozy impasse of historicism plus form,” North imagines a “philosophical account of how subjectivities come to be cultivated and a rigorous methodology of reading.”39 My similar concern here with thinking beyond “nothing,” with thinking a “gap” in aesthetics without overwriting it or synthesizing it into a dialectical negation, and with in turn thinking a “gap” in literary presence or objecthood as not blank, void, or nothing, but as “something,” should be seen as sympathetic with North.40 But my broader claim is that this thinking takes place implicitly within idealism itself, and further, or more strongly, that this idealizing moment is a necessary moment in critically framing an object like literature. Without a conception of literature’s autonomy, this collapses into historical determinism. But without historicizing that autonomy, we are stuck with the apparently transcendent model of value that governs North’s criticism paradigm. It is notable, then, that my own reading turns to precisely that period of financialization, “around 1970,” as offering precisely that negotiation with aesthetics as the disciplinary rationalization of the object of literary criticism, literature, in ways that fill in the content of something like the materialist aesthetic North calls for. But the works I examine do so in terms that also seek to radically limit that autonomy to designate a limitation itself. My contention, in turning to Adorno and Blanchot, is that aesthetics becomes a site for the disciplinary understanding of art as consisting of an experience of material that is in a sense radically undetermined by its form. Their reprisal

16 Introduction

of aesthetics (which I attempt to demonstrate in this book) occurs on this level. And further, this radical non-­determination of material in art and aesthetic experience constitutes a counter-­gesture to that Hegelian paradigm of dialectical history which might help reframe that birth/death periodization of criticism. That formal deployment of materiality is, I will argue, a historicization of material, because it becomes historical in form in the sense of becoming dynamically active there, actively contested. At stake in historicizing this moment in the history of critical theory is a way to think this contested objecthood in literature, what appears to be immaterial, as nonetheless apparent. This occurs, historically, in the deconstructive moment before North’s identification of a neoliberal transformation of the institutions of criticism. These dynamics become apparent on the critical level of Adorno and Blanchot’s writing, but also on the meta-­critical level I have been discussing in this section of the introduction in a return to the field which emerged into deconstruction. They both offer models of criticism as engaging in literary form as a site of dynamic contestation, and can be seen in contestation themselves, both with one another and with critical history. Reading Adorno and Blanchot together means reading two quite different writers, who seldom responded to each other’s work. For Leslie Hill, there is indeed a formal incommensurability between the two thinkers. Blanchot’s late work proposes “a radical futural trace irreducible to presence.”41 But Adorno’s sense of fragmentation, according to Hill, attests to the incoherence of a past totality, recuperated in the present as a negative “fragmentary” totality.42 Yet this incommensurability can itself be mobilized on the terms of historicism telegraphed above. Thinking the fragment in both projects means, in this sense, thinking through the stakes of their historical present. For Emmanuel Ravel, this negative dialectic in Adorno “establishes the necessity of appearance by the fact that the différance of meaning which it engenders alone signals the possibility of a coherence to come.” And this “fragmentary” present aligns with Blanchot’s “unworking [désoeuvrement], by which art’s total destruction of itself is generative of new forms.”43 For Vivian Lyska, this “contestation” experienced in literature is indeed as of two histories, as in Hill. In her reading, Adorno insists that, after Auschwitz, we are “after” the caesural event of modernity which was preceded by a formally powerful concept of art. His aesthetics are, therefore, recuperative. Blanchot, however, insists on the historical immanence of this interruption to literature, which could only ever mimic its incoherence.44 Far from reading them together, reading Adorno and Blanchot means reading this space of contestation between them, but also in both of their thinking, in which two different historical limits of criticism are staged. William S. Allen has most extensively considered this contestation, remarking on Blanchot’s conception of literature as “the infinite space of the work in its contestation.”45 In Adorno, Allen thinks this as an “abstraction” which yields a “materialist history of form” reflecting its “sociohistorical context” by revealing “negatively what remains

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unabsorbed by this process.”46 Blanchot’s literature then becomes a “mode for communicating this intransitive understanding”47 of that “sociohistorical context.” In other words, it means reading what Allen calls an “aesthetics of negativity,” the way that art’s resistance to experience and to determination might either negatively attest to a lost whole, or otherwise attest to a negativity at the heart of experience. One reads, then, back through negation in this contested space. Thinking between Adorno and Blanchot means reading their points of contact, but also the critical “between” that they both think. Thinking Adorno and Blanchot means thinking two different modes of historicity. Understanding this theoretically contested space means both identifying the historical scope of that contest, the ways it takes place within a broader history of criticism, and understanding their work to be mobilizing that contestation of space as grounding a critical practice. My contention is that Adorno’s and Blanchot’s parallel critical history invokes that materialist aesthetics through precisely its materials’ imbrication with idealist thinking. Literary material is such through the forms of dematerializing abstraction which limit it. This does not yield a negative blank, a nothing attesting by its absence to something absent in the world. But neither does it yield a material presence which could posit something outside literature. What I want to investigate, through Adorno and Blanchot, is the way material is transformed through this historical-­aesthetic dialectic into “something” which is neither positive nor negative, not absent, not blank, not a gap. Their thinking would then constitute an aesthetics of this implication in artistic form, an account of its conditions of legibility, as the historical emergence of a contested matter. The ways that criticism is transformed for Adorno and Blanchot in reading Celan’s late poetry offer possible alternatives to contemporary critical paradigms. Specifically, they mobilize poetry’s materiality to include its dynamic dematerialization; and, in turn, this constitutes a reformulation of the concept of form in criticism as radically historicized by this dynamic manifestation/erasure. Adorno and Blanchot provide versions of critical autonomy at this limit. But we should also understand this critical limit space to be a form of between space: the critical space that opens up in reading; the space between these thinkers, Adorno and Blanchot; and the geographical or real space which frames their historical encounters with texts. Thinking Adorno and Blanchot together involves thinking all of these levels as in a fundamental sense contested. Formalism and Materialism The different contemporary models for reading form in this way as a contested space of the emergence of material will be handled in greater detail in chapter 1. Here, though, I will telegraph that debate in order to highlight the relevance of reading Adorno and Blanchot for it. Again, this will mean

18 Introduction

identifying the ways that reading them together will allow me to rethink certain fundamental critical questions; and again, this will emerge at something like a limit of criticism. In the post-­1970—­the post-­historicist and post-­deconstruction—­critical discussion of this relation of the historical “material” of literature to critical method, Rita Felski has most emphatically invoked the “limits of criticism” as a means to rethink the space of literature and reading as a “coproduction between actors” rather than an “endless rumination on a text’s hidden meanings.”48 Felski rationalizes a turn to different spatial metaphors for the kinds of close reading: reading which invokes the textual surface with, as Heather Love puts it, “practices of close attention” that “do not engage the metaphysical and humanist concerns of hermeneutics.”49 At issue in this thinking is the relation between literary form and its material. This means, on the one hand, thinking form as “a notion bound pragmatically to its instances,” an “entity known by occasion,”50 for Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian; and on the other hand, thinking form, like Caroline Levine, in “all ordering principles,” social or literary.51 Critically thinking that relation means in some sense incorporating the kinds of contested historicism outlined above: as Paul Hamilton puts it, “Most attractive to a critic writing after Foucault and wishing to have no truck with universal, transhistorical humanism would be a kind of local knowledge of the past true to its own largely piecemeal self-­ awareness.”52 Such a future historicism would be reflective on the conditions of its own attention: the ways its self-­awareness is gathered also in the contested space of the text, together with any pre-­Felski critical insights. I invoke these general stakes to indicate the ways an inquiry into form in Adorno and Blanchot might raise this question of history together with the question of a text’s materiality, and of its represented material. Thinking the space of contestation in Adorno and Blanchot, and between them, as the site of an emergent history should indeed prompt us to pause here. My contention in this book is that their work imagines history as an emergent form of materialization which consists, also, in the dematerializing forms of its apprehension in reading. For Robert S. Lehman, one problem with what he calls “modern formalism” is its conflation of these levels, between the aesthetic forms of comportment, a Kantian “mere form” (to which I return in detail in chapter 1), and the phenomenological features of a text. Inquiry into the former cannot depend on the latter, and this means limiting any formalist grasp on those phenomenological features. Lehman, like North, takes issue with Adorno as conflating these levels.53 But as Josh Robinson has argued, Adorno’s “poetics of form” should be understood to consist in an inquiry into the ways form is itself constructed through the social material it also materializes. Crucial for Adorno is the way artworks, like all objects, are sedimentations of subjective forms, intentional forms, which also construct, dialectically, the form of their articulation. The phenomenological level of the object of reading, then, is again in a contested relation with the form of

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reading: as in music, for Adorno “a medium, a third factor or middle that mediates between composer and composition.”54 And as Gerhard Richter also suggests, thinking Adorno’s “prioritization” of the object means rethinking the form of its apprehension in reading as an “uncoercive” gaze of the eye that allows itself to take form in its materials in “a kind of self-­delivery into the sphere of its subject matter and its requirements.”55 Adorno’s theory of form has in this sense been aligned with the constraints put on reading by its material object. And in this sense, reading him together with Blanchot—­ and thus reading their space of contestation—­should allow us also to think Blanchot in terms of form.56 Reading these writers in such terms of form, however, means addressing the issue of art’s matter signifying merely nothing, it means thinking negativity in terms other than positing and negation in order to signal the possibility of a non-­negated, neutral materiality. For Angela Leighton, this is the characteristic “doubling” of form, in which “signifying nothing, like significant form, keeps signification in view while also emptying it of matter, and of mattering too much.”57 But if we were to intensify Leighton’s view, we would think this emptying of matter as not nothing, not as what Marjorie Levinson calls New Formalism’s “form as organic and totalizing, a fantasy machinery for converting fact into symbol, leaving no remainder and no marks of labor.”58 Thinking this immateriality, however, means thinking also in the space of excess material which, for Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, is the problematic view that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-­creative, productive, unpredictable,” in which space “a host of immaterial things seems to emerge.”59 But in The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz describes precisely such a “genealogy of the impossible division between the material and the immaterial.”60 Drawing upon Deleuze, and a kind of Deleuzean Kantianism, Grosz argues that “ideals” are regulative rather than normative, and she describes the potential of material as a “membrane”: the regulating passage between interior and exterior, past and future, matter and form. These potentials of organization are “immanent in materiality and its orders of complexity” as “virtual” or “futural” potential.61 Grosz’s account is most useful here not only for describing a philosophical lineage parallel to my own history, but for giving conceptual legibility to the kind of dynamic formalism which we might see to be needed in the critical accounts of form and its limitations discussed above. That is to say, thinking the critical space of contestation in Adorno and Blanchot will mean thinking the conditions of a non-­determined, and in that sense, as in Grosz, incorporeal, immaterial materiality of language emerging in literature. Thinking them together will mean also thinking that space of the inbetween which in their thinking constitutes criticism: the site for a negotiation over precisely what constitutes matter, as present, as presence, which in their thinking is dematerializing.

20 Introduction

This book reads through this critical limit as itself a question of form, in Adorno and Blanchot. For Adorno: Because form is the central concept of aesthetics and is always presupposed by it in the givenness of art, aesthetics must gather all its forces to think the concept through. If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form, yet the concept of form refuses to grant a voice to anything aesthetic that claims independence from it. An aesthetics of form is possible only if it breaks through aesthetics as the aesthetics of the totality of what stands under the spell of form. Whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as form does, no better.62

The historical possibility of art depends upon this “thinking through” form against “the spell of form.” “Thinking through” form as a concept does not mean, however, either abandoning the concept (which is the only way art is legibly art) or transcending the artwork as an object by positing something beyond it. Thinking art as “something” means thinking through a form which cannot be identical with it. “Aesthetics must not transcend its object by way of a concept of form, and yet it must see beyond the coherence given to the artwork by its own immanent form: a double movement, then, and double prohibition against transcendence: against form as the given totality of the meaning of the artwork, and against a totality that would think beyond the artwork.”63 Thinking this “double movement” of form will mean both thinking the manifest totality of an artwork, and thinking against it. But this does not result in a negated concept of form. It means rather a reflective doubling of the concept which, through art’s contradiction, opens its historicity in reflection. What emerges in such form is neither total presence nor absence, but a reflective movement of non-­transcendence, a materialism of the limit. The object of the concept of form is thus both legible under the concept, and legibly contradicts it. Understanding form to consist in this double movement will mean reconfiguring the materiality of that object as itself dynamic and, importantly, virtual: a movement that is a limit of presence and a disabling of presence. It seems fruitful to me to think this double demand of form, in aesthetics, by turning to a similarly programmatic statement from Blanchot. In the “Note” preceding The Infinite Conversation (from the same year as Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 1969), the book in which Blanchot opens his writing to an exploration of fragmentation, he asks: “What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?”64 This is the basic question of aesthetics, but it turns us to thinking “something” that exists, “something”

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phenomenal in writing which, as Blanchot writes, “seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity.”65 Thinking this something, however, will mean submitting to its “force of absence.” “From this point of view writing is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own.”66 That “and also its own” (Your wounds / ​too, Rosa), that excess by which writing reflectively cannot grasp its own “law,” is for Blanchot writing’s immanent “outside.” The question of the Book’s present materiality, its objecthood, which for Adorno prompts a reflective recomposition of the concept of form, is for Blanchot the way writing discomposes its own form. Thinking this outside of writing, however, means thinking, as Adorno does, without transcending writing: it means thinking writing’s condition in form as an exteriority which it cannot accommodate, as an “absence of the book” that is the condition of its presence. Thinking the limits of criticism means thinking this doubling demand, in form, that criticism, like writing, is itself a “limit space”: a space that calls into question the terms of its own articulation, what I am calling here its materiality, by refusing the law that is the condition of it appearing. In both Adorno and Blanchot, art’s form designates the space of an emergent material which cannot be reduced to its historical outside, precisely because it is the emergence into history of that outside: neither a birth nor death but a contestation of literature as an object. Celan, Heidegger, and the Limits of Reading My particular attention to this critical limit gathers around Celan and, here, Heidegger. The intense focus of philosophers on Celan has been described most recently by Denis Thouard in Pourquoi ce poète? Le Celan des philosophes.67 There, a picture emerges of Celan as a Heideggerian poet, as he is, for example, for Badiou.68 I want to think outside the Heideggerian readings of Celan in order to think what Thouard terms Celan’s “provocation” of philosophy, but also in order to think the ways Celan’s poetics themselves contain, through the dynamic picture of poetic form I am attempting to draw, an apparently obscured history. I want to read Celan in terms both of a poetics of resistance to presentation, of what resists presentation, and in terms of politics. Thinking the contested space of reading in Adorno and Blanchot as a space of material’s taking form in processes of suspension and deletion will mean thinking through the contestation of space, and the emergent limit space, in Celan’s poetry which is the same space as that contested politics of resistance outlined at the opening of this introduction. This space becomes clear when we read Celan outside Heidegger. A political Celan, and a poetics of politics, emerge when we read Celan outside that Heideggerian scope. Much critical thinking of Celan has centered on Heidegger, even if that centering is strained.69 The classic reading is, again, Lacoue-­Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience, which makes the maximal claim that Celan’s poetry is, “in its

22 Introduction

entirety, a dialogue with Heidegger”; a totalization that yields, however, a “nothing” of being in reading him.70 This idea is finessed by Badiou as “subtraction”: “what assembles the poem with the direct aim of a withdrawal of the object; the poem is a negative machine, which states being, or the idea, at the very point where the object has vanished.”71 In this “nothing,” in an “age” limited for Badiou by Celan, poetry becomes a “pure thinking,” “like a mathematical number.” This, it seems to me, is the problematic association of Heideggerian thinking with Celan: that it turns around an inarticulate nothing in the space of their divergence which cannot, however, be thought beyond the limits of Heideggerian philosophical poetics.72 These limits, I have been claiming in this introduction, are the shared limits of the political. With Heidegger, we can think up to the limit of the political, and so Celan’s own interventions into the space of the political are merely illegible, “hermetic.” Yet for Christopher Fynsk, Celan’s poetics of “reality” motivate a thinking of poetics “after Heidegger.”73 As David Nowell Smith argues, there is possibly a different reading of this Heideggerian “limit of poetics” not as the ontologizing presencing or absencing of being, but rather as describing the possibility of an ontic opening of that question in language’s form itself. Poetic form then becomes decisive as delivering to language a negotiation of the ways the presencing and absencing of the word open that word to thinking.74 Thinking Celan in such post-­Heideggerian terms allows us to read the ways his poetry negotiates with the opening of space which is decisively political. This book will read outside Heidegger in order to make this opening legible. It is striking in this sense to read Aris Fioretos’s characterization of “history and materiality” in Celan, meaning the ways it suspends its material legibility as promissory, as “nothing.” Reading Celan, for Fioretos, means reading these traces of “nothing.”75 My own counter-­Heideggerian reading seeks to evade this voiding of articulation in Celan’s materiality by detailing precisely the ways Celan’s writing through surfaces (streets, windows, pages), and apparently abstract images (snow, glass, color) becomes an articulate form of political disarticulation. It is the “something” which is a suspended materiality, here, that allows for thinking poetics after Heidegger’s ontologization of poetry. Reading Celan in these terms provides scope for thinking both a “limit” of poetics, in Nowell Smith’s sense, and “after” Heidegger, in Fynsk’s sense, towards a new question of what the object of poetics is, as well as of what the object in poetry is, what sort of object poetry is. The critical and political stakes of this question are central to what we might call form in Celan’s writing. One of the major claims of this book is that we might think of poetic form as a condition for being historical. Being poetic means becoming historical in the sense of producing the space or gap of reading. Yet a second claim of the book is that this gap is not merely nothing, but is in fact also the emergence of something, something poetically material and immaterial. In this expanded sense, form designates not only the organizing features of poetic

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language, but the ways poetic language, in producing such spacing, produces the terms of critical legibility. Form would then designate the becoming historical of poetry in reading. This book seeks to read that space produced by poetry, that gap in language’s systematic form, as a condition of reading, but also as a material space itself. Form thus emerges at the limits of its historical and critical intelligibility as the legibility of a poem as poetic. It is thus understood as a dynamic activity of materialization. Reading for such form would include reading the ways that what emerges as poetic is also lost in that reading, dematerialized. The limit of form, that is to say, is not historical or material significant content, but rather the ways that in poetry such content is exposed to its possible dematerialization. And this makes that limit one shared with reading, which similarly must dematerialize its material if it hopes to make it present. In proposing this periodization and this constellation of writers, I hope to develop an account of legibility adequate to thinking this double demand: that we read poetry’s suspended, dematerialized, immaterial material as nonetheless invested in reality, as “something” rather than “nothing.” The motivation for developing this account of legibility is thinking poetry’s limit space as a means for thinking criticism’s own limits. Thinking criticism’s contested space will mean thinking criticism as itself a limit space, as occupying a space where its own emergence is gathered through the reflective, non-­ determining apprehension of its object as a limited object, in its immaterial and emergent form.

Chapter 1

Reading Indeterminacy From Poetic Materiality to Materialist Aesthetics

This chapter proposes a framework for answering the broad questions about reading literature established in the introduction. How should we understand that aspect of poetry which is historical but not identical with a history, with a material presence? And how should we understand that aspect of poetry which is formal (organizational), but which does not thematize any given material? How do we read, indeed historicize, a poem that constructs itself from representational failure, from such non self-­identity? These questions can be located within a philosophical structure of judgment outlined in Kant’s aesthetics. There, the object of judgment emerges at the horizon of an idealist understanding of the spatial and temporal dimensions of judgment as its peripheral space, its conditioning limit. Poetry, I will argue here, assumes a relation to criticism apposite to that of material in Kant’s aesthetic judgment. What this apposition means for these questions is that answering them will require us to understand how the nonidentical history, matter, and form of poetry are articulated by a structure of aesthetic judgment which positions these at, and as, a limit of apprehension and representation, and further as an enabling limit of judgment itself, the means by which it is distinguished as aesthetic. Making this argument will mean first outlining the scope of this protocol of reading in a certain conception of criticism, and then explaining how Kant’s aesthetics offers a model that can make sense of that protocol. The broad movement I want to trace in reading from Kant to a theory of reading poetry is also the development of a conception of what I am calling “indeterminacy,” from denoting structures in aesthetic judgment, to the ends of that judgment, to the underwriting dimensions of reading. Indeterminacy can be understood to denote a series of different aspects of this plot:



1. The “indeterminacy” of the object in aesthetic judgment: the ways it characteristically, for Kant, invites aesthetic reflection because (whatever determining judgments might be made of it) 25

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it remains in some formal sense not exhausted by conceptual determinations of it. 2. The “in-­determination” of that judgment itself, in the sense that the judgment, for Kant, is reflecting rather than determining, and moreover functions as a judgment of the world without legislating for it. 3. The “non-­termination” of this judgment: the ways that, consisting in a free play of the cognitive powers, it eschews conceptual ends (though not, for Kant, eventually, moral ends), and moreover the ways that such experience is unanticipated.

I am tracing schematically here the way Kant’s aesthetic can be seen to outline, first, the indeterminacy of the object of judgment; second, the indeterminate or non-­determining mode of that judgment; and third, the non-­termination of what results from that judgment. The chapter will proceed by explaining these as different levels of the indeterminate construction of the object or material of reading, and mapping those levels onto criticism’s understanding of poetry. Doing so will mean showing how that aesthetic model can be seen to shape a certain theory of reading, and not just to endorse Kant’s own philosophical project, its “ends,” to use a Kantian vocabulary. This chapter, then, in moving from theories of criticism—­specifically the critical construction of the lyric poem—­to Kant’s philosophy, intends to show how certain critical commitments take shape within a philosophical horizon which underwrites, but also limits, the dimensions and conditions of that critical project. The result of this procedure will be that the indeterminacy of poetry’s materiality, both the objects it mediates and itself as an object, becomes critically apparent, legible. In my usage here, materiality also has different levels:

a. “Matter” as the referential material of poetry; b. “Materiality” as the empirical materiality of the poem itself as a linguistic artifact; c. The poem as a representational “material” for judgment, the ideal “object” of its disciplinary structure—­the critical “materialism” which frames its reading.

My argument will unfold by showing each of these to subsist as a peripheral materiality, neither present nor absent from representation, which emerges at (and from) the limits of idealist judgment. This will first mean investigating how material, objective “presence” (a) in poetry is characterized by a gap in poetic articulation which is shared by a gap in models of reading. Aesthetics can outline the dimensions of this shared space, the process of spacing which is shared by both poetry and reading (c). That is to say, I want to read the ways this spacing is understood both to characterize what

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we might call poetic form (b), understood as the ways poetry differentiates its own objective presence from other forms of articulation, and material or history (a), understood as the opening of poetic language onto an expansive contextual field of its reference. Both of these characterizations of poetry and criticism can be seen in the dimensions described in Kant’s judgment. But the ends of that connection between literature, criticism, and philosophy will be unfolded by Adorno’s and Blanchot’s description of a theory of reading in them. This chapter is partly methodological, establishing the conceptual terrain of the rest of the book by developing its key terms and contexts, and advancing the theory of legibility that I will develop in reading Celan’s poetry. But in turning to Adorno and Blanchot here, I also intend to establish a particular context of their thinking. This chapter centers on Kant, but my reading is in a sense counter-­Kantian. Where Kant seeks in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, of which his aesthetics comprises the first part, to justify the systematic unity of his critical project as a whole, I am interested in the ways his thinking there opens up to an indeterminacy the ends of which, when redeployed in a theory of reading, it cannot contain. Adorno’s and Blanchot’s readings of Kant provide this critical leverage. Kant’s prominence, here, consists in thinking of the disciplinary opening of criticism: the conditions and limits of its powers, the terms by which it functions, the kinds of judgment it makes. But I also argue that the two writers turn to the Kantian account of aesthetic experience in order to gain leverage of their own against the systematicity of Hegelian dialectics. The aesthetics which emerges in this complex picture—­from Kant, to Adorno and Blanchot, against Hegel—­is from a specific moment in French and German thought.1 In this historicizing gesture, I intend to characterize Adorno and Blanchot as finding in the debates of Idealism a latent materialism, one which counters the dominant Hegelian paradigms of midcentury European thought, and which does so on the terrain of aesthetic judgment. By framing their attempts to move through Hegelian dialectics in a turn to Kantian aesthetics, I think that we gain a possible way to think the question of poetic legibility, the conditions of poetry becoming legible, which does not either formalize away poetry’s materiality or historicize away its form. Adorno and Blanchot turn against Hegelian dialectics by reengaging with Kantian aesthetics as dynamic. Indeed, it is in the model of dynamic suspension, of provisional and virtual form, offered in Kant’s aesthetics that I think this model of legibility emerges as a shared indeterminacy of poetry and aesthetics against the paradigmatic dialectical sublations which dominate Hegel’s account of aesthetics, its totalizing logic. I turn to lyric poetry in this context not to recover the well-­trodden ground of Adorno’s account of lyric form in “Lyric Poetry and Society,” but rather to think about how the challenges posed to reading by lyric form might be situated in a more general theory of reading in Adorno’s work. And with Blanchot, I want again to show how what we might call a theory of reading

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which is indeterminate and concerned with gaps responds to the challenges posed by lyric form: not gaps in the sense of absences, however, but crucially as the spatialization of judgment in which an indeterminate material emerges. My intention, to reiterate, is to consider aesthetics as the experience of such a gap in determination not as empty but as material. Lyric provides critical scope here, rather than becoming an object of my inquiry. I am interested in the ways reading poems as lyrics has raised broader questions about reading poetry which we might put to Adorno and Blanchot. So I want to think about this gap in experience, this indeterminacy, as a condition of reading. Indeed, considered on one level of materiality, reading is itself a process of moving over gaps, a series of saccades where the tracking eye must omit the space between words in order to pass between them.2 I want to think about this gap as a condition of legibility which poetry stages itself: as a temporal gap in history which is nonetheless historical. Aesthetics provides the theoretical terrain for thinking such a form of reading. The complexity of this plot—­ moving from poetry, to philosophy, to criticism—­will require some schematizing itself. I will proceed here first by identifying the characteristic indeterminacies associated with reading lyric poetry, and then attempt to route these through aesthetics as a disciplinary attempt to ground and make sense of these characteristics. This move provides a theory of “reading” as the negotiation of these levels. The resources gained from this account of Kant help make legible Adorno’s and Blanchot’s turn away from Hegel, and in turn give substance to that theory—­historical as well as conceptual.

Reading and Indeterminacy in the Lyric The lyric poem is a peculiarly apt site for thinking indeterminacy in criticism. It characteristically presents a temporal and spatial bracketing of experience, comprising a series of non-­narrative gaps which exclude historical legibility. But this illegibility, these gaps, open lyric up to ambivalent critical attention. Taken one way, this spacing can be characterized as the opening in a poem where criticism provides the historical content the poem reserves or obscures. The critic restores the history which lyric form excludes by setting the poem back into its contextual continuity. Otherwise, the critic is limited merely to surface appreciation. But this surface is itself the site of a radical extraction from history and form, what Paul de Man characterizes in his late work as a “radical formalism”: a mere form which criticism cannot rationalize into representation. Paying attention to this appearance of a lyric gap, in such terms, would mean understanding its indeterminacy to be aesthetic: the materialization of a gap or bracket in formal terms. The history of criticism’s attention to this indeterminacy might direct us towards thinking the continuity between this constitutive gap in poetic

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representation, in lyric, and the bracketing which enables the reader’s own critical attention. Wolfgang Iser, for example, emphasizes the “indeterminacy” at work in the interaction of reader and text. For Iser, “the literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to re-­create the world it presents. The product of this creativity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality.”3 The gaps in writing—­the omissions, frustrations, surprises—­induce a creative and active production of meaning by the reader. This relationship is in many ways characteristic of Kant’s account of the aesthetic, in which, as we shall see, a certain “omission” of determination in experience induces the reflection characteristic of aesthetic judgment. For Iser, “indeterminacy” makes reading fiction a dynamic process in a virtual space of interaction between text and reader.4 Iser’s focus is on the temporal experience of narrative in fiction. But his characterization of reading’s temporal experience raises another question. What is the virtual space of lyric reading? What happens to this experience of temporal indeterminacy in reading lyric as definitively non-­narrative, and how does lyric itself handle this indeterminacy? We might think of one part of contemporary lyric studies as answering this question by focusing on the ways readers construct lyric form in reading. In a classic of this kind of study, Stanley Fish describes the constitution of a poem by an act of reading which identifies a text according to formal expectations and their fulfillment by interpretation.5 This turns the question of reading lyric into a question of lyric-­reading, of the ways a poem is generically constructed by the anticipatory dimensions of its reading, or what The Lyric Theory Reader terms “lyricization”: “The history of lyric reading [as] the history of thinking about poetry as more and more abstract and ineffable,” a process of idealization which turns the poem into “a paradigmatically self-­enclosed verbal icon.”6 But Iser’s account is interesting, for my purposes, for the way this act of reading both proceeds by temporal gaps and itself constitutes a spatial gap, an opening onto a world. Is it possible to think of reading as a form of mediation in turn affected by what it mediates, and not only the idealization of otherwise singular poetic material? This question is closer to Paul de Man’s thinking. Again, de Man is interested in a certain gap, a void which he thinks is characteristic of poetic form.7 De Man has been characteristically read, indeed, as a critic of indeterminacy. His paradigmatic “Rhetoric of Temporality,” for Susan Wolfson, presents form as the production of indeterminacy by the necessary incompletion of textual unity.8 But I think that de Man’s position on the connection between form, indeterminacy, and the third term introduced here by Iser, reading, or—­ as I will suggest, in an attempt to emphasize the materialization involved in the procedure, “legibility”—­merits closer attention. Indeed, de Man also finds in Kant’s aesthetic the mobilization of a systemic “gap”: the gap of the aesthetic itself in systematic philosophy. In de Man’s double reading, Kant both establishes the possibility of non-­systematic aesthetic thinking of material,

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“materialism,” and closes off that possibility by referring it to his critical system, “aesthetics.” I think we can push de Man here to find a dynamic form of reading in lyric which returns to the indeterminate gap of Iser’s thinking, which treats that gap as the opening to de Man’s Kantian materialism, and which therefore finds in that materialist reading a way to read lyric form. In “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” de Man describes how the aesthetic grounds Kant’s and Hegel’s systems: “the possibility of philosophy itself, as the articulation of a transcendental with a metaphysical discourse, depends on it.”9 The crucial idea here is that the aesthetic is the site of the “articulation” of philosophical reason: the place where it is realized in history. But the aesthetic is what cannot be “articulated” itself.10 In a materialist account of experience, rather than aesthetic, ambiguously meaning “perceptual” here, there is the experience of the critical “architectonic” “as the material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body” which “marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category.”11 In this way de Man finds in Kant’s aesthetic of the sublime a “formal materialism” in which the “purely material . . . is also purely formal, devoid of any semantic depth.”12 Seeing the world “as poets do,” as de Man quotes Kant in a companion essay, means that it “must not even attain the status of a phenomenon.”13 Kant’s aesthetic both makes this non-­phenomenalized material available, and obscures its experience. We might understand it to be a “mere” materiality, antecedent to any apprehension or representation that would make it a phenomenon. But what is indeterminate about lyric materiality that we might take from de Man’s suggestive account of the latent materialism of sublime experience? For Daniel Tiffany, de Man describes the “irrealization” of matter in the lyric, as part of a more general argument that “lyric substance” disarranges our sense of corporeality and visibility by presenting a “material occult.”14 It is, indeed, the “rhetorical” level, “the prosaic materiality of the letter”15 that for de Man decides Kant’s thinking on the sublime, in the way that his apparently systematic transcendental connections are in fact governed by phenomenal sound-­patterns.16 The structure of articulation is rhetorical, not conceptual. But in this de Man detects the possibility of an “absolute formalism”: “Kant’s looking at the world just as one sees it (‘wie man ihn sieht’) is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis.”17 The formalism of this material is outside reference itself. What remains is “mere form,” in Robert Lehman’s recent Kantian distinction, rather than “phenomenal form”: form as a matter of judgment rather than as a feature of an object.18 The phenomenal is present in this experience as Iser’s gap of indeterminacy: it is what in Iser cannot be read; what in de Man cannot be phenomenalized in the sense of included in a system of perception. To see “as poets do” is to see this material as indeterminate, rather than phenomenal, in the sense that it frustrates judgment’s attempts to make of it an object. This material “absolute formalism” is the refutation of formalization that, nonetheless, as material, underlies form.

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This sense of form can be read back from de Man’s work on aesthetics into his work on poetry and its criticism. It is in this sense that, in the earlier essay “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” de Man understands form to be a “process.”19 In the aesthetic judgment of it, material is articulated by its systematic totality in philosophical experience, while that same material “disarticulates” any systematic attempt to totalize it. Form in poetry similarly describes a systematic totality between reading and text that cannot be achieved. The temporality of reading is such that poetry is a “foreknowledge” of criticism, which lags behind even as it constructs the object which precedes it. In this way, form necessitates a theory of history. Understanding can be called complete only when it becomes aware of its own temporal predicament and realizes that the horizon within which the totalization can take place is time itself. The act of understanding is a temporal act that has its own history, but this history forever eludes totalization.20

History is introduced into reading by the temporal lag of form itself. And we might develop this idea by saying that a poem and its reading become historical through nonhistorical form. Form here designates that which cannot be articulated historically. It is because reading is not identical with its text, and because form must be constructed through a “dialectical interplay” between reading and text, that reading is itself historical: that it can be interpreted across time, in new contexts, on new readings, and only in time. In this, de Man suggests that historical interpretation is premised on precisely the nonhistorical procedures of poetic form: of producing a single, autonomous, differentiated piece of writing. Reading’s access to historical material in poetic form mirrors de Man’s characterization of the aesthetic’s access to material. In both, material emerges in and as a “radical formalism,” a bare or mere form. Reading poetry in this way plays across the movement between “mere form” and “phenomenal form” in the aesthetic. The poem is legible to the extent that it remains partly not legible, non-­phenomenal. Reading has as its condition some part of the text that cannot be read. Form’s history is dynamic in this movement between legibility and illegibility. It constitutes a present which makes that movement possible. It is for this reason that lyric poetry is paradigmatic of the temporality of modernity for de Man. Modernity is a lyric category in the sense that it “designates more generally the problematical possibility of all literature’s existing in the present, of being considered, or read, from a point of view that claims to share with its own sense of a temporal present.”21 Modernity designates the lyric possibility of existing in the present: the rhetorical bracketing of reference that produces a present of reading. Again, this is put in materialist terms: lyric, in Mallarmé, constitutes a “tomb” without a body.22 It is a reference without referent, an “absolute formalism” of matter as mere form. The

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“present” which lyric produces is “ambivalent” because it refers both to the realization and the “irrealization” of its material. Lyric allegorizes reading by constituting the same present by which reading, also, becomes historical: where reading functions by moving across, like a saccade, a spatial gap or temporal lag. We can clarify this “lyric rhetoric” of history by turning to two recent accounts of lyric form, by Jonathan Culler and Marjorie Levinson. There, the dynamic and virtual elements of lyric poetry will elaborate this complex interplay in de Man between text and reading, and thus between material, history, and form, in ways that let us see more clearly what I am calling lyric’s indeterminacy. Culler and Levinson both draw upon the structure of form in the lyric to understand the form of history of its reading. If lyric reading, as Prins and Jackson propose, is the idealizing production of a genre through the prefigured expectations of its critical readers, or “lyricization,” then the form of history proposed for the lyric above in de Man—­processual, dynamic, and non-­totalized—­constitutes a kind of counter to Prins and Jackson in the sense that history is constituted in lyric terms. History in poetry is connected to material in aesthetic experience by its “disarticulation” in lyric form. Indeed, as Lytle Shaw has usefully focused this debate between historicizing and trans-­historicizing accounts of lyric reading, we might think of reading’s movement between synchronic and diachronic levels as internal to lyric’s own articulation.23 If we are to understand history in a lyric poem, it would be through the way that history is constituted in lyric’s formal transformation of time into a present for history. Jonathan Culler describes the rhetoric of this transformation of time in lyric “apostrophe.” In Structuralist Poetics, he argues that lyric is “atemporal  .  .  . complete in itself,” organized around an apostrophic address.24 In Theory of the Lyric, however, he develops the argument by showing how that construction of temporality in the lyric, indeed that “atemporal” bracketing of apostrophe, might be thought of as interactive and dynamic with its reading. The transformation of time in the lyric includes a transformation of historical time. Issues of history are transformed in lyric’s “now” space of apostrophe, in which “the lyric can displace a time of narrative, of past events reported, and place us in the continuing present of apostrophic address, the ‘now.’ ”25 In this “now,” “the temporal movement from A to B, restructured by apostrophe, becomes a reversible alternation between A′ and B′: a place of presence and absence governed not by time but by poetic ingenuity or power.”26 The “atemporal” bracketing of lyric time is also a restructuring of history as narrative sequence. As with de Man, this history is a kind of formal totality which also refuses totalization, in the sense that its “reversible alternation” prompts more reversals rather than their completion. If reading requires some historical temporality, some difference between reading and text, then it functions by a gap of omission, as Iser suggests. But here that gap is the bracketing of temporality which actively produces the terms of reading:

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the reversible alternation of attention, as in apostrophe, between subject-­ reader and text-­object. Lyric indeterminacy is in this sense not an empty gap of omission, as in Iser, but a construction of that reversible temporal space, “now,” in which reading can take place. The history that conditions lyric reading might in this way be thought recognizably lyric in form. But this claim returns us, again, to the issue of what the material being read actually consists of in this bracketing. The bracketing of sublime “absolute formalism” in de Man’s reading of Kant led to a “mere form” of non-­phenomenalized material, a bare kind of materiality that consisted only of form without any determinable features filling it in—­merely looking, perception, the aesthetic. Marjorie Levinson usefully approaches this materiality through the terms of lyric form as access to material, rather than its omission. In Thinking through Poetry, she suggests that “form is an effect of the poem’s behavior within an environment that is not the world referenced by and also in the poem, but that exists in the exact same space as the poem.”27 And in this view, poetry, like other “self-­organizing systems,” produces the components that produce it—­not as a once-­and-­for-­ all event but through the ongoing behavior of the system. What makes such systems creative (and not just infinite regress machines) is that the production of components not only composes the system’s environment, it ceaselessly renegotiates the boundaries of that environment.28

This “exact same space of the poem” seems also to be the space claimed by the lyric “now” in Culler: it is a self-­organizing system in the sense that it produces its own boundaries as reading. But for Levinson, these boundaries are not separable from that systematic organization. Levinson suggests a systematic connection between material and reading. To translate this into my own argument, what I am terming the indeterminacy of reading, constructed by the bracketing of temporality in which reading is never total, is produced by a non-­determined material. The third level, in my introduction to this chapter, emerges from the first. Material emerges, for Levinson, in the interplay of time and space that, for de Man, characterizes reading’s history. The key axiom is that the material (and/or nature)—­its provenance, locus, content, and effects—­is neither an essence nor a social construction (as in either a hegemonic or consensual projection), but a historically conjunctural phenomenon in the sense of an objective convergence of historical forces. That being the case, every act of materialist critique must first labor to determine what matters (which is to say, how matter materializes) within a given conjuncture.29

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Connecting history with materialization seems an important shift, to me, for the way it connects the two wings of de Man’s project outlined above. The rhetorical production of reading as history in form can be connected to the “absolute formalism” of material in aesthetic experience. In this way, poetry “suddenly emerges as a determinate form and in the same stroke brings into being its enabling context.”30 Just as a poem comes into being together with its context—­to use Levinson’s simile, like a whirlpool nothing other than the difference it makes with its material, water—­so criticism can access a poem’s historicity systematically through the difference it makes with its shared poetic environment which, as language, it also is. Lyric constructs the terms of its reading by making that difference which constitutes history, a gap in determination. The determination of form emerges through processes of non-­determination which are also processes of materialization—­just as lyric constructs its now temporality by bracketing it off from time. From Culler and Levinson, we might infer that reading the materiality of lyric poetry, and reading its history, involves a sense of form as a suspension of reading and text. Reading proceeds by moving across gaps, both hermeneutically, as in Iser, and materially, as in the saccade and saccadic suppression. The suspensions of history characteristic of lyric form therefore become models of reading itself: of the ways it thinks through gaps in determination. In Culler, then, we have a sense of lyric as designating a transformation of forms by this suspension. And in Levinson, we have a sense of transformation as systematic, as producing the terms of its reading by this configuration of materials. History has as its condition, as in de Man, this gap of determination. The present which is the condition of reading is a product of lyric’s suspension of temporality. Reading lyric as indeterminate therefore means also reading the ways that both matter and reading emerge by indeterminate processes. I now want to pursue this double condition by thinking of the terms of the dynamic and provisional—­the indeterminate—­in Kant’s aesthetics. As de Man suggests, and as Culler and Levinson develop it, this lyric indeterminacy is a structure of materialization, and the aesthetic offers a possible way to think its structure in the terms of reading itself. Identifying a latent materialism in such indeterminacy in the lyric will mean reading in the gap that emerges between ideal and real in the philosophical aesthetics that gives structure to that reading.

Indeterminacy and Dynamism in Kant’s Aesthetics A theory of reading can emerge from these aesthetics through a description of judgment. Judgment, in Kantian aesthetics, can be characterized as not only responding to its object’s indeterminacy, but as an indeterminate activity itself, whose dimensions give shape to this theory of reading. The broader pressures of materiality and materialization can be seen to underwrite Kant’s

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description of this reflecting, aesthetic judgment. Viewed through that pressure, a picture emerges of an indeterminacy of both judgment and the object of judgment in aesthetic terms which can be seen to translate into the critical terms, into reading, outlined in the first section of this chapter. My intention is not to offer a philosophical commentary on Kant, but rather to show how Kant inscribes a certain logic into criticism which can be excavated as a theory of reading. This excavation will become apparent in the chapter’s final section. Like reading lyric form, Kant’s aesthetics are motivated by a gap in experience. I mean this in the strong sense I have been developing with de Man: that our task in reading poetry, exemplified in lyric, is precisely to read this bracketing or spacing which opens up in poetic articulation on its own terms. Kant’s aesthetics, I will suggest here, outlines the dimensions of just such a spacing in judgment: the reflecting aesthetic judgment opens up, and keeps open, an indeterminate “something” as the object of the subject’s attention. Through Kant, then, we can outline the dimensions of this “something,” both as material and as the limit of material representation. Aesthetic judgment will operate in the space this limitation opens, and the task of criticism (as outlined in the previous section) consists, similarly, in reading poetry in this open space. In such terms, we might consider the ways in which a suspension of material determination produces reading, rather than communication or articulation. By this I mean the ways it identifies the conditions of something, some material, becoming legible without that legibility also denoting a communicable determination. This, it seems to me, is de Man’s point: that the “mere form” of bare material, “absolute formalism,” is not communication or communicability but legibility—­only reading. In other words, we can take Kant’s account of communicability, sanctioned by material indeterminacy, into a theory of reading which is likewise indeterminate. To make this argument, I will first establish in what sense we can see Kant’s aesthetic judgment to be indeterminate. Then, examining the relation between this judgment and its object, I will explore the particular construction of a nonobjective materiality—­an indeterminate “something”—­in the aesthetics. Finally, I will connect this to a dynamic picture of material in Kant’s philosophy from which emerges an indeterminate realism of aesthetic experience. The logic of this argument tends to presenting a theory of reading from this philosophy. This section will thus suggest that Kant’s aesthetics equips us to read the dynamic, virtual, and provisional poetic form of lyric; but it will also suggest that this provisionality is troubling for Kant’s attempts to limit the aesthetic in his critical philosophy. Indeed, in reading Kantian aesthetics beyond his own controlling ends (the mere communicability of common sense, the transcendental validation of judgment), I want to open up the question of end—­of termination—­in judgment. Further, I want to identify the ways Kant’s philosophy constructs legibility from illegibility, to understand writing to consist in an inscription which becomes legible by an

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act of erasure of the surface or space of that legibility as an aesthetic surface. Raising the question of legibility, then, means attending to a certain form of negativity: the construction of an object, art, which, as I will argue here through Kant, is a loss of objectivity. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a full account of the implications of Kant’s aesthetics, though I will refer to numerous sources that do offer such commentary. Instead, I will focus on one aspect of it: the relation, or articulation, between the idealizing practices of judgment, and the possibility of thinking the material constituents of that judgment as what I call indeterminate. Writing, in this framework, as a poetic matter, will emerge from this double gesture as an idealized material; and reading, again in this framework, will similarly identify materials in such poetry through that constraining idealization. Indeterminacy in Reflecting Judgment Kant distinguishes the legitimacy of aesthetics as a philosophical field by establishing the validity of reflecting, and not only determining, judgments. Rather than determining a representation by reference to a concept of the understanding, aesthetic judgment refers to the subject’s own pleasure in merely reflecting on it. The reference of aesthetic judgment is not an object, but the subjective pleasure felt in its experience. This means that aesthetic judgment is limited from “knowing” its object: “the subjective aspect in a representation which cannot become an element of cognition at all is the pleasure or displeasure connected with it; for through this I cognize nothing in the object of the representation.”31 The aesthetic judgment of an object does not determine it, but merely reflects upon it. It is defined by the pleasure resulting from the “free play” between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding at work, but not to a determined conceptual or moral end. By way of this reflection, Kant intends to connect the accounts of judgment in the first two Critiques which do function to determine objects, by an account of the activity of judgment itself. In determining judgments, the subject encounters a particular object and refers it to a general concept. Reflection makes this transition possible, as detailed in the first Critique, by referring representation to the correct faculties, constituting the “state of mind under which we can arrive at concepts.”32 The reflecting judgment (of beauty, the sublime, or of the principle of purposiveness in organisms in teleological judgments) is judging without referring to the understanding to fill in the content of that judgment. In the aesthetic (i.e., nonconceptual) judgment of taste, then, the subject encounters something that, aside from whatever conceptual determinations are employed (this is a tree, or a painting), leads her to judge that it is beautiful or sublime. Rather than determining the object, the subject feels the subjective connection between her own faculties, now unchained from their work, pleasurably. In reflecting judgment, the subject feels the harmonious

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play of her faculties of cognition rather than any representation of objective agreement.33 This description of pleasure has been important for commentary,34 but I want to focus instead on the displacement of the ends of judgment from determining an object to the free play of the subject’s faculties. The reflecting judgment refers to the free play occasioned by the “relation of the two faculties of cognition which constitutes the subjective, merely sensitive condition of the objective use of the power of judgment in general.”35 The free play characteristic of reflecting judgment in this sense depends upon the non-­ determination of an object. Further, this initial characterization of the free play of the cognitive powers in reflection yields, in §49, the “aesthetic idea” as “that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.”36 The structure of reflecting judgment, in this sense, both inscribes a non-­termination to judgment (its mere free play) and describes its terrain of that movement as a kind of limit to intelligibility. The mere reflecting judgment functions according to a movement that does not terminate in a concept. And further, this model of judgment, in the account of aesthetic ideas, is characterized as not giving intelligibility to its object. This double characterization of reflection as both a non-­ terminating movement and as a non-­determination of an object gives a picture of judgment as, in both senses, indeterminate. But the significance of this judgment not making its object intelligible to the subject deserves further exploration. There is a threat here that indeterminacy means a significant detachment from any object—­a mere formalism. But aesthetic judgments are structurally supposed, by Kant, to form a “bridge” between the different aspects, phenomenal and nominal, cognitively determined or morally free, under which we think.37 There are proliferating, unanticipated, contingent natural forms which one is capable of experiencing. And in parallel, there are theoretical, moral ideas which are not manifest in the world but which must, according to the second Critique, be possibly effective in the world: our moral purposes must be realizable in the world. There is a doubling of freedom here. The subject is free to reason not only about the world, but free from the world in unanticipated ways. And nature is free both as freely available to the subject, and free to be any other way.38 These freedoms, indeed, are collaborative: not only do subjects continually know things about the world, they also continually construct new ways of being in the world, and hence newly effective moral attitudes. If nature were not free, then reason could not freely reason either. There must, then, be a connection between these twin freedoms. But freedom must itself constitute this connection. This bridge between reason and nature must be constructed in the teeth of their manifest disconnection. That is to say, reason is only free to the extent that our idea of nature is free from its ministrations, mediations (in the form of concepts) tailored to our

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capabilities for experience. This is a crucial vice versa, in that nature is only free to the extent that reason can conceive of it as free from its own attempts to represent it. The collaborative relation between the two is therefore negative, and this impacts the significance of the “non-intelligibility” of the world in aesthetic judgments. There cannot be a positive “bridge” built between these two “worlds,” because that would violate the freedom of which it must be constituted. It is as if they were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second: yet the latter should have an influence on the former, namely the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world; and nature consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom.39

Aesthetic judgment, then, does not determine anything of any object; and yet, as an experience in which the faculties of reason and understanding are nonetheless animated, it is structurally apt to form such a bridge. In such experience, both the subjective forms of reason and the objective forms of nature are felt freely. To say a rose is beautiful might not tell me anything determinate about roses, but it does tell me that I am capable of experiencing roses in their freedom from determination, and simultaneously I am free from having to determine them. Aesthetic judgment thus provides a form for registering connection without determination. For Rachel Zuckert, the crucial idea here is “purposiveness without purpose,” indicating both the teleological principle that guides our judgment of organisms as “organized” without a concept of their end, and the idea of purposiveness that structures the reflecting judgment of beauty as, similarly, lawful without any conceptual grounding of that lawfulness. For Zuckert, the governing, regulative idea of judgment’s purposiveness without purpose “serves as a structure of the subject’s practice of judging”—judging, that is, the contingent experience of beauty in terms of formal harmony, in which the subject is “engaged in a future-orientated anticipation of an indeterminate, non-conceptually ordered whole.”40 The practice of judging is “indeterminate” in the sense that it does not organize its materials according to a given whole, but rather according to this “future” whole. Aesthetic judgment does not have a determined end. Its animation is in this sense free in ways that indicate the purposiveness of its object without having established a law, a whole, that could have organized our judgment of that object before we judged it. The freedom, here, consists in the way our judgment of the object is unanticipated. The initial characterization of aesthetic judgments functioning according to a “mere” reflection, and of aesthetic ideas as not leading to an “intelligibility”

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of the object, develops this stronger sense of judgment as a free animation. Rather than being separate from the world, the aesthetic judgment responds to its representation as, in this double sense, free. This is close, surely, to de Man’s “radical formalism” and aesthetics of “materialism.” To push this connection further, in Kant aesthetic ideas are paradigmatically aligned with poetry because “the poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas”—­seeks, that is, to make ideas “sensible beyond the limits of experience.”41 Poetry in this sense “adds” to ideas “a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept.”42 As well as a harmony of the faculties, outlined in the first version of the “Introduction” as the “merely sensitive condition of the objective use of the power of judgment in general (namely the agreement of those two faculties with each other),”43 the reflection in poetry suggests a play of concepts and the limits of presentation themselves. In other words, something like a free play of presentation occurs in poetry. Poetry as the object of judgment in this way indicates the connection between “mere form” and an indeterminate materiality. By this experience of mere form, Kant intends, as Henry Allison argues, to identify the ground for reflection in general.44 This, indeed, is what Lehman refers to as “mere form”; i.e., that form in Kant’s aesthetic refers to this representation rather than to any phenomenal features of an object. However, as Rodolphe Gasché has argued, this means that only “wild” or undetermined material can provide a ground for this “mereness.”45 So what connection, what articulation, might obtain between this reflecting judgment and the non-­phenomenalized object? For Paul Guyer, this movement from particular to general, from representation to concept, constitutes a “possible concept” in the aesthetic, “the general condition for the application of concepts, the harmony between the imagination and understanding.” But it does so only to the extent that the judgment is a nonconceptual synthesis of its empirical materials.46 That is to say, because it does not offer conceptual determination, there is for Guyer no way to any “object” in aesthetic judgment. There is no object of judgment, in this idealist sense. The lack of its material’s objectivity is turned on the subjective faculties themselves, the feelings of pleasure which now become the pseudo-­objects of the judgment. If we are to think, as I have been claiming, of a materiality of radical formalism in Kant’s aesthetic, then we have to do so without thinking of that materiality as constituting an object in this philosophical sense. The reflecting structure of judgment, its limitation from intelligibility and conceptual synthesis, means that what is judged remains itself indeterminate in the strong sense of not constituting an object. From Judgment to Object I want now to think of what this “something” in aesthetic judgment, if not an object, is. But to do so, I want briefly to cover some of the ways that

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commentary has framed this nonconceptual synthesis, and its articulation to empirical objects. This is important to establish because the object of aesthetics, in a broad sense, should demarcate its disciplinary structure. If that object were not only related indeterminately to the structure of judgment, but itself constituted something not determinate in that judgment, then it would lead to a disciplinary problem: if what the discipline knows is a non-­object, then what would that knowledge consist of? And moreover, if reading constitutes a structure, like judgment, that makes of its object a non-­object, then what is the object of reading? What relation between judgment and object underwrites the critical relationship—­ the possibility that criticism could know, make intelligible, or determine something in its (literary) object? As we have just seen, in Kant, reading poetry consists of an expansion without determinate end—­“much thinking” without any subsequent language being able to become fully “adequate” to it. And further, the judgment is structurally singular, and particular. Because their ideas cannot be generalized into determinate concepts—­“beauty” cannot become a determinate concept, but remains reflective—­aesthetic judgments are always numerically bracketed to their particular moment, even if that moment is universalized.47 The question of the “non-­phenomenalized” object of aesthetic judgment pertains to the critical reading of poetry on these terms: if the judgment, as the rationalized response to aesthetic experience, structurally consists in delimiting itself from its object, then the disciplinary object of criticism that reads on those structural terms would similarly have, as its object, that space of limitation rather than objective presence. Answering these questions will require examining in more detail, first, what that Kantian “nonconceptual synthesis” consists of, and second, what the status of the object is in that synthesis. We might first note a shift from thinking that synthesis as nonconceptual to thinking it as indeterminate. Allison implies that there is a problem in Guyer’s nonconceptual synthesis, in that judgment would have somehow to generate its own laws for its activity which would govern that synthesis.48 Hannah Ginsborg uses the idea of normativity to answer this problem. Ginsborg reads Kant’s understanding of the imagination as a “lawfulness” “without a law” in the sense of being normatively “exemplary.” The imagination “sets the rules to which it conforms” in the sense of arising “in the act of synthesis” itself, such that “I have no conception of how [something] ought to be except that afforded by the example of my activity itself: namely, the indeterminate conception that it ought to be this way.”49 The experience of an object as beautiful is thus indeterminate: it is the application of judgment which, rather than applying terms already established, establishes its own terms in the act of judging. The indeterminacy of the imagination is that it functions “as it ought to function with respect to the object, yet without either having in mind an antecedent concept of how it ought to function, nor arriving at such a concept through the activity itself.”50 The aesthetic experience of an object is “an experience

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of the free or indeterminate lawfulness of one’s imaginative activity”51 in this sense of normatively producing the rules which govern it “when I take my imaginative activity in the perception of some particular object to exemplify how it ought to be with respect to that object.”52 Aesthetic judgment does not, in this sense, need to call upon conceptual norms to justify its protocols, because it is the normative experience of the imagination establishing its own parameters, and its own relation to the representation of an object. Where this leaves us is, again, with that object. I have suggested that in Kant’s account (1) judgment is reflecting, and as such delimits itself from both its object (in the sense of not determining it) and conceptual synthesis; (2) that in this it does not provide intelligibility to the object or terminate with that object; and (3) that this reflection is active, in Ginsborg’s “normative” sense of establishing its terms in the particular and contingent “practice” of judging which, as Zuckert puts it, is “future-­oriented,” marking an “unanticipated” whole. It is in this structure that the something of judgment, its non-­object of non-­knowledge, appears. Matter and Dynamics Understanding aesthetic judgment to be normative of its particular, unanticipated, and contingent judging contexts opens up the space in judgment not for an object, but for that something in judgment as constituted by the dynamic structure of reflecting judgment itself. I want now to turn to the non-­object in judgment as dynamically structured by this play with termination and determination in reflection. Realism, or an empirical materialism in the aesthetic, will be tied here counterintuitively to the idealist dynamism of judgment itself, precisely as the immaterial and dematerializing frame of judgment in which matter appears as such. My contention is that Kant gives a framework for thinking the indeterminacy of judgment together with a dynamic picture of materiality. We get to this picture by way of the reflecting structure of aesthetic judgment. Ginsborg’s sense of aesthetic judgment as nonconceptual in a normative sense—­producing the terms of its judgment reflectively but lawfully in accord with the imagination—­moves us toward a picture of judgment as a dynamic activity. We might, in this context, also think of Robert Brandom’s account of the normativity of judgment in Idealism, in which judgment again functions as a “selection” in evolving contexts which produces a dynamic, but systematic, whole.53 On these terms, it is precisely the idealism of the judgment (the reference to ideal spaces, in the aesthetic the space of the faculties rather than the object) that enables its dynamic evolution in lawful terms. Judgment functions in a dynamic system in which it is self-­adjusting to the newly normative contexts which it judges. If we transpose this logic to the aesthetic, it is so precisely because its “object” is itself the evolving, dynamic “something” that is not quite an object.

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To think about matter in these terms is to mobilize reflection as a dynamic activity. In Kant’s idealist scheme, matter is “substantia phenomenon,” or “phenomenal substance.” But matter is outside the limits of experience: The absolutely internal in matter, according to the pure understanding, is a mere fancy, for it is nowhere an object for the pure understanding; the transcendental object, however, which might be the ground of this appearance that we call matter, is a mere something about which we would not understand what it is even if someone could tell us.54

And this is verified in reference to form in aesthetic judgment. In taste, that is, in aesthetic power of judgment, it is not the sensation directly (the material of the representation of the object), but rather how the free (productive) power of imagination joins it together through invention, that is, form, which produces pleasure in the object.55

Aesthetic judgment upholds the ban on the experience of matter: our pleasure is in representation, not in its material source. The account of the imagination and its limits in cognition thus reflects imagination in aesthetic judgment. However, if we take the above structure of judgment to fill out this idea of form, then a more complex picture of what might be materially “something” in judgment begins to take shape. In that judgment, what Kant is referring to as form, here, can be taken to be a dynamic movement of material which, while not being available to experience as determination, nonetheless presents its constitutive limits. Material constitutes the periphery of the judgment, constructed by the limits of its dynamic movements. The dynamism of this material can be seen to consist in the movements of judgment itself. On these lines, Rae Langton argues that Kant’s account of space yields a “blueprint that enables us to represent the real dynamical relations of a causally interactive world. But it is a blueprint that captures only relations.”56 And Lucy Allais suggests that Kantian space is “dynamic” in the sense of being an ideal space which is itself articulated by the movement of bodies in it. In these dynamics “matter, as appearance, consists only of relations or forces.”57 Yet “Kant explains the space-­filling property of matter, impenetrability, in terms of opposed forces rather than solidity, saying that attractive and repulsive forces constitute the essence of matter.”58 Material, in other words, is a function of movement, in the sense that it is not substance but the interactions of forces in ideal space. This yields a “realism,” for Allais but not for Langton, from the terms of idealist judgment. For our purposes, this means thinking about judgment as an idealizing activity which, as idealizing, outlines a non-­determined materiality in its dynamic movements. The

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non-­material, ideal reflection which we saw outlined in Kant’s “aesthetic ideas” thus analogizes these constitutive movements of the penetrability and impenetrability of matter. Reading, rather than depending on a “penetrability” of its object, can be seen in this sense as premised on constituting the terms of its object’s impenetrability precisely by its movements around it. The materialism of this impenetrability is constituted by a dynamic judgment not because it yields any experience of its matter, but precisely because it does not. In other words, just as what is material emerges at the horizon of that dynamic field of ideal space in Allais, and just as judgment in Brandom and Ginsborg functions by producing and reproducing that field itself as its normative activity, judgment in the aesthetic functions by producing a field of indeterminate realism, in which the limitation of judgment from its material constitutes the field of its dynamic appearance. The dynamics of reading—­the movement from reader to text, or in reading itself as a form, the temporal lag or gap, or the saccadic suppression of the reading eye—­might in this way be considered dynamics that yield a material, but they do so through dematerialization, an idealism that limits itself fundamentally not only from intellectual cognition but also from presentation of an object. The result is a thinking of limits. In the first section of this chapter, I suggested that we read at the limit of textual presence in the lyric, with its spatial coordination of matter as a temporal limit, bracketing. And in this section, I have suggested that, in Kant’s account of it, we judge at the limit of presentation in the aesthetic. What is material to this judgment, just so, emerges at this ideal limit; judgment functions, in a normative or pragmatic sense, at a limit, encoding its own movements in particular and contingent contexts. There is in Kant, therefore, a latent theory of materialist reading—­latent, that is, in the encoding, idealizing, dematerializing ideal practices that do not determine or make an object intelligible, do not make of “something” an “object” of experience, but rather inscribe the dynamic limits of that appearance. Such a limited materialist theory of reading does not yield, therefore, the experience of material, but rather a peculiar, dematerialized movement of matter within an indeterminate (not determining, not terminating) framework. That is because it is this movement itself that constitutes materiality as a limit to judgment. Its experience requires an idealized framing sense of space in which such movement can function. From within the Kantian critical limit of experience, with its ban on thinking the thing in itself, we might therefore find a theory of reading as similarly dynamic, and similarly concerned with a virtual rather than an actual unity of its object. What thus emerges in Kant’s aesthetic is a possible theory of reading: a relation of forms of apprehension to material form which is aesthetic; that is to say, one concerned merely with appearances and their reflection. Although Kant situates this experience, as “mere form,” in the subject, in doing so he makes possible thinking exactly the “immaterial” material of

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aesthetic experience: the dynamic movement by which a non-­determined matter can be registered, in which nonobjective presence can be judged. As such, the aesthetic presents an experience of material as indeterminate—­as non-­phenomenalized, nonobjective. The theory of reading which we might develop from this premise would similarly be a critical response to the mere form of its materials as indeterminate. Kant develops a dynamic picture of space and bodies which we can call materialist in ways that support a dynamic picture of material that emerges in lyric poetry as what is illegible—­ producing the conditions of its reading precisely by its non-­determination as matter, appearance, presence, as a “gap” in articulation.

Not Hegel: Adorno, Blanchot, and Legibility Such a theory of reading would need, however, to be dug out from Kant’s philosophical aesthetics, in the sense of redescribing the ends to which those aesthetics are directed. My claim has been that Kant outlines a possible concept of legibility to consist in the limiting non-­intelligibility of matter in judgment; that precisely because it is not an “object” in an idealist sense, the “something” of aesthetic judgment is described by a dynamic movement between penetrability and impenetrability which models reading on those terms. To complete my argument here, and to bring this theory of reading into relief against the aesthetic, I want to turn to Hegel. In a schematic sense, Hegel understands art and philosophy (rather than aesthetics) to comprise a dialectical dynamic of matter and its mediation. Art is the determination of otherwise undetermined matter by spirit, its mediation. Philosophy mediates this art object in turn by determination; but this is a determination which negates, further, the matter of art. I intend to concentrate on the ways Hegel transformed Kant’s aesthetic into (1) a determination of sensual matter by its mediation in art, and (2) the reflexive basis for the dialectic. In turning against both of these Hegelian ends, Adorno and Blanchot will emerge as “Kantian”—­not, however, on Kant’s own terms, but in the sense of theorizing a relation in reading between form and material which is also indeterminate, and which will grasp the lyric indeterminacy outlined in this chapter’s first section. Hegel and the Ends of Art Hegel announces that art, considered “in its highest vocation,” “is and remains for us a thing of the past.”59 What limits art? Art’s “highest vocation” would be the manifestation of truth. This is not, as Schiller had it, merely the “appearance” of truth; nor, as Kant had it, a true (but subjective) pleasure. For Hegel, in art the Concept is reconciled with external appearance. Art is “true” to the extent that it manifests, objectively, the Idea. Historically, this

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means that, to use one of Hegel’s examples, a Greek sculptor makes sensually manifest the idea of human perfection which could not yet be articulated as an idea.60 Art shows that human perfection is true, because it makes it into an object which can be thought. But this manifestation is also art’s limit. Unlike the other “modes” of the Idea, religion and philosophy, art is limited to appearance.61 Hegel at once identifies art as the materialization of truth, its free appearance, and identifies that manifestation as a limitation of that freedom. Art is thinking in “sensuous form,” and “when art is present in its supreme perfection, then precisely in its figurative mode it contains the kind of exposition most essential to and most in correspondence with the content of truth.”62 Art’s claims to truth are the claims of manifestation: as beautiful, art truly makes the Concept appear.63 Art is the sensuous embodiment of the Concept; but it is also the “ensouling” of mere sensuous matter. As beautiful, lifeless matter “shines” with spiritual content. What is beautiful is “ensouled”: “the Concept ensouls the real existence which embodies it, and therefore is free and at home with itself in this objectivity.”64 The beautiful form, then, articulates the adequacy of matter for the articulation of truth. It is true, beautiful and ensouled, to the extent that it can manifest spirit. There is therefore a collaboration in art between organic and manifest life, and the Spirit that ensouls it—­a dialectic. Thereby the sensuous aspect of a work of art, in comparison with the immediate existence of things in nature, is elevated to a pure appearance, and the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought. It is not yet pure thought, but, despite its sensuousness, is no longer a purely material existent either, like stones, plants, and organic life; on the contrary, the sensuous in the work of art is itself something ideal, but which, not being ideal as thought is ideal, is still at the same time there externally as a thing.65

Art mediates the Idea. But although art can refine the beauty that appears in nature, such that art can become Ideal, “whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point,”66 to be adequate to the Absolute it must relinquish sensuous particularity. Spirit itself requires the self-­transparency of philosophy, and the philosophical articulation of the Concept which unfolds from its own form. As a vehicle of Spirit, art is finite, precisely because its material, like nature’s, is finitude itself; whereas Spirit, if it is free, is infinite.67 Art is a transitory moment in the history of Spirit. This transition away from art, however, is effected by the very form of manifestation which art presents: reflection. Art is constituted by the reflective way Spirit is manifested in sensuous appearance. The external appearance is not identical with Spirit, but art’s “outside” is not just mere matter either.68 Its strange, medial quality is conferred by aesthetic experience. A person recognizes the way an artwork mediates subjective form through an object, and this recognition

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registers the subjective way that objective artworks function. The artwork is an object constituted by subjective reflection. What is thus displayed is the depth of a suprasensuous world which thought pierces and sets up at first as a beyond in contrast with immediate consciousness and present feeling; it is the freedom of intellectual reflection which rescues itself from the here and now, called sensuous reality and finitude. But this breach, to which the spirit proceeds, it is also able to heal. It generates out of itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.69

The artwork is torn between presentation and representation.70 The spiritual “beyond” that it reflects is “suprasensuous,” but its material is markedly sensuous. Art constitutes, to preempt Blanchot, a kind of “not beyond,” a “now” space, a mediating “gap” in temporal and historical continuity. Its reflective work therefore presents the form of spirit, but is insufficient to represent it, to bring it into an articulated temporal scheme like history. Art thus instantiates the form of reflection by which the experience of art will supersede precisely that form.71 Once art has disclosed to us the form of this reflection, then that reflection exceeds the particular presentation of the artwork. It is for this reason that, historically, art is a “thing of the past”: it “has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.”72 We stand in need not of art, but of a philosophy of art. Without such a universalization of reflection in philosophy, art would be limited to local historical presentation, and its ahistorical significance would be missed. Finding such significance would mean going beyond art. A philosophy of art must turn to art “for knowing philosophically what art is,”73 to consider the way that art’s objectivity is not sufficient either to the production or the experience of precisely the reflection it presents. Art is lacking, and it presents what it lacks. The beauty of art may well be “born of the spirit and born again,”74 but what it births is reflection, not art. This is the situation that explicitly confronts Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory. Once art, he writes there, has become “autonomous,” has liberated itself, in Benjaminian modernity, from its “cultic functions,”75 then what does it do?76 This autonomy is “irrevocable.”77 And this is the situation that less explicitly confronts Blanchot in his account of writing. There is, to use Blanchot’s word, a désoeuvrement—­an “unworking”—­of art by art, after Hegel: if art’s function is actively to reconcile truth and appearance, then its “untrue” appearance “unworks” that function. What do we make of art’s appearance when it no longer manifests truth? This is something surely analogous to both de Man’s “radical formalism” of the materialist aesthetic and to lyric poetry’s “now” of modernity. Hegel’s retrospective sense of art’s history (henceforth

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we are “after” art as mediator of the Concept) is reproduced in his retrospective sense of the dialectic’s synthetic operations. Absolute knowledge contains the now reconciled history of its articulation; it comes after history. And the reflective truth of aesthetic experience negates the history of art’s truthful appearance in artworks. The aesthetic therefore parallels the dialectic, and offers a possible way into it. Art, too, has a history of its articulation. And art for Hegel implies a teleology. Art asks the question of its future possible determination (as opposed to the Kantian “future-­directed” indeterminacy of Zuckert). The “end” of art raises a question about the form of its displacement, as well as the ambiguous form of its telos. The question of this chapter, and this book, is not therefore about the “end” of art, but about the various “ends” of aesthetic thinking, and the figurability of those ends (their translatability) into unexpected futures. And Kant, not Hegel, provides a form for thinking these ends. What can we gain for an understanding of the end or ends of art or aesthetics from relating Kantian aesthetics to Hegel’s? We can register how the shift from the subjective experience of beauty to the objective reconciliations of art reinvests Kantian aesthetics with the question of history and manifestation. Hegel drew upon Kant’s account of the aesthetic pleasure taken from the sensed reconciliation between inner subjective experience and external objective form. Hegel agrees with Kant that judgments of taste are not merely sensuous, and therefore contingent: they refer to a subjective capacity to judge, and to a form of judgment, as well as to the form of the object.78 He also agrees with Kant that, in aesthetic experience, the subject assumes an attitude different from conceptual experience: the subject does not desire to appropriate the object, nor, as in science, to abstract knowledge from it.79 But the problem for Hegel is that beauty does not fully reflect human freedom. Bound to nature, it limits the spiritual freedom of subjective thought.80 Unlike nature, art’s beauty is “born of the spirit and born again.”81 But as Julia Peters points out, we cannot divorce Hegel’s claims about the end of art from his sense that beauty, too, develops historically.82 Beauty, marking that apparently disarticulated “now” experience of the aesthetic, thus, again, becomes as this now the condition of historical articulation. Beauty, the appearance and manifestation of truth, after the end of art is a remainder which also turns against itself: what happens to art, and not just to art, but also to the forms of aesthetic experience and judgment which beauty validates, after beauty? Adorno, Blanchot, and the Kantian Critique of Hegel After beauty, art’s mediating role, mandated to beauty, is revoked. Once art no longer manifests the reflective work of the Idea, beauty is no longer significant. If art lingers, it does so indeterminately in a sense that goes beyond the three Kantian definitions offered at the start of this chapter in becoming

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historical, disciplinary. Yet we must look elsewhere than Hegel, to Kant, to think this aesthetic indeterminacy. And this can transform into a question about negativity. Adorno’s and Blanchot’s interventions into Hegelian dialectics are legibly aesthetic in the Kantian sense that they think indeterminacy. But they are post-­Hegelian in that this indeterminacy is historically motivated. We can see what this means, first, in Adorno. Hegel describes the necessity of philosophy overturning art. Adorno reverses this situation through aesthetics. Aesthetic experience conserves reflection where philosophy abandons it. It is not only that art stands in need of philosophy; philosophy stands in need of philosophy. Like art, philosophy stands in need of reflection. For Hegel, art’s transience, its provisionality, means that its reflective work necessarily passes into the determinate form of philosophy. But for Adorno, it is precisely this persistent provisionality that registers the ways philosophy has failed to become reflective. Aesthetics would respond to this provisionality and, as for Kant, become reflective itself. Aesthetics “demands of philosophy precisely what philosophy has neglected to do: that it extract phenomena from their existence and bring them to self-­ reflection.”83 Adorno suggests that for Hegel art is not only a transient mode, art itself is “transient.”84 But this transience is the manifestation of precisely that “self-­reflection.” Adorno reverses art’s transience into a philosophical necessity. Philosophy has failed to do exactly what art is supposed to do: to make the identity of the Concept actually manifest. Apparently negated, art lingers as negative. Art’s history is “inhomogenous.”85 Its truths are contradictory, in that its transient forms contradict one another. But in a situation where philosophy requires reflection, this negativity is significant. In Negative Dialectics, “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”86 Philosophy is shown to be necessary in the formal way that art was to be shown, by Hegel, by its belatedness to be unnecessary. Philosophy lingers in its need for philosophy, just as art lingers in its need for philosophy. Critical aesthetics begins, then, with a need in philosophy. The way that philosophy deals with art—­aesthetics—­shows us how philosophy has not dealt with itself. Art gives form to a critical need in philosophy. Adorno’s reversal of Hegelian dialectics in Negative Dialectics is an attempt not to overturn Hegel’s dialectics, but to redeploy and reemphasize them. Hegel’s dialectics are not negative enough. The negative is the motor of thinking. Molly MacDonald argues that the “gaps” of negativity “are the gaps on which the entire movement of consciousness depends. Without the space created in the movement of negation, there would be no state of transformation, no moment in which a retrospective understanding of the preceding shapes of consciousness could be gained.”87 Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness mobilizes these gaps in order to move, to become dynamic. If dialectics is constructed backwards, through the retrospective Aufhebung that speculatively recognizes the real identity of apparent contradiction, then it has to

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be able to position itself in this negative way. Adorno’s dialectical twist will be to emphasize this premise on gaps in articulation. If the negative could be posited or grasped, then it would not offer the indeterminate, negative space in which thinking might move or change. Such space must, however, itself be provisional, changing, and unexpected, or else it would merely present opportunities for further self-­identification. A “negative” dialectics would therefore have to develop a model of reflection that could reflect provisionality, without the synthesis of that reflection in a final moment of reconciliation. Just so, a criticism of negativity—­of gaps in articulation, as in this chapter’s first section—­would need to account for non-­manifestation, for a dynamic space of disarticulation. Art’s manifestations after beauty, after truth, can make this non-­manifestation legible. So where Hegel sees the limit of art in its presentation, Adorno sees, in the situation after Hegel, art’s provisional character as presenting, in semblance, the kind of reflective form that philosophy lacks. Dialectics is incomplete so long as it cannot grasp the reflections of its own operations. Art presents this lack, precisely where Hegel thinks it lacks itself. This issue of the negativity of the dialectic itself also animates Blanchot’s thinking. In “Literature and the Right to Death,” Blanchot argues that there are experiences of negativity not susceptible to negation. The crucial experience is death: there is death as the negation of experience, but there is also the “other death,” death as the impossibility of negation, the experience of which is impossible.88 This kind of negativity without negation is registered in literature. Here the concerns of the anti-­Hegelian dialectic develop into Blanchot’s later concerns with fragmentary writing. The crucial experience of literature is of fiction—­the “he/it” (il) gestured to in The Step Not Beyond,89 the “third person who is not a third person”90 in The Infinite Conversation, the experience of writing that is positioned negatively in relation to the world, rather than operatively negating the world. Literature can register the ways experience itself is disastrously fragmented by the negativity by which it is apparently driven. Hegel proposes the negation of contradiction in the way the otherwise subjective Spirit can be reconciled with objective appearance in art. But for Blanchot, the kind of negativity experienced in literature is the displacement and dismantling of experience as possible, because it dismantles precisely the objectivity of its appearance. In literature, one is exposed not to “an other,” whose identity is finally reconciled with the reader’s speculative identifications; one is rather exposed to the “other” of experience, to the “third person who is not a [dialectical] third,” to the contradictions of non-­identity. Literature manifests in a material, literature itself, which is thoroughly nonidentical with itself. In such literature, there is a negativity with which the subject cannot identify. There is nothing, for Blanchot, no coherence, to be expected from literature.91 The problem which Blanchot identifies, then, is that dialectical coherence depends upon an anticipation of form which is itself negative. And its material manifestation, likewise, is immaterial in this anticipation. The speculative thought posits a possibility

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which exceeds the present. But it does so from a negating-­reflection of the present. Apparently determinate, negation returns us to a material indeterminacy. Art does not manifest, as objective, a thoroughly determined Spirit. It does, rather, the reverse: literature’s material is indeterminate to the extent that it cannot be identified with, cannot be identified. Its dialectic, like Adorno’s dialectic of art, is negative. Kant can give form to the kind of reversal being thought here in the dialectic. As we have seen, his third Critique connects the freedom of nature, manifest in beauty and in teleological form, with the freedom of the subjective judgment. In the former, the subject registers its own capacity merely to think, without conceptual reference to an object, and the pleasure of this attests to the way that beautiful forms can provoke such free, noncognitive experience. In the latter, the subject’s capacity to judge the teleological organization of natural forms (the way organisms appear at once to be a means and an end) registers a correspondence between the organizing principle of judgment and the organic forms of nature. But this connection remains negative, in the sense that, unlike Hegel, Kant’s judgment does not determine its experience, but merely reflects upon it. Judgment’s capacity merely to reflect, to operate reflectively—­which is to say, judgment’s capacity not to determine nature objectively—­marks its principle of freedom shared with nature. Hegel agrees that human experience is internally divided, even contradictory. But such contradiction can, for Hegel, be reconciled by the speculative activity of thinking itself.92 It is the task of philosophy to resolve the contradiction between internal and external; art gives form to such reconciliation. Philosophy affords a reflective insight into the essence of the opposition only in so far as it shows how truth is just the dissolving of opposition and, at that, not in the sense, as may be supposed, that the opposition and its two sides do not exist at all, but that they exist reconciled.93

Philosophy is thinking here in the form of reflection that it also, in universalizing, negates. It is precisely at this point, where philosophy assumes the reflective work that art presents as a reflective form, that Adorno turns Hegel against himself. Philosophy, indeed, depends upon a presentation—­it shows how truth reconciles—­and therefore upon an aesthetic. If truth is to be shown, then it must be shown in a form. But, as Adorno suggests, this means that philosophy itself stands in contradiction. It must dissolve its own reflective capacity to show truth and become reflection itself. But in order to do this, philosophy stands in need of reflection which cannot be posited, or positive, but must be negative. Here Kant’s aesthetic can expose Hegel’s own aesthetic to its contradictions. As Kant recognized, the aesthetic experience is negative, in that it does not refer determinately to an object. And the aesthetic judgment is likewise negative, in that it does not claim any objective

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determination. Crucially, this negativity is not itself negated but indefinite. Aesthetic judgment is reflective and yet universal. Kant’s aesthetic is open to reflection, including its own reflection, because it is constituted by the indeterminacy of both the object of beauty and the subjective judgment of beauty. This is a shared indeterminacy, and therefore a reflective indeterminacy, that parallels the shared conceptual determinacy of knowledge judgments. The ground of Kant’s aesthetic is not, therefore, the final truth of reconciliation in a philosophy of art, but the neutral, provisional, and repeated experience of aesthetic indeterminacy itself, in which the subject is repeatedly exposed to unexpected aesthetic forms. There are, then, two different histories at work here (and we can recall Adorno’s characterization of art’s history as “inhomogenous”): in Hegel’s history, art is an amplification of natural beauty in the Ideal which is eventually subsumed into the truth of philosophy; in Kant’s history, art is the unexpected harmony of objective form with a subjective capacity to experience such form. Kant, then, encodes a structural provisionality into judgment that lets us read poetry as provisional, dynamic, virtual rather than as Hegel does, as the determination of matter/sensuousness by spirit. Kant’s indeterminacy—­ non-­terminating history, non-­definitive judgment—­encodes the continuing reflection of which, as Hegel recognized, philosophy stands in need.

On Reading and Legibility This leads us to the question of legibility. I have argued that Kant establishes an account of the aesthetic which leads to reflective ends that do not, as Hegel’s do, end. This proliferation of reflection’s provisionality endorses the indeterminacy of those ends, their non-­termination subsisting in a non-­ determination. To return to the questions which opened this chapter, from Kant we get a picture of how reading emerges—­the philosophical scope of its object—­which suggests, rather than its intelligibility, its mere legibility: its object’s encoding as a limit to intelligibility which is itself material, dynamically provoked by the judgment’s non-­determining movement around it, as in a field. Kant’s limitation of aesthetics to form, then, enables a materialist theory of reading to emerge in terms of a non-­determined material. But this emergence requires us to redeploy the ends of Kant’s aesthetics, to show them to be historically conditioned by particular emergence—­a task which this book will carry out in the following chapters, but which is indicated here by the way Adorno and Blanchot use a Kantian logic to critique Hegelian history. Where Hegel’s historicism is critiqued, then, we get the indeterminate but historical materialization of poetry—­the neutral, provisional, limited material which emerges at the periphery of idealist judgment. This is the basis of what I would call legibility: the unanticipated ways that new surfaces emerge for reading is encoded in the negative presentation of the aesthetic judgment

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itself. If it is possible to “read” indeterminacy, it is on that condition of aesthetic reflection, “legibility” as the emergence of unanticipated form, which runs through Kant’s insistence (or perhaps my insistence of Kant) that aesthetics does not encode the end of its object but rather its ends: a lack of objectivity is not a failure of judgment but its provocation. In taking Kantian aesthetics as the terrain in which Adorno’s and Blanchot’s thinking move, I am concerned with the way that Kantian aesthetics is not adequate to the context of late twentieth-­century theoretical and artistic practice, and with the way that, yet, such inadequacy makes legible otherwise negative structures of thinking and conceptualizing in that new context. The implications of this legibility are negative, in that they are alien readings of Kant’s systematic thinking. And these implications, these ends, extend beyond the aesthetic, to think about situations organized by non-­negation. We should not, to quote Celan, “split off No from Yes.”94 Any account of the crucial but difficult role of negation in Adorno’s and Blanchot’s projects would have to respond to the way negation does not negate its object. The material indeterminacy outlined in Kant’s aesthetic—­where the object is not constituted or constructed but negatively registered, a lost objectivity—­makes sense of a turn to form as the site of negotiation of the object of criticism in that later context. Similarly, we should be guided by the ways that conceptuality can be exposed to the indeterminate reflections which ground it. This would be a non-­transcendent negation that I trace through the aesthetic. In order to think such disconnection, we must attend to the ways that conceptuality re-­situates determination, and in such re-­situation remains legibly indeterminate: not without end so much as a redeployment of ending. We do not, finally, make sense of disconnected relations, of disarticulation, “radical formalism”; we do not, critically, find a way to connect what is otherwise disconnected. The poem that is exiled from meaning does not find its home in criticism. Criticism does not resolve the hermeneutical problems that such poetry presents. But in order to think this, we must have forms for disconnection itself. The question I finally address, then, is this: what form could such a disconnection take? The tentative, always provisional answer is indeterminacy: a descriptor for local, specific situations that do not resolve into conceptual clarity or determinacy. How else do we respond to these singular situations—­political, poetic, or philosophical—­which reverse our capacity to conceptualize them, which demand of us (as Kant’s aesthetic judgment does) that we register this reversal as the only ground and expression of our capacities to experience them?

Chapter 2

After Communication Neutrality, Fragmentation, and Literary Politics in the 1960s

The question of jurisdiction raised by the French decolonization movements of the 1960s—­a history which provides the map for this chapter’s reading of literary politics—­can be read as an aesthetic question. The question of where political territory extends its laws, of the limits of articulation for its laws, is recognizably analogous to the question of the limits of the territory of knowledge covered in chapter 1’s reading of Kant. But in what does this analogy consist? We saw how Kant established the parameters of judgment in the aesthetic, of what is or is not intelligible, what is or is not determinable by the subject. This chapter will concentrate on the ways this aesthetic construction of philosophical jurisdiction articulates a limitation of spatial determination shared in political conceptions of space. Reading Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan through a long-­1960s perspective—­between the war of Algerian independence and the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and the student-­worker uprisings in Paris in 1968—­this chapter will focus on this shared articulation of space, in the border space, the space of political mediation (walls as surfaces of writing), and the space of political appearance, the street. There is an emergence of the political in these spaces of emerging legibility. This is an appearance, a phenomenal materialization of a space which is recognizably political, but which does not articulate a positive political content. Recognizing, reading this appearance of politics, means focusing, then, on the aesthetic as an indeterminate spacing. In this sense, I do not want to investigate politics as the content of art, or of its aesthetic judgment, but as a surface in which art inscribes a certain legibility. The question is how political space, the space of the political rather than politics, is constituted in a surfacing of indeterminate space which is shared with literature. The question which follows this is what such sharing consists of. The answers offered by Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan will be extreme—­ which is to say, articulated at that limit itself: space which is “neutralized,” in Adorno; what is “not shared” as the basis for intersubjective relations, in

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Blanchot; and what is not represented as the medium of representation, in Celan. The aim of this chapter is to think of these gestures as political, as covering that ground of surfacing into appearance which characterizes this description of the political. The literary politics which emerges from such gestures, however, is not one in which we can read the communication of politics as a content, or of positive contributions to political ideas. And yet, neither are these politically negative. Instead, they each scan the political as a space of emergence contiguous with writing, and therefore as one whose legibility as political is conditioned by the limits of writing. The rereading of Kantian aesthetics here, as with chapter 1, takes place in thinking through the ends of those aesthetics. The major shift I am tracing is in the idea of communication, and it will take place between two positions, the first of which will require some reconstruction. In one paradigm of aesthetic politics, Kant’s account of “common sense,” the shared sense presupposed in aesthetic judgment which validates those judgments as both universal and subjective, can be seen to outline a form of communicability which underlies a conception of intersubjective sociability. The key idea here is that aesthetics comprises a formal anticipation of the terms of political communication. The intersubjectivity sketched formally in aesthetic agreement—­common sense—­ prepares the ground for actual communication in politics. We can associate this reading of the political ends of Kantian aesthetics with Hannah Arendt. Arendt excavates a form of communicability from Kant’s aesthetics which she takes to outline a possible political philosophy. The idea of “spectating” is the hinge of this operation. Arendt’s “reconstruction” of political philosophy, in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, concerns the organization of space in spectating, or judging, into a “public space.” This space, moreover, is for Arendt “plural.”1 Judgment indicates, and enacts, a “common sense” which underwrites this organization of space into a public space. In Kant, this common sense answers the problem of judgment’s singularity by constructing an ideal space of intersubjective validation. The problem is that judgments of taste are at once “singular and without comparison to others,” and “in agreement with the conditions of universality.”2 And further, such judgment is “universally communicable without the mediation of a concept.”3 This apparently internal, subjective experience, without conceptual reference, speaks in a “universal voice.”4 It is a “communal sense [gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes].”5 These paradoxes—­of number and position, whether singular and subjective or universal and objective—­are resolved “by one holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgment of others, and putting himself in the position of everyone else.”6 In this communal sense as a solution to the problem of the singular universality of judgments of taste, Kant turns a feeling of the subject into an intersubjective feeling. Aesthetic judgment remains subjective, but as such “demands”7 universal assent on the basis of the shared form of subjectivity thus felt. What is universal in such judgments is not an objective determination, but

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the necessarily universal basis of communication as such: the feeling of the faculties themselves, in harmonic free play. Arendt reconstructs a political philosophy from these premises—­reflecting judgment, common sense and communicability, and the public nature of thinking—­precisely because they do not constitute political action. The distinction her lectures draw from the vita activa to spectating is from politics as a performed activity to spectating as a judgment which locates that activity. Politics constitutes action in the sense of appearance. But the problem of appearance, for philosophy, is that its particularity as appearance is not susceptible to conceptual regulation—­that Kantian problem of judgments of taste. Arendt turns to aesthetics, therefore, as offering resources for thinking the universality of the particular, appearance, validated by the contemplative process of judgment which, in its procedures, creates the public space of common sense. For Arendt, “the judgment of the spectator creates the space without which no such objects could appear at all.”8 And this is significant, for Arendt, because it outlines not only the ground for judgments of taste, but the sociability which, as she puts it, is “the very origin, not the goal, of man’s humanity.”9 The “world-­spectator” is thus the one who judges history, the origins, goals, and ends of human progress, who judges whether “progress is being made.”10 The force of this perspective is that “by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public.”11 This “enlarged mentality,”12 that is to say, is a “community sense” in a literal sense.13 If politics, for Arendt, does not appear in philosophy, then this perspective of the spectator is designed to make space for its appearance. The politics, and the political community, which emerge from aesthetics are in this way recuperative. Aesthetic judgment rescues for the realm of appearance the otherwise particular matter of opinion and taste. Politics, likewise, is constructed by an act of spectation which makes politics viable by making space for intersubjective communication. In other words, the very non-­determination of appearance in aesthetic judgment becomes the covert means of substantiating a politics of appearance, and the social origins of humanity. But reading aesthetics outside this recuperative logic, and yet still on the terrain of politics—­as I intend—­will mean thinking sociability, community, and intersubjectivity on extreme terms that, while not crediting the appearance of politics, nonetheless are figured as part of its grounding articulation—­what is neutral, in Adorno, what is not shared, in Blanchot, and what does not enter the logic of representation, in Celan, as all presenting the grounds of a theory of the political. Against Arendt, another paradigm for the political ends of the Kantian aesthetic would be revolutionary, identifying a political gap, an event of suspension in which new forms can be constituted. But while Adorno and Blanchot think such gaps, as we saw in the previous chapter, they are each differently concerned with the ways such a gap is not empty, or blank.

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Thinking this aesthetic space of common sense as both inactive, to reverse Arendt’s key term, and yet political, will mean thinking writing as producing a space which is, itself, not determined by that writing. I argue that writing does not compensate for this gap. Writing does not substitute for the discursive continuity lost in politics. Rather, it marks its dispersal and displacement. My focus on space should therefore be thought as a focus on the space of this dispersal: the ways literature conceptualizes the space of its reading—­its legibility—­are as neutral or fragmentary rather than formally continuous or politically committed. Politics, like writing, occupies a space which is a condition for sharing—­and for communication—­without itself being shared. Such writing does not determine a political scene that otherwise lacks determination. Instead, the challenge of reading politics as discontinuous with the past provokes the kind of formal (spatial and temporal) displacement that is the shared condition of reading. Such writing, here poetry, is not a continuation of politics by other means, but, as Paul Hamilton proposes in the context of another post-­revolutionary period, European Romanticism, what he calls “Realpoetik”: Realpoetik is the business of clarifying the philosophical legitimacy of translating the terms of one discourse into another. And what we glimpse in passing from one language to another is then lit up not as a void over which we step, a wordless profundity, but another possible direction or discursive option which at present we are unable to take up.14

And where, in early German Romanticism, this announced a “fragmentation” of writing, Schlegel’s “permanent parabasis,”15 or writing’s ironic address to itself as audience, so here too, in this later context, there is a fragmentation of political effect in literature’s fragmentary mechanism: writing. Reading, in this context, does not mean piecing politics back together, but passing from the language of politics to “another” language, literature, “not as a void over which we step.” Those Romantics responded to this exigency with a fragmentation of literature. I trace here another post-­Kantian context of the fragmentation of communication. Reprising this post-­Kantian aesthetic situation in this new scene of literary politics means understanding that scene as a mediation of historical and material experience in the terms of a dynamic indeterminacy: the ways that the political material of writing is not a “void” of determination but a transformation. I want to consider in detail the ways the political becomes a surface or site—­a space—­of reading through the structures of that post-­Kantian aesthetic. Doing so will mean passing through the scenes of its emergence, from historiography (as writing the events) of France between the decolonization of Algeria and the student-­worker uprisings of 1968—­events which frame Celan’s poetry but which, as we shall see at the end of the chapter, Celan’s

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poetry transforms. But I am thus interested in historicizing these texts, in locating their connections and historical proximities, their contact through history, in order to locate what is not historicizable in their writing. Adorno’s and Blanchot’s conceptions of space which follow this historiography give scope for understanding why Celan’s poetry can be read politically: not as a determination of politics, but as an opening in literary space to its legibility.

Writing and Equality: France, 1958–­1968 Jacques Rancière characterizes aesthetics as political in the sense of describing “the regime of intelligibility” in which a “reconfiguration” of forms of nature and culture can be thought. In Rancière’s terms, my reading of Kant’s aesthetics as a discourse on judgment as non-­intelligibility, and of a criticism consequently of non-­legibility, would be decisively nonpolitical. Yet Rancière’s “regime” of aesthetics, in deciding the limits between nature and culture, is recognizably Kantian. Indeed, he reproduces the problem we saw Kant encounter in the previous chapter, a “gap separating nature from itself,” which becomes, however, “the site of an unprecedented equality. And this equality is inscribed in a history, which, in exchange for the loss, carries a new promise.”16 We might pursue Rancière’s sense of unprecedented equality in this suspension of the identity between natural and mental form in Christoph Menke. For Menke, “political equality is an aesthetic thought”:17 “Equality is an aesthetic effect, an effect of aestheticization in spectatorship. And if aesthetic spectatorship is an activity, then we make ourselves aesthetically equal. Or: in the aesthetic activity of spectatorship we make ourselves equal.”18 Thinking equality as a set of political relations means thinking aesthetically, as in Rancière, about the forms of its possible distribution. But we might also think of Claire Bishop’s wariness of determining political outcomes from such spectatorial aesthetics. For Bishop, “far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely merged with ‘I.’ ”19 The specter of Guy Debord and the harnessing of spectacular politics in Society of the Spectacle (1967) colors the way we write moments of oppositional politics like ’68. Following Bishop, the question of equality is also the question of how we write this relation, historically, between politics and aesthetic participation. What form of aesthetic spectation, outside the scope of an Arendtian shared sense, could be equal to a politics that is not shared? I want to plot, briefly, the ways in which the political pressures on conceptualizing such equality are registered as aesthetic pressures on writing it. I focus on the period between two points of suspension: the states of emergency of de Gaulle’s inauguration of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the student-­worker uprisings of 1968. These uprisings were global, and affected Adorno as directly as they did Blanchot and Celan—­as we shall see in thinking about the spatialization of judgment in Adorno. But the localization of

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these uprisings in historical experience puts them onto the terrain of writing. Thinking these political suspensions in writing means, I will suggest, thinking a suspension that is common to writing itself. But this does not mean that writing takes up the work of such thinking where politics leaves off. I am interested here in the unanticipated forms in which this non-­conceptualization of politics reemerges. The problem here with writing’s history, as with history writing, is not in recovering a heroic or radical history from these events, but in the way that, as Kristin Ross puts it, they “contributed to creating a timeless and eternal era where even the idea of discontinuity and historical change has been evacuated. . . . Completely deterritorialized, May becomes one with a stage of capitalism that denies any succeeding historical stages.”20 This is as much the history of Jean Baudrillard’s empty signification as of Francis Fukuyama’s liberal consensus. But it is also the poetic problem of lyric: of a suspended temporality which encodes a dehistoricized eternity. The problem of political equality—­in what form could politics be imagined where its members were not identical, but equal?—­morphs into a problem of writing. The problem, as Ross sees it, is that writing about May ’68 makes it “identical” with the present rather than “equal” to it as “another present” itself. As Henri Meschonnic suggests, the problem with the “nostalgia culture” of writing ’68 is that “memory plays the role of forgetting.”21 If politics depends upon history’s remembrance of its events, then it also submits what it remembers to the possibility of forgetting. Writing’s suspension of temporal equality thus disables precisely what it makes possible. The political suspension of continuity is the state of exception conceptualized as the focus of political sovereignty.22 The question of historiography, which I am suggesting here frames literary politics in Paris throughout the 1960s as it tries to write its present, must contend with this notion of political suspension if it is to conceptualize its own suspension of continuity by which writing is possible. The prolonged state of emergency which de Gaulle declared in the wake of an attempted military coup in 1961 (the Algiers Putsch, led by precursors to the OAS) amounted to a state of exception, temporarily assigning extraordinary powers to the president, which was repeated in ‘68. The events of the Algerian war were a preliminary rupture reproduced in ’68. The conceptual reconfiguration of republicanism was carried out in the context of political suspension. This suspension submerged negotiations of law, particularly in Algeria. The question over Algerian independence was framed, as Todd Sheppard demonstrates, as a contest between historical determinism and republican legalism,23 which could be further abstracted into two versions of temporality, or the form of historiography itself. Those who resisted Algerian independence (chiefly the paramilitary OAS) did so on the grounds that Algeria was, in fact, already part of the constitutively indivisible French Republic. If Algeria was allowed to secede, the Republic would not be legally coherent as a republic. Algerian independence threatened French sovereignty. Those who advocated Algeria’s independence did

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so on the basis of historical determinism. The manifest separation of Algeria from the metropole belied a legal fiction. The problem, however, is that this dialectical clash was suspended. The legal argument was historically untenable. But the historical argument was legally un-­grounded. In the context of the war for Algerian independence, these ideas of jurisdiction and historical irreversibility thus became the conceptual territory in which sovereignty was played out, however much its argument remained subterranean. Addressing the questions of legality figured in this republicanism could, Sheppard’s analysis implies, rewrite the grounds of history on which the Algerian appeal was mounted: the silence with which historical determinism was accepted by the Left came at the expense of its legal conceptualization.24 My claim is that because this fragmentation or suspension of law was not conceptualized politically, it emerged aesthetically, in writing. The prolonged crisis of Algeria resulted not in a triumphal left-­wing revolution of the political status quo, but in the occlusion and internalization of a suspended legal negotiation. May ’68 was not, therefore, the spontaneous affirmation of individual liberty, but the vexed return of an un-­ conceptualized legal suspension—­an inability to treat the past as an “equal” present, as Ross puts it. In retroactively ascribing necessity to these events, in the temporality of historical determinism—­that ’68 was continuous with Algerian independence, for example—­their contingency is obscured. And so is the future which that contingency made it possible to think. In saying that Algerian independence was historically necessary, one might avoid the problem of its legality, but one also avoids responding to the discontinuity of that event as indeterminate. Thinking these histories means thinking their discontinuity. The aesthetic, with its validation of reflection which, as Kant puts it, gives its principle to itself, might therefore seem an alternative route to validating such politically reflective organization. The discontinuous arrangement of people in politics might mirror an indeterminate play of ideas in aesthetics. In this case, the common sense in the Kantian sense that I outlined earlier in this chapter as the space of subjective validation (supposing others who would judge the same way) would substantiate political dissensus by recovering it for subjective, and intersubjective, consensus, in what Terry Eagleton calls aesthetic “ideology.”25 This “strong” reading of Kant would make of “common sense” a political form, as in Arendt. But I want to suggest, rather, that the problem of thinking equality as legally discontinuous intervenes at precisely this point of common sense. For Ross, the displacement of political conceptualization emerges in new forms of historiography.26 Ross suggests that this displacement is registered in historical writing, and that this leads to the “real question”: “the question of equality  .  .  . as something that emerges in the course of the struggle and is verified subjectively, declared and experienced in the here and now as what is, and what should not be.”27 These are exactly the terms of Kant’s reflecting aesthetic judgment: a subjective internalization

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of a reflective experience for which conceptual forms are inadequate, or in judging their particular contingency inappropriate. These political questions are worked out like aesthetic questions. The political question of equality and its suspension of legality is the formal question of aesthetics which also confronts a suspension of conceptual legality. They share, precisely, their discontinuity. In the history of ’68, writing is exposed, like politics, to the indeterminacy of experience. But this coincidence of political indeterminacy with aesthetic indeterminacy exposes aesthetic experience, too, to the radical displacements at work both in the present of attempts to equalize relations, and in the retroactive history that tries to account for that equality. Such a writing’s “common sense” would not, then, ratify its continuity with political dissensus, but rather become itself a site for the kinds of discontinuity and displacement which animate that dissensus. In this way, the problems raised by these events are historiographical as much as political. Between de Gaulle establishing the Fifth Republic in 1958, the crisis in Algeria in the early 1960s, and the student-­worker uprising in 1968, the idea of sovereignty in the Republic is under question. What constitutes a republican territory—­and does its jurisdiction include Algeria? Where are its laws effective, and on what grounds? Who are its members, and what are the grounds of connection which establish such membership without authority except in this numerousness? These crises in sovereignty are reproduced in crises in written authority. The events of ’68 have to be understood, ironically, on this continuum of discontinuity. I am interested, here, in the way this transposition of questions raises formal questions of legibility. What counts as a “territory,” and what a “jurisdiction”? In what spatial terms do these questions become legibly political? In order to write about political equality, writing must reproduce the form of this politics. But this would mean, paradoxically, that it could not spectate that form, as Menke puts it, could not get outside it—­which is the condition of it becoming equal to rather than identical with its subject. The problem of getting outside history’s jurisdiction, of finding a neutral space from which to write it, reproduces the political problem of getting outside consensus, outside law, outside authority. This transposition, this muddling of forms, is acutely indexed in ’68 for historical reasons. In this period in France, the politics of suspension left un-­conceptualized precisely this legal border: what counts as politics, and what as sociability? The legal question remained non-­determined, non-­conceptualized. The aesthetic therefore becomes a site where that non-­conceptualized indeterminacy might be registered. Writing history, however, reproduces this problem of historical equality with a difference. We cannot simply read the aesthetic as taking over where politics stops. The contemporary writing of ’68 emphasizes the ways the usual authorities no longer explain what is happening. Political authority that depends upon a sovereign capacity to suspend politics leaves the political terms of that decision un-­conceptualized. The political authority of sovereign

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suspension is what Carl Schmitt calls a “borderline concept”: that “to produce law it need not be based on law.”28 Law is not necessarily continuous with past law. Just so, any concept of writing must refer its own claims to authority through such a discontinuity with its historical material. Writing therefore takes over the suspension of political authority, without replacing it with its own authority. This displacement externalizes a suspension that politics has internalized. Conceptions of literature at this time thus focus on the way writing divests exactly these kinds of authority, such that a dissolution of political authority parallels a dissolution of literary authority.29 But when sovereignty is not conceptualized legally, or when legal conceptualization becomes inadequate, writing does not become a more adequate way to conceptualize sovereignty. Writing dissolves the kinds of authority associated with sovereignty in such a way that it is exposed to this dissolution, rather than crediting it. Writing inhabits this dissolution of sovereignty. By looking at this suspension through writing, not politics, we can register the ways the political is structured by a reflection which is also a displacement of its own procedures. This would be to re-situate Kant’s “common sense” according to the politics of “community.” The discontinuity between political community and Kant’s common sense makes legible the discontinuity which reflectively organizes politics of community. We move from Kantian “communicability” to this mere “legibility” in art. The political crisis opens up to the reflections of the aesthetic. But this exposes a further problem in common sense. The political crisis exposes a crisis in aesthetics, the idea that Kant reflected on as beauty’s lawfulness without law: how should reflection legislate without determination? On what kind of plane, in what kind of space, in what territory and with what jurisdiction, would aesthetic judgment be effective? The political problem presented by ’68 is internal to aesthetics.

The “no man’s land” of Common Sense: Adorno We might in this way think of the problems presented to politics, of measuring equality in society and in history, as shared with aesthetics, which also measures the articulation of history and sociability in judgment. We can think this conjunction with Adorno, and thereby give fuller detail to the way it frames reading in his thinking. While we might think explicitly of Adorno’s work on politics, I want to locate his thinking within aesthetics itself, and with the ways he redistributes the parameters of aesthetic judgment. Thinking history with Adorno, and thinking of art’s sociality, its connection to society, means thinking the materiality of art in terms of what is not presented in art. This thinking develops out of Kant’s aesthetic judgment and its de-localization of society and social content in sociability, mere communication, in “common sense.” Adorno localizes this in his account of the social character of art. But

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this localization is not as a determination or presentation of politics in art content. It is instead the transposition of the Kantian space of intersubjective assent, common sense, into precisely a space, a “no-­man’s land.” This means finding the “sense” in “common sense”: that materialization of feeling which, in order to ratify intersubjective agreement, remains for Kant a subjective pleasure. I will therefore trace Adorno’s characterization of the “feeling” of an artwork, and of the artwork’s own contradictory manifestation of society, in order to develop the scope of what I will call a neutral political space in Adorno’s aesthetic judgment. In this characterization, Adorno is responding to the terms of equality outlined above. In these terms, Robert Kaufman has argued that Adorno thinks an “aporetic” moment of suspension in Kant’s judgment—­ its “as if” character—­in order to develop a “constructivism”: to “construct construction—­construct the possibilities for critical agency—­itself.”30 This would mean seeing Adorno turning a negative moment in aesthetic judgment back on society itself. But that transition can be complicated when, as Josh Robinson demonstrates, art form is in complex ways itself a materialization of those social forms. For Robinson, Adorno finds, as an example, that in Schoenberg’s music “form becomes a medium, a third factor or middle that mediates between composer and composition.”31 The question of construction thus becomes a question of mediation, or what Gerhard Richter similarly calls “correspondance”: “that which emerges or steps forward . . . in an unexpected manner in order to describe a dialectical relation in which it works to illuminate the present through what it brings to this present while in turn being illuminated—­which is to say, read and interpreted—­by the same present.”32 My sense is that Adorno revises the space of dialectical mediation here. Thinking the spatialization of judgment in neutral terms, as in a no-­man’s land, means reframing the terms of connection between writing and politics. Thinking this connection between writing and politics means not only thinking how they are shared, as Rancière puts it, but also thinking the space in which they are shared. Adorno’s theorizing of the space of aesthetic judgment is also a theorization of its jurisdiction—­its legal effectiveness. The status of mediation in criticism and art form is worked out in the terms of territory and legality. It accompanies the question of equality. If ’68 is a reemergence of latent decolonizing displacements, from Vietnam to Algeria, then the “no-­man’s land” which Adorno finds in Kant’s aesthetic “terrain” accommodates those displacements on their own terms. So what, indeed, is this neutral terrain of aesthetic judgment and experience? Common Sense In Kant, aesthetic judgments are validated in a non-­spatial intersubjectivity, a common sense which is supposed without being actual. It is a sociability without politics. Adorno uses this “asocial” aspect of aesthetics, however, to

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make sense of art’s social character. Adorno thinks the contradictory sociability of politics itself in this asocial space. First, how does Kant conceive of the aesthetic as a site for thinking sociability without actualizing it? As we saw in chapter 1, a reflecting judgment, by Kant’s definition, must provide its own “principle.”33 It does so on the basis of form: the pleasure felt in the conjunction of subjective forms with the beautiful forms of nature registers the continuity which must hold between subjects. If one did not feel pleasure, one could not think at all, because one would not have those forms—­understanding and imagination—­which make cognition possible. To this extent, the aesthetic proposes communicability without communication, reflection without determination. For Adorno, however, this reflection-­without-­determination exposes an instability at the core of Kant’s critical project. Kant’s common sense is conditioned by its figurative, “as if” character. There is only a common sense on the condition that that supposed community is not actual. Supposing a regulating “you,” “I” reflectively construct “your” assent. It is in this way “a faculty for judging that in its reflection takes account (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing in thought, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole.”34 This supposed commonality works figuratively. The aesthetic judgment compels the subject to conjure up a community, to imagine one, and indeed, to “demand” one. Aesthetic judgments communicate the condition of “communicability,”35 rather than any objective information. The structure of judgment is communicable, but not its representations.36 No conceptual content is communicated. Kant at once restricts the communication of pleasure (judgment “merely connects its constitution together with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure”),37 and claims that, as judgers, we “have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure in everyone.”38 He therefore establishes communicability at the expense of communication. The pleasure of reflection itself cannot be communicated. And yet, we demand it of others. In this way, common sense occupies a second level of reflection. It is structurally necessary to validate aesthetic judgment, but it also constitutes a further level of the reflection of pleasure. It both marks the internal connections of judgment, and constitutes its own reflective connections. This common sense is a common without any sense, any content. Reconnecting sense with that actual community would expose this internal contradiction. For Adorno, this is what happens when we think about art. While Kant is concerned with connecting the forms of nature with subjectivity through the subject’s feeling of pleasure, in thinking about art Adorno is concerned with how this connection might be made objectively, in the constructed examples of artworks. Artworks, that is to say, have a history, and articulate a history. This is their material. The separation of the aesthetic sphere from the empirical constitutes art. Yet Kant transcendentally arrested this constitution, which is a

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historical process, and simplistically equated it with the essence of the artistic, unconcerned that the subjective, instinctual components of art return metamorphosed even in art’s matured form, which negates them.39

Indeed, in this account, art’s objectivity is also a transformation of subjectivity. “The relation of subjectivity to art is not, as Kant has it, that of a form of reaction to artworks; rather, that relation is in the first place the element of art’s own objectivity.  .  .  . The subject inheres in their form and content [Gehalt].”40 For Adorno, an aesthetics of art amounts to the historicization of aesthetic judgment. The artwork is the externalization of reflection in a different sense than the externalization of that reflection in common sense—­ precisely, indeed, in that it is a sense. The subject occupies, “inheres” in art’s “form and content” because art is the objectivity of that subjective relation—­ society, not sociability. There is an interobjectivity of artworks, and not only an intersubjectivity of common sense. Common sense is drawn into temporality through artworks, objects, in being made into objects of experience. And those objects record a history of that temporalization. Judgment, now, marks the artwork’s processes of manifestation, which are decidedly historical: the ahistorical, “mere” communicability of common sense will no longer hold. Art, Society, History Adorno shifts from Kant in thinking aesthetics as historical, which is to say as a manifestation that is conditioned by its material, art. This shift, however, does not fill in the formal gaps of Kant’s aesthetics by denoting art’s social material. Art’s material is, for Adorno, the contradiction marked by common sense itself: the dissociation of judgment from material, and of “common” from “sense.” Kant’s reflective form of communicability is necessarily not actualized in space. It is a sociability without society. Adorno does not invert this position, however. In a complex way, art, for Adorno, is also “asocial” in its sociability: Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful,” it criticizes society by merely existing. . . . Art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society.41

Art bears a formally critical relation to society; it negates the “negations” which already characterize a “determinate society.” But it does so in the way that is also constituted by that form. If we are to think of aesthetic experience reflecting free social relations, we must do so through the way art opposes and contradicts society. The community indexed by aesthetic experience is

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therefore not the resolved or reconciled community projected from a harmonious feeling of internal free play. But neither does art merely reproduce a “determinate society.” Society instead marks the externalization of this free play in contradiction, not reconciliation. And art is the negation of this social “negation” of free play. In art, one experiences the autonomy of art as the object of subjective reflection, rather than as the reflective autonomy of one’s own subjectivity. The history “in” art is therefore a history of this externalization of subjective experience. The history “of” art, as a consequence, “cannot fulfill its concept.”42 Art’s history is a noncontinuous, “inhomogenous”43 history of artworks. The contradictory material of art is reflected in the conceptual contradictions which constitute a history of aesthetic judgment. When art takes on this history as its material, it is not possible, as it is in an aesthetics of taste, to dissociate the end of sociability—­the community of judgers—­from the cause of the object because art, for Adorno, is constituted by precisely this society. The difference, however, is that this translation is not simple. Art’s social “asociality” is its contradiction of its material, rather than its harmonic reflection upon it. But it is also the way that art’s reflection constitutes an asociality, a form of relation which does not claim, or demand, positive assent. For Adorno, reflection is contradictory, antagonistic, and negative precisely at the point of materialization where, for Kant, it is productively displaced into the subject’s own forms. The consensus modeled in Kant’s common sense can only model free social relations by jettisoning its objects, while the history of art, for Adorno, opposes and contradicts society, or gives form to society as contradiction. Aesthetic Jurisdiction In this way, turning to an aesthetics of art compels Adorno to rethink the terms of the Kantian critical project as such. If the possibility of aesthetic judgment grounds, as “mere” communicability, communication in general, then the discontinuity of this reflection in art—­its contradictions, its displacements—­would constitute an interruption of the grounds of communication in general. This has consequences, too, for the kinds of community which such communication might make visible, or viable. Speaking in a “universal voice” means claiming a jurisdiction (juris+diction), somewhere law can speak, where the voice is (universally) legal. And that, for Adorno, means speaking a contradiction, speaking against itself (contra+diction), to the extent that art’s reflections are, first, antagonistic to their aesthetic recuperation and, second, antagonistic to their own constitutive material. With Adorno we might instead begin to think art’s neutrality: neither positively denoting a purely formal mere communicability, nor merely reproducing the contradictions of its social material, but presenting its own contradictory social character as its history.

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My contention here is that Adorno describes this neutrality—­what he calls a “no-­man’s land”—­in ways which spatialize the question of political territorialization and its displacement raised in ’68. We should pause, here, to reflect on Adorno’s own increasingly “asocial” position. The German manifestations of the ’68 protests included, famously, direct action targeting Adorno, and equally famously Adorno’s refusal of either blanket condemnation or approbation of the protestors. It would be hagiography to apologize for Adorno’s position through the mechanism of a neutralized dialectic—­but it is historically interesting to note that these intrusions of “sense” (bodies, sounds, protests) into institutions (the lecture hall) circle around Adorno’s reflections on aesthetic jurisdiction at the time. His Aesthetic Theory was written through this professional and personal crisis. It is intellectually interesting, then, that we might recover in Adorno’s thought from that time a turn to sense in a different form. This “no-­man’s land” which I am pursuing as a key motif here is not merely the abstract question of the terrain of judgment, in Kantian terms. It is also the territorialization of that terrain. Where for Ross, as above, the key issue in writing ’68 remains its “deterritorialization” in writing, the question of—­if not integrating—­registering sense in this aesthetic abstraction becomes decidedly dialectical. At stake in the question of giving sense to communicability is the issue of whether the kind of freedom scanned in common sense can be redeemed for actual politics. The question, then, is of uncovering this neutral space, this space which resists determination, as the space of sense within the Kantian tendency to equate indeterminacy with abstraction. My broader argument depends upon that localization of indeterminacy, precisely, as what is sensed. That Kantian terrain is framed legally. Crucially, it is a description of a layered space. If nature is understood as a field of experience, then the different modes by which it is experienced by a subject have different, but overlapping, legal jurisdictions. Judgment’s terrain overlaps with the realms of understanding and reason, which are operatively distinct, legislating in different ways, but on “one and the same territory of experience.”44 This territory is externally coherent but internally, legally divided. Thus Kant: Concepts, insofar as they are related to objects, regardless of whether a cognition of the latter is possible or not, have their field, which is determined merely in accordance with the relation which their object has to our faculty of cognition in general.—­The part of this field within which cognition is possible for us is a territory [Boden] (territorium) for these concepts and the requisite faculty of cognition. The part of the territory in which these are legislative is the domain [Gebiet] (ditio) of these concepts and of the corresponding faculty of cognition.45

The distinction here between territory and field is instructive. Between Boden and Gebiet—­two concrete words for ground, soil, or field—­is the difference

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between a neutral territory and a land under legislative control. Where concepts are legislative, the field of experience is a “domain”; where they are not, it is merely a “territory.” Concepts are still active in this field, even when cognition is not possible. We can think of things we cannot cognize, and this distinction holds to separate the field of experience according to the faculties of understanding and reason. Outside this field there is the “unlimited but also inaccessible field  .  .  . namely the field of the supersensible.”46 But there is a peculiar intrusion of this inaccessibility into the field of experience which it limits. The supersensible is autonomous from the field of experience, but it “should have an influence” on it, “namely, the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real [wirklich] in the sensible world.”47 If commerce must be possible between these two worlds, across this “incalculable gulf,”48 it is because judgment functions in both realms without legislating in either. Judgment is neutral with regard to cognition. In order to operate in both fields of experience (which are, of course, metaphysically one), and to reconcile them, it cannot be identical with either but must be coincident with both. Judgment’s neutrality, its deterritorialization, is necessary to endorse this territorialization of reason and nature. Kant establishes a neutral “territory” and not a workable “domain” for aesthetic judgment. And this inoperability has consequences for the common sense that Kant seeks to develop through aesthetics, which are drawn out in Adorno’s account of art’s contradiction of society. What is “incalculable” is too numerous for measure, or exceeds the conditions of measurement. Aesthetic judgment operates within this incalculability by measuring its incalculability. It operates neutrally on the field of experience, without any conceptual legislation, as if on a no-­man’s land of incalculability between the domains of calculation. The difficulty with aligning judgment to this mere field is that it leaves a gap in the core of the critical project. Kant validates it by turning this gap into the space of common sense. But in Adorno’s focus on history and materialization, we begin to find the spatialization of this neutral field itself. Adorno’s judgment, rather than bridging this gap, occupies its no-­man’s land. In doing so, it works through the internal contradiction of reason. The transcendental conditions of experience have an objective basis. As Adorno says in his lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, “these conditions can only be held to be valid if they do in fact relate to experience.” So “the sphere of the transcendental is neither one of logic—­because it is concerned with the possible knowledge of objects—­nor is it a sphere concerned with the contents of knowledge—­because it does not presuppose such contents, but only the possibility of possessing such contents. It is, then, a curious no man’s land of knowledge positioned somewhere between psychology and logic.” 49 The transcendental conditions of experience are already outside themselves, conditioned by experience, just as aesthetic judgment takes its form from external artworks, and therefore history, and not just from its own

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transcendental forms. In aesthetic experience, pleasure is felt at the suspension, and then the supposed reconciliation, of this gulf. But art’s objective character, the sedimentation of experience in artworks, threatens to overrun these borders. This returns us, again, to the intrusions of sense in metaphysics: not as the negation but as the non-­negated surplus of what is permissible in a space. Indeed, we can relate this gulf to Adorno’s vision of utopia from his childhood, where “the land . . . that I occupied when playing on my own was a no man’s land.”50 The subject here occupies a no-­man’s land, a literal space, for Adorno, between political borders. So when Adorno uses the same expression to describe the “gulf” in reason as he does to describe the “gulf” between borders, I think he is parodying the Kantian narrative of aesthetic judgment, as well as belying his own reticence around ’68. The subjective autonomy of aesthetic judgment becomes social and political autonomy. As a child, Adorno is literally between political borders, and he is socially isolated, playing “alone.” Like the aesthetic judgment itself, playing between the forms of cognition, he “plays” between two political spheres. Adorno is describing an actualization of the community which, for Kant, aesthetics can only suppose. But what he experiences is not the connection of these two spheres. It is rather the “no man’s land” of their separation, the gulf between the two. But here, in this “no man’s land,” Adorno (remembering the child) experiences pleasure, freedom, play. Pleasure is not in reconciliation; it is in the feeling of being between borders. The aesthetic experience, this pleasure, is an experience of literal exile, a political suspension of jurisdiction. Adorno collapses the distinction that Kant tries to make in order to secure the validity of aesthetic judgment, between its “present” in experience and its “future” in community. Play is internal to reason, and so, therefore, is borderlessness. Community is articulated in this collapse of borders: the collapse of the territorial distinctions which Kant establishes in reason. “Community” does not secure the relation between the subject and the world of objects. Rather, it exposes this relation as already exilic, already displacing its object, even if that object is subjective feeling, pleasure. The ground on which judgments operate is the field of experience as such, not a “territory” nor, certainly, a “domain.” And this para-­legal space is the space where aesthetic judgment’s validity is claimed; in other words, the space of the common sense where those judgments find their ground and validity, becomes objective, social. In the experience of the objective contradictions of art, it is possible to occupy the contradictory space of common sense as a literal community. Contradiction We can see that Adorno has effected several redistributions of aesthetics in his account of art. The locus of aesthetic experience is not subjective play but

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art’s materialization of social—­subjective—­relations. The judgment of such art does not harmonize separated faculties and domains but, in its neutrality, occupies the gulf between them. And art is in both of these senses contradictory: first, in that it “speaks against” its own material; and second, in that it “speaks against” an attempt to reconcile or bridge gaps in experience. The consequences of these redistributions are not in politics but in the form of communicability which art might vouchsafe. Politics, the sociability of ’68, intrudes not as positive social relations, but as a space which disarranges and disarticulates the claims to communicability which ground aesthetic judgment. Art’s own contradictory material, and its contradiction of its material, redescribe the parameters of that intersubjective terrain of assent which aesthetics was supposed, by Kant but also by his commentators, such as Arendt, to validate without actualizing: communicability itself. In other words, the contradictory material of art provokes a different experience of community, a neutral experience, no-­man’s land, which is nonetheless localized in historical objects, artworks. The political consequences, then, are not direct but lie in the ways that art constitutes a “determinate negation of a determinate society.” In modern art, for Adorno, this determination of value by processes of exchange is suspended by the neutral occupation of the mechanism of exchange. And to be explicit, we should think here of judgment—­and reading—­as forms of exchange: as movements between subjective and objective forms. Modern art complicates this movement precisely by occupying its terms. If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value, not use value, that is consumed, in the modern artwork it is abstractness, that irritating indeterminateness of what it is and to what purpose it is, that becomes a cipher of what the work is. This abstractness has nothing in common with the formal character of older aesthetic norms such as Kant’s. On the contrary, it is a provocation, it challenges the illusion that life goes on, and at the same time it is a means for that aesthetic distancing that traditional fantasy no longer achieves. From the outset, aesthetic abstraction . . . was foremost a prohibition on graven images [Bildverboten].51

Reading art’s images against this Bildverboten means engaging in a process of contradiction. Art produces images by abstraction. Aesthetic abstraction is a ban on art’s own abstraction, an exclusion of what I have been calling its material. And that exclusion constituted art’s common sense, in Kant and even more emphatically in his inheritors, like Schiller; and we can detect its traces in the “constructivism” of Kaufman, for example. But engaging with art’s “world of imagery [Bilderwelt]”52 means entering into a relation of abstraction by abstraction. One does not get behind the Bilderwelt, the “images-­world,” to an un-­abstracted Welt. Art, then, manifests abstraction.

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And in its aesthetic judgment, we enter into a relation by abstraction—­ something like de Man’s “absolute formalism.” In such a picture, art does not legislate for any positive political community, but the question of how far its negations provide negative scope for thinking an undetermined, neutral, “no-­ man’s land” of childish play between borders is complex and open. If art does not give form to the assent which grounds a sense of community, but contradicts precisely this ground, then what do we make of its newfound neutrality? “The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible. What artworks’ longing aspires to—­the reality of that which is not—­is transformed in longing’s memory.”53 The utopia glimpsed in memories of playing between borders is scanned in the ways that art invokes those borders and their neutral, mere ground—­the grounding of exchange in the abstractions of images, for example. But reading artworks in this way means responding to their “possibility,” their reality, as the sedimentation of a lost desire, a longing for such utopia, which artworks transform—­their longing for the reality of their own images. The history of art then becomes a “memory” of this desire, not its reality. But its reality, its objectivity, testifies to that memory.

The “Unavowable” Common Sense: Blanchot In the 1960s, chiefly in essays collected in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot develops what he calls the “relation without relation” of poetry. This not only describes a reading situation, in which the reader is always “without relation” to the text, always in some sense outside it, but the “relation” of language to reality in literature itself which is, like an image, never identical to its referent. The difficulty of this thought is that this relation without relation, in which reader and language are both exiled, exterior, is also the intimate core and condition of literature. Literature, for Blanchot’s thinking, has as its condition this relation without relation to language. And so does community.54 Both literature and community, for Blanchot, are conditioned by an anonymity. Writing is a neutral (rather than a positive or negative) use of language with which one cannot work. Community, friendship, is what Blanchot calls a “conjunction-­disjunction,”55 a provisional form of being together with others which is conditioned by its finitude, its future loss. Thinking these relations together, then, will allow us to see a politics of literature as neutral itself—­not in the sense of literature being withdrawn from political commitment, but rather in the sense of its measuring a spatial and temporal condition of politics. Finally, this will let us see the ways that Blanchot conceives aesthetics without communication: without either a negative vision of sociability or a positive determination of a society by aesthetic experience. Blanchot’s politics of friendship are not, for Gerard Bruns, “intersubjective.” Rather, “friendship for Blanchot entails foreignness or separation as one of its conditions.”56 I  focus on this “foreignness or separation” as

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spatial, in the space of common sense but not of it. Aesthetics “after” communication would occur in such a space. The neutrality of Blanchot’s writing works across that terrain outlined in Kant’s common sense, and in Adorno’s no-­man’s land. In the next section, I will examine Blanchot’s development of fragmentary writing together with political writing in the 1960s, culminating in his retrospective history of ’68, The Unavowable Community of 1983. Political Impediment For some recent commentators, Blanchot imagines a gap in literature, a void or blank, in order to obscure a gap in his political thinking. His early political commitments in the 1930s are obscured in an insistent “anonymity” of literary experience in his work from the 1950s onwards. To make literature anonymous is to insist on a corresponding political anonymity. How might we think the politics of literary work in Blanchot as anonymous but not a void? In a letter to Roger Laporte in 1984, a year after publishing The Unavowable Community, Blanchot describes facing a “real dichotomy” in the 1930s: writing journalism in the day, and at night writing without any “exigency but [writing] itself.” The division between the reality of political commitment and withdrawal from politics is mirrored in a division in writing, between committed and autonomous writing. “If there is fault on my part,” he continues, “it is in that division [partage].”57 But what does writing divide from, and share with—­partager ambiguously means both—­politics? At this time, in The Unavowable Community, Blanchot turned back to May ’68. Michel Surya argues that this conceals a “metamorphosis” in Blanchot’s first turn to literature from politics in the 1930s.58 For Surya, this second turn back to politics obscures Blanchot’s political commitments of the 1930s. The “passion” for literature merely conceals a “political passion”—­in other words, the kind of “ideology of the aesthetic” which I characterize with a “strong” reading of Kant. And likewise, for David Amar, writing “acts as a kind of impediment [empêchement]” to understanding the political present of May ’68.”59 In these claims, writing conceals (dark) political commitment. Writing’s aesthetic is merely the ideological cover for the real contradictions it obscures. I want to argue, in contrast, that we should read Blanchot here in the terms Adorno establishes for the aesthetic. Yet the “relation without relation”60 of poetry is not a “common sense” that provides the formal condition of intersubjective assent without any real commitments. Reading it outside Surya’s and Amar’s characterization will mean showing how poetry does provide some “sense” that disarranges those claims of merely formal “common sense.” Blanchot’s development of a neutral writing is not, in this reading, politically neutralizing so much as a way to disclose a neutrality which grounds political commitment, just as Adorno saw the aesthetic working through a “no-­man’s land” internal to reason.

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But I want, again, to think of this gap as yielding a more thoroughly political experience itself, as indeterminate. Indeed, in The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot is imperative: “Don’t think you can use others to free yourself from yourself: you are condemned to yourself in order for there still to be someone to welcome others.”61 Far from constituting a void or blank, “otherness” is the constitutive space of the self—­not the space, however, where the self is constituted, but the self as a space where the other can appear, transformed into the aesthetic surface or terrain where otherness might become legible through disarranging it. Thinking this theory of writing in political terms, far from papering over unsanitary political commitments with a void, opens up the shared condition of political and literary relations through a shared space of indeterminacy which makes relations to others possible. If there is a correspondence between literature and politics, it is between the anonymity of writing and the anonymity of politics. That is to say, Blanchot’s political thinking, in common with his literary thinking, responds to the anonymity of its object, and takes on that anonymity as the groundless basis for relation “without relation.” If the un-­conceptualized political history of the 1960s (and perhaps even the 1930s) reemerges in literary discourse, then it does so as an interruption of that discourse, even as it does so through the interruptions that literature might be able to make legible. For Leslie Hill, Blanchot’s account of sovereignty in the 1930s and 1940s is in this sense a legal suspension opened up by writing’s radical groundlessness.62 As Martin Crowley argues, this rupture “also” constitutes a relation, “a possible site of collective, oppositional activity.”63 This rupture of writing, then, rehearses the “gulf” which constitutes judgment’s legal neutrality in Kant. Literature is interrupted by history, but its interruption gives us a minimal opportunity to think of the ways history is interrupted in turn by its own constituents. That is a “real dichotomy.” The two are disconnected, and yet we think through this shared disconnection to a possible politics of disconnection. If Blanchot’s passions metamorphose with his politics, they do so according to the exigency of the present, which is to say the exigent pressure on that present of a non-­manifest future that we might call politics. My intention, in this section, is to find in Blanchot’s thinking about the relation between politics and writing an indeterminate space of reading. Passion, too, is subject to the neutral relations of writing: passion that declines, for Blanchot, into patience, to passivity, and not to power. We can think of present anonymity as not, contra Amar, constituting an “impediment” to the present of politics if we think of the specific relation that writing bears to anonymity. Community is the point of negotiation of this anonymity. And the anonymity of this community is legible when thought in the place of Kantian “common sense.” That means thinking about it through the anonymizing experience of writing and reading. The dispersal of the present of experience might obscure the present of politics, but it does so according to a reconfigured common sense: a sense that shares dispersal.

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The Territory of Literature As I suggested in the opening section of this chapter, the interruption of legal universality by Algeria and ’68 is not answered in subsequent political history, and so it resurfaces in other discourses. For Blanchot, the strain of identifying with what is not just politically nonidentical (the oppressed other), but nonidentical with politics itself (outside the territory of law), is a strain felt by the writing I. A failure of politics to organize its reflective relations is reproduced as a written incapacity to identify its singularity with the plural community it writes toward. The problem is in speaking an “I” as a “we,” a singular universality. We can see this tension in the series of political events to which Blanchot responded in the 1960s, which are, again, issues of territory and jurisdiction, of space or surface. As a signatory of the “Manifesto of the 121,” the “Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War in 1960,” Blanchot attests that “this is a war of national independence. But what is it for the French? It is not a foreign war. French territory has never been threatened. Moreover, it is being waged against a people whom the State ostensibly considers French, but who are fighting precisely to stop being considered so.”64 Republican community is extended into its nonidentical Algerian territory. Blanchot identifies with the anonymity of Algeria’s extraterritoriality. He is attesting to a non-­relation, or to a relation without relation, a relation to the Algerians as outside the jurisdiction, the territory of law. The neutrality of friendship in writing can thus be coordinated through this history. Making this declaration, Blanchot later attested that “each one of the signatories needs to be considered equally its unique author; I assume this responsibility globally, in its entirety.”65 This pluralized Kantian universal voice is what Blanchot calls “speaking as if anonymously.”66 This equality, as the shared discontinuity of singularity, is negotiated in writing between the singularity and the multiplicity of “I.” Speaking together, equally, “I assume this responsibility globally”: “I” assume, in this form, the equal anonymity of each of its singular authors. “I” is overwritten with a displacing equality of the numerousness with which it identifies, and attempts to incorporate. And this becomes “global,” a spatial figuration, a mapping of equality. In identifying with the nonidentity of Algeria, “I” am dispersed, fragmented; in identifying with the friend, in reading, “I” am refused the coherence of a symmetrical relationship. In the collectively authored Comité issue to which Blanchot largely, anonymously contributed during May ’68, writing becomes “a power of refusal that we believe is capable of opening up a future.”67 “We” believe in, attest to, the incapacitation of singularity by anonymity, and in this separation marked by “we” a future opens up. The “future” here is the potential change opened in the suspension of the self-­identity of the I. Just as Algeria is not French territory, so “here (in the French world)  .  .  . we can only speak in enemy

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territory.”68 “We” measures between different territories, and makes room in the I for an anonymous we. As in the United States, “we must feel (behave) like blacks in a white society.”69 “The texts will be anonymous. . . . to constitute collective or plural speech: a communism of writing.” Thus the texts will be fragmentary: precisely to make plurality possible (a nonunitary plurality) . . . in order to find their meaning not in themselves but in their conjunction-­disjunction, their being placed together and in common.70

Writing “places in common” a “conjunction-­ disjunction.” Speaking in a universal voice displaces the unity of the I. This is felt historically in the displacements of identity involved in a political identification with otherness. In writing, as anonymous, I give up my identity. And the disjunction of this anonymity constitutes a conjunction to which politics negatively attests. Any community is organized by a dispersal of singularity, just as writing displaces the singularity of its voice into the third person, the fragmentary. This political anonymization of identity passes through writing. Writing “passes through the advent [l’avènement] of communism  .  .  . communism being still always beyond communism.”71 Like communism, writing’s failure to be “present” makes its future presence (in reading) possible. If writing is not simply to take the place of a suspended legality, but rather to write into its “conjunction-­disjunction” of being in common, then it must affirm what Christophe Bident calls this “necessary insufficiency,”72 “the political incarnated in the detour”73 of writing. In an essay on Sade written in 1965,74 collected in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot describes “the way in which writing, the freedom to write, can coincide with the movement of true freedom [la liberté réelle], when the latter enters into crisis and gives rise to a vacancy in history. A coincidence that is not an identification.”75 Indeed, it is the coincidence of these two freedoms, the freedom of writing and political liberty, that provokes the rupture between them, this “vacancy” or gap. We cannot expect writing to reconcile the breach it provokes. Instead, writing and politics constitute a coincidence but not an identification, a “conjunction-­disjunction.” This dissymmetrical relation suspends politics’ continuity. Like revolution, like conversation, writing “is the time of the between-­times [l’entre-­temps] where, between the old laws and the new, there reigns the silence of the absence of laws, an interval that corresponds precisely to the suspension of speech [l’entre-­ dire].”76 Writing is between times in the sense of coinciding with two parallel but nonidentical times, of inscription and reading. Writing is thus “naming the possible, responding to the impossible”:77 it is a reality of what is possible but a longing for a future, here configured by its reading. The “communism of writing” is the present impossibility of community by which its future possibility is preserved: it is a response to the possible that responds also to the impossibility of that present possible being the future, being any future.

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The question of writing politics, the question of anonymity, is also a question of territory. But Blanchot does not write politics’ deterritorialization by its identification with various decolonizing events. Rather, the localization of writing these events is the anonymization of writing. Writing’s anonymous relation—­ saying “we” as if in relation to Algeria or Vietnam or the United States in France, in relation to that non-­relation—­is to say the territorialized, but provisional and anonymous relation which is friendship, community as friendship. “Explosive Communication” Writing community means writing this displacement of space: its appearance on unanticipated surfaces in unanticipated spaces. I want now to explore the ways this political writing might connect the anonymity of community with the experience of sense, might connect “common” with “sense,” as in the previous section, through a material experience of localization, of territorialization. As Jean-­Luc Nancy puts it (in what we might call the Kantian terms of this book), “sense [sens] is already the least shared thing in the world. But the question of sense is already what we share, without any possibility of its being held in reserve or avoided.”78 How do I communicate my singularity when singularity is precisely what is incommunicable? How do I think of sense in common when my experience of sense is singular? Friendship, like writing and reading, is a question of sharing sense, sharing a singular and provisional sense of conversation, like writing. The problem of sharing sense, which is in one way the condition of reading, is that writing can only relate to an other through displacing its own identity. The “relation without relation” of writing is without relation in this explosive sense. And its sense, its phenomenal materiality, is the possibility of the explosion of communication indicated by that openness—­writing “on the walls.” In making this connection to sense in writing, it is useful to frame it, again, with reference to Kant. To reiterate, Kantian aesthetic validity is secured through its sociability. It “presupposes a social condition (talking with others).”79 There is no end to such sociability other than its formal reflection in “talk,” conversation; and there is no attached object into which it could settle. While for Kant the aesthetic judgment finds its ground in “the feeling of the subject,”80 he also claims that this constitutes a “common ground, deeply buried in all human beings.”81 This common ground is located inside, deeply buried, but it is also shared, outside, in an indeterminately plural “all human beings.” Faced with the “exemplary” “products of taste,” every human would judge in common; yet “taste must be a faculty of one’s own.” By displacing this ground of communication into the common of sense, Kant avoids the question of the sense of common. With Blanchot, however, that sociability is in unanticipated ways materialized in the experience of community. In this experience, the possibilities of communication are formally excessive. The events of ’68 demonstrated that

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explosive communication could affirm itself (affirm itself beyond the usual forms of affirmation) as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex, culture, to mix with the first comer as with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown familiar.82

“Explosive communication” exceeds that mere talk of sociability by locating sociability “beyond the usual forms of affirmation.” And where Kant’s common sense demands assent from the subjects it presupposes, Blanchot’s “community” that generates “explosive communication” is unanticipated: the “unknown familiar” that remains unknown in its familiarity, that is familiar to what the subject does not know—­an externalized intimacy, reversing Kant’s internalization of intimacy in subjective form. This experience is not of communication, but its explosion in unanticipated, unknown but familiar, others. This displacement of the ends of communication is literal—­literalized in writing on new surfaces in ’68. Communication has a sense. “Everybody had something to say, and, at times, to write (on the walls); what, exactly, mattered little. Saying it was more important than what was said. Poetry was an everyday affair.”83 We should focus here on the surfaces: the walls. What matters here is such explosive surfacing, the proliferation of forms of reception that disarrange hopes for subjective communication. “Poetry” is in this sense the production of reception, of legibility, by its fragmentary inscriptions on “everyday” surfaces. Such writing “(on the walls)” introduces the nonobjective common sense into a political present of society—­into the territory and field of those social relations, its fragmentation in newly generic walls of streets. But the utopian hopes here are conditioned, despite the Surrealist “everyday affair.” Blanchot withdraws writing from a model of communicating ends. And just so, the community it describes manifests in unanticipated ends and surfaces of reading. This experience of non-­relation as relation marks the possibility of friendship: of a relation that does not identify as its other, but with the nonidentity of the other. Unavowable Sense This explosion of the surfaces of reception—­ the dispersal of spaces of legibility—­is also a dispersal of the ends of communication, in aesthetics. In The Unavowable Community, Blanchot explicitly frames the experience of community as a reading relation. What we sense, in reading, is incomplete, in that it is conditioned by the possibility of rereading, reading in the future. The reading experience is provisional. It is “beyond utilitarian gain,” like “love,” “a transcendency without glory that puts it endlessly at the service of the other.”84 This means that reading—­as Blanchot reads Duras’s La Maladie de la mort in this book85—­forms a dissymmetrical “weakness” in “love” of its

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object. And this incompletion is the condition, the “principle of community” imagined in such literary politics. If, as a principle of community, we had the unfinishedness or incompleteness of existence . . . we have the accomplishment of community in that which, precisely, limits it, we have sovereignty in that which makes it absent and null, its prolongation in the only communication which henceforth suits it and which passes through literary unsuitability, when the latter inscribes itself in works only to affirm the unworking that haunts them, even if they cannot not reach it. The absence of community puts an end to the hopes of the groups; the absence of a work which, on the contrary, needs and presupposes works so as to let them write themselves under the charm of unworking, is the turning point which, corresponding to the devastation of the war, will close an era.86

The principles of community are in common with the principles of reading: a displacement of sovereignty to the future—­the space of the reader—­which is a finitude of the reading relation. So “communication . . . passes through literary unsuitability” in the sense that to read is to bear relation to an object of sense, a text, with which one cannot fully work. The turning which closes this passage is the equivocation, the “unworking,” between subject and object in reading. Such a community is “unavowable”: it cannot be attested to because attesting to it would displace the indeterminate future which is its condition of possibility. So, if the relation of man with man ceases to be that of the Same with the Same, but rather introduces the Other as irreducible and—­given the equality between them—­always in a situation of dissymmetry in relation to the one looking at the Other, then a completely different relationship imposes itself and imposes another form of society which one would hardly dare call a “community.” Or else one accepts the idea of naming it thus, while asking oneself what is at stake in the concept of a community and whether the community, no matter if it has existed or not, does not in the end always posit the absence of community.87

“Given the equality between them,” we have to think in this way: we have to name this community, knowing that community does not name anything present, but rather the loss of presence which is its condition, the otherness of its relation to an unknown familiar. However, in this way community “responds to the impossible” in the present, it responds to a future hope (love) that would (impossibly; would not) be able to think in this communal way. The present, indeed, demands this kind of community. “The existence of

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every being thus summons the other or a plurality of others. . . . It therefore summons a community: a finite community, for it in turn has its principle in the finitude of the beings which form it.”88 Reading opens us to the possibility of such a finite community in the sense that the finitude is not what reading lacks, not void or blank, but the condition of presence of another. Literature does not positively model community, then, but rather becomes the site for this experience of suspension which is the condition of community.89 From this perspective, Blanchot’s interventions into Algeria and ’68 are interventions into precisely those arguments about historical determinism that we saw conditioned the response to those events. Writing yields some experience which is not shared. Yet this is the “principle of community.” The text can be read to the extent that it remains, partly, anonymous, not shared, not distributed. Its condition of reading, like the condition of friendship, is this constitutive finitude of its sense. It is for this reason that writing is, in Blanchot, fearful, rather than pleasurable. This fear is something we witnessed, fear—­that cannot be shared—­ was given to us that we might share it, and that we might master it in the very rejection of all mastery. . . . But it implies the discretion that culminates in silence, even as it turns us aside from it.90

“We” witness what was supposed to be shared “that cannot be shared.” The “scandal” of exchange here is sharing that which cannot be shared. This apparent paradox is not, however, a paradox if we think of it as a localization of the space of reading. The ends of such sharing are not communicative, but a suspension of the self that might register the other. The suspension of faculties in aesthetic free play—­like Adorno’s no-­man’s land—­is mobilized here as a means not to validate an intersubjective common sense, but rather to make space for something other than the subject. Thus in The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot’s imperative: “Don’t think you can use others to free yourself from yourself: you are condemned to yourself in order for there still to be someone to welcome others.”91 And, “Think about others in such a way that it is no longer you who comes back from this thought and that it is not in a thought that you dispose yourself towards them.”92 Disposing yourself towards “them” means disposing yourself towards a multiplicity, a numerousness, in which singularity becomes anonymous. Just as the “I” is displaced by the “we,” not “you” but “them.” And finally, “you” are displaced (Your wounds) by “him”: the third person. “You” are “il,” he/it, the “third person who is not a third person [troisième personne qui n’est pas une troisième personne].”93 This neutral third person, the person outside witness, who is not a (dialectical or witnessing) third, displaces the second-­person you. The experience, in reading, of a suspension of mastery makes space for the experience of something like friendship: in the anonymizing of the self. Just so, turning to Algeria or the United States from France made space in France

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to think a relation without relation to the law—­not as universal (as the OAS claimed), yet neither as historically deterministic (as the Left claimed), but rather as grounded in its own suspension of ground. In other words, reading’s displacement onto new surfaces grants an unanticipated legibility to space. And this works through the subjective terrain of experience itself: the self, reading, now becomes the site for a displacement that can welcome others. This is the space of a numerousness of the city. We are exiled in the city: it is the place of displacement that we nonetheless share. The city becomes the space of this fear: “the fear (the fear provoked by nothing), the ancient fear that reigns over the city.”94 Anonymous Writing The city is the place of displacement that we nonetheless share. Is the fear of this relation a fear that we lose identity to credit a community? Is this the fear of writing that, rather than pleasure, if it loses its common sense yields only disconnection? To draw the conclusions of this section, we can turn to some of the ways that Blanchot has been read. For Christopher Fynsk, Blanchot’s “fear is never overcome, but this does not prohibit the concluding naming of an impossible peace and even an apparently peaceful acquiescence.”95 This “exilic” experience, for Fynsk, instantiates the conditions of something like peaceful community without corralling identity through Kantian demands. And I think this makes sense, too, of Sarah Kofman’s reference to “the foreignness of that which can never be held in common,”96 the foreignness of thinking in common itself, but also, for Kofman, of thinking in common with Blanchot. Blanchot writes towards foreignness, not only literally to Algeria or the United States, but the foreignness of reading which remains singular, not shared. Reading means entering into this “relation without relation.” In such reading, writing is linked to politics by its anonymity, the displacement of identity that makes space for what is other to identity. As well as his letter to Laporte, and The Unavowable Community in 1983, in 1984 Blanchot published “The Last to Speak,” another work of retrospection: an elegiac essay written for Celan in 1972 after his suicide in 1970. Celan, as much as ’68, is a point of orientation here, of community. Engaging with the history of the 1960s, like elegizing Celan, means engaging with anonymity. In The Step Not Beyond, “We speak, we speak, two immobile men whom immobility maintains facing one another, the only ones to speak, the last to speak [les derniers à parler].”97 “We” speak, but only anonymously; “we” converse, we speak together, only to interrupt one another’s presence, to speak as “the last to speak,” expecting no answer, with no “we” to hold us together in common. The interruption that constitutes conversation is conversation itself here. The “last to speak,” for Blanchot, is both anonymous and, as Christophe Bident points out, the “anonymous” friend Celan.98 By using the Celanian phrase as a title for his essay on Celan, the last to speak

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is named, Celan (it becomes singular, “le dernier”), but Celan is also named anonymous, plural (“les derniers”). Celan is unnamed. “Friendship attests only to the absence of testimony for death,” and this is its “law,” its “gap.”99 If there is a relation founded by reflection in writing, then it is to the extent that writing is interrupted by that relation. A community, similarly, would be oriented by a relation to what is foreign to it—­including the singular—­as Kofman suggests, what “can never be held in common.” Kofman aligns this relation with Adorno’s “new categorical imperative,”100 after Auschwitz, that Auschwitz “should never be repeated, so that nothing similar should happen”;101 which in Blanchot means “you are condemned to yourself.” And accordingly we should not dispense with Kantian subjectivity, but reimagine the form it imagines. The self is now not itself but marks the minimal space, the mere form, in which there might be “someone to welcome others.”

Celan: Poetry and the Space of Images in ’68 My intention in this chapter has been to show how “literary politics” transforms into a politics of literature, Hamilton’s Realpoetik, not as the determinate envisioning of politics, nor as the representation of political content in literature, but as reading’s exposure to an indeterminacy by and of politics. Politics becomes a surface for reading neutrally, a neutral space in which political intentions are transformed, but in which transformation there remains the possibility of transformation as such as a condition of a different form of politics. I will now, finally, briefly, turn to Celan’s own response to his political situation in order to reflect more concretely on how this might emerge as a theory of lyric reading in the terms of the previous chapter. This will serve as a propaedeutic to the following chapters on Celan, but hopefully also as an insight into the orientation of this chapter’s thinking here—­to the provisional, dynamic movement of images in Celan’s poetry as a neutral spatialization of politics, and, moreover, of reading’s own movements. Indeed, a fundamental question here is about the form of dynamic movement that could explain reading’s movement across surfaces, but also explain the transformations of politics into other (aesthetic) discourses—­a dynamics worked out in chapter 1, and developed above: how, in Adorno, we read the “contradiction” in the relation of art to its social material; and how, in Blanchot, we read the “foreign”—­in Fynsk’s terms “exilic”—­space of writing as if it were itself a transformative site of community and friendship. Celan’s poetry does register a series of explicitly political events through which he lived in Paris. But they are pitched through a poetics of the image. They are legibly poetic, then, through a theory of reading that can make sense of their dynamic transformations of political material, politics itself, into a site of transformative and open-­ended—­indeterminate—­movement. I shall chart this movement, here, by charting the movement of images in Celan’s poetry.

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In his Meridian speech, from 1960, which I will treat in more detail in chapter 5, Celan makes something like a programmatic statement about poetic images. And then, what would the images be? . . . What is perceived and is to be perceived once and always again once, and only here and now. Hence the poem would be the place [der Ort] where all tropes and metaphors want to be carried ad absurdum.102

This account of images is spatial. The poem is a localized “place,” “der Ort,” not an abstract “space,” Raum. This localized place is, however, dynamic: a place of movement “ad absurdum.” The poem thus constitutes a space where images move dynamically to no end, in a lyrically bracketed temporality of” here and now.” The temporal “once and always again once” and this “carrying” of tropes and metaphors seems to be ahistorical. But we should note the temporality of the process of perception: these images are “to be perceived.” The shuttling of reading within this space is historical in the sense of bracketing its own temporality. The “once” is “always again once,” a space of continuous appearance. Poetry in this sense is characterized by Celan, as he describes to his wife upon seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s depiction of the Russian Revolution, October, as “Hope always on the way, the brother of poetry.”103 Like tropes and metaphors, poetry is “hopeful” in the sense of making space for such movement.104 This movement is given shape in the poem “From the Moorfloor,” but it is also complicated there as Ohnebild, “sans-­image,” “without image.” From the moorfloor to climb into the sans-­image, a hemo in the gun barrel hope, the aim, like impatience, of age, in it. Village air, rue Tournefort.

Aus dem Moorboden ins Ohnebild steigen, ein Häm im Flintenlauf Hoffnung, das Ziel, wie Ungeduld mündig, darin. Dorfluft, rue Tournefort.105

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For Werner Hamacher, the poem schematizes the history of its reading. Its “movements are in a terrain that is not yet occupied by historical facts or events.”106 And in this sense it makes space for “another” history, that of reading. Yet this means the poem is itself Ohnebild, which for Hamacher “means on the one hand that which is without image; but on the other also the image of a Without—­: so that the image preserves its negation in itself, image mixed with imageless.”107 The poem thus upholds the movement, depicted in The Meridian, of images and their temporality. It instantiates a history, a space of its reading, by not presenting an image, or by presenting what Hamacher calls an “aporetic syntagm,”108 a space of movement that is not resolved in stillness. We can therefore think of the poem’s “without image” as dynamic in the sense that it is not nothing but a site of transformation of images. Here, I think, the implicitly political aspect of this space opens up. We climb, in the poem, from a “moor” into “village air,” “Rue Tournefort,” in the Latin Quarter where Celan lived—­a most local space. And moreover, this was a space of protest, a street of “movements” of placards, images, screens, politics, as Celan wrote this poem in 1968. The “villagey,” communal air, the locality of this city street is surprising, then, as is the “hope” “aimed” as if down a gun barrel. If this poem “climbs” into a space “without-­image” that is in a sense a condition for images, for their movement or historical instantiation, then why is that local space, that detail, so blank? And why is that hope so violent? “Dorfluft, rue Tournefort,” becomes, in fact, a space of “without-­image” itself: the street of the “strong turn” turning upon the word Ort, place—­ “Dorfluft, rue Tournefort,” reflecting into mere sonic material, reverberating in this final line. To be in “place” is to move to “without image,” to climb into a without image, a space that is not (like the moor) the natural space—­we might recall Kant’s own “Boden” or “field” from earlier in this chapter—­but is the “place” of the poem, Ort. Kant, in fact, uses this same “moorland” space as a setting to stage his account of the telos of aesthetic judgment—­its own movement or direction. If someone searching through a moorland bog [Moorbruches] finds, as sometimes happens, a piece of carved wood, he does not say that it is a product of nature, but of art; the cause that produced it conceived of an end, which the wood has to thank for its form.109

Celan’s poem in a way “climbs out” of this same “moor,” this space of undifferentiated form, into something like Kant’s teleological form, with its “end” or “aim.” Adorno’s own “climbing out” of Kantian judgment should be instructive here. His “new categorical imperative,” indeed, takes as its premise that “we cannot say anymore that the immutable [das Unveränderliche] is truth, and that the mobile, transitory [das Bewegte, Vergängliche] is appearance.”110

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Grasping such mobile or transitory, provisional truth means registering precisely this movement from undifferentiated nature to differentiated culture, the space of that movement. Celan’s political should be located here, I think, in this thinking of movement, in the transition from “moorfloor” to “without-­image,” and in the ways that what emerges is not a verifiable image but a further level of transformation and transition—­Hamacher’s “aporetic syntagm,” an Ohnebild. It is striking, then, that this same image, the “moor,” emerges from two other poems situated at points of protest, like rue Tournefort, which are sites of transition and screens of movement for images, placards, slogans, in protest. This image “climbs out” of two other poems, modeling a “climbing out” of politics and history into a space “without image” of the street, the “absolute formalism” of the street itself. The poem, like a street, becomes a site for the transformation of images. The street is a site of movement, of protest, where figures move as an organization of politics. In “Imagine” (“Denk dir”), the mass suicide of Jews in resistance to Rome in Masada in a.d. 73–­74 (excavated 1963–­65) returns as an imaginary encounter of the “Moorsoldat” from the bog in the context of the Six-­Day War (June 5–­10, 1967). Celan wrote this poem on June 7, 1967, after participating in a protest in support of Israel at the Place de la Concorde on June 6, 1967. Imagine: your own hand has held once more this into life re-­ suffered piece of inhabitable earth. Imagine: that came toward me, awake to name, awake to the hand, forever, from what cannot be buried.111

Because this image “cannot be buried,” it signifies a certain resistance, but also a scandal to exchange. The soldier is not, in a sense, exchangeable, and here I think lies the subtle sarcasm of Celan’s voice: “Imagine” this protesting soldier because you can’t think him; this “inhabitable earth” comes “once / ​ more” like an image itself, but that does not mean we inhabit it. The problem here is temporal, as well as historical. Our “imagining” of an image in a different context might well be resistant to that context, but it also depends upon a certain exchangeability of the image which images themselves also formally protest. This is made explicit in a poem from ’68, explicitly representing politics, protest.

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The Runic one too changes lanes: amidst the arrest-squad he scrapes himself, arresting-arrested, red, carrot, sister, with your peels plant me, the moory one, free from his Tomorrow,

Auch der Runige wechselt die Fahrbahn: mitten im Greiftrupp schabt er sich Greifend-Gegriffenen rot Mohrrübe, Schwester, mit deinen Schalen pflanz mich Moorigen los aus seinem Morgen,112

The movement here of images from different contexts, across histories, is given a different, material—sonic and visual—dispersibility in the space of the poem. The troping space of the poem is a counter-transformation to the “arresting-arrested” movement of protest. While the protestor sarcastically “changes lanes” with apparent ease, he also obscures a distinction in the crude “CRS=SS” slogan that would collapse two histories into one image. The protestor transforms into the image of the “runic” SS he would apparently resist precisely because of the way that protest collapses historical distinctions into one image. The poem interrupts this imaginative suspension by imagining its interruptions. The poem is in this sense another arresting-arrested movement, and not a simple counter-protest. In a more complex sense, the poem substitutes what The Meridian terms, from Büchner’s representation of the 1789 revolution in Dantons Tod, a “counter-word,” a “step,”113 understood, however, not as a reactionary arrest of movement, but rather as the introduction of a space where it might transform. Celan notes how protestors “ironically” simulate Nazi salutes “behind the red and black flag.”114 The socialist “red” is in the grip here of a more sinister Nazi “black,” red under the image of its own erasure. The “moor soldier” interrupts this elision: the “red” turns into the “carrot” (Mohrrübe), rhyming now as an aural image into “Moorigen”

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and “Morgen.” The “forever” “un-­buried” moor soldier is un-­buried again by this collapse of imagery, this time into the “morning” of the future. The poem, in this way, discloses through images the history that images otherwise might conceal. In turning his poem into a site of the movement of images, rather than their resolution or growth, Celan preserves this possibility of openness, the paradoxical “without image.” Celan’s poems thus trace a history of revolutionary protest, from Russia, to Masada, to revolutionary Paris in 1789 and 1968. But they do so by tracing a space of movement of images, not by political representation. The images are curious without-­images, de-­substantiated, images of the dematerialization of politics by its representation, an attempt to rescue a space in the city where politics might be substantiated. The movement of these images is curious in that it is an exchange which is itself non-­exchangeable; and given that exchange is a condition of images (the troping of language, its capacity to transfer reference into other words), what emerges is without-­image, a no-­image, Ohnebild. In other words, the foreignness of images, what cannot be shared or exchanged, as in Blanchot, is in Celan that space of movement itself, that space of exchange. Reading the politics in these poems means, then, identifying a certain unexchangeability to them—­analogous to the illegibility found in chapter 1. But again, exchange is surely also a condition of reading, a movement or transfer between the site of the poem and the contexts around it. Reading the poem, then, means reading something like Levinson’s “conjunction” of material in a field form of reading, where material produces the context of its reading. But it also means being attentive to Blanchot’s “conjunction-­disjunction,” the ways that conjunction is premised upon a certain dematerialization, a certain exclusion of what can be referenced, as the condition of reference at all. This, I think, is also the neutral terrain scanned in Adorno’s aesthetics: that “longing” of what “is not” in art’s possibility of the possible. In the rest of this book, I want to attend to this conjunction-­ disjunction, this neutrality of dematerialization within materialization, this loss for which politics, in Celan’s poems, becomes the screen of reading.

Chapter 3

Disastrous Materiality Neutrality and the “Impossible Real” in Blanchot’s Fragmentary Writing

The appearance of politics on the spaces and surfaces of the city—­the streets in which protests moved, the walls on which slogans were written, the lecture theaters in which action happened—­was, in the terms established in the previous chapter, both aesthetic and extreme. Its appearance was as if in an aesthetic space, which is to say in a space that is not legislative, a neutral terrain. And in this neutrality, it was extreme, which is to say located on the edge or limit of appearance. In this framework, Blanchot’s work considers an appearance of material in literature through processes of reading and writing which are dematerializing. How, I ask with Blanchot, do we read this suspension of material in reading which dematerializes? How do we read the erasures of writing as substantial? I will argue here that Blanchot’s answer is extreme, in the sense of proposing a boundary space, a limit. In the formulation I attend to here, there is no presence in literature except for writing; and there is nothing to hope for from literature, it sanctions no future world. And yet the extremity of this position perhaps actually consists in Blanchot’s insistence, too, that this writing constitutes a body, an “inaccessible presence” that is not “blank” or “empty.”1 Thinking through this body without presence and without future will lead us to a form of reading which does not determine the material in a text, but which rather identifies the form of immateriality which is the condition of that material’s legibility. Blanchot’s attention is to the condition of reading: the space in which words can be shared between text and reader. The material which emerges here, I will argue, is attenuated, and this has consequences both for how we think about reading, and for what we might think of as the outcome of reading. Blanchot’s thought surrounding writing as a “mark” establishes this relationship with reading. This mark is a limit material, a material-­immaterial, the erased presence of writing as material inscription in a space of reading. We move from thinking the matter of writing as indeterminate (its reference to politics, history) to thinking the materiality of writing itself, its inscriptions and

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marks, as indeterminate. From this will emerge the object of a limited critical materialism. In chapter 2, I suggested that Blanchot develops his political ethics, as an orientation in writing towards otherness, through his account of writing’s fragmentation. Fragmentary writing is there a form in which the foreignness of the other might become legible. For Leslie Hill, Blanchot’s fragmentary writing is a “radical suspension” of the neutral as neutre: “a thought perpetually other than itself, and other than the other.”2 This neutrality, for Hill, is pitched radically against history, such that “the demand of the fragmentary now turned meaning, history, being towards the outside, towards that which could no longer be named or addressed as such.”3 The interruptions of time in writing “set aside” time,4 so that writing becomes anti-­aesthetic, a withdrawal of writing from precisely the terms of construction which we identified earlier with aesthetic form.5 And for Christopher Fynsk, writing undergoes an “exilic movement” that “carries beyond the order of representation, beyond the figural.”6 This is an exilic step in the sense that writing instantiates a neutrality where there should be transcendent meaning, a collapse into a neutral futurity of the kinds of meaning that figural thinking should guarantee (that something could be otherwise). Fynsk thinks the neutre explicitly not as a means to get beyond language by means of language, but rather as a force of something like its mere present. Such writing is a “disappropriating movement” which is “perhaps still thought, but it is indeed a disaster for thought.”7 And yet, for Hill, in the “disaster” of such writing, there is “something else.”8 I want to use this description of writing as non-­ transcendent, however, within the framework of space and judgment I have established in the previous chapters, which occupy the aesthetic and history in neutralized terms. From that perspective, the neutrality of writing consists, again, in the interruptions of space and time that make space for “something else”—­not as “blank” or “empty,” a void gap in experience, but as a kind of material of writing, understood in the terms of the extreme or limited material that emerges at the peripheries of judgment in Kant’s aesthetic, and as the explosive space of writing in the streets. From the perspective of this neutralization of space by writing, what I want to call material is Blanchot’s account of inscription as a process of the dematerialization and suspension of the presence of its referent, matter, and itself, material. Writing is indeed a fragmentation of time and space, for Blanchot, and this can be understood in material terms according to the kind of provisional and limited dynamics outlined in chapter 1: in Blanchot’s non-­transcendent description of writing as a “step not beyond,” le pas au-­ delà, rather than negation or positing, there emerges a neutral materiality. Further, the identifiably lyrical structures of Blanchot’s politics, in the previous chapter—­the conditions of address, of presentation, and of spatial and temporal bracketing in form—­are, in this chapter, also systems of materialization, of the presentation of a neutral space for the appearance of “something

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else” in the territory of experience—­in other words, as a kind of aesthetic experience. The pronouncement with which I ended my consideration of Blanchot in chapter 2 is taken from this work, The Step Not Beyond (1973). “You are condemned to yourself” in the sense of being condemned to being in space as a neutral site which might “welcome others”; not in order, through a negative, to escape the self nor, through politics, to positively posit another’s presence, but to become something like mere space for appearance: the terms of chapter 1’s aesthetics. And this aligns with what Blanchot later calls, in The Writing of the Disaster (1980), the “danger,” a danger not only of positing meaning in such a space, but also of negating it. The “danger” is “that the disaster acquire a meaning instead of a body.”9 Avoiding this danger requires us to read this “disastrous” body, and yet not to give it a meaning. In other words, it requires a different form of reading. Between The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster we might therefore find in Blanchot something like an indeterminate materialism of reading. But it is important to note that this material is framed by the earlier sense of writing as a “conjunction-­ disjunction,” as in community: that any materialization through conjunction is premised upon and arrives with a dematerialization of disjunction. Blanchot’s complex intervention into the dialectics of negation by the neutre, in this sense, is also an attempt to find something like a disaster of material, its non-­presence which haunts its present, and, moreover, to find in that disastrous dematerialization of material also a condition of the kinds of futurity which might be imagined in politics: that space of the self’s presence which is reserved from the self in order to welcome others. Blanchot imagines instead “a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body.”10 This presence is a scandal to exchange, and indeed to reading: a body which cannot be identified as a body cannot, either, be legible, be read, precisely because it cannot be adopted into experience in the way that aesthetics (in Kant, as in chapter 1) adopted the “mere reflection” of a beautiful object into experience. It cannot, that is, become a subject, or a form. The stakes of the unexchangeable in community, what cannot be shared, are here aligned with a written material experienced in reading as foreign—­with the range of implications for Blanchot’s political, territorializing project in the 1960s in play. This chapter will work through Blanchot’s fragmentary writing from The Infinite Conversation to The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster to find this form of materialization. The trajectory of the chapter is towards thinking the material which I identified, in chapter 1, with detailing the indeterminacy in reading lyric poetry, and in chapter 2 with the political space of reading. Developing this theory of reading will require a certain amount of reconstruction of Blanchot’s thinking in these texts, as well as of the philosophical stakes of that thinking. After that reconstruction, I will also briefly

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contextualize the critical conversation around that thinking. But the aim of the chapter is to develop the ways in which what Blanchot is configuring in these fragmentary texts—­what poetry, for him, is naming—­might be considered material; and the ways in which, in turn, that consideration requires us, as readers, to recognize the processes of dematerialization in which such poetic material is suspended, the “impossibility” to which it responds. The resulting picture of material is also immaterial, a material-­immaterial, a limit of experience in which something like this neutral suspension can become legible. There are three stages to this argument, which it is worth clarifying here: (1) that writing as material inscription is a “mark,” a separation of time; (2) that reading takes place in the space of this separation, marking the separability in writing of the present of writing from the present of reading; and (3) that reading is a relation to this mark, and that as such it is a neutral, rather than a positive or negative, relation. In this chapter’s first section, I reconstruct the idea of form in Blanchot’s thinking as a disarrangement, by writing, of the unity of space and time. In the next section, I develop the implications of this disarrangement with a wider view of reading, considering writing as an intervention into dialectical thinking as a limit. In the final section, I consider this revision of dialectics by writing as a mark—­and that mark of writing as a limit material, matter without presence.

Disaster, the Mark of Writing, and the Disarrangement of Space and Time Blanchot describes fragmentary writing as a disarrangement of space and time—­and therefore of form. As we shall see in the next section, this emerges from Blanchot’s interventions into dialectical thinking, through thinking literature and writing, from the 1940s and 1950s.11 And as I suggested in chapter 2, the alignment of writing and community in the 1960s also marks an entrance into a newly conceived dialectic. The crux of this turn is fragmentation, the “relation without relation” considered in both political and literary surfacing. For Blanchot, this amounts to a transformation of form, signaled by poetry. The sense, in Blanchot, of poetic form as a fragmentation of the continuity of space and time in writing can be traced throughout his writing on (and by) fragmentation. In The Infinite Conversation, poetry is characterized as “naming the possible, responding to the impossible.”12 Poetic naming—­the poetic word—­instantiates a dialectic of possibility and impossibility that reforms other relations dependent on that dialectic—­such as those of community. Poetry responds to impossibility, “each time it is poetry,” by not naming it. The possibility of poetry, positive naming, is at the same time a response to its impossibility, something it is not. Poetry names this relation to its impossible

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condition. How could a poem make impossibility a possible experience, this simultaneity of possibility and impossibility? This demand, in The Writing of the Disaster, is disastrous. The disaster: break with the star, break with every form of totality, never denying, however, the dialectical necessity of a fulfilment; the disaster: prophecy which announces nothing but the refusal of the prophetic as simply an event to come, but which nonetheless discovers the patience of vigilant language. The disaster, touch of the powerless infinite: it does not come to pass under a sidereal sky, but here—­here in the excess of all presence. Here: where, then? “Voice of no one, once more.”13

The difficulty (which will be continuous in this chapter) of defining this idea, disaster, consists in two things: first, that it denotes a condition for thinking, rather than a thought itself; and second, that it is thus not a concept. In schematic terms, however, this difficulty is useful: the disaster of thinking, as I will explain in this section, is that the condition for thinking is a formal unity that is itself also the disruption of formal unity. Writing proceeds by discontinuity and spatial disunity, and disaster will characterize this procedure. This discontinuity is material, writing inscribed as marks in a space. It is helpful, further, to focus on the spatial and temporal descriptions of disaster. The sky imagined in disaster is sidereal, but emphatically the disaster distances us from that sky—­dis-­aster, dés-­astre, without star. This is not only a play on words, finding a causative fatefulness in the Greek etymology. The “powerless infinite” by which this space “here” is touched is an interruption of temporal causation. But this should be thought as an interruption. Blanchot is thinking, here, of writing as a space of systematic and dialectical totality. And yet, the system of writing, its “here,” is also constituted by a serial displacement of relation, rather than its fulfillment—­“Voice of no one, once more.” Writing, for Blanchot, seems both to proceed dialectically and to interrupt the characteristic movements of dialectics: the ways it identifies history, progress, through identifying space and time. This “disastrous” dialectic centers on a displacement of sense, its materiality: “touch,” “voice,” an “excess of all presence”; and these displacements of sense (powerless, voice of no one) announce a futurity which must simply be awaited rather than progressed into, continuous with the present. The fulfillment of this future is impossible. Any futurity is not prophetic, in the sense that it is never present, never merely a future proceeding from the present. And neither does this futurity “take place here”: its space, its presence, exceeds space. And so it is not spoken by anyone. It is the repetition of this “no one, once more.” This occurs within dialectics. Dialectics proceeds in this impossibility. And this disables dialectical history from within. It presents a history of dispersal. “ ‘Already’ or

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‘always already’ marks the disaster [la marque du désastre], which is outside history, but historically so: before undergoing it, we (who is not included in this we?) will undergo it. . . . a remainder which is neither a result (as in subtraction), nor a quantity left over (as in division). Patience again—­the passive. The Aufhebung turns inoperable, ceases.”14 The positive “remainder” of this dialectic, the “mark,” is the mark of dialectical movement in which Hegelian sublation “turns inoperable,” neutral. And again, this history includes a dialogic history of saying “we.” This is friendship, a connection by radical incompatibility that articulates a radical incompletion of dialogue: “to die in common through separation.”15 In this way, the question of “impossibility” named by poetry is shared with the question of friendship’s anonymity—­as I argued in chapter 2, here the “we.” But poetry thus also rearranges the temporality of history, which is “outside history, but historically so.” Understanding this “historically so,” and the history of “conjunction-­disjunction,” the “common through separation” of friendship, means thinking of the ways poetry rearranges forms of space and time. And it means thinking the mark of this arrangement in writing. The Mark of Writing: Time and Error I think that we can illuminate the stakes of writing here by reference to Kant again. Writing for Blanchot reproduces the problem I identified in Kant’s aesthetic: namely, the problem that aesthetic judgment, in not determining its object, reproduces that indeterminacy in the non-­closed ends of judgment. But this release from an objective and conceptual rationale raises the problem of error, which is conceived as a misalignment between concept and sense. Kant’s recourse to common sense can be seen as an attempt to avoid this problem by referring the lack of conceptual ground in aesthetic judgment to the intersubjective, the “universal voice,” of mere form itself. Blanchot’s disastrous “Voice of no one” replays this problem and its spatial and temporal implications. In order to account for what it “senses” in aesthetic judgment, aesthetics in Blanchot would have to account for the non-­manifestation of its object, for the way its material, writing, does not resolve into an object. Kant thus sets the terms in Blanchot for an aesthetic of non-­manifestation: for thinking the spatial and temporal conditions of apprehending what does not manifest. We can read this in Kant’s account of the formal separation of space and time in the Critique of Pure Reason. Disaster, for Blanchot, is the necessity of this discontinuity between space and time, present and presence, in writing (but also, as we shall see, in thinking itself). At issue here is the difference between what Kant calls the “inner sense” of time and the “outer sense” of space.16 As a priori categories of intuition, these are basic. But we cannot intuit them as such: space is always experienced “outside” the subject, and

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time “yields no shape.” We therefore, Kant writes, have recourse to “analogies” to make sense of time: to think of it as a line, for example, extended in space.17 And it is this spatialization, in the imagination, of time that accounts for the possibility of error in judgment for Kant. If judgment is the correct identification of concept and intuition, then “error is effected only through the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding,” an error which is like a “curved line” where “another force influences it in another direction.”18 We have already seen that Kant’s account of reflecting judgment hopes to secure judgment on its own terms. But this possibility of error in a spatialization of time and a temporalization of space persists. In fact, I argued in chapter 1 that this possibility of errant “spatialization” of time was a formal condition of the lyric, a poetic force, and a formal condition of its critical reading. Blanchot’s focus on the possibility of error in judgment, in terms of space and time, will reframe this point: if we are to understand critical reading to take place in a spatialization of the temporal discontinuity which is writing, then we also understand it to take place in what Blanchot calls the “space of error.”19 It is this marking of time, its spatialization, that structures Blanchot’s sense of disaster. “♦ There would be a separation of time, like a separation of place, belonging neither to time nor to place. In this separation, we would come to the point of writing.”20 Writing marks the way time becomes historical in being separated from itself: its marks are historical in this sense of marking time as spatial separation, literally in the inscription of words on a page which is a separation of the time of writing from the time of reading. Writing is an externalization of temporality, like Kant’s error. Time becomes an event when it identifies a present with spatial presence, in writing’s inscriptions on a page. If becoming an event, history, means marking the identity of time and space, then the problem with writing is that the kind of time and space it marks is, as Fynsk argues, “exilic”: it is self-­displacing because it is always dependent upon some other time, the future time of reading. Blanchot asks us to think of the time of reading as this displacement of time in space. This separation of time will be crucial to understanding the spatial mark of writing. Negation, Disaster Disaster, for Blanchot, can be seen to represent this conditional, necessary impossibility of writing as a self-­identity of time. Because writing is a mark of the separation of time—­the time of writing from the time of reading—­it is historical. But the event of reading, always futural to writing, makes that history discontinuous. What is read, then, the mark of inscription on the page, is in this sense a mark of self-­separation. The problem, for Blanchot, is that the present of the text nonetheless remains without being negated by that reading. Reading does not negate the literary mark of writing. Writing

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lingers, or remains, as something, a mark, which is not negated dialectically in being read. This interruption of dialectical negation is in this sense important for understanding how reading functions, and not only writing. If writing presents its separation from the future present of reading, then what one encounters in reading is figured as a kind of “blank” in space. We can see this paradox (of writing being both “something” and “blank”) in the final fragment from The Writing of the Disaster, which returns us to that space of the sky with which I began this section. “♦ Shining solitude, the void of the sky, a deferred death: disaster [Solitude qui rayonne, vide du ciel, mort différée: désastre].”21 The sentence is in reverse: “désastre,” which should predicate the clauses it follows, instead turns into a pseudo-­subject. It fails to resolve in meaning the clauses it describes. Disaster here acts as “the key word that opens and does not open [ouvre et n’ouvre pas]”;22 by wordplay neither “opening” (ouvrir) nor “working” (oeuvrer). The materiality of language’s somatic play becomes literal here, as in the displacement of time into space in dés-­astre. Opening and working also do not work, in that the word opens itself up to an internal deferral of meaning, not to any resolved work: désoeuvrement, worklessness. The “key word,” disaster, both opens and does not open, works and does not work. The sentence is organized syntactically around this negative. The colon opens it up to “désastre,” only for that key word not to make sense of the clauses it follows. We might read the sentence thus: There is solitude which “brightens” in rays of light; solitude which opens up, turning against the clotted sky, “vide,” “empty,” which should otherwise be opened up at the same time as it is filled with rays of light. This solitary space is therefore one which is not timed by light. The death which is the condition of possibility for the experience of a present is not distinguishable from the nonperson who dies. In this collapse of distinction, the possible futurity opened by death (open sky) is not distinguishable from an impossible futurity (clotted sky). Disastrously, in the present we await death as the displacement of the present, just as in dying I am displaced by the other I who dies, who exceeds my experience, yet who is nonetheless me. The future displaces the present, repeatedly. Negation is set aside. Light is set aside. Instead, solitude radiates. This is the radiation of fragmentation: of singular, discrete, solitary points which do not connect, which do not work together, but which are related by this disconnection, this unworking. Singularity is characterized by this displacement, not by a reciprocal reflexivity. This thought of fragmentation is thus coordinated by the displacements of spatiotemporal unity in writing. The serial, repetitious, but neutral worklessness of fragmentation is a systematic disorganization of unity, just as writing’s spatialization of time is. Disaster cannot be incorporated into any singular experience even as it conditions that singularity of experience. Again, Blanchot works through this idea in terms of space.

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♦ If the break with the star could be accomplished in the manner of an event, if we could, if only through the violence that operates in our bruised space, depart from the cosmic order (the world), where whatever the visible disorder, order still dominates, the thought of the disaster, in its adjourned imminence, would still lend itself to an experience of discovery whereby we could be recuperated, not exposed to that which slips away in motionless flight, in the separation of living and dying; outside experience, outside the phenomenal.23

The point, then, is that we cannot escape from the disaster (the “break with the star”) of disarrangement because the very mechanism of our subjective experience of the world, the transcendental unity of space and time, is already conditioned by this disarrangement—­indeed, it proceeds in the form of this disarrangement. Disaster does not signal some external event, some exit. It is the intimate ground of experience that resists all experience, its surface. The experience of writing is, similarly, as a mark, not an exit from this disaster but its inscription. Writing should be thought as “outside the phenomenal” and “outside experience” in the same way that, in writing, time is outside itself as continuity. Poetry’s “naming the possible, responding to the impossible” is the production of something “possible,” the inscriptions and marks of writing, which nonetheless respond to their own “impossible” conditions: that that same mark is not temporally or spatially self-­identical, that its “presence” and “present” are not identical. Writing is fragmentary because it is the disarrangement of space and time, but it is so by spatializing time through inscription. This is therefore also a disarrangement of the unity of reading. The object of reading—­writing, naming, the word—­is a displacement of the formal unity which should be the condition of reading. What emerges in this conjunction of reading and writing is the space, like a “void sky,” which is neutral rather than negated. And it seems to me that this space, emerging in this way from Kant’s account of the transcendental conditions of experience, describes something like the conditions of the aesthetic experience of material seen in chapter 1, which we might now see as a neutral experience: neither positive nor negative matter, but that material-­immaterial of poetry.

The Experience of Reading Blanchot terms the disaster of writing a conditioning disarrangement of the conditions of the experience of writing—­space and time—­by inscription. The fragmentation of writing thus yields a “disastrous” space in which reading takes place. It is characterized by Blanchot as a limit space, a “step/not [pas]” beyond. The marks of writing are encountered in this space as a limited

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material presence, the presence of a limit, in which the space of reading is conditioned by that formal interruption of writing, its disaster. The Eternal Recurrence and Identity I suggested above that the fragmentation of time in writing—­its separation—­ emerges from Blanchot’s consideration of dialectics. A second context of this consideration is a turn in the 1960s to Nietzsche’s account of time in the eternal return. Nietzsche represents a way both to describe the fragmentation of space and time in reading, and to critique the logic of Hegelian dialectic that was dominant in French intellectual life before the 1960s. Nietzsche, for Blanchot, comes after Hegel, but also before him; the fragmentation Nietzsche articulates is the effect of Hegelian dialectical history, but also its condition. The interruptions of fragmentation constitute the condition for temporal continuity in the sense that sequential progress is established by making discontinuous moments continuous. The eternal recurrence thinks the displacement of metaphysical presence by the recurrence of presence (in which circular infinity there is never any singular present to which to return). In this noncontinuous sequence of eternal return, the principle of identity becomes dis-­identifying, because the return of the same is different; A=A becomes A=A′. This can be thought as something like Culler’s “reversible alternation” in a lyric apostrophe of “A′ to B′,” from chapter 1. Nietzsche’s claim is that “you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”24 Time is no longer a Kantian “inner sense” but what “arrives” again, the inside now outside. By working through this “eternal recurrence of the same to the same” as a literary relation, like the “bracketed present” of the lyric, Blanchot will work through the neutrality of the “relation without relation” of reading. The stakes of this commentary on Nietzsche should be thought as those outlined above: the arrangement of space and time as form in literature, and the disarrangement of experience by that form. The return of the same to the same displaces presence. And this suspends negation. In the thought of the eternal recurrence, negation turns into the “step not beyond,” the pas au-­delà, step/not beyond, which, passing, does not pass anywhere beyond that negating step. The step by which time should proceed, negation, turns into recurrence, repetition. The principle of identity itself disarranges identity—­just as the “marking” of time disarranges the unity of its presence. An important interlocutor here is Pierre Klossowski, according to whom we “identify” with the eternal return. This identification requires an identification of singular experience with its eternal multiplication in repetition. In such identification,

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“I am no longer in the moment when the abrupt revelation of the Eternal Return reached me.”25 The circular form of time “relieves the individual from the weight of its own acts once and for all.”26 This weightlessness of experience, this feeling of internal multiplication in the act of self-­identification, of willing, is a feeling of the self as a space not/beyond the self in which the self both “is” self-­identical and, by virtue of that self-­identity, nonidentical because identified with the arrival of the self. It both introduces the self into an intersubjective space—­the numerous sociability of multiplication—­and attenuates that space by locating it discretely in the self. This experience of identity is also an experience of fragmentation. In The Step Not Beyond, this nonidentical and fragmentary quality of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is made explicit. The “re” of the return inscribes like the “ex,” opening of every exteriority: as if the return, far from putting an end to it, marked the exile, the beginning in its rebeginning of the exodus. To come again would be to come to ex-­center oneself anew, to wander [à errer]. Only the nomadic affirmation remains.27

The self is opened to exteriority through error—­and Blanchot makes this etymological connection of nomadic wandering errer, “to err,” explicit (like errantry in English). The movement, here, is disunifying. The pas au-­delà should be thought as a space of this movement of erring. As Levinas puts it, for Blanchot, “writing does not lead to the truth of being. It might even be said it leads to the error of being—­to being as a place of errancy [lieu d’errance] and that which cannot be inhabited.”28 But the question here is not only ontological—­not only of the relation between being and language.29 It is also a question of place, of writing’s occupation of space, of form, the aesthetic. What we might call form in writing, the organization of space and time, is nonidentical in its very production of unity: a “time” of return in which we enter a “space” of error. The space of the self, as reading shows us, is the site for this nonidentical return of identity: writing does not change in the time of its reading, but its self-­identity returns, in this sense, as a repetition that disarranges its self-­identity. The connection with reading here is that the site of reading—­the subject—­is uncannily exposed to its condition outside itself, writing, as something that presents unity in terms of this disunity. There is a dissymmetry in repetition which allows us, however, to think of the future as possibly different by the terms of its identity. In other words, Blanchot uses the terms of identity—­the repetition of the same as the same—­as the nondialectical space for thinking the possibility of difference. Here, he calls that “a completely different modality,” and we are opened again, as in writing, to the idea of a historicism that revises the future of reading.

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Even in the law of the Eternal Return, the past could not repeat the future as the future would repeat the past. The repetition of the past as future frees for a completely different modality—­which one could call prophetic. In the past, what is given as repetition of the future does not give the future as repetition of the past. Dissymmetry is at work in repetition itself.30

Blanchot is thinking here the repetition of the future rather than of the past. The present is opened to a repetitious “outside” that is not merely the past repeating itself, but the future repeating itself. The future here denotes that as yet empty, undetermined time which is the condition of reading (that writing will be legible in an as yet undetermined future). This helps to make sense of writing’s space as a repetition of futurity. In reading, we experience the fragmentation of experience as the condition for any experience of writing. In order to read, the subject needs to engage with the process of disunification which is the formal condition of writing. We can only recognize writing by its discontinuity from the transcendental conditions for experience: the present of writing is this dissymmetrical future, in which there is no presence as the unity of space and time. But, as I will argue at the end of this chapter emphatically, rather than meaninglessness, what emerges is a body, an indeterminate meaning that preserves the possibility of futurity by withdrawing from its presentation. The Repetition of the Present: Le pas au-­delà and Limits The context of a Nietzschean critique of Hegelian dialectic thus sketched here allows us to think more clearly the present of writing as a disarrangement of presence. The present of eternal recurrence is a disunity by the mechanism of unity, as in Kantian error. In the literary space of this error, the present signifies an experience of futurity dislocated from the past. It is “historical” in an “ahistorical” way, disaster. We can further develop this disaster from within the present of le pas au-­delà by tracing the development of this fragmentary present from The Infinite Conversation to The Writing of the Disaster. For Hill, Blanchot endeavors to “think the challenge of a future that was radically irreducible to presence.” Rather than a “transcendental enquiry,” this constitutes “an exploration of the impossibility that announces itself in thought . . . as the limit and condition of thinking itself.”31 But what is the effect of this displacement of transcendental inquiry—­the kind of Kantian project with which I have been measuring Blanchot—­in our understanding of reading? We might first see this as a shift from philosophical representation, such as Kant’s, to the experience, in reading, of something at the limit of presentation—­what Blanchot describes in The Infinite Conversation as a “limit experience.” Indeed, this seems to be aligned with the limit experienced in aesthetic judgment, as outlined in chapter 1.

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Presence without anything present [Présence sans rien de present]. In this affirmation which has been released from all negation (and consequently from all meaning), which has relegated and deposed the world of values, which does not consist in affirming—­i.e., bearing and sustaining—­that which is, but rather stands beyond it, outside of being, and no more belongs to ontology than it does to dialectics, man sees himself assigned, between being and nothingness, and starting from the infinity of this in-­between [cet entre-­deux], accepted as relation, the status of his new sovereignty: the sovereignty of a being without being in the becoming without end of a death impossible to die.32

This “in-­between” space is dialectical without negation or positing. It is a neutral space. Yet it remains a formal space, like the transcendental aesthetic: a site for the organization of presence in space and time. This is the space which Blanchot will characterize, in The Step Not Beyond, not as “beyond” but as a “not beyond”: a limit space. There, “it called thought outside (not beyond) [au dehors (non pas au-­delà)], designating to thought by its fissure that thought has already left itself, that it is already outside itself: in relation—­without relation—­with an outside from which it is excluded to the degree that thought believes itself able to include this outside.”33 The transactions between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, that characterize relation are “without relation” here. It is a presence without signified content. Thinking the present “as present” means thinking it in the terms of this repetition without any “beyond” indicated by that present, and yet in relation to the “not beyond” space which delimits it. The present of reading, in these terms, occurring at a limit of presentation, exposes us to a limit experience in subjectivity. Hill’s description of le pas au-­delà as para-­conceptual, a limit-­concept, is useful for understanding what this characterization of the experience of reading means for our understanding of experience as such.34 Writing, le pas au-­delà, is a concept of non-­transcendence, but it is also a non-­transcendent concept. It is a concept that does not mediate an experiential outside into a conceptually determinate, systematically secure interior. Instead, it is neutral. The concept of le pas au-­delà marks the failure of conceptual form to negate its object. It persists as a suspended negativity. And so conceptually, le pas au-­ delà fails itself, weakens itself. It is a threshold-­concept for a limit experience. And that limit experience is the experience of the neutrality of the negation that should comprise thinking. If we think of writing as the displacement, rather than the conduit, of presence, then we are thinking in this “non-­ transcendent” way. Writing marks the space of this suspended negativity. But it also marks the space of transition—­negation itself—­by which concepts do claim a determinate grasp on their objects. Reading literature’s suspensions of determination—­poetry’s “response” to the “impossible”—­means reading

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this space of movement as error, movement that does not pass from subject to object and then back, but which is rather the mere passage of time in unanticipated marks of spatial inscription. The experience of writing thus disables the mechanism of experience itself: the form of negation that underwrites conceptual thinking. And the result is that what is experienced in reading is the presence of the suspension of the protocols of experience—­an aesthetic experience of a suspension of subjecthood, in which writing, inscription, is experienced as a suspended presence. Blanchot returns to the eternal recurrence in The Writing of the Disaster on the terms of this present. ♦ The present, when heightened as successive instants (appearing, disappearing), forgets that it cannot be contemporaneous with itself. This noncontemporaneity is a passage already passed over; it is the passive which, outside time, disarranges time as pure and empty form wherein all would order and distribute itself either equally or unequally. Time that is deranged and off its hinges still lets itself be drawn—­if only through the experience of the crack—­into a coherence which unifies and universalizes itself. But the experience of the disaster—­the experience none can have, the retreat of the cosmic which it is too easy to unmask as utter collapse [effondrement] (the lack of foundation [fondement] where once and for all, without ambiguity or questions, everything we can conceive of and think would be immobilized)—­obliges us to disengage ourselves from time as irreversible, without the Return’s assuring its reversibility.35

We are tasked, then, with thinking an experience “none can have,” which is nonetheless the condition and orientation of that experience, just as thinking time in Kant means spatializing it in error. The present is not exchangeable, or dialectical, where each moment proceeds into the next by its negation, but is rather a serial return of the mere present. We are “obliged” to, we are responsible for this experience, because responsible for presence. And we are obliged, therefore, to stop thinking of time as irreversible and continuous, and instead think of the discontinuities to which it is subject. Bearing this responsibility also means bearing the way it collapses experience. Writing thus works through, and not despite, the contradiction by which experience is conditioned. This contradiction consists in the way that, in order for there to be space for others, space to “welcome others” in thought, this identity which is the condition for thinking must inscribe its own displacement. Experience and Disaster The condition of possibility for the experience of writing is the conjunction of space and time which constitutes an event, something that happens. But

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disaster, denoting the way the production of unity is also a disunification of these terms, is internal to that experience. The disaster is and is not external or outside thinking. It is the exteriority immanent to thinking. And the “something” which is thought there is, indeed, the world. “The disaster—­experience none can undergo [inéprouvée]—­obliterates (while leaving perfectly intact) our relation to the world as presence or as absence; it does not thereby free us, however, from this obsession which burdens us: others.”36 As Bertrand Renaud argues, writing enjoins language to a responsibility for the world. But this responsibility is to the world outside our experience of it.37 We are “burdened” to the world in its neutrality. That is to say, the neutrality of this experience of the world can be thought of as the experience of the world as neutral. It is important to note this shift, I think, to make sense of poetry’s “naming the possible, responding to the impossible.” Reading, we bear responsibility to the impossibility of the world as this “place of errancy . . . that cannot be inhabited,” as Levinas puts it—­to the neutrality of the world. The problem is that this otherness, this neutralized world, is also the condition of experience. The disaster, unexperienced. It is the very possibility of experience—­it is the limit of writing. It is necessary to repeat: the disaster de-­scribes [de-­crit]. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of the writing, is excluded from it, is outside writing, an outside-­text [soit hors écriture, un hors-­texte].38

The disaster, non-­experience, makes experience possible by marking its outside. But writing, that “force,” is radically included. If the concept proceeds by negating its object, writing is more precariously exposed to the negative which it does not negate, cannot exclude, the impossibility to which poetry responds—­the world in its impossibility of experience. It bears a responsibility to what it cannot exclude. Blanchot includes writing’s incapacity to present as a condition for writing. This frames the force of others, of “you.” “The one who waits precisely does not wait for you. It is thus that you are however awaited, but not in the vocative mode: not called.”39 We are exposed in writing to a responsibility to this exclusion of presence as what makes present experience possible. And yet we are enjoined by writing to attend to the possibility, in this depleted present, of a future not yet present, an other time or other reading. I think Kevin Hart is right, therefore, to characterize The Writing of the Disaster as “a book of experience, of what ‘experience’ of the disaster might be.”40 This usefully opens up Blanchot’s work to the terms of form, space, and time which I am tracing through Kant, and through a post-­Kantian concept of history it radicalizes as fragmentary. If experience is to be transcendentally justified, then disaster at once demands and refutes all justification. This means, for Hart, that disaster is, “first of all, experience par excellence,

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exposure to peril, yet also, since it is not a lived event, non-­experience, an attunement to the Outside that is suffered in a state of radical passivity in which one loses the power to say ‘I.’ ”41 Yet Hart identifies this outside not with form, understood as the conditions of possibility of experience, but with the kind of particular historical event that we have just seen Blanchot dismiss: for Hart, the Holocaust. Indeed, “we better understand what ‘disaster’ means, what the approach of the neutral Outside ‘means,’ when we reflect on the Shoah.”42 Hart is certainly registering the irony of such a “meaningful” interpretation of the Shoah. And yet, however caesural, even in such an ironic reading, to locate meaning as “caesural” is to figure and to orientate as meaningful, even negatively, what Blanchot insists is neutrally “outside” meaning. Is it possible to read historically, attentive to the history of writing’s formation, but without locating meaning where, historically, writing does not offer it? After all, the “relation without relation” is both historically manifest and critically manifest; it is a relation both articulated by writing and borne to writing, witnessed in writing. The interruptions to thinking posed by disaster are internal to thinking, and cannot be associated with any historical event, even as they manifest, as writing does, historically. So I want now, to conclude, to read the conditions of possibility that disaster displaces.43 The disaster’s immanence is so thorough (it “ruins everything”),44 yet its depletions so provisional, that we are obliged (as if under transcendental law) to think of the disaster internal to thinking, if we are ever to think justly. “To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”45 Writing continues through its own dispersal; its future is this futureless procession of reading without “acquiring meaning”—­reading to which writing remains necessarily non-­determined. If we are to make sense of the disaster, of fragmentation, of “relation without relation” as formal, then we need to read the experience it presents as an internalized repetition of the outside that displaces any history even as it installs it, just as thought’s reflexive encounter with its own conditions—­the neutral materiality outside thought—­is disabling of thinking. This is to think, to affirm Blanchot’s imperative, of the ways disaster might acquire a “body” instead of a “meaning.”

Marking, Materiality, and Criticism Writing disarranges form, and emerges for reading in a space of limitation, as this disastrous body: a body which is a limit, the disarrangement of space which is the condition of writing and reading. To reiterate, the “danger,” for Blanchot, is “that the disaster acquire a meaning instead of a body.”46 To think this body of disaster would be to think a mark without presence, to think of the neutral and displacing present of writing as the mark of a kind of material appearance which, however, is also the dematerialization of

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appearance. This, I think, is the peculiar demand of writing in Blanchot: that we think of the body of words, their substance, as simultaneously insubstantial, just as we think of time as a simultaneous “noncontemporaneity” in the limit concept of le pas au-­delà. This thought can be made visible by outlining what Blanchot calls an “outside-­text” (un hors-­texte) against Derrida’s dialectics of the logic of the trace. The mark, in Blanchot, is “outside” in an extreme erasure of the trace as “remainder.” But that erasure, I argue, is the mark of writing’s material-­immaterial: its presence without present. Fragment, Trace, Mark, Erasure To summarize the premises presented thus far: in writing, presence is not identical to the present. Yet writing is oriented by its relation to others, which is indeed registered as a responsibility to others, and to the world. Writing is thus neither an autonomous self-­identical presence (the fragment as monad), nor identical with any referent outside it. The question of the experience of reading as a mark of such a disunity of presence can be contextualized both by Nietzsche, as above, and by the idea of writing as a trace. Blanchot’s thinking about fragmentation is informed by a Nietzschean conception of the present as a disunified moment of return. His characterization of writing’s present constituting a mark should be understood in these terms: as a moment of presence without present. The result is that writing is encountered as what, in Levinasian and Derridean logic, is described as the “trace” as “original repetition”: that presence is constituted by the dialectical logic of synthesis, rather than that synthesis proceeding from a given presence.47 However, Blanchot will put this logic of the trace under pressure in his fragmentary writing. The trace is a constitution of the terms of synthesis from the act of synthesis. For Blanchot, writing marks, it inscribes, and the mark effaces itself. ♦ Effaced before being written. If the word trace can be admitted, it is as the mark that would indicate as erased what was, however, never traced. All our writing—­for everything and if it were ever writing of everyone—­would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come.48

This writing “in a past to come” redeploys the logic of the trace. But the difficulty here is that this erasure is without synthesis. The mark, in Blanchot, is matter without presence. This is an erasure of the trace itself. ♦ Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing. . . . To write at the level of the incessant murmur is to expose oneself to the decision of a lack that marks itself only by a surplus without place,

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impossible to put in place, to distribute in the space of thoughts, words and books. To respond to this demand of writing is not only to oppose a lack to a lack or to play with the void to procure some privative effect, nor is it only to maintain or indicate a blank between two or several affirmative enunciations; what then? perhaps first to carry a space of language to the limit from which the irregularity of another speaking, nonspeaking, space comes back, which effaces it or interrupts it and which one approaches only through its alterity, marked by the effect of effacement.49

We can see the spatiality of my earlier discussion at work here: the “space of writing” which is a “surplus without place,” and without “distribution.” Blanchot’s insistence that this mark is outside the logic of the trace, and outside play, is simultaneously an insistence that this space is not a blank. It is rather a limit. Any undecidability is subject to erasure here. Any future would be “erased before being written.” There is no symbolic recuperation of the negative in a writing that inhabits its loss—­no sublime. Writing instead enjoins us, over and over, indeterminately, to this limit of language which returns to disperse writing. Responding to a lack of determination, writing becomes a “surplus without place,” an effect without ground or presence. Exceeding all presence, however, it does not constitute in itself another (dialectical) presence “beyond” that lack into which presence might proceed. It marks, rather, the alterity of effacement itself, the alterity of nonspeaking, which is not an absence of communication but the neutral dissipation of communication. The effacement here is the scanning of a neutral space. Effacement is dematerializing, erasure. It is the suspension of writing for the sake of the “nonspeaking.” In this suspension, however, we are exposed to a different modality of time: “there is no future [avenir] for disaster, just as there is no time or space in which it might fulfil itself.”50 The future does not “come” (venir); there is no present adequate to it. It might only be preserved, then, by writing which responds to its alterity to the forms of experience, its nonexperience. And we are exposed, too, in reading, to a persistence of erasure, of dematerialization, in marks of inscription: not a recuperation of original loss, but the non-­compensatory limit of experience that cannot be included in the system of writing precisely because it is that system. Hope, the Future However, the suggestion in The Step Not Beyond that writing is carried to the “limit” of experience and exposed there to the “other” of speaking is cautiously reconfigured in The Writing of the Disaster; and I think this reconfiguration also describes Blanchot’s reconfiguration of the trace towards a neutral materiality of marking.

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But to travel to the end of thinking [aller au bout de la pensée] (in the form of thinking of the end, or the edge)—­is this not possible only by exchanging one thought for another? Whence the injunction: do not change your thinking, repeat it, but only if you can.51

The injunction here is against “exchange” as a cipher for change. Writing is instead a repetition. In order to think of the future in its indeterminacy—­its refusal to end—­writing must think beyond time as a form of succession, in which each moment is exchanged for the next. And so it must think in the serial repetition of fragmentation, in which fragmented interchangeability each fragment is reversible, and so therefore irreversible, not something we can read beyond. Writing is “the movement of irreversibility that, as such, is always reversible (the labyrinth).”52 Fragments repeat, rather than exchange. There is no “limit” or “edge” to fragmentary writing, but rather the site of its persistent transformation and modification in reading. The “irreversibility” of this “labyrinthine” space is important. There is an impenetrability here, and a dynamics of that impenetrability, that we saw in chapter 1 to be a condition of the appearance of matter in writing’s materiality. The penetration of space by inscription is by an impenetrability. The impenetrability of what is not exchanged, much as what is not shared in community, is here “naming the possible,” repeating it “if you can.” The matter of writing is this inscription without presence: without presence, precisely, because it is not exchanged for other things, contents, meanings—­in which exchange it would be lost. Blanchot’s writing suspends presence in the present. And this suspension is the condition of a future which, however, is not ever present. Writing is committed to the present precisely by being attentive to the way the present is not oriented by any future that might meaningfully secure it. So, Le Pas au-­delà opens with this reversal of law as hope: “Do not hope, if there lies your hope—­and one must suspect it—­to unify your existence, to introduce into it, in the past, some coherence, by way of the writing that disunifies.”53 Writing is disunifying. But that does not mean that it fills the fissure of this disunity with its own presence. Writing, like time, is already coordinated by this fissure. One cannot retroactively find meaning through writing that is oriented by a future in which its presence is dispersed. But this is the temporality of reading as the experience of writing. This movement of dispersal that traverses the present, in the progressive exchange of present for present, in the continuing loss of presence that is felt as the present, is felt as suffering. “Listening, not to the words, but to the suffering that, from word to word, without end, traverses the words.”54 The possible loss of each fragment, which is necessary precisely because of this possibility, marks the ways the present is already lost to itself. If Blanchot thinks dialectically, then it is in this way: in exposing within the dialectic the loss that it calls progress, in exposing what is negated, erased, in being determined. The neutrality of this

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passage of writing is that its emptiness, its disunity, cannot be used to credit the subject who reads or writes. The mere presence of writing without present, its disunity, persists as an experience that is not determined. Not hoping for unity, then, means reading without finding in that space of reading a repetition of the self. Instead, it is the induction into a space of nonidentity. But this space of nonidentity, in its persistence, is nonetheless the mark of a certain kind of futurity: the future as neutral rather than as determined by the past, or by the self who reads. Writing in this way presents an extreme mark of erasure: not only the erasure of any meaningful past or future, but the erasure of itself as a trace. What is left is the extreme experience of a neutral space of this material-­immaterial, this material in its dematerializing erasure. The difficulty of conceiving such a systematic organization, or form, for writing is that it is double. It responds to the impossibility of the system by writing from within its impossibility. Fragmentary writing responds, as I have been claiming, to a double demand with a double voice: There must always be at least two languages, or two requirements: one dialectical, the other not; one where negativity is the task, the other where the neutral remains apart, cut off both from being and from not-­being. In the same way each of us ought both to be a free and speaking subject, and to disappear as passive, patient.55

If writing is to found any political subjectivity, it is in the way it gives voice to this double and paradoxical exigency: to think of present suffering without transcending that suffering, and to think hopefully of a future without that future constituting a transcendent third into which that suffering present would be negated. It is a suspended dialectic which demands of reading that it not exchange its marks to substantiate itself. Writing inhabits the injunctions to which it responds, and repeats them. And in doing so, it outlines the parameters of an immanent form of reading: reading which is non-­ transcendent, but in which immanence means also a dispersal of presence. Criticism and the Neutral Extreme of Reading Blanchot’s position here is extreme. If reading constitutes a material limit at which the textual object and the reading subject meet, that limit does not permit any communication between the two. Rather, it constitutes an experience of a disturbing exile, a neutrality which is present without any presence, a murmur “not/beyond” any content a text might communicate which is the condition of that text appearing at all. That is to say, the neutral space of this present mark is the disarrangement of form which is the condition of writing appearing at all. In reading, we always also read this disarrangement of the present of the text which is also the condition of that present—­and the

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condition of reading: the bracketing of the world from itself in naming, and the impossibility of the world in naming that possibility. We could not read, one might infer from Blanchot, unless there were some space in which what we read, the word, is also erased by that reading, is also deleted from appearance as the present is by the future with which it cannot be identical. Reading must delete what it reads in order to read it, and Blanchot’s neutre constitutes an attempt to get on terms with this erasure as the condition of reading. With Blanchot’s account of reading, we can see that we read in a space that has to have been emptied to make space for the inscription of writing. Writing is always an erasure of the blank page. But the inscription—aside from what it communicates—also bears this space as the condition of its appearance; not emptied but neither filled positively by that inscription. Instead, it is neutral. That empty space cannot be read, but it accompanies writing. It is a body of disaster, a dead body, which cannot be possessed or shared. Yet it is the condition of writing—and also of reading, which must reproduce this space in order to bracket the appearance of meaningful words. Thinking the neutral in Blanchot means thinking this material-immaterial: the mark of an erasure of presence which remains in writing, and which writing affirms. This is not, however, a material trace which synthesizes in a reading present. It is rather an insistence of immateriality, the “dead body” about which no one could say “I.” This mark is what is not shared—and in this sense it is not exchanged, and not read. This extremity, however, also yields a new possibility for criticism. If critical reading attends to its object, then it attends to the ways this neutrality refuses a determining reading of the text. Such reading does not find “meaning” but a “body” there. To rehearse the argument briefly: writing disarranges form as the unity of space and time; and reading, as the experience of writing, consists in reading this writing “which disunifies”: reading in a space of the separation of time. The experience of literature is in this sense what Blanchot calls a “limit experience”: an experience of a limit space which does not, however, pass into any positive or negative space. Reading literature is the experience of this limit. My argument is that the spatial mark of inscription of this limit might be considered material, but as an attenuated material of the limit, a neutralized materialimmaterial. We are thus tasked with reading what is material in literature—as in reading poetry “naming the possible, responding to the impossible”—as neither presented nor negated, but rather as neutral. And this means thinking the ways its inscription, in writing, is also conditioned by erasure, its material also conditioned by dematerialization. Reading the “body” of disaster means reading this object which, in reading, one also erases or dematerializes. And this suggests that reading writing’s “material” body means engaging in practices of erasure, bracketing, and displacement that are dematerializing. The matter that emerges in writing is the mark: neither positive nor negative, but neutral in the sense of a space where materialization (and temporalization, becoming historical, in time) is also dematerialization. Reading should not

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in this sense “hope” to substantiate either the subject reading (self-­identity through the otherness of the text) or any objective material character of the text because that would be to claim a unity to both reading and writing that the marks of literature erase. This account of the neutrality of reading emerges in a task of criticism. Criticism is tasked by Blanchot with reading the “invulnerable,” “inevitable” impenetrability of literature, its “System,” as presenting a certain illegibility. The correct criticism of the System does not consist . . . in finding fault with it, or in interpreting it insufficiently . . . but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism or, as they say, inevitable. Then, since nothing escapes it because of its omnipresent unity and the perfect cohesion of everything, there remains no place for fragmentary writing unless it comes into focus as the impossible necessary: as that which is written in the time outside time, in the sheer suspense which without restraint breaks the seal of unity by, precisely, not breaking it, but by leaving it aside without this abandon’s ever being able to be known.56

The outcome of the extreme experience of the neutrality of reading is this “criticism” which totalizes its target as “System.” Rendering the System “invincible, invulnerable to criticism” is also rendering it impenetrable, illegible, and a material body. Neutrality here means two things: (1) neither positively nor negatively finding interpretative meaning in writing and its relation to System, and (2) producing in this neutrality a textual “System” itself, an experience of a limit of reading’s reach. This neutral materiality of writing is not penetrated by reading; it is also impenetrable in the sense that it is not to be experienced, if experience is understood to consist in sharing in something of the object’s form. Criticism that does not seek to undermine, to go beyond, to pass over its object makes it invulnerable. This is again an extreme position—­more extreme, indeed, than recent turns to reading the literal meaning of a text’s surface,57 or what Rita Felski calls in The Limits of Critique the “post-­critical” work of “co-­production.”58 Blanchot’s reading is neither negative nor “reparative” but neutral. An exposure to the neutral materiality of a text is also an exposure of its systematic totality. And this totality is the entrance of fragmentary writing—­the “impossible necessary”—­ which we saw in chapter 2 also to be the entrance of a politics of friendship. The condition of such reading is illegibility, the production of something that “cannot be shared.” The disaster, the “break with the star,” is the break with a certain kind of fateful futurity. And yet, if it is the break with a determinate future, with prophecy, it is also not possible to accomplish this break. The disaster is precisely that thinking functions by such erasure, that material is always deleted in thinking, but that we cannot thereby think this deletion. Writing does not

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break with this procedure. Rather, it accomplishes le pas au-­delà, the step/ not beyond by which it does not break with anything, by which it lingers on the threshold of conceptuality. By not breaking with time, by not exceeding it, by not becoming another space beyond System, writing becomes a space to “welcome” that otherness of material, erased, material-­immaterial, impossible to experience. I shall return to this “something else” that traverses writing, in Blanchot, like “suffering,” in chapter 5. There we shall see how Blanchot allows us to detail this neutral something within the attenuated present of reading, not by finding its meaning but its body. This means reading poetry as “responding to the impossible,” “in the thrall of the impossible real, that share of disaster wherein every reality, safe and sound, sinks.”59

Chapter 4

Progressive Impossibility Reading the Art Object in Adorno

This chapter considers the artwork as an object in Adorno’s philosophy and aesthetics. Again, however, this objectivity of art will present as indeterminately substantial, in complex ways the product of an aesthetic theory which also dematerializes it. The object of aesthetic experience is characterized by Adorno as contradictory. Its objectivity consists not in a determinate representation of the reality which is its material, but in a dynamic transformation of that reality that is also its de-­realization. The aesthetic experience of this materiality, then, requires a dialectics of that contradiction: a form of experience which could apprehend contradiction. In this chapter, I consider the ways Adorno’s dialectics, in Negative Dialectics, thus inform a way to read art’s materiality in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s “prioritization” of the object is a dialectical orientation of thinking towards its object in which that object is not positively identified with the form of that thinking. In thinking through the polar, dynamic, and mediating dialectical relation between subject and object in aesthetics, Adorno’s aesthetic theory will provide—­like Blanchot in the previous chapter—­a way to think criticism that does not proceed either by binaries, or by positing the transparent legibility of its materials. Crucial to this model will be the conjunction of form in philosophy and art. But thinking form, we shall see, will mean thinking the ways this mediation also consists in dematerializing and transforming art’s material. Thinking art’s form will mean thinking its “present impossibility,” the ways its presence is promissory, a contradiction of reality, and “utopian” in the sense of preserving in the present the possibility of a future which is not identical with that present. The experience of art, and an aesthetics which might apprehend that experience, would be oriented by the priority of the object in this sense: that it is oriented by a future which is not present in that object, and which is nonetheless the condition of its appearance. This chapter seeks to develop this dynamic form of reading in Adorno’s dialectical thinking in order to arrive at such an aesthetics.



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Poetry for Adorno exemplifies this experience of “present impossibility” in reading as a “crisis” of criticism. Reading poetry’s “impossibility” “after Auschwitz” means, I will argue, thinking its future as impossible. But this is not a ban on thinking poetry. It means rather thinking poetry’s present impossibility, in which impossibility is reserved the non-­materialization as the condition of its future. Poetry’s contradictory present is developed in the context of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Thinking the object in those dialectics will mean thinking not a positive matter but a dynamic relation between subject and object positions. This dynamic relationship in artworks is developed further in Aesthetic Theory, where the artwork’s objectivity consists in this dynamic materialization, but also dematerialization, of its material reality. Finally, Adorno’s aesthetics develops the futurity of an artwork in this body, in this thought of the dynamic material-­immaterial of art as futural, and promised, as what Adorno calls “form.” But understanding form will mean understanding its dynamic relation between art and aesthetics, subject and object, and material and immaterial. I will consider the implications of this dynamics for reading’s own formal conditions. The chapter in this way develops Adorno’s focus on the objecthood of artworks and the form of reading as mediation, materialization, but also as dematerialization, which is the dynamic condition of that objecthood.

Poetry and the Crisis of Criticism For Adorno, poetry is historically in a position of impossibility. Famously: “To write poetry after Auschwitz [nach Auschwitz] is barbaric.”1 This barbarism can be read as an injunction against writing poetry. But the ambiguity of “nach Auschwitz” is important for reading its deployment in Negative Dialectics, where “nach” means both to be temporally “after” and to “approach” Auschwitz. I think this ambiguity also holds in this statement, where writing that tends both towards Auschwitz as a topic and after it as if it were continuous with history would inevitably be involved with the logical history that led to Auschwitz in the first place. The point is that both modalities, spatial and temporal, are operative. One crucial point of contact here is Celan. Celan is responsive to Adorno’s ambiguity: “What concept of the ‘poem’ is being presented here? The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-­speculatively to contemplate or poetically describe Auschwitz from the nightingale-­or lark-­perspective.”2 Lyricism is contested by the impossibility of “singing” Auschwitz. And yet, this makes Auschwitz a condition of lyric poetry. In Peter Szondi’s reading, for Celan, “after Auschwitz no poem is any longer possible except on the basis of Auschwitz.”3 And for Werner Hamacher, this “baseless” basis is literalized in the growing ground of Celan’s “Radix-­Matrix.”4 As Josh Cohen puts it, Adorno’s prohibition is not a prohibition against art,

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but an insistence on consciousness of the continued barbarism and its effect on art’s “future.”5 Historical impossibility becomes the ground for future writing. As Howard Caygill points out, this impossibility was always part of poetry’s history.6 The poetic situation discloses the idea that “works of art are by definition objects that exist in breach of their conditions of possibility—­ their peculiar condition of possibility is that they exceed their conditions of possibility.” Accordingly, “the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is its condition of possibility; yet it must establish a form of existence that affirms this impossibility, otherwise art will affirm the very conditions of possibility of a repetition of Auschwitz.”7 This does not mean strictly that poems are no longer historically possible, but that their condition—­impossibility—­has been made real, and must be responded to as real. The poem becomes the site for thinking history’s impossibility, specifically its continued impossibility: its impossible but continuous temporal relation with itself. This brings into relief the impossibility which we thought with Blanchot in chapter 3. Blanchot responds to this impossibility explicitly with reference to Adorno in “After the Fact” (“Après coup”), a text published in 1983 as an afterword to two stories from the 1930s. “After the Fact” is a meditation on a strikingly prophetic story from before the war, “L’Idyll,” which seemed to predict the concentration camps.8 Writing this post-­face to two “fictions,” the text acts as a kind of historical hinge, reorienting work whose origin Blanchot claims to have forgotten. Significantly, then, this text becomes an exploration of impossible writing from a perspective “après coup.” The récit’s impossibility is that “before all distinctions between form and content, between signifier and signified, even before the division between utterance and the uttered, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a ‘narrative voice’ that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates.”9 That is why, in my opinion—­and in a way different from the one that led Adorno to decide with absolute correctness—­I will say there can be no fiction-­story [récit-­fiction] about Auschwitz. . . . The need to bear witness is the obligation of a testimony that can only be given—­and given only in the singularity of each individual—­by the impossible witnesses—­the witnesses of the impossible10

The impossibility here is the condition of writing. “From this it would seem that all narration, even all poetry, has lost the foundation on which another language could be raised.”11 Language must repeat its loss of foundation. I want to suggest, then, that this decision is not so different from Adorno’s. Both Blanchot and Adorno find in narrative form a procession by continuity which has as its condition an impossible discontinuity—­a discontinuity which it cannot incorporate. Poetry, for Adorno, names this impossibility.

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Reading such poetry is therefore a crisis for criticism. How should one read this impossible present in poetry? Blanchot’s reading of his own text finds a future impossibility in it—­a discontinuity which is the condition of its present articulation and which interrupts that articulation. For Adorno, art is faced with a present crisis that “endangers” the possibility of its future. The crisis of art, which has today reached the point of endangering its very possibility, affects both of its poles equally: On the one hand its meaning [Sinn] and thereby essentially its spiritual content [Gehalt]; and on the other its expression and thereby its mimetic element. One depends on the other. There is no expression without meaning, without the medium of spiritualization; no meaning without the mimetic element: without art’s eloquence [Sprachcharakter], which is now in the process of perishing.12

The danger, we might recall, for critical reading in Blanchot was in “acquiring a meaning instead of a body.” And the solution, for criticism, was to make “System” invulnerable to criticism. This “crisis” in art’s conditions, for Adorno, is registered similarly as a “disaster” for critical aesthetics. “The more art is compelled to oppose the standardized life stamped out by the structure of domination, the more it evokes chaos. Chaos forgotten becomes disaster [Unheil—­where Heil means intact, complete; hence dispersal].”13 The crisis, here, is a dissociation of “meaning” from “expression.” Meaning depends upon art’s “voice,” its sounding or speaking, its articulation. But precisely this articulation is under threat. The crisis is that art has to think meaning together with form, as its articulation, even if their coincidence is presently impossible, because that articulation is precisely what is impossible. We are left with their discontinuity. As Andrew Bowie puts the problem (suggesting, however, that Adorno fails to resolve it): “If what is aimed for in both art and philosophy is a wholesale critical response to the totalizing nature of the commodified world, the danger is that they will mirror what they oppose.”14 A totalized correspondence between form and meaning would have no critical grip on the world because it would have no negativity. Adorno’s response is the fragmentation of this relation. But I think this should be read much like Blanchot’s invulnerable System in The Writing of the Disaster. According to Adorno: “Only philosophy in fragment form would bring the monads, designed in illusion by Idealism, to their proper place. They would be representations in particular of the totality unrepresentable as such.”15 The fragment is the necessary impossible of the system. When thought in such a system, art becomes mobile. The truth content of art, whose organon was integration, turns against art and in this turn art has its emphatic moments. Artists discover the compulsion towards disintegration in their own works. . . .

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However, the truth of such disintegration is achieved by way of nothing less than the triumph and guilt of integration. The category of the fragmentary [Fragmentarischen]—­which has its locus here—­is not to be confused with the category of contingent particularity: the fragment [Bruchstück] is the part of the totality of the work that contradicts totality [welcher ihr widersteht].16

Aesthetics has to register the ways the artwork objectively contradicts, widersteht, the kind of reconciliation, the “integration,” that is nonetheless its work. This contradiction reproduces an aesthetic crisis on a critical level. And this reproduces a contradiction that fuels philosophy: not between the particular object and conceptual universality, but between objective particularity and subjective particularity. This is worked out, for Adorno, between Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. In tracing the two projects together, we can find a critical relation between the need for a dialectics which prioritizes objectivity, and an aesthetics which marks the form of legibility this kind of experience can historically achieve. The problem of poetry is of impossibility and contradiction. The impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz speaks to another impossibility: the impossibility of the future. Thinking poetry’s impossibility means thinking this impossibility of the future. Yet it also means thinking the contradiction which (1) marks matter in dialectical thinking, and (2) which is itself the motor for thinking, in a utopian sense, the possibility of a future in a present. Adorno’s negative dialectics are thus read here as a means not only to comprehend this contradiction, but to mobilize it in reading poetry. Reading becomes a means of thinking contradiction, and thus of a future materiality which is in the present immaterial—­promised, futural, utopian, and impossible. The point is not, therefore, to suggest that Negative Dialectics morphs into Aesthetic Theory, with philosophical lack supplemented by aesthetically felt plenitude, but rather that the two establish a mutual debt to experience: a philosophical debt to the object obscured by a subjectively oriented theory of knowledge is calibrated by an aesthetic debt to the artwork. My concern is with the form of contraction and impossibility which arises in reading poetry as fragmentary and as impossible. This is borne out in Adorno’s dialectics. But it concerns thinking that body, that form of art, as not falsely reconciled with positive meaning, yet neither as merely negative, but rather as the manifestation of a “present impossibility,” the future. What subjectively oriented dialectics loses is not credited by an aesthetic experience which significantly loses its own object, art; art’s “irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being” which is paradoxically only “visible” “at a standstill.”17 Rather, there is a collaboration between these losses. The “progressive impossibility”18 of negative dialectics lets us read a significance into Adorno’s aesthetics that goes beyond art’s critique of the “wrong state of things [falschen Zustandes].”19

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Dynamics of Subject and Object in Negative Dialectics The “right state of things,” Adorno continues in Negative Dialectics, would “be neither a system nor a contradiction.”20 It would be neither another system itself, nor its blunt contradiction. It would rather consist in a mediation of reality which could itself be modified by that reality. As Brian O’Connor characterizes the project, Negative Dialectics is a philosophy of “concretion” by “rationality,” which shows how “the very possibility of subjectivity assumes the possibility of experience, and in experience there is always this nonsubjective component.” What results is, for O’Connor, mediation as “the interdetermination of subject and object.”21 But it is important to think this mediation, O’Connor’s term, outside the scope or procedures of Hegelian dialectic. Concepts are modified by the bodies they think. For Simon Jarvis, this is indeed “contradiction,” but one in which a “real difference” between “real” and “actual” is speculatively treated as real.22 Treating it as real means, as Josh Cohen again argues, that such reality must be “voiced,” given form and expression, as contradiction.23 That is to say, the problem of form in poetry, discussed earlier, is a shared problem with philosophy: the problem of how to think the priority of the object within a system which contradicts that priority. The implication of such thinking, for criticism, is necessarily to limit reading from what is read, and to identify as the object of reading precisely what reading cannot grasp. The object of criticism is not something criticism can simply have, or posit; the negative cannot be presented. As Adorno puts it, just because “what we do in such reflections, without confessing to it, is to presuppose as mediating what we want to deduce as mediated, the subject, thinking,”24 and thereby hypostasize the subject, indeed “objectify” the subject, does not mean that criticism can do away with this difference by inverting it, by replacing the subject with the object. Rather, “critical thinking” should “eliminate this hierarchy”25—­but in eliminating the hierarchy not abandon the structure. It is not enough simply to replace the hypostasized subject with a re-­valorized object. That would be merely to reinforce the separation by which the subject is hypostasized. Such replacement, indeed, is precisely what the subject does: it places itself, as “mediator,” in the place of what it “mediates.” In this, thinking threatens to become a form of logical “noncontradictoriness [Widerspruchlosigkeit].”26 In thinking contradiction in Negative Dialectics, then, I want to think the way Adorno’s relation between subject and object is not foreclosed but dynamic—­and to think further how this dynamic relation, this horizontal geometry, might be mapped onto a theory of reading as the experience of art. Adorno characterizes this hierarchical structure as polar. In it, the identity of the object is obtained from the identity of the subject. This apparently undialectical situation is, for Adorno, in fact the condition of dialectics, which thinks the difference between subject and object.

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The polarity of subject and object may appear to be an undialectical structure in which all dialectics should take place. But the two concepts are originating categories of reflection, formulas for an irreconcilability [nicht zu Vereinendes]; not positive, no primary states of fact, but negative throughout, expressing only nonidentity. Even so, the difference between subject and object is not easy to negate. . . . They constitute one another just as, by virtue of such constitution, they diverge from each other [auseinandertreten].27

The movement here is interesting: these “poles” “constitute one another” as they “diverge from each other,” auseinandertreten, as they “step apart,” “separate.” Thinking consists in this doubled movement of constitution by separation, rather than in an identification of object by subjecting—­a determining of matter by concept. But thinking is equally differentiated from a pure objective determination. The apparently undialectical condition of dialectics, this polarity, is itself dialectical: the subject is not-­object, the object is not-­subject. Their separation, this divergent step, is the step of nonidentity by which thinking might think. In this way we begin to think of dialectics not in terms of mediation, but as conditioned radically by what thinking cannot mediate. What Adorno’s aesthetics, and a criticism responding to those aesthetics, prompts us to think is this non-­mediated object. A negative dialectics first does not constitute a system abstracted from objects, and second, its objects are only constituted as such, even negatively, in this relation. Thus Adorno affirms: “In truth, the subject is never wholly the subject, the object never wholly the object; and yet the two are not pieced out of [herausgestückt] any third that transcends them.”28 This dialectical relation between subject and object should therefore be seen without that Hegelian moment of reconciliation in a further concept that could embody their identity. It is a dialectics without “any third that transcends them.” The subject is only provisionally a subject according to its negative relationship with its object, a relationship that might change. Something else could become a subject, or an object. Adorno is speculating, in this negative polarity, about the possibility of a non-­transcendent dialectical thinking, one that does not propose to solidify or secure as positive either the subject or the object, but rather to work through their divergence, their separation. The subject is the product of the objectivity it negates. A negative dialectic would recall this objectivity, not negate it. The subject is a negated objectivity. But objectivity is also a negated subjectivity. Thus, the subject constructs the object it negates. As through the crenels [Scharten] of a tower, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, rises. And yet it is the very wall around the subject that casts its shadow on whatever

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the subject conjures: the shadow of reification, with which a subjective philosophy will then again impotently feud.29

So the subject is trapped in the subjectivity by which it thinks. And yet, that does not mean there is any third beyond subjectivity that could release the subject from this trap. “What would lie in the beyond [jenseits] makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within.”30 Dialectics might well falsely collapse the distinctions between inside and outside in identification, but the outside is only conceivable in this collapse and this identification. The real is at once obscured by the subject and is only minimally available through such subjective obscuration. Concepts make thinking possible. Adorno proposes rather that with negative dialectics, “we can think against our thought without abandoning it.”31 We cannot think outside thought, but we can think of the ways thought is outside itself. This would require not just a reconfiguration of the terms—­replacing the subject with the object, the concept with, for example, “the body”—­but a reconfiguration of their relation in which “the rigidly dichotomous structure disintegrates [zerfällt] by virtue of the determination of each of the poles as a moment of its own opposite.”32 It is not by negating this dialectical opposition, but by affirming the polarity, that the continuous identity between subject and object is interrupted. This abstraction is the abstraction of both the subject and the object. The negative dialectic is the amplification of the nonidentical relation between each pole of this duality. Adorno’s negative dialectic calls for a dynamic understanding of the relation between subject and object, in which each becomes the locus of formation of the other and in which their “stepping apart,” their constitutive divergence, is not resolved but remains a continuous movement. The contradiction of reality in such a dialectic would not consist in positing the opposite of the actual as real—­and would not consist in the identification of the real as the contradiction of the given. But this means also conceiving negative dialectics not as some “opposite” to identity thinking, some “non-­identity thinking,” as Yvonne Sherratt argues.33 It would rather consist in the space of suspension of this identity, either positive or negative. Adorno’s negative dialectic thus thinks a repeated, discontinuous constitution of objects by their dynamic relation to their thinking. It is repeated in the sense that it does not settle. It is discontinuous in that the divergence of the relation is itself constitutive. And it is dynamic in the sense that it is the mobility of concepts, provoked by the pressure of thinking bodies, that is to be thought. And as Claudia Brodsky points out, the art object, “an ‘object’ made of ‘moments’ may well be the only proper object of a subject that alternately perceives and fails to perceive it.”34 Art, the object of aesthetic experience, models the moment of a kind of subjectivity that can accommodate its alternations between subject and object. The subject in aesthetic experience, experiencing an object as a moment of non-­relation to it, itself becomes a moment of this polar non-­relation.

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The Artwork and the Contradiction of Reality in Aesthetic Theory How does the objecthood of art fit in this negative dialectic? The artwork is a contradictory object. It “speaks against” its frame of knowledge. This would make it the exemplary object of O’Connor’s “interdetermination,” in that it would, as bodily, compel a modification of concepts that try to accommodate it. But we should think the particular contradictory character of art alongside this mediation. Indeed, the account of interdetermination or mediation given above is itself contradictory in the sense that it is a constitution by divergence, a counter-­word. Thinking this nonidentical relation in art will need to account for the fragmentary character outlined in the first section of this chapter: art presents impossibility, and speaks against attempts to read it. Thinking art’s mediation as contradiction would in this sense consist in rethinking both art and aesthetics as the framework of knowledge that apprehends it. In this rethinking, in thinking art and aesthetics as mutually constitutive moments in experience, the artwork’s objecthood is constituted by the dynamic relation worked out above. It is not positively identified, but rather marks a site of dynamic transformation of reality or matter. And this means thinking not only the materialization effected by art, but its dematerialization. Art’s objecthood is both itself contradictory and a contradiction of reality, even as thinking contradiction is the mobile mark of Adorno’s negative dialectic. I want now to turn to the ways art’s contradictory objecthood mobilizes thinking in this way by producing forms of contradiction. I will close this section by considering the image of the wall in Adorno’s thinking and in Celan’s poetry, as simultaneously thought’s articulation and its block, its object, before turning to the materialization of “contradiction” (Widerspruch) in Celan’s poem “Ram” (“Widder”). Contradicting, I will argue, means running against this material-­immaterial wall. Just as contradiction makes possible the positive dialectic that works by negating that contradiction, so the negative dialectic by which art is experienced works by lingering with that contradiction as negative. This is registered in the way we judge art. There is no a priori ground for calling an object art other than the history of provisional artworks with which it enters into constellation. The artwork bears a doubled, paradoxical relation to reality: it constitutes its own autonomous reality out of the provisional matter of society and history, not from the finite but ontologically necessary reality of nature. Every artwork is in fact an oxymoron. Its own reality is for it unreal. . . . An artwork is real only to the extent that, as an artwork, it is unreal, self-­sufficient, and differentiated from the empirical world, of which it nevertheless remains a part. But its unreality—­its determination as spirit—­only exists to the extent that it has become real.35

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The artwork is an “oxymoron,” its “reality is for it unreal,” because its reality is form—­and this means that its condition of being art is also that it is “unreal,” and to the extent that this “has become real.” The artwork is “really” there, but is “really” semblance. “In aesthetic semblance the artwork takes up a stance toward reality, which it negates by becoming a reality sui generis. Art protests against reality by its own objectivation.”36 The artwork presents an objectification of reality that contradicts the positive constructions of reality in dialectics by working through that process of negation-­as-­construction in positing its own construction-­through-­reflection. The world is not, in art, a negation of the world, but the materialization of its own sui generis formation. Art is constituted by this dynamic relation to the world—­and as this relation, its constitution by divergence. Its transformations of reality are negative, but are not negations of reality. There is nothing in art, not even in the most sublime, that does not derive from the world; nothing that remains untransformed. All aesthetic categories must be defined both in terms of their relation to the world and in terms of art’s repudiation of that world.37

Art is art as a repudiation of its materials—­matter, the world. But that does not mean it is distinct from either the world or from subjective, aesthetic categories. And so art, as a way of reflecting the world, works autonomously from the subjective reflection that it nonetheless reproduces. The experiencing subject, from which aesthetic experience distances itself, returns in aesthetic experience as a transaesthetic subject. The aesthetic shudder once again cancels the distance held by the subject.  .  .  . The moment of this transition is art’s highest. It rescues subjectivity, even subjective aesthetics, by the negation of subjectivity. The subject, convulsed by art, has real experiences.38

Art does not therefore simply reproduce reality; but neither does it repudiate it. Rather, it becomes the site of an experience of subjectivity made objective. Subjectivity becomes the object of this experience—­not in the paradigmatically Kantian sense where the free play of the subject’s faculties comprises the feeling of pleasure which grounds judgment, but in a more radical sense in which artworks are the sedimentation or objectification of those subjective forms. In the artwork, constituted as an intentional object by subjective desire, one has the uncanny experience of oneself reflected as if part of the world, an object. This is experienced as contradiction, in which I am outside, not I. In this radicalization of Kant, the artwork as an object provokes and claims validity outside its own objectivity, inside the subject’s experience, in what the subject feels. However, “the feelings provoked by artworks are real

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and to this extent extra-­aesthetic [außerästhetisch].”39 One experiences what Adorno calls the “transaesthetic subject.” And to this extent, experienced as a pseudo-­object, this subjectivity outside the subject, art does not either present objectivity as presence, or as subjectively mediated. For this reason, “the relation of the objectivity of the artwork to the primacy of the object is fractured [gebrochen].”40 Art is an objectification of a fragmented relation to reality. It does not present the object but rather its fragmentation. The artwork’s claims to objectivity are themselves mediated by subjectivity: not only by the apprehending subject of aesthetic experience, but by the subjectivity-­dominated context of society which constitutes art’s materiality. I think it is therefore useful to think of Adorno’s aesthetics as mediation, but understood through these processes of “irrealization,” repudiation, and contradiction. Art is an object that mediates the world by contradicting it. And the world it mediates includes the categories of its experience (aesthetics). Aesthetics shares form with its object, in this sense, as a simultaneous constitution and divergence, a material-­ immaterial. Art therefore works through form as its point of connection with thinking, philosophy, by working through precisely this mediation as materialization-­ dematerialization. “Both” art and philosophy keep faith with their own substance through their opposites [Gegensatz]: art by making itself resistant to meaning; philosophy, by refusing to clutch at any immediate thing. What the philosophical concept will not abandon is the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art, and whose fulfilment shuns the immediate side of art as mere appearance. The concept—­the organon of thinking, and yet the wall between thinking and the thought—­negates that yearning. Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit to it. It must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.41

Art is related to its substance by its opposite. Its form is this relation. And it shares this relation with philosophy. Both art and philosophy are configured by their opposites. Art: towards the objectivity lacking in subjectively oriented dialectics; and philosophy: towards the nonconceptual which it cannot conceptualize. Both, in other words, work critically, negatively, not by positively generating any meaning. Only this self-­criticism can stop the subject from “building a wall [Wand] between itself and the object.”42 And yet, just as the subject builds the “tower” of the real into which it is locked, the real is only available as this wall. Criticism must figure the way thinking is blocked from what it thinks, and that means figuring the way thought is blocked. The real must be figured in order to be critiqued. Criticism, like thinking, is always criticism of something, it is a negative procedure. This figure—­the wall—­constitutes the reality it critiques. It is contradictory. But this contradictory process models the way art exposes the apparently subjective work

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of aesthetic judgment to the objectivity it lacks. If art is to imagine itself into this gap, it does so only in contradiction. “The power of what exists erects the façades into which consciousness impacts/from which consciousness is repelled [auf welche das Bewußtsein aufprällt]. It must try to penetrate them.”43 Thinking is nothing other than this attempt to penetrate the limitation by which it is established. There is no outside which the wall demarcates, because thinking is the wall and its penetration. Let us turn, then, to this form of figuration in the wall—­and in so doing, turn from aesthetics to poetics. I want to think in more detail about this figure of the wall as both separation and conjunction, in Adorno’s model for thinking, by turning to its figurative work in Celan’s poetics. There, the wall takes on the complex and plural reference of the Temple’s wall in Jerusalem, the site of mourning, and the Berlin Wall (erected 1961), the site of displacement and separation, the border—­ indeed, Celan’s poetic “meridian” itself (1960). And it is worth recalling, in this context, how for Blanchot the condition for “explosive communication” was that writing could, in fragmenting them, exceed its generic borders in its new medium: writing “(on the walls).” Writing on walls here means writing that is both provisional and excessive: temporally, it is written in a public present; spatially, it is written on any possible surface. In both modes it is both unnecessary and provisional: it should not be there and it might be erased. The wall here signals the condition for this provisional and excessive communicability, this unanticipated legibility. The wall thus becomes a figure for an unexpected, provisional legibility. Writing, too, like thinking, is like a wall: it inscribes a possibility in the teeth of an impossibility which that inscription obscures. For Celan, this surface-­ inscription is the “wordwall.” FROM FISTS, white from the truth hammered free of the wordwall, a new brain blooms for you. AUS FÄUSTEN, weiß von der aus der Wortwand freigehämmerten Wahrheit, erblüht dir ein neues Gehirn.44

This “new brain” blooms organically from the “wordwall.” Words are conceived here as a wall themselves from which truth is worked. The new possibilities opened by such a truth are newly material possibilities: a new brain, a new configuration of thinking; newly material thoughts (no mind but brain) translate from the lithic wall into the organic, blooming, brain. But these images, inorganic wall and organic brain, are not opposed. The wordwall is violently worked out, hammered, into some newly beautiful

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image. Such figurative violence, like inscription, is irrevocable. It traces the figurative heart of aesthetic experience: that the aesthetic judgment is as irrevocable as any determinate judgment, that the organicism of Kant’s beauty infects its subsequent production in artworks, and that the production of such artworks—­and crucially, such aesthetics that could frame the experience of those artworks—­is organized by a kind of block. When Adorno says that suffering needs expression, but that expression occludes suffering, and then doubles the problem by tying the capacity for expression to its twin, meaning, he is similarly tracing this violent path the mute object takes towards meaning. We can see how this mute path works in Celan’s poetry. with the outward-­and away-­ burrowing black-­constellation swarm: into the silicified forehead of a ram I burn this image

mit dem sich hinaus-­und hinweg-­ wühlenden Schwarzgestirn-­Schwarm: der verkieselten Stirn eines Widders brenn ich dies Bild ein45

The “Schwarzgestirn-­Schwarm” might also be translated as the “blackstar-­ swarm.” It is significant that these stars, Gestirn, transform into the “pebble” brow of the ram, its “Stirn.” The adjective “verkieselten” might be literally translated as “turned to a pebble [Kiesel].” The “burrowing” motion of the stars is both out of the stars and into the pebbled brow. The image of the “Great, glowing vault” which “I” burn into the ram’s forehead is “burnt in” through this constellation of inverted stars. The stars’ blackness is their presence in absence of light, an impossibly swarming, numerous presence. The ram’s brow is also produced in a reverse history: bone mineralized into stone, rather than minerals organically becoming bone. Both of these figures go backwards: stars to darkness, bone to stone. The ram’s skull is “burnt into,” with the swarming black stars. The “ram,” Widder, becomes contradiction, Widerspruch. Contradictorily, the ram literalizes the Widder figuratively concealed in Widerspruch. Its work is framed negatively: “What / ​doesn’t he / ​ butt against?” Negation is a thing, a ram. And it was indeed the ram’s horn—­ the shofar—­which was blown at the walls of Jericho. In turning this negation into an object, Celan contradicts it, speaks against it; the ram speaks against

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(widerspruch) itself (Widder). Contradiction, speaking against, resisting, is paradoxically both forceful and powerless: it can only contradict its object by not negating it. For Adorno, art works through such reversals of conceptual progress, such reversals of negation. This is “form”: the nonviolent [gewaltlose, also “forceless”] synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding. A posited unity, it constantly suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other just as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere.46

This is a reconceptualization of form as indeterminate, a suspension of determination, a kind of figuration. And this “form” of construction is reflected in aesthetic judgment, which similarly must construct itself out of provisional materials, and out of relations between particular works of art. The history of these relations, art to art, forms a contradictory history, inhomogenous: a temporal synthesis constituted by points which contradict one another, rather than harmonizing. “A noncontradictory [widerspruchslose] theory of the history of art is not to be conceived: The essence of its history is contradictory in itself.”47 Adorno frames this contradiction negatively: we are asked, impossibly, to conceive of a noncontradictory theory that could frame the discontinuities of art. Aesthetics is essentially in this position of impossibility: it bears a relation to a history of discontinuity that, contradictorily, both presents and asks for synthesis. In a negative dialectic, art does not become some privileged discourse that can substitute for an otherwise compromised form of subjective identification. It does not propose meanings where other epistemologies cannot. It becomes, instead, the thoroughly negative site where the subject is repeatedly—­over and over—­exposed to its nonidentity with objectivity. Art form remains a contradiction. But in the experience of this, subjective experience is exposed to the contradiction of the future as promissory, to which we will now turn.

The Body of Art, Utopia, and Impossibility To close this argument, I want to consider the “body” that emerges in such aesthetics, as the image emerges in Celan’s poems above. Adorno’s focus on form in the experience of art’s objectivity is central to this consideration. Characterizing what I mean by “form” here will mean developing the ideas of the previous two sections. First, that negative dialectics describes the condition of a dynamic relation of subject to object, in which an object is the intermediation by its subjective experience, and vice versa; but this

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intermediation is a constitution by “divergence,” by nonidentity. The object of such experience would be this dynamic relation of materiality to dematerialization itself. Understanding form in this position means thinking of it as indeterminate. And second, that art gives form to such an object as a process of contradiction, speaking against, where materiality can be located as what is “spoken against,” the “wall” which art form thinks. I turn now to the way we experience art as the contradiction of its own materiality. It is useful to think of form, in Adorno, in such a futural or “promissory” position, and in this section I will aim to think through it to that paradox of “present impossibility” with which I opened this chapter: thinking such form puts us in a position of thinking its present impossibility as the mark of a futurity. For Adorno’s aesthetics, the subjective faculties which constitute the terrain of aesthetic experience in Kant are themselves forms: the sedimentation of objective, social, and historical forms. They are generated from a history of cognition, and from the objective history of social conditions. They appear to be subjective precisely because that history is the history of negating objectivity. But in the aesthetic experience of art, the subject thinks reflectively from the objective forms that art gives to experience. If art expresses anything, it is in form. Aesthetics has therefore to be an aesthetics of form if it is to respond to art. And yet, aesthetics cannot merely repeat art’s form—­there has to be some critical difference. But neither can aesthetics think of anything beyond what art gives in form. This is the crisis outlined in this chapter’s first section. The contradiction that generates artistic form is reproduced differently, here, as an aesthetic contradiction. Because form is the central concept of aesthetics and is always presupposed by it in the givenness of art, aesthetics must gather all its forces to think the concept through. If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies, it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form, yet the concept of form refuses to grant a voice to anything aesthetic that claims independence from it. An aesthetics of form is possible only if it breaks through [Durchbruch] aesthetics as the aesthetics of the totality of what stands under the spell of form. Whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as form does, no better.48

Aesthetics cannot recuperate anything distinct from that given in art’s form, and neither can aesthetics merely repeat art formally. Yet in a curious reversal, Adorno says that the future possibility of art—­and not just aesthetics—­ depends on the capacity of aesthetics to “break through” its own dependence and conditionedness on “the totality of what stands under the spell of form.”

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Aesthetics has to go beyond what art presents, but at the same time it cannot think outside art. If there is any future to art, as well as to aesthetics, it has to be thought through this contradiction, and this double demand: to think of the future (not) beyond the artwork. Thinking the futural orientation of this situation of persistence means thinking the ways aesthetics persists as a product of art’s material non-­ determination. The condition of legibility of the artwork is that aesthetics can posit some future difference of the artwork: and in that future the artwork becomes materially something different, something read. The artwork’s present is both material and immaterial in this sense: it is the present form and the possibility of disintegration which is the condition of that present form. There always has to be more possible future experience, otherwise the indeterminacy that characterizes it would terminate. But that future legibility has to be present, now, in art’s form. The “communication between objects,” is preserved by aesthetics in “communication as the affinity of elements that remain unidentified,”49 an indeterminate affinity communicated by an objective indeterminacy. Thinking through the concept of form means thinking through the present illegibility of form. The present of form is a promise. For Kant, the reconciliation felt within judgment promises future intersubjective reconciliation. But for Adorno, the failure of this to materialize, for society actually to be reconciled, means that the promise persists negatively. The future imagined by art is not reconciled with the present of its imagination. This is the “promise of happiness” that is scattered through Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. This has accrued much commentary, some of which I consider here. But I want to think specifically about the ways that happiness, which for Adorno is bodily or not at all, is both a mark of substantiality and the deletion of that mark. It seems to me that Adorno thus aligns art’s form with an impossible substantiality, and an impossible temporality of its experience. Commentary has indeed focused on the ways art’s “appearance” preserves a negative space of happiness. James Gordon Finlayson argues that the experience of the artwork does not prefigure any determinate future. Art anticipates happiness, “like a hope raised by the work itself,”50 in which anticipation of the future is not manifest, but is made possible as different to the present. And as Menke observes, “beauty is the illusory appearance [scheinhafte Erscheinung] of happiness . . . , happiness that can only be made as appearance [Schein]: which remains a mere promise, of which one does not ever know whether it can be redeemed or is a lie.”51 In art, the subject is presented with an experience that cannot be reconciled with the present. Reconciliation is not deferred, it is “broken.” That is art’s promise. According to Thierry de Duve, Adorno sacrifices art to its future reconciliation, while de Duve himself does “not entertain, even remotely, the hope that some future day the world might be peaceful enough—­harmonious, beautiful, reconciled enough—­to allow for the vanishing of art into uselessness.”52 Art, here, promises an aesthetic reconciliation in which it would disappear; de Duve holds on to the hope that it will not.

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But does the future function in this way, for Adorno, as a “disappearance” via “appearance”? I think Adorno’s characterization of form as contradictory speaks against this. The temporality of hope is only possible if the artwork does not make it manifest. For Adorno, this means that while art synthesizes it does not identify, make identical, its materials. Art thinks against its own promised happiness. Stendhal’s dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur implies that art does its part for existence by accentuating what in it prefigures [vordeutet] utopia. But this utopic element is constantly decreasing, while existence increasingly becomes merely self-­equivalent [gleicht immer mehr bloß sich selber]. For this reason art is ever less able to make itself like existence. Because all happiness found in the status quo is ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it.53

Art wants to promise a reconciled form of the future, but that means it cannot merely make its materials like itself, equal to itself, gleichen. As what is actual becomes historically more self-­identical, art must refrain from its own synthetic work if it is to stay true to its utopic syntheses. “Art is the ever broken promise of happiness [Kunst ist das Versprechen des Glücks, das gebrochen wird].”54 We should note Adorno’s translation of Stendhal’s French. Versprechen is not equivalent to la promesse, promettre. Promettre, like the English “to promise,” derives from the Latin “to send forth,” pro (before) +mittere (to send). A promise prefigures some future occurrence, precedes it. But while the German prefix “ver” can refer to “before,” it can also more ambiguously describe the error of its verb’s action (verlesen—­to misread), an error which is also errancy, to misguide, such that versprechen means to promise but sich versprechen means to mispronounce. What French and English “promise,” what they “send forth,” is in German open to the risk of error, errancy, mistake, misleading: speaking-­before but also mis-­speaking; an errancy which is performed or risked in Adorno’s translation. Breaking the promise of happiness is also keeping to it as a promise. This aligns with what Raymond Geuss describes as “utopian” temporality, which must both respond to present reality and make demands impossible in that reality.55 For Josh Cohen, Adorno thus reproduces Kant’s categorical imperative with a historical difference: after Auschwitz, it “demands above all a vigilant resistance to alterity’s assimilation to knowledge,” and so “the judgment of its fulfilment belongs of necessity to an unachieved and unachievable future.”56 Not just unachieved: unachievable. The future is not prefigured but, for Cohen, interrupted. This “conjunction of necessity and impossibility”57 constitutes art’s promise. “Art is not the fulfilment but the maintenance of its promise.”58 Art cannot present happiness, only promise it. We do not experience any presence in art, only its promise; indeed, the broken promise that

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does not ever manifest. And this is the promise of aesthetics, the promise that something like reflective experience, and therefore something like art, could be possible, but which is not present in art’s form. The futurity of art’s present is non-­transcendent: as futural, it does not go beyond what the artwork presents, even as it promises something else than what it presents. The future is promised as a non-­manifest happiness. An aesthetics responsive to this form of futurity as promise in art would have to think through exactly this non-­manifestation, a form of criticism Alexander García Düttmann characterizes as “the critique of what exists in the name of what does not yet exist.”59 Aesthetics oriented by art’s promise would critique what is present “in the name” of what is not yet present. What is presently possible is referred through a presently impossible futurity. By reflection, the future becomes a coordinate by which the present might be read. We read according to a “utopian trace” at once present and futural; a depletion of what exists by what does not yet exist which does not, however, transcend what exists. Like language, in language, meaning in art is immanent to its form, and yet is necessarily read, and therefore reread. This means, however, that any utopian meaning cannot positively be located in language. Aesthetic experience does not amount to “non-­identity thinking,” in Sherratt’s sense. Rather, it attends the temporal displacement of meaning, of reading, immanent to language’s mechanisms. Any legibility of aesthetic theory must assume a position of displacement in relation to art. It is never adequate to the sensuous, embodied meaning of the artwork; and yet, its inadequacy exposes the truth of this meaning by becoming the negative refusal to impose meaning or to transcend the artwork. The embodiment of appearance is also the dematerialization of appearance. This does not mean that theory is just the aporetic repetition of its own conceptual inadequacy. Rather, theory’s decisive displacement by the artwork models a different condition for truth: the truth of promise, not correspondence; but only insofar as that promise is always displaced. Theory’s displacement lets us think of truth as displaced, exilic. But that means thinking through the form which truth takes: language, writing. In Negative Dialectics, hope is in the form of the constellation: “it is not to transfigure the existence of these elements, but to bring them to a configuration, in which the elements enter into a writing.”60 Just so, in Aesthetic Theory, the artwork’s written character is reproduced on a critical level by aesthetic experience: “Art transcends the nonexisting only by way of the existing; otherwise it becomes the helpless projection of what in any case already exists.”61 “Through its own figuration [Komplexion], art brings the essence into appearance in opposition to its own semblance.”62 Art transcends its object status only in aesthetic experience, which it nonetheless contradicts. This does not just mean that it projects a new, future subjective form in which it could be experienced. It means, rather, that the artwork undertakes what Gerhard Richter calls “a mimesis of what does not yet exist, the negative traces of futurity that can be neither predicted

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nor programmed in advance.”63 Only in aesthetic experience is the present of the artwork unfolded into these “negative traces of futurity,” not new meanings but newly legible, indeterminate futurity. In art, universals are strongest where art most closely approaches language: that is, when something speaks, that, by speaking, goes beyond [übersteigt] the here and now. Art succeeds at such transcendence, however, only by virtue of its tendency toward radical particularization; that is, only in that it says nothing but what it says by virtue of its own elaboration, through its immanent process. The element in art that resembles language [sprachähnliche] is its mimetic element; it only becomes universally eloquent in the specific impulse, by its opposition to the universal. The paradox that art says it and at the same time does not say it, is because the mimetic element by which it says it, the opaque and particular, at the same time resists [opponiert] speaking.64

Art’s eloquence, like philosophy’s, is the eloquence of what it lacks. Aesthetics does not recompense for this lack. Aesthetics does not transcend the artwork. “What speaks out of important artworks is opposed to subjective reason’s claim to totality. Its untruth becomes manifest in the objectivity of artworks.”65 Art’s eloquence is of this manifestation, its objectivity oppositional to objecthood as presence. Just as the artwork is not determinate, is not ever complete—­its promise never either redeemed or falsified—­so is aesthetics oriented by incompletion, “grasping theoretically its continually transforming object of reflection,” as Aleš Erjavec puts it.66 Aesthetics is provisional, yet it must, in a sense, think beyond the artwork. Here Adorno runs into the same problem as Blanchot. Aesthetic thinking about art must simultaneously respond to two polarizing demands: that it not be identical with its object, and therefore in some sense exceed it; and yet that it not overwrite it, or negate it. Adorno argues that meaning is not merely to be located with subjective intention. It is objectively mediated. But neither is an artwork meaningful in itself. The artwork must enter into relation with a judging subject through aesthetic experience, because it is not sheer objectivity: it is the objectification, the sedimentation, of a subjective history of art as intentional objects. This reflects the intermediation, the nonidentity of subject and object, their mutual construction in form. And in the experience of art, the subject is also exposed to the way it is organized objectively. The critical disconnection registered with art by aesthetics reflects a disconnection between subjectivity and the subject’s objective moment. The supposed fundamental facts of consciousness are something other than merely that. In the dimension of pleasure and displeasure

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the bodily intrudes upon them. All pain and all negativity, motors of dialectical thinking, are the often mediated, sometimes unrecognizable forms of the physical, just as all happiness aims at sensuous fulfilment and obtains there its objectivity.67

Happiness is felt in the body or it is not at all. Happiness needs to be articulated. But it is articulated by art, even bodily, according to the temporality of the promise. This means that happiness, in art, is a felt distance from objectivity, the suffering, the weight of objectivity on the subject that needs expression. We cannot talk about meaning in art without recognizing the way meaning depends on this negative expression. Suffering is not just negated happiness. Suffering is the weight, from the future, of an objectivity that must be negated in order to be thought. Happiness is manifest or it is not at all. And yet, “any happiness is a fragment of the whole happiness,”68 just as the fragment in philosophy is “representations in particular of the totality unrepresentable as such,” and in art is “the part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.” Happiness is the contradiction of a futurity that opposes happiness now. Its singularity registers the multiple legibility which its non-manifestation makes possible. If art is supposed whole and unfragmented [bruchlos], it is bound from the outset to fail; if it is jettisoned in order to be won, there is no guarantee that it will return; it is lost insofar as the individuated does not on its own, without any deus ex machina, go over into the universal. The sole path of success that remains open to artworks is also that of their progressive impossibility [fortschreitender Unmöglichkeit].69

The “steps” of progress (fortschreitender), like Blanchot’s pas (step/not), are impossible because they promise an impossible, non-manifest futurity, what “is not.” Criticism, then, must respond to this impossibility, and not engage with art as so much figural ore to be mined. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea of a preestablished order conferring meaning, the more dubious the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theology. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given historical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence. This has consequences that reach deep into aesthetic form. When artworks have nothing external to themselves to which they can cling without ideology, what they have lost cannot be restored by any subjective act.70

No subjective act could positively pose the nonidentical. And subjective judgment cannot answer the debt to the negative by which it proceeds. The

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aesthetic experience of art cannot, in this sense, posit material reality; neither, it follows, can criticism identify materiality positively in art. The body, far from being the refuge of happiness, is already the site of multiple nonidentities which the subject occludes, even as it makes them available to experience, like that Celanian “wall.” This is the body space of art, its substance, and its objecthood: the future possibility of nonidentity in present substance. Rather than obtaining for a transcendental system the nonconceptual truth of aesthetically felt pleasure, aesthetics responds to the suffering of that loss, which is not the loss of pleasure but the loss of pleasure’s identity with happiness, the discrepancy between art’s materiality and its pleasure. This loss vouches for the futurity of happiness, not for its present meaningfulness, as the feeling of present pleasure. Aesthetics suffers to lose its object because losing it is the only way to rescue it from meaning, a meaning that would occlude the indeterminate, futural happiness the artwork prefigures, figures into, steps (not) toward.

Chapter 5

Something in Poetry Reading Poetry’s Material-­Immaterial

So far in this book, my attention has been on the different ways criticism might be thought within a spatialization of writing that, structurally, makes its object of interpretation (both the materiality of the poem as writing, and the matter it references) indeterminate. I have been using “indeterminate” in a strong sense to refer both to this object of the poem and to criticism itself, worked out from structures of aesthetic judgment in which judgment both takes place at a limit, and judges something which is limited for it. Underlying this investigation into conditions of reading has been an idea of form as the formation of this limit simultaneously with the “something” that poetry writes. My reading of Blanchot and Adorno has been circling around this poetic something. Now I want to address this level of my argument more explicitly. The accounts of critical reading I have been presenting work by dematerializing their object, but in doing so they yield the non-­manifest materiality of poetry. What I am now trying to argue for is the limited presence of matter in poetry, and consequently for a criticism that can recognize the appearance of a deleted presence, the presence of that limit, in poetry without substituting that for meaning: the immaterial body of poetic writing. In Celan, this characterizes a poetry which takes as an object something incompatible with its own procedures of representation. Adorno and Blanchot offer ways to think about criticism oriented by this loss of presence, which do not try to compensate for it with interpretation. Thinking this, however, will mean thinking materiality, “something,” not as present, but indeed as something which is painful to thought. The something which will emerge in Celan’s poetry is painful precisely in this sense of revising the aesthetic premises—­pleasure—­of its reading. Thinking the something in Celan—­ temporally displaced into the future, spatially displaced in disorientation—­will mean thinking adequately this pain, as Adorno puts it, of thinking “out of things” in philosophy. I read here the ways that Celan’s poetics write as material their loss of objectivity. Celan’s poetic presentation of its historical, material, and political other is as stringently immaterial, in

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this sense, as his encounter with poetry’s ethical and linguistic otherness, the other voice, that we saw in chapter 2. My argument in this chapter is that Celan stages illegibility in his poetry as a means to present this materiality. Reading Celan, then—­reading Adorno and Blanchot reading, reading Celan reading poetry, history, and politics—­gets us on terms with the illegible that conditions such extreme legibility. This chapter has two halves. In the first half, I bring together Adorno’s and Blanchot’s dialectical thinking—­which were treated separately in chapters 3 and 4—­as a means not of thinking matter positively, but of thinking the painful ways that matter is lost to thinking. This will form the residue of “something” (etwas, quelque chose) in their thinking. And it will model a form of reading matter’s immateriality: the ways it is lost to reading. This will occupy the second half of the chapter, where I work through Celan’s late poetry as dealing with the presence of its object—­as “you,” as politics and history, and as other poems—­as a form of witnessing. Reading matter in these poems will mean addressing it, and witnessing it—­a double task which Celan’s poetry sets itself, but which it also troubles. This chapter reads towards poetic materiality as dematerialized in that reading, and then thinks through that troubling, suspended state as offering possibilities for future critical thinking.

“Something Sounds”: Poetry, Dialectics, and Pain Thinking the materiality of poetry will mean for Adorno and Blanchot thinking the “something” which “sounds” in philosophy. We recall from chapter 1 that Hegel saw the passage from poetry to philosophy as mediated by sound. Sound becomes “extrasensuous” in poetry, occurring in the “inner space and inner time of ideas and feelings” rather than in things. And this marks the passage from art’s embodiment of reflection in sensuous form to philosophical reflection on the concept. In other words, for Hegel, philosophy jettisons the sensuous aspects of language by way of this transformation of sensuousness in poetic sounding. Adorno and Blanchot will both offer meditations on sound in dialectics as a way to interrupt this transcendence of materiality by philosophy. And my argument in this chapter’s first half, which intends to frame an entrance to poetry in the second half, is that in thinking the “sounding” material in dialectics, Adorno and Blanchot both offer models for thinking the “sounding” matter of poetry. This is not, however, a positive sensuousness. Indeed, it is the complex extrasensuousness of sound that enables us to read it in poetry. Both Adorno and Blanchot frame this reading as dialogic. For Blanchot, thinking dialectic’s object, its something, means thinking a neutralization of sound which enables dialogic interruption. This interruption models a legibility of that something, but it also registers a suffering, a pain in thinking.

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For Adorno, thinking something in dialectics means thinking it as a kind of suffering. Thinking this suffering of expression, I will argue, will mean thinking the ways the presence of something in thinking is something suffered by thinking—­that its presence is dematerialized by dialectical thinking, excluded from it, impossible for it, and disabling even as it is its enabling condition. The picture of sensuous, material, something which emerges from these accounts will be as a non-­manifest presence which thinking has nonetheless to think. It is painful to think this. This painful thinking will model a painful reading to which, I think, we are enjoined by Celan: to read something like words without presence, their extrasensuous sounding, as something. “How Strangely This Sounds”: Blanchot’s Dialogue in Dialectics Blanchot’s theoretical interruption of dialectical thinking by literary writing is mediated by its sounding. This sounding is an ambiguous materiality: something sounds, but only neutrally, without positive meaning, but also without being negated by dialectical thinking. Reading is framed as an experience of this sounding neutrality which—­like dialogue—­is an experience of something other to me in the space of my own experience. Blanchot’s dialogic form, the form of waiting, will therefore constitute a model of dialogic reading: reading as a relation between subject and object, I and you, which also disables that relation, in which I only await presence. Sound is neutral in dialectics, and in dialogue. “The neutral, the neutral, how strangely this sounds [cela sonne étrangement] to me.”1 Sounding neutral is strange to “me.” Blanchot’s condition of dialogue is the demand that you “act in such a way that I could speak to you.”2 “You” must be addressable. But you “sound” strange, neutral, “to me.” Dialogue in this sense reconfigures dialectical systematicity. The neutrality of its sounding is the sound of what cannot be accommodated; yet its exclusion only sounds in “the dialectical process.” In this way, in The Writing of the Disaster, “something rings false in the dialectic [Quelque chose cloche dans la dialectique], but only the dialectical process, in its inexhaustible demand, in its ever-­maintained completion, allows us to think what is excluded from it.”3 “Something” “sounds,” rings like a bell (cloche), contradictory, but it is only sounded in dialectics. The dialectic sounds the loss of this object, its exclusion. Thinking something in dialectics will mean thinking like in dialogue, which is to say thinking the “strangeness” of the self in relation to “you.” In this sense dialogue is neutral. The neuter is ne-­uter, neither one nor the other, not-­either. It is an “operation that is inoperative,” an “effect of non-­ effect.”4 The neutral, like writing, constitutes a “common point” of dialogue, the place where words are exchanged between me and you. But this neutral space is also a space of separation, a poetic making, poesis, that is also a “dispersion”: “Poetry: dispersion that, as such, finds its form. . . . It is as though language were torn from itself.”5 This tearing, this dispersal is poetic form:

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that making is also negating. But in Blanchot, this is also the condition of reading. It is the condition of “you” appearing. Poetry’s sounding measures this torn time of waiting where you appear. For Blanchot, the relations which constitute community thus turn us towards both thinking the negativity of the dialectic as a dialogue, and towards thinking the sound, the voicing materiality of poetry. The space of appearance, of an object, is also the space of poetic sounding, which is to say also the space of tearing, of separation. The waiting that is characteristic of the ethical relation of dialogue is therefore aligned with reading, as also a kind of waiting. The interlocutors of Awaiting Oblivion, Blanchot’s récit which opens his thinking of fragmentary form, decide that they are not alone, but not quite together, because “we’re only together if we could be separated,” so that they are “united: separated.”6 The condition for being together is separation. “Everything would change if we waited together.”—­“If the waiting were common to us [commune]? If we belonged to it in common? But isn’t that what we are waiting for, to be together [ensemble]?”—­ “Yes, together.”—­“But in waiting.”—­“Together, waiting and without waiting.”7

Between being common, commune, and being together, ensemble, there is an interval: waiting. Waiting is what is in common. Waiting is a passivity, an incapacity actually to be in common, together, and it is this passivity which is shared. The two speakers are awaiting together the capacity to speak in common because conversation structurally always takes turns, because one waits to speak while the other speaks. Speaking becomes waiting, because speaking is structured by its intervals of interruption. I must interrupt you in order to speak. As in the essay “Interruption” from The Infinite Conversation, “Interruption is necessary to any succession of words; intermittence makes their becoming possible, discontinuity ensures the continuity of understanding.”8 Speaking is discontinuous, and the continuity of being together is this common discontinuity. In this interval, awaiting “waiting,” the interlocutors are differentiated, singular. Being together means in this sense being discontinuous. Awaiting, in dialogue, the interlocutor’s speech means, further, assuming a self-­discontinuity. This, indeed, is the space where Blanchot begins to think the “pas au-­delà” in Awaiting Oblivion, the “not/beyond” space considered in chapter 3. He who lives in a state of waiting sees life come to him as the emptiness of waiting and waiting as the emptiness of the beyond of life [de l’au-­delà de la vie]. The unstable indeterminateness of these two movements is henceforth the space of waiting. At every step [pas], one is here, and yet beyond. But as this beyond is reached without being reached through death, it is awaited and not reached [on l’attend et

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on ne l’atteint pas]; without knowing that its essential characteristic is to be able to be reached only in waiting.9

Waiting is neutral time. He waits—­another, not I. In this indeterminate waiting (awaiting itself has no end, no termination, because it would terminate if what it awaited arrived), what is awaited is waiting. He awaits something for which to wait, some object, some end. This is the pas au-­delà, the step/ not beyond. Nothing is negated, and so there is nothing beyond waiting; and yet waiting is structured by the neutrality of this “not beyond” that is not reached. In Awaiting Oblivion, writing is always awaiting the other it addresses. But it also has to forget this other in order to speak. “ ‘This is indeed proof that I am addressing you.’—­‘I am not asking you to speak: to hear, only to hear.’ ”10 Dialogue does not mark presence, but the lack of presence, where the other is necessarily forgotten in my own speech. “It was as if he had introduced inside his thought a form of suffering that, as soon as it was awakened, forced him not to think about it.”11 “As if pain’s proper dimension [espace] were thought.”12 Waiting is the presence of suffering in thought. In this intrusion, it is as if pain was a part of thought, its “space,” as if it were possible to think pain. But that would mean thinking the separation that pain marks. Dialogue is sharing pain, shared dissimilarity, shared alienation from sharing or communication itself. But pain is what resists thinking. What dialogue could be organized by pain? How could it be sounded, sensed in common, as in reading? Suffering: Painful Expression in Adorno In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry describes the experience of pain as a kind of maximum or excess of sense that also dismantles our capacity to make sense of it. The isolation of pain—­–­only I might sense it—­is also its alienation: it is that of which I cannot make any sense. The experience of pain is the dismantling of experience, because it cannot be communicated. The experience is not of communication, then, but of witness. To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-­ language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-­ language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language.13

In pain, sense intuition exceeds the conceptual categories by which it might be thought. Pain invokes the imagination only to have it fail. But “it is appropriate to think of pain as the imagination’s intentional state, and to identify the imagination as pain’s intentional object.”14 Pain is here a conditional

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state: a pure reflection on the conditions of communication, in language, without their signification in language. But this interpretation seems to me to raise a further issue. If pain sublimely presents our capacity, in language, to accommodate pain (however symbolically), then it is rendered exterior to the function of language itself. It is the separation which is the “birth” of language, but not its articulation. Thinking the articulation of pain in language, however, thinking of pain as a “space” in thought, as in Blanchot, will mean thinking exactly this articulation. This is what Adorno will consider in his own dialogic dialectics as expression. We saw in chapter 4 how Adorno’s dialectics are turned to the priority of the object from within a dialectical system. Thinking that object will mean entering into a form of dialogue with it. “If thought really yielded to the object  .  .  . the very objects would start talking under thinking’s lingering glance [verweilenden Blick].”15 This dialogue with objects “compels our thinking to linger with minutiae [vorm Kleinsten zu verweilen]. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of those things.”16 Thinking out of concretion means entering into dialogue with them, lingering, waiting—­verweilen—­with them. This means thinking the exteriority of objects, and their exteriority to thinking, as interior to the articulation of philosophy in dialectics. Thinking painfully is thinking itself, for Adorno, because it means thinking the exterior of language—­in Scarry that space of witness to the birth of language—­as concretion: to think “out of those things.” Indeed, for Adorno, thinking such exteriority is freedom. But this freedom is felt at once by a subject and against subjectivity, inside and outside. The freedom of thinking painfully exceeds itself, and exceeds the body from which (with which) it thinks. Where thinking goes beyond the bonds it tied in resistance—­there is its freedom. Freedom follows the subject’s urge to express [Ausdrucksdrang] itself. The need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth. Suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression [Ausdruck], is objectively mediated.17

It is painful that to think means to dis-­identify oneself from one’s own body. The most private, subjective experience, precisely because of its subjective privacy, must be communicated even to the subject itself before it can be experienced. The subject is deprived of the suffering that weighs upon it, which, however, it is. Subjective experience, the most subjective experience, singularity, manifests an objectivity which interrupts the self-­ presence of subjectivity—­but that objectivity is precisely subjectivity itself. The expressive movement from inside to outside (Ausdruck: pressing out) marks a transition from subjectivity to objectivity. The expression of suffering is the failure of expression, but it is also the objectification of the subject. Adorno continues:

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This may help explain why the presentation of philosophy is not a matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea. Its integral moment of expression, nonconceptual-­mimetic, is only objectified through presentation—­language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing but the capacity to sound its unfreedom.18

The expression of suffering, the “pressure” (Druck) which suffering applies from within (aus) subjectivity, is the subjective expression of something objective: the subject itself. The freedom of philosophy is this capacity to “sound its unfreedom.” Here the subject is exposed to its own painful objectification. In “sounding,” expression, the subject becomes objective, outside itself. But for Adorno this is thought’s freedom. It is pain which is to be expressed, not pleasure. The freedom experienced in pain is the freedom from a form of thinking that suppresses its own objectivity as outside experience. The pain of the “most subjective experience” is its objectivity, and this objectivity salvages experience for expression. Pain is at once most internal and the condition of externality. Something: The Immateriality of Matter This expression of suffering is the expression of an objectivity of the subject that subjectivity is not adequate to think. For Adorno, this suffering is immanent to conceptual form. To think is to think something.19 But, conversely, this something is not available without thought. “The nonidentical is not to be obtained immediately, as positive on its part, and neither by a negation of the negative. This is not itself, as for Hegel, affirmation.”20 Materiality is only material, only something, dialectically. Thinking this means recognizing the ways dialectics both negates this something and, in this abstraction, makes it something. To think means to think something [etwas]. By itself, the logically abstract form of “something,” something that is meant or judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it—­indelible for a thinking which would delete it—­is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking at all.21 “Something,” as a substrate necessary to thinking of concepts, including the concept of Being, is the utmost abstraction—­not to be abolished by any further thinking process—­of subject matter not identical with thinking; without that “something” formal logic cannot be thought.22

Concepts cannot be divested of the specific materiality they think. This is the something they think. Negation is always the negation of something. Concepts

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cannot move beyond this materiality, cannot “abolish” it. But neither is there “something” without its being thought, negated. The concept of materiality is already an abstraction; but abstraction is already the site of vestigial materiality, where the nonidentity of the matter with conceptuality is exposed. We encounter such matter “in the interior of supposedly pure concepts and of their truth content.”23 We cannot think without identifying, even if that identification misses something of its object. “To think is to identify [Denken heißt identifizieren].24 . . . The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. This entanglement cannot be overcome by decree, as for instance by an assertion of being-­in-­itself outside the totality of thinking’s determinations.”25 Without abstraction something would not only not be apparent, it would not be material. We can think here, in terms of a materialist dialectic, of the way capital is divested of any appearance of the residual labor for which it was exchanged. To remember that labor means thinking back through the process by which capital transformed and concealed it. So abstraction potentially turns critical, here, by registering the “weight of objectivity” it abstracts. “Something” is suffered, not divestible. The consistent consciousness of such nonidentity, as Adorno says in his lectures, is the speculative truth of identity. “A truly achieved identity would have to be the consciousness of non-­identity, or, more accurately perhaps, it would have to be the creation of a reconciled non-­identity.”26 The reconciliations of identity have to be achieved, created, manifest, presented. A “reconciled non-­identity” is therefore not just inverted identity, but the “consciousness of non-­identity.” Such consciousness is suffered. In suffering, consciousness is exposed to its outside, and that is abstraction. Yet in suffering, the place of abstraction is occupied by the something abstracted, the something that remains nonidentical with abstraction. It is experienced as something consciousness loses. The experience of this gap not only speaks truly about the nonidentity of the something with thinking, but establishes in this utopian space (no-­man’s land) the possibility of such nonidentity becoming a relation, though not a thing, in itself. Consciousness of nonidentity becomes utopian when it becomes a way of thinking external as well as internal relations. We might think of suffering in Adorno as the expression of this something, as the model of thought in aesthetics which, we recall, must for Adorno think through the concept of form. Rather than disabling thinking, as Scarry argues, we can position this suffering in the Kantian tradition of aesthetics where the pleasurable experience of indeterminacy in aesthetics provokes reflection. By thinking aesthetically, it follows, we might utilize the negativity of something pleasurably. If aesthetics were adequate to the indeterminacy experienced, the nonconceptual would be a pleasure. Negative dialectics is therefore necessary because other epistemological models do not adequately reflect their complicity with concealing this something. A negative dialectic would present this reflection. Thinking beyond conceptual domination, thinking what suffers, must come from within. Matter and materiality are not objectively available except through the concept that negates them. So if,

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in a general sense of his criticism, for Kant matter is not conceptually available to thinking, that is because concepts are not sufficiently provisional to think of matter’s provisionality. Sensations, the Kantian matter, without which the forms would not even be imaginable, which therefore are also for their part conditions of the possibility of knowledge, have the character of the transitory. The nonconceptual, indispensable from the concept, disavows the concept’s being-­for-­itself and changes it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot linger [verweilen] with itself, with epistemology; it obliges philosophy to material-­substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit].27

Philosophy is obliged to think the indeterminacy of its object, obliged to think something, because abstraction always comes from something. This is impossible, however, because it is nonconceptual. Suffering is the failure of thinking to think the nonconceptual. Aesthetic experience does not remedy this lack, but it does offer a way to think of it as more than just a sublimely empty space.28 Experienced aesthetically, precisely this something cannot be divested from experience. Nonconceptuality is thus reflectively transfigured, reconfigured, as the negative—­mobile, dialectical, transitory. It is the weight of objectivity, the something which concepts think, that resists conceptualization, not some sublime but ineffective failure of the imagination to dislocate itself conceptually or reflectively from matter. This excess of sense, this remainder from form, is what M. J. Bowles calls Kantian matter,29 and Adorno calls the suffering of objectivity—­ something. Matter marks the excess of experience that is also the condition of experience, its indeterminate future. In this reading, matter is what is painful, because futural if the future is thought as not identical with the present. It provokes the failure of experience even as it conditions experience. The something which sounds in Blanchot’s dialectic—­ sounding only through “its inexhaustible demand, in its ever-­maintained completion”—­ sounds in the neutral space of waiting, the space which also conditions dialogue. It is not outside dialectical thinking. It is the space dialectics must cross to think—­the neutralized object. And as a condition for such dialogic communication, it also stands as a condition for reading. Reading, like conversation in Blanchot, reads its object of address, its you, through this painful space where it necessarily does not appear. Blanchot, here, and Adorno in his aesthetics of suffering, think what I will call in the next section the insurrectionary space of poetry in Celan. We should recall that, for Blanchot, the “danger” with matter is “that the disaster acquire a meaning instead of a body.”30 The danger is that the something that orients thinking would, indeed, orient it: give it direction, meaning, and thereby be forgotten in negation. Giving this indeterminacy a body does not mean, however, making it present. It would rather be “a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the

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hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body.”31 If we are to think of this body, it is in this neutral non-­presence, you, and the displacement this non-­presence subjects us to, bodily, enjoins us to, dialogically—­enjoins us to our incapacity to host it.

From “You” to The Meridian, to “The Poles”: The Space of Disorientation, Reading, and Witnessing in Celan Celan’s relationship to the Parisian reality in which he lived can be understood in terms of this painful relation to the object. Celan, indeed, “names” Paris, but does so in terms which both submerge and overwhelm that naming act: “Betrinkt dich / ​und nenn sie / ​Paris,” “Get drunk / ​and call it / ​Paris.”32 The “you” of Celan’s poems are not outside reality but drinking it in, swallowing and swallowed by it, inebriated. The various configurations of what Celan’s poetry writes will constitute a relation to objecthood which is not only other, but, in its resistance to representation, to communication, and to manifestation, occupies something like the aesthetic space of material-­ immaterial outlined above. And this aesthetic space also inhabits the body space, the space of breath which poetry occupies in its utterance. To drink Paris, to get drunk, is to figure it as a material which is both internalized and transforms the body. The poetic body is marked by this insurrectionary displacement, not only of the object but of poetic voice or breath. The poetry’s object is other to the poem’s procedures of representation. What is at stake in Celan’s poetry, in calling something, in naming it, as in this example, “Paris”—­in naming a place, a locality, a presence or reality—­is the insurrection of the poem’s space by something incompatible with that poetic space. This relation is painful, as above, and enjoins us to a painful reading: one which recognizes the “weight of objectivity” and reads as if it were a “proper space” for pain. So this naming requires a certain submersion, being in its element as well as drinking it in. To characterize the space of the poetic object, its presence, in these terms is to think of it through the neutralized space of the dialectic outlined above, in which something emerges through immersion as expression, a pressure from inside, a “weight” of objectivity. Here I consider the ways a construction of you as other in the poem’s space might be thought as outlining a space of such poetic reading. The centrality of otherness to Celan’s poetry, and of a poetic orientation by otherness, has been much commented upon. The critical readings of Celan have characterized this otherness as an experience of presence by a dissociation of the present—­a Heideggerian reading which has its classic articulation in Lacoue-­Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience. For Lacoue-­Labarthe, Celan’s poetry is, indeed, “in its entirety, in dialogue with Heidegger’s thought.”33 Lacoue-­Labarthe describes the “dizziness” of Celan’s poetry as a “syncope,” a “blank”: “What is suspended, arrested, tipping suddenly into strangeness,

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is the presence of the present (the being-­present of the present). And what then occurs without occurring (for it is by definition what cannot occur) is—­without being—­nothingness, the ‘nothing of being.’ ”34 Lacoue-­Labarthe pursues Celan’s dissociation of present and presence into a blank, a nothingness. My consistent question in this book has been how to read such a space not as a blank but as a condition of “something’s” appearance. Lacoue-­ Labarthe finds instead a kind of sublime of experience: a presentation of language as both the condition of experience and outside its powers. Critics after Lacoue-­Labarthe have offered ways to think this non-­present presence in terms other than sublime nothingness, however. Michael Levine, for example, describes the “voided present” of Celan’s poetry as a kind of haunting of presence, implying some kind of persistence.35 And for Amir Eshel, Celan offers a critique of Heidegger, a “pause” where Heidegger’s “postmetaphysical critique” is turned to the “concrete, unsubsumable names of places” of the Shoah.36 Reading this concrete space in Celan will mean reckoning with its “unsubsumability,” as Eshel puts it, which is not Lacoue-­Labarthe’s blank, nothingness, but which is nonetheless emphatically not a presence; rather, it might be thought in terms of what Anna Glazova calls the historicizing “distance” in Celan’s notion of the presence of the past through translation.37 In the rest of this chapter, I will develop this space of reading as a translation and transformation of space internal to his poetry. This poetry does not address absence, but, I will argue, a presence that it loses in representation. This is legibly something, not nothing, in the terms of the first half of this chapter. This limiting space of presence is what Celan calls a “meridian.” My argument will be that this meridian space, in poetry, reprises what I have been outlining as a “limit space” in reading: the horizon of interaction which limits criticism’s grasp of its object, but what we construe as materiality emerges in this limitation. This is focused first in the ways his poetry constructs the presence of its object of address, “you.” Reading politics, writing you, and reading poetry mean reckoning with the ways that reading constitutes an insurrection: a painful rising up into the surface of the poem of something that cannot be read in critical terms, that intrudes into the poem’s legible surface. My argument is that Celan’s poetics develop the immateriality of poetic presence (Lacoue-­Labarthe’s Heideggerian void) as emphatically something, not nothing, and that this constitutes a reconfiguration of the terms of the poems’ own legibility as such an insurrection. Writing history, writing Paris, writing matter—­as in chapter 2’s poems of protest—­will mean also writing this space of reading as insurrectionary. Insurrection and “Other Matters” Celan’s “you” can be thought through Martin Buber’s I-­Thou relation, in which “whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.”38 Yet in thinking through this relation, this “having

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nothing,” I think Celan outlines a poetic address not to nothing, to no object in Buber’s sense, but rather to Buber’s “no-­object” itself. The poetry stands in relation to this no-­object, rather than to no object. Celan’s du is also a range of other, plural and singular, grammatical positions and pronouns, and thinking these will constitute the bulk of this half of the chapter. “You” is both the object of address and is insurrectionary of that address. Speaking to you means also displacing you. But that “you” is also insurrectionary, the site of emergence of a materiality outside the poem’s address—­what Celan calls “other matters.” Here I want to read the ways Celan’s poetry constructs this dialogue of placement and displacement. Thinking “you” in these multiple terms will mean thinking the insurrection of that space of poetic relation by a numerousness that both exceeds and conditions poetic expression. To think of matter as addressed, as a poetic “you” means to think this limit space, and its insurrectionary construction. We detailed some of this insurrectionary structure of the poetic image in Celan’s thinking in chapter 2: the ways his poetry traces the movement of images across political surfaces in contradiction of their politics, as undetermined by political intention. I further suggested there that the image of this movement is itself “without image”: that the enabling space of such political dynamics is not itself representable. This insurrection is apparent in another of Celan’s protest poems—­connecting ’68 with the protests of Celan’s youth, the post-­1917 socialist revolutions in eastern Europe. As well as a site of personal history, and loss, the east marks a place of revolutionary hope in Celan’s poetry. Writing “you” means writing this revolutionary space. The poem “Vaporband-­, Banderole-­Uprising” from Atemwende (1967; Breathturn) opens its last three stanzas by repeating “With you.”39 The poem speaks “with you,” not “to you.” But if you are present “with” the poem, how can you remain “you,” separate, addressable? In a letter he wrote to his wife, Celan describes this as a tension between the political and the figurative, the “insurrectional” quality of the poem’s images. The poem “is, you well know, insurrectional and glacial at once. Uprising of placards, redder than red, under the—­astonished?—­eyes of seals. Uprising of other matters too [soulèvement d’autres choses aussi], geological, scriptural, of the heart.”40 The poem’s images are insurrectionary not in the sense of communicating insurrection (as we saw in chapter 2), but in the sense of configuring the space of their own interruption by “other matters.” The revolutionary “uprisings of placards” give way to “other matters,” other “things” (choses). We read the poem as moving across this space from insurrection to things. To be “insurrectional and glacial at once” is to scan different kinds of movement, crystalline and fluid, and different kinds of thing. How, indeed, do we get from interruption to a glacial condensation of time in crystal form? How do we get from uprisings to other things, as if through the nonhuman, astonished eyes of seals? Do we read poetic time out of its glacial crystals, or with such mere, blank astonishment, like seals rising briefly from the harbor

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water? Does the poetic image, then, endorse interruption as mere interruption, in which the “insurrection of other things” can appear? We can consider the alignment of this image space with the space of address, of you, in the poem. The poem proceeds through this movement of address and the different spaces it might be “moored” or figured by writing like leaflets on poles in the street. The beam hammered all the way through you, that writes here, redder than red. Der durch dich hindurch-­ gehämmerte Strahl, der hier schreibt, röter als rot.41

Writing is this beam, a beam of light, which “writes” through you, with you, passes through you. This “with you/through you writing” then leads each of the next stanzas: “With its words”; “With you to coin gold, now”; “With you to assist the banderoles”; “With you to moor the glasshard leaflet / ​to the blood-­bollard [Blutpoller].” This image of nailing the poem to a coin, placard (Joris’s “banderole”), or bollard is writing as political dissemination, but the nailing is accompanied each time “with you.” The leaflets are nailed to the bollards with you. Any image, any light, any politics must also pass through you. The insurrection of political writing materializes with the “you” which it materializes. But this means that you are also weighed down with all these images. The poem is demanding, even as it nails you down, your presence. The space of the political is excessive, redder than (socialist) red, because of this excessive you. With you to moor the glasshard leaflet to the blood-­bollard, that the earth pushed out through this step-­pole. Mit dir das glasharte Flugblatt vertäuen am lesenden Bluttpoller, den die Erde durch diesen Stiefpol hinausstieß.

The (red) “blood-­pole” turns into a “step-­pole,” the “Poller” proliferations of this detached “Pol.” The polar relation between you and the leaflets (both are hammered in) is picked up in the poetic “polarity” between the “Bluttpoller”

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and the “Stiefpol.” But the poem also interrupts this polarity. A polar relation is of opposites, but here there is one pole, detached. A “step-­pole” is a slant polarity, the unknown familiarity of a step-­sibling. It is an assumed pole, taken on. Just so, the literal space of the political, the bollard, must be “hammered through.” And just so, “you” must be hammered through; indeed, you are “moored” here, grafted to this detachable pole. I shall return to these poles at the end of the chapter. But here we should consider in more detail the “you” they scan. The poem addresses you by freighting you with this figurative weight. Writing “you” means writing you into an image. Elsewhere in cycle V, you are “threaded,” but this threading also undoes the images it threads, or connects, in what I think can be read as an image of reading across spaces. “You” passes through a needle’s eye. You, the hair taken from the lip with the bright-­ seeing highsleep: threaded through the goldeye of the sung-­aright ash-­ needle. You, the knot torn out of the throat with the One Light: run through by needle and hair, under way, under way. Your reversals, incessantly, round the seven-­ fingered kisshand behind happiness.

Du, das mit dem hell-­ sehenden Hochschlaf von der Lippe genommene Haar: zurechtgesungenen Aschen-­ nadel gefädelt. Du, der mit dem Einen Licht aus dem Hals gerissene Knoten: durchstoßen von Nadel und Haar, unterwegs, unterwegs.

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Eure Umschwünge, immerzu, um die sieben-­ fingrige Kußhand hinterm Glück.42

The du of the first two stanzas becomes the multiple eure of the final stanza. A multiplication of you is also a multiplication of space, and of images. Again, you are spatial—­but this is the space of the image, that repetitive “place” where “tropes and metaphors” turn “ad absurdum” in The Meridian. The “hair” which “you” takes from the lip (a mouth’s edge open like a needle’s eye, another figurative modulation) is threaded in the first stanza, and then “run through by needle and hair” in the second. “You” are both the threaded hair and the “knotted” thread. These are “Your reversals, incessantly,” where “you” makes up both the threading and the tearing/knotting of that thread. Figures reverse, repeatedly, immerzu. The throat is the medium of breath, and is itself a place of transformations. Breath comes silently inside and outside through the throat (reversals or turns of breath), but it might also be transformed into speech through the opening lips, speech threaded through the breath in the throat. “You” are both the silently threading breath and the speech “torn out” from the throat. We can think of “you” as imagining a space of transformation and multiplication, rather than of secure “nailing.” The throat, the needle, the thread—­like the bollard or pole—­are places of troping and transformation in which words materialize in unanticipated forms. The pole (neck) you are moored to is this site of material transformation. To-­ be-­deciphered you. With you, on the vocalcords’ bridge, in the great Inbetween, nightover.

Zu Entzifferende du. Mit dir, auf der Stimmbänderbrücke, im Großen Dazwischen, nachtüber.43

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These spaces are here characterized as “Inbetween.” The “Bänder” of poem six, the leaflets or flags of political movement, are here the “Stimmbänder,” the vocal cords. Political writing is transfigured into speech—­rather, not yet speech but the cord, bridge, that joins breath with voice, sounds it. And again, this is “with you,” you are threaded in. Both leaflet and vocal cord are “Inbetween” spaces, places where bodies become images, either in the breath of speech or in political writing. They are also spaces of inscription, of provisionally legible interpretation: the temporary leaflet, the voiced breath. The poem therefore stages the threading of two different kinds of threading work: the internal bridging between inanimate breath and speech, the breathturn to speech which identifies you; and the external bridging possibilities of the political, in which a space is made, again, for you to be recognized, moored. Poetic breath, sounding or voicing, is spatially a kind of turning or transformation where becoming bodily means becoming inbetween, a site of transition and of the reflection of images. Here we see Celan’s poems locating you, your identity, in spaces that are materially transformative: the vocal cord as a place where mere air becomes words; the bollard which transforms into a political space with a leaflet; the thread which is nothing but a space of suture. The bodies here are mere spaces for such transformative identification. And underwriting this is a poetics of the image, of the image as a kind of body. Understanding the politics of this bodily you, this relation to the body as a point of objectification and transformation which is other to the poetic subject, requires us to think figuratively, in the form of the image—­to think the body as a site of indeterminate and provisional transformations. The consequence of this thinking is that these bodies-­as-­images—­placard, bollard, thread, throat—­are places of movement rather than of solidification. They transform themselves in poetic images. The cycle’s final poem connects this space of transformation, of threading, to a “quasi-­stellar” constellation. Without light it rolls, without color—­you, stick the ivory needle through it —who doesn’t know that the tigered stone, that jumped you, rang out on it?—­, and so—­whither fell earth?—­ let it turn time-­up, with ten nailmoons on the towrope, in serpent-­nearness, at yellow-­flood, quasistellar.

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Ohne Licht rollts, ohne Farbe—­du stich die Elfenbeinnadel hindurch —­wer weiß nicht, daß der getigerte Stein, der dich ansprang, an ihr zerklang?—­ und so—­wohin fiel die Erde?—­ laß es sich drehen zeitauf, mit zehn Nagelmonden im Schlepptau, in Schlangennähe, bei Gelbflut, quasistellar.44

Without color; the bone-­needle running through; the pebble or stone that turns against you; the earth falling without direction, non-­polar; the mooring place: in this final stanza the figurative work of the whole cycle collapses together. The figures constellate, or quasi-­constellate. They “rotate” or “spin,” “es sich drehen,” “time-­up,” into time. The complex falling-­together of the figurative work of these poems turns around this rotation, and it does so “with you.” In this way we are returned to the cycle’s first poem, which ends: “The world is gone, I have to carry you,” “Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.”45 All the “mooring” work the poems do for “you,” tying “you” onto directional poles, threading “you” figuratively into the world as if with a needle, is only, finally, poetic work. “The world is gone, I have to carry you.” This could mean two things. The world is gone and so I must stand in and bear you in its place. Or else there is no world, and in its place I must carry you, wear you, to bear me. You are either borne in the poem, despite everything, or else you become the real orientation of the poem after the world is gone; in which case this figurative weight is loaded onto you, the you the poem creates itself, spins out of itself. What does the poem do with you? Does the poem thread you back together, provide the figurative transformations necessary to describe sundered relations? The poem does not carry out the work of politics, but rather provides the figurative space where the political can take form, the space of its insurrection of space into the necessarily transformative space of politics. But in outlining this space, the poem makes itself open to “other matters too.” The poetic ambiguity about that spatiality, about whether it bridges or threads anything together, opens up the question of whether the political space is finally, possibly, moored to any real articulation in bodies. Celan’s poetry is painfully oriented by the you it addresses. Any presence of you, and meaning for you—­including political meaning—­cannot be produced as poetic effects. The suspension of you in Celan’s poems opens that space to other insurrections. Reading “with you,” in Celan, means reckoning with the ways reading also displaces “you,” the ways reading is an insurrection of that space.

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Disorientation As I argued in chapter 2, Celan’s poems thus constitute insurrectional spaces of the political not in the sense of presenting politics, but in the sense of interrupting it through poetic images. There I identified this with the lyric as a space of address, and we might think of the space of you outlined in the previous section in those political terms as a site of the concretion of reality through dialogic form, apostrophe, and address.46 As Yves Bonnefoy recalls Celan saying, “you (meaning French or Western poets) are at home, inside your reference points and language. But I’m outside.” “You” are at home, but I am outside. Bonnefoy continues: “Doubtless, the most harshly felt form of his exile was that as a Jew, i.e., inhabited by a founding word from the other, moving outward from I to thou, he had to live in the essential impersonality of the Western languages.” Celan, in other words, felt his exile in language; not just in living his daily life in Parisian French but writing in his mother’s High German, but immanently in language, in language always thought of as an exile of the “I” from the “you.”47 Rather than signaling presence, or its absence, “you” is a site of transformation in the poetry. And this is a transformation of poetic space: the throat, pole, or thread which is an “inbetween” space, a place of mediation which is not itself mediated. The poetry addresses this space. But this means it addresses something that puts its own articulations into question. The space of these images is also the place where the poem is transformed. That is to say, it is like a space of reading: a place where the poem is itself mediated and transformed. In The Meridian, Celan describes poetry as, in this way, “like art.” Perhaps—­ I am only asking—­ perhaps poetry [Dichtung], like art, moves with a self-­forgotten I toward the uncanny and the strange, and sets itself free again—­but where? but in what place? but with what? but as what? // Then art would be the route poetry has to cover—­nothing less, nothing more. I know, there are other, shorter routes. But poetry too does hurry ahead of us at times. La poésie, elle aussi, brûle nos étapes.48

The “étapes,” the “steps” or “stations,” are burnt, stepped out before us, in poetry; but to where? “Who knows, perhaps poetry follows its path—­also the path of art—­for the sake of such a breathturn [Atemwende].” Brûler les étapes means, idiomatically, to “jump the gun,” to “cut corners.” Here poetry is outside the present, not just a present yet to come. Poetry is not, here, reconstituting in the present a future to which we might return, not “going home.”49 Poetry “covers” art, passes through it. This is its “meridian”—­in the Oxford English Dictionary, the “circle of the celestial sphere which passes through the poles,” as well as the line crossed by the sun at noon; both a circle (self-­reflexivity) and a limit. It is also midday, noon; as well as a separate

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place, a place of separation. It is derived (in German and English) from the Middle French meridien, meaning the south. So: a line, a border to be crossed, that turns out to be a circle; a highpoint, noon, that is also a point of division; and a polar reversal of orientation—­the south, not the north.50 In such disorientation, the poem does not lack orientation, chaotically or meaninglessly signifying nothing. It is instead oriented precisely by the disorientation it addresses. It addresses the image space of insurrection outlined above: “(the place [der Ort] you come from, / ​it talks itself dark, southward).”51 Homeland is talked into darkness, the noon meridian signaling its reversal into a southern, dark place (recall the “Ort” of the image). “You” come from this reversal in which, as in “Speak You Too,” you are enjoined, “from / ​Midnight to midday and midnight,” this meridian, to a kind of neutrality: “don’t split off No from Yes.”52 In this neutrality, the image does not go anywhere, but still moves. For Roger Laporte, with the meridian Celan is thinking “non-­presence”: “or better, as Blanchot says, the experience of non-­experience, is capable of speaking the poetic ‘experience’ without sublimating it into a MEANING.”53 The Meridian speech itself marks this meridian point of transgression: “for in this work, by means of this work, the border—­the distance—­separating prose and poetry was destroyed for good”;54 writing passes “into a frightening territory.”55 We do not pass from poetry to philosophy, as we saw Hegel claim in chapter 1, nor return to poetry, but trace a poetics of the meridian, the border, the non-­place, the “no-­man’s land” of chapter 2, “explosive communication.” “From / ​the east”: Reading Hölderlin I want now to focus the ways this orientation is configured as a space of reading. This becomes visible when we consider the ways Celan’s poetry more literally reads into its history—­here, Hölderlin. But my argument is that the same orientation to “you” seen as insurrectionary above is also encoded in Celan’s poetry as a site of reading. Reading, like addressing “you,” means configuring the poem as a site of mediation, transformation, and the suspension of presence—­into a legible surface where the exchange that underlies a model of reading can be encoded. The Hölderlin who emerges in this site is similarly a poet of exchange, but also a poet of suspension. Holding these two kinds of movement together—­exchange and suspension—­will mean thinking, again, about orientation as dis-­orientation. And again, this disorientation is taken figuratively, which is to say on the level of the troping play of language itself. The east in these poems—­the Orient—­is reconfigured in this space of reading as an image. The east marks, for Celan, the lost homeland of Czernowitz in the now defunct Bukowina. But as Jewish, the east is also Jerusalem, the city always anterior to the fulfilment of the messianic promise of its presence. The east is ambiguously both a lost past and a non-­manifest future.

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This disorientation—­this exilic turn to the east, the Orient, this non-­present Orient—­can be thought through Celan’s reconfiguration of Hölderlin. Hölderlin’s work is famously the site of a contestation, which forms the background to my reading, between Adorno and Heidegger. Adorno’s reflections on the poetic rhythms of “parataxis,” “artificial disturbances that evade the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax,”56 lead to a resistance to critical synthesis. Adorno locates the truth of Hölderlin’s late poetry both in its serializing rhythmic disturbances and in its semblance character. In opposition to what he terms Heidegger’s assimilation of truth content to textual surface, for Adorno, “the real is honored . . . in that Hölderlin keeps silent about it [es verschweigt], not merely as something antipoetical but because poetic language feels shame at the unreconciled form of what exists [das dichterische Wort Scham ergreift vor der unversöhnten Gestalt dessen, was ist].”57 It is important for Adorno that the semblance character of poetry is the paratactical, and critical, articulation of reality, and that we read the poetry without restoring a communicative clarity to it as if it were the bare articulation of thought itself. This anti-­Heideggerian reading insists on the poetry as a site of reading understood, similarly, to be attentive to poetry’s language as an “unreconciled” presentation of its referents. The poem thus becomes a complex historical surface in which reading means both a mediating transformation and, guided by the poem’s “passivity,”58 a certain restraint in approaching it as the object of judgment. Reading Celan’s remediation of Hölderlin in these Adornian terms should help us understand how that passivity of materialization, and that indeterminate layering of poetic surface, informs Celan’s own poetry. What is present, in Atemwende’s “Ashglory,” what is “cast-­in-­front-­of-­you,” comes “from / ​the East.”59 The cast-­in-­front-­of-­you, from the East, terrible. No one bears witness for the witness.

Das vor euch, vom Oster her, Hin-­ gewürfelte, furchtbar. Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen.

Reading through this poem means moving through different terrains—­ different Easts—­ and different metaphorical territories, to arrive at “no

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one,” and witness. We see again, in this movement, the images of threading, “Auf dem senkrechten / Atemseil” (“On the vertical / breathrope”), “zwischen zwei Schmerzknoten” (“between two painknots”), and the vertical insurrection—as if a climbing moon, “Tatarmond zu uns heraufklomm” (“Tartarmoon climbed up to us”)—of “you,” your presence, in these spaces of troping, of indeterminacy. Indeed, we have here the ash of the introduction: that de-substantiated substance, elevated, the “auf” of up related on lines 6, 10, and 11, rising up to be read. The movements up and down— “ertrunkenen,” drowned, to “rauscht es auf,” roar up—play up this scale of insurrectionary movement, the emergence of legible marks, you arising, up, “aufklomm,” like ash. But it is striking that these emerge here through the terms of a spatial or territorial disorientation. I will unfold some of these territories through Hölderlin, showing Celan to be, in this poem, effecting a form of reading that revises the present through its spatialization in metaphor and in reference. The east, in this specific case, is the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, from which Hölderlin’s Danube returns to Germany in “Der Ister.” Yet almost this river seems To travel backwards and I think it must come from The East.60

The river “seems” (scheinet) to travel “backwards” (Rükwärts zu gehen). The river might go east, but it seems to come back to Germany, and to German. This seems to substantiate a Heideggerian reading of origin and sourcing. But the east here is also a site of reversal, and of seeming. And in “Die Wanderung,” Hölderlin declares, “But I am bound for the Caucasus!”: for this east. That time out of mind our parents, The German people, had quietly Departed from the waves of the Danube One summer day, and when those Were looking for shade, had met With children of the Sun Not far from the Black Sea’s beaches; And not for nothing that sea Was called the hospitable61

The east is a place of exchange, where Germans “Vertauschten das Word,” exchanged words. This is hospitality. The reversal of the river imagines this exchange. It is in the hospitable east that German is conceived, not against another language but in translation with it.62 The east, then, is Germany’s nomadic home. The “Black” sea is transformed in the poem, too. It is the

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sea of “shade” (Schatten), of rest but also of materialization (shadow cast from something), a hospitable meridian point in which exchange can take place. So Hölderlin translates the Greek πόντος εύξεινοσ (póntos eúxeinos, “hospitable sea”) as “gastfreundliche.” This translation “names” the Greek meaning in German. In “Ashglory,” Celan mirrors this naming, but also cuts it in half: naming the sea merely “Pontisches,” “pontic,” and cutting off the “hospitable.” This eastern sea was hospitable, once.63 This hospitality was a hospitality to difference, which was capable of framing that difference as a productive exchange. This, at least, is a version of Hölderin’s argument in the short essay “Being Judgement Possibility,” where judgment (Ur-­teil) describes an “original division,” “that separation, by which object and subject first become possible”: “the I is only possible by virtue of this separation [Theilung] of the I from the I.” There is no reconciliation of the subject with the object in such judgment because it is only by separation that there is any subjectivity at all. One proceeds from and by this separation, this division.64 In “Der Ister,” this becomes the condition of writing: an incision, a separation, a “furrowing”: “But the rock needs incisions / ​And the earth needs furrows, / ​Would be desolate else, unabiding [ohne Weile].”65 While for Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin in this way conceals a “violence,” where “art forces a way, creating a ‘Bahn,’ a track. . . . a violent inscription creating memory, which precedes it,”66 we might also think of this separation as a space of exchange. Thinking poetic inscriptive incision means thinking the ways poetry can make this space of separation, of “furrowing,” the productive origin of its own expression. “Lingering,” verweilen, with such separation is not necessarily the ground of presentation but of exchange, if we think of it in the terms of hospitality above—­the east. “Ashglory” imagines the space of reading as a demanding space of separation, but also of exchange. The difference, however, is that the poem’s imaging of this space also disturbs it as a space. This is configured, as an orientation, by the east in this poetic reading. The east, in “Ashglory,” is also where “while / ​the glossy [blanke] / ​Tartarmoon climbed up to us, / ​I dug myself into you and into you.” For Celan, this is the space configured in his poetry as reading Hölderlin. The first poem from Atemwende’s first cycle (“Ashglory” is from the third) opens thus: “Du darfst mich getrost / ​mit Schnee bewirten,” which Joris renders as: “You may comfortably / ​serve me snow.”67 “You,” here, are welcomed, but welcomed as a “host,” welcomed to host me. “Bewirten” means to host, as well as to serve, as a landlord hosts guests; or, as Felstiner renders it, “You may safely / ​regale me with snow.”68 This is to say, “you” are not a guest. The poem rather demands hospitality from you, the strange hospitality of an image, “snow.” The poem does not host you; it demands that “you” host it, read it. So while Hölderlin’s river is both the site of exchange and the inscription of meaning through exchange, for Celan, it is legibility which needs to be hosted by the poem. You are created as a host by the demands of the I. And again, the east is something that comes to

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you—­the moon rising above us—­but it comes violently, the Tartars intruding from the east, like Georg Trakl’s wolves in “Im Osten,” “in the east,” who “break through the doors.”69 Thinking this violence as an insurrection, however, means thinking this demand as one for spacing itself, rather than its disruption; a place in you where I can be. The poem navigates these demands by registering the insurrection in what might be called love, and exposing it to the less certain relation through fear. The moon rises to “us”—­you and I together. And the “fearful,” “terrible” (furchtbar, not Hölderlin’s Furchen, furrows) east is cast in front of you, plural (euch). The poem is oriented towards this displacement of singularity by a numerousness which demands, at the same time, that we recognize its singularity. Witness In reading Hölderlin, writing Hölderlin, Hölderlin becomes an exemplary figure in Celan’s poem. Rewritten into Celan’s poem, his images mark out the terrain of his reading outside the terms of that poem. Rather than finding an original space, reading finds the ways that space displaces origin—­a meridian space of limits that marks the transformative exchange of writing. The possibility for exchange and productive hosting is simultaneously the possibility of displacement. Reading Hölderlin means allowing him to bear witness to the future east of Celan. Reading Hölderlin means, in Celan, witnessing this space. “Ashglory” ends, however, by disturbing precisely this capacity to bear witness. No one bears witness for the witness. Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen.70

Celan’s witness to Hölderlin’s east is framed by the suspension of the possibility of witnessing. Like Hölderlin’s judgment as original separation, the ground of “witnessing” is always, impossibly, outside witnessability, unattestable, unavowable. In order to testify, I must place myself outside that to which I testify. If I testify for myself, I must place myself outside myself. The structure of witness is internally divided because in order to be a witness, I have to separate myself from what I witness. The object of the poem is this unavowable object of witness. Reading the poem means making some other space to it which is also internal to the poem. Hölderlin writes the east which Celan, in “Ashglory,” witnesses as both the internal work of the poem (its “incisions” which I “dig into you”) and outside the poem, what the poem “hosts.”

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This structure leads Derrida to note a “triangulation” of witnessing, its deferral always to some other witness.71 But we also might think in more detail about the movement inscribed by witnessing in Celan as a form of reading. If we are to think of reading as hosting, as making space for the poem’s present, and as witnessing as constituting another space for the poem, then we might think of Celan here as configuring a space for reading poetry as a movement of space. The first cycle from Atemwende, “Breathcrystal,” ends with three variations of witness. In poem 19, “the heart-­ / ​shaped crater / ​testifies [zeugt] naked for the beginnings, / ​ the kings-­ / ​ births.”72 In poem 20, in parentheses, “Where flames a word, would testify [zeugte] for us both? / ​You—­all, all real. I—­all delusion.”73 And in poem 21, which closes the cycle, Deep in the timecrevasse, in the honeycomb-­ice waits, a breathcrystal, your unalterable testimony. Tief in der Zeitenschrunde, beim Wabeneis wartet, ein Atemkristall, dein unumstößliches Zeugnis.74

There is a modulation from zeugt, to zeugte, to Zeugnis.75 In poem 19, there is a “crater,” heart-­shaped but not a heart, which testifies that something had begun. This is messianic, again: a king’s birth. In poem 20, there is a similar absent testimony: the poem asks for a word which could testify for such a relation. Rather than an event, then, here there is a missing relation, in the plural. In poem 21, the testimony is to come, or is itself to be arrived at; a noun, not a verb. By this modulation, the process of witnessing is separated from the witness. We await witness, not a witness. We await testimony for a relation which could tell us in the retroactive way a crater tells of something that happened, that is done with. We await, then, in the future, the arrival of something that could attest to the possibility to attest to something that happened, in the past. We await a past, the confirmation of its absence. The word that would witness such history would have to testify to my incapacity to witness—­a disabling demand. If poetry is to attest to some future in which it might attest, a future of its reading, it must first of all attest, now, to

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its own incapacity to attest. Its orientation, its path, is opened up onto this impossibility. So, at the close of “Ashglory,” the witness (Zeugen) is separated both from witnessing (Zeugnis) and from his or her own name: he or she is named, as witness, “Niemand,” no one. In the poem “Solve” from the fourth cycle of Atemwende, witness, numbering, or naming names and people, is bound to this disorientation, “Entoster.” The word oscillates between east as a cardinal point and Easter as a temporal, messianic—­as well as geographical and historical—­point of orientation. Joris thus renders it as “De-­easterned,”76 as does Felstiner;77 whereas Hamburger has it as “De-­Eastered.”78 That this play with “easternness” is wordplay is significant. The word itself becomes a place of transformation. But it also enables other transformations. Celan’s poem plays through its stakes in orientation in the space of the word—­its material sounding. The “tomb-­ / ​tree” which is “de-­easterned” in the poem is set “upstream, down-­ / ​stream.” Again, we can recall Hölderlin’s “Der Ister” here, with Celan invoking, behind these streams, the “no one” of Hölderlin’s witness: “Yet what that one does, the river, / ​Nobody knows [Weis neimand].”79 In “Solve,” this tree “splits,” in this movement, like a word itself, like marks or inscriptions: by the tiny flaring, by the free punctuation mark of the script salvaged and dis-­ solved into the count-­ less to-­be-­ named un-­ pronounceable names. vom winzig-­lodernden, vom freien Satzzeichen der zu den unzähligen zu nennenden un-­ aussprechlichen Namen aus-­ einandergeflohenen, ge-­ borgenen Schrift.

The “to-­  / ​be-­deciphered you” above is here the “to-­be-­  / ​named.” De-­ eastering, this displacement of space in disorientation, is configured here as a displacement of writing, of the inscription or incision in Hölderlin, by a future. The names are not countable in their numerousness, are only said as

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a caesural punctuation mark that connects as it separates, Hölderlin’s caesura as a “counter-­rhythmical interruption.”80 The “scripts” are “salvaged” (Geborgenen), but salvage is itself split in the German, “ge-­ / ​borgenen” to uncover “borgenen” inside it, which means to lend, to loan. What would be salvaged, then, is this loan—­and here I want explicitly to recall the system of exchange that Hölderlin establishes in translation as/of origin and its reconfiguration by Celan in “Ashglory.” The names which are “de-­easterned” are both “to-­be-­named” and “unpronounceable,” unsayable. Naming is both a loan (a finite gift) and irreversible. And it results in a necessary impossibility, an illegibility. What appears here to be read is loaned: provisional names, provisional script, in debt to the poem from which those names are exchanged. Reading means reading this provisional space. The “you” in the previous section emerges in this terrain. Its presence is not absent, or present, but provisional. Reading as witnessing means responding to this impossible presence. The impossible structure of witness here witnesses its own impossibility, the “Niemand” behind the stream of witness. In doing so, it testifies to a community of people “to be named” without hoping, with false hope, and also to “name” or inscribe those names. The temporality of the “unpronounceable” “to be named” ones is significant. They are futural. Like readers, they might be anticipated but not named. The “script” inscribed into this future is rather a demand to host, to provide space, to something which is not present. Reading occurs in this limit space of incision as separation, without however substantiating this separation. Poetry provokes more “witnesses” as readers by describing this space. This is literalized in Celan’s “reading” of Hölderlin. But it also inflects the poetic account of space he gives as witness. To witness is to occupy a position of separation which is internal to the poem. It is to feel the “weight of objectivity” of the subject—­the illegible interior of subjecthood, the “no one” that one is in witness, and that one is also, in Hölderlin, in judgment. For Celan, this no one is the positing of the self as a site of transformation, like a throat or a leaflet on a pole, through which the poem threads while also disappearing. We shall see how Celan writes this elegiac space in the next chapter, the “snow-­needle” which melts as it threads. But here it is important to note how the poem becomes a site of transformation in separation, a materialization in dematerialization, by this structure of witness by no one, the no one who witnesses, the world I must bear for you which you also are, the world which is gone. The Poles: “We” and “Us” If we are to think the “something” in Celan’s poems, here, it is in this transformative space of the poem which is figured like the space of reading. The poem writes something like “you,” by suspending spatial substantiality and instead inscribing a separation of space. In the earlier section, I considered

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the ways “you” becomes a space of transformative mediation, and the ways this space itself becomes insurrectionary, a space of the image. Then I considered the ways that Celan thinks “orientation” in this space by writing through a reading of Hölderlin’s east—­not as a space of substantiation but one of separation by exchange, just such a site of poetic imagining. The question of space as insurrectionary transformation, as constituting a “meridian” limit space, becomes a space of legibility, in this final part, in the poem “The Poles”: a polar space which imagines its relation to you like a relationship in reading. If we are to read the something in these poems, then we respond to the ways the poems already imagine the terms of that reading as a suspension of identity by that something and as that something. The political, historical, and material stakes of the poetics outlined above resolve, in this poem, around that imagination of reading. The space of such reading is not identical with the poem’s space, but the poem does imagine it. But this does not render the poem “nothing,” as in Lacoue-­Labarthe. Rather, it shows the poem to consist in an act of witnessing, distancing, which cannot be separated from concretion because it is the spatial condition of concretion. At issue in this poem, indeed, is naming another city: “say, that Jerusalem is.”81 The ontology of naming, however, is referred to the space of the image and of imagination. Naming Jerusalem, in this poem written after a trip there, naming it from Paris, in 1969, means naming the exilic relation of that city as a poetic relation—­as the space of poetic imagination, an image—­just as, for Celan, “naming” Hölderlin’s east as “hospitable” means opening it to a separation. This is the pull of the other described in the Meridian speech as a “figure”: “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it. / ​Each thing, each human is, for the poem heading toward this other, a figure [Gestalt, form] of this.”82 Responding to Jerusalem, the poem is already exilic, writing towards Jerusalem from Paris; but also writing back into Paris from Jerusalem. In the poem, Jerusalem is a limit space—­temporally messianic, and spatially a border—­but also a “polar” space: a place from which to address its other, Paris. The specifics of history are significant in locating the poem’s present, in dating it, but also slip between these two contradictory temporal dimensions, and these two cities. The circumstantial fact of Celan’s writing in German in Paris is historically far from circumstantial, and poetically it is significant. So Celan’s work is fastidiously dated because it is re-­figuring the landscape of history itself, which is to say, the conceptual space by which we are inducted into historical time: the east as a form of legibility. The condition of legibility of “you” is framed here as a poetic question. It is framed as a “polarity” that doubles, as an image, into other polar images. The poles are in us,

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insurmountable while awake, we sleep across, to the Gate of Mercy, I lose you to you, that is my snowcomfort, say that Jerusalem is, say it, as if I was this your Whiteness as if you were mine, as if without us we could be we, I leaf you open, forever, you pray, you lay us free.

Die Pole sind in uns, unübersteigbar im Wachen, wir schlafen hinüber, vors Tor des Erbarmens, ich verliere dich an dich, das ist mein Schneetrost, sag, daß Jerusalem i s t, sags, als wäre ich dieses dein Weiß, als wärst du meins, als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein, ich blättre dich auf, für immer, du betest, du bettest uns frei.83

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The figurative stakes I have been tracing are laid out here: this orientation to the East, specifically to Jerusalem and to the Gate of Mercy in the Temple; the conditions for speaking together, for saying the relation between “I” and an addressed, hosting “you”; and the conditions of legibility of this relation itself—­ the polar structure of the poetic image. “I lose you to you.” Saying you means you are lost. How do we read this presence, this material-­immaterial you? The poem thinks through a polar form. First, “us” is oriented towards the messianic “Gate / ​of Mercy” which it cannot cross, which interruption occurs in the line break dividing it. Then, that “us” is unfolded into a series of possible constellated relations: where “you” are lost to “you,” as if “Jerusalem is,” “as if I was this / ​your Whiteness / ​as if you were / ​mine.” Each of these stations unfolds into the loss of bond in “us”: that “you” remain separate, that Jerusalem could be but is not necessarily “named” as present, that “I” could be “Whiteness,” an abstract space that we shared but that was not identical with either of us. This culminates in the decisive distinction (although still speculative, in the subjunctive) between naming “we” and naming “us”: “als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein.” The syntax of this line also sequences its words temporally, so that the first “we” is separated from the second: “as if we could without us be we.”84 The “we” is doubly framed. First, it is set into the subjunctive, into a possible future, an image of what we could be: “als könnten wir.” Then, it is negated, or has “us” negated from it: “ohne uns” (recall the Ohnebild, Hamacher’s “aporetic syntagm”). Only then is it positively posed: “wir sein.” The second “wir” contains the history of both subjunctive and negation within it, as well as being a repetition of that first, framed “wir” in the clause’s subject position. Implicitly at stake here is a history of saying “we.” Celan traces the history which makes possible such identification of relation, which is a history of separation. The rest of the poem stages these conditions in the images of polarity. These, however, are conditioned on reading Celan’s de-­easterning of the images’ orientation in Atemwende. Saying “we” is thus configured by this reflective, polar history that interrupts it with an us. Saying “we” means saying the “us,” the objective relation, which displaces that we—­so that being “us” means no longer being “we.” The poem speaks “as if” it could say this “without us,” the “you” “I lose” to “you.” What is this lost you, this you I lose? We (us) only go as far as the “Gate / ​of Mercy,” itself polar, an empty, framed space of a door, a threshold. “Our” passage is “unübersteigbar.” What is “unübersteigbar” is, as Joris’s translation suggests, “insurmountable.” But we can separate Celan’s word further to read steigen out of it. Steigen means to climb—­as from the “moorfloor”—­but also to increase; what is steigbar is therefore climbable, but also increasable; and what is übersteigbar is both surmountable and excessive, increasing beyond itself. There is an excess of numerousness here under negation. We cannot increase beyond these poles, just as we cannot climb over them (or the gate). There is a limit here, invoked through a negated increase, a finitude to us. “We” increase, we are numerous,

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“us,” but that numerousness is contained, limited. Us marks the limit of what we can name. The concern for naming can be connected with the modulations of witnessing. Naming a community in “us” imposes two kinds of polarity: polarity as what contains opposition within itself, and polarity as a terrestrial or spatial polarity, marking the extreme limits by which space is delimited and oriented. This figurative delimitation of “us” is a spatial delimitation (“in us,” “across, to”), but it is also temporal: the Gate of Mercy is the gate through which the messiah will enter Jerusalem. The gate remains a threshold. As a threshold, it marks the border of the city, the political border of the community. The Gate of Mercy thus stands for an entrance to the city, to the community, and an end to nomadism (the end, literally, of the Jewish Exodus, and therefore of history). Here this is marked by the possibility of naming Jerusalem: “say, that Jerusalem is.” If Jerusalem is, then we are, are a community, in a place, a city. But if we are, then it is without us: “As if without us we could be we.” The self-­identity of we, the matching of the first “we” with the second “we,” would be the identification of this city. The “us” is still nomadic, in nomadic space, outside, exiled. The definition of we is opposed to the delimitation of us. We can pose a “we” as a future community, as an active first-­person plural, but that means losing “us,” losing “you to you,” losing the opposition that characterizes the polar space of us which the poem delimits. So where does poetry intervene in this polar exile? For Celan, poetic language does not transfigure or render, it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible. True, this is never the working of language itself, language as such, but always of an “I” who speaks for the particular angle of reflection which is his existence and who is concerned with the outlines and orientation. Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.85

Naming means naming from a particular angle, an “orientation.” Naming the real, naming the possible, means searching for—­moving to—­reality. If reality is not simple there, then naming Jerusalem, as the poem does, means naming the space where it might be searched for, the exilic space that is its condition. Naming you means losing you. And so “I lose you to you”: I turn to you turning to you. “We” turns figuratively to “us.” The pole is no longer a single north, a point of astral orientation, but a numerous us, located in a singular, repeated you. “I lose you to you,” and that is the condition of you being there, the way you become insurmountable. Naming you means also losing you to you. You being present means my separation from you. If we take you to designate the other towards which a poem writes, its presence, then the poem is here outlining its “comfort,” what it names, in losing you to you. You are the material-­immaterial of the poem, its presence of loss, what the poem expresses in suffering. There cannot, for Celan, be any we without

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us; and yet poetry proceeds “as if” this could happen, as if there could be subjective experience without any object, as if I did not lose you to you. To say “we” means to speak without us, to say a relation, like the city, which must be imagined without being present. The legibility of you also inscribes your loss, the objectivity—­the indeterminate, the futural objectivity—­that writing thinks but also conceals. These are the terms of the legibility it encodes. As Blanchot puts it, this is neutrality, “testifying to the absence of testimony.”86 Such testimony testifies to poetry’s neutral continuity through its suspended poles, the suspended I and you, their turning meridian. So we read, as elsewhere, On both poles of the cleftrose, legible: your outlawed word. Northtrue. Southbright. An beiden Polen der Kluftrose, lesbar: dein geächtetes Wort. Nordwahr. Südhell.87

The gulf, the cleft (Kluftrose, “Your wound / ​too, Rosa”—­Rosa Luxemburg who came “from / ​the East,” from Poland, Polen) which is where you are becomes legible (lesbar) in this meridian (Southbright) outside legal jurisdiction, outlawed. There are “still songs to be sung beyond / ​mankind.”88 But this is also a neutral, not-­beyond mankind, a present neutrality which aesthetic experience has to think, a no-­man’s land, experience (ex-­perience, ex+perius, “from out of peril, risk”) of exile. You are “to-­  / ​be-­deciphered” and “to-­be  / ​named.” Reading this “you” in Celan means entering a space of mediation, transformation, but also separation, where I lose you to you, where “you” are something else, an image, in a meridian place where images, “tropes and metaphors,” turn “ad absurdum.” Mediation, then, is also a separation, making present, poesis, a conditioning loss. This means reading painfully, as in Adorno and Blanchot, the way that thinking “loses” its object, the way that something only “sounds” in the dialectic by its exclusion. Thinking in this way “out of things” means thinking this painful “you,” in Celan’s poem, as the site where what is thought is concretized through the ways it is lost. That loss is the space which makes naming possible, the exilic site which reserves the possibility of a city as a set of social relations which are impossible in the present—­Jerusalem, here, but also secretly Paris, named by submersion, the insurrectionary space of the insurrection of space by “other matters.” Celan’s “you” occupies a dialectical position, but not positively. The poem constructs a negative space where the positing of a dialectical third (a reader,

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in the lyric geometry of the one who listens in on the poetic address to the other) is not substantiated in the poem, but neither where its absence is sublimely substantiated in a symbol. Rather, a poem, for Celan, bears witness to this exilic space as which, however, it is constituted: the space of its future reading which is the displacement of the poem’s present. That is to say, poetic form depends upon a future legibility which remains only indeterminate in the poem’s present as the possibility of reading which it inscribes. This means that the kinds of materialization poetry might offer are routed through this immateriality of form. The consequences of this for reading Celan are that the presence is both a concretization and “un-­named.” The poem scans the space of this un-­named presence, which we should not read as “nothing” in the poem but rather its substantial loss, the way substance is transformed and mediated poetically by words which name its as yet “undeciphered” presence. That is to say, this poetry presents its materiality as the space where materiality might be, and therefore as dematerialized as much as materialized in its poetic presentation. This materiality must be located in the poem as what interrupts it, just as you, like us, must be said as the interruption of what is present by what is not present. This is not to say nothing but to say “something” as the excluded presence of dialectical thinking, which the poem “sounds.” In the next chapter, I turn to this lost substance and its elegized reading.

Chapter 6

The Figure of Snow Elegiac Reading

For Hélène Cixous, referring to the paronomasia (the punning, the “naming-­ beside”) by which he got to that name from Anschel (Ancel, An-­cel, Cel-­an), Celan is “the poet with the name in reverse.” Celan “called himself contrarily.” Cixous reads him from this point of contradiction. “Only thus are we able to advance, by beginning at the end.”1 This act of reading backwards, of reading from a poetic present to a past it references, is characteristically elegiac, and Celan has been subject to much elegy, critical and poetic. But his poetics seem also to occupy this futural position of elegy: imaging, addressing, and presenting its materials as deleted, erased, lost. Images, the processes of figuration, are central to this poetics. The structure of poetic images—­connecting like things, or finding their identity, through their structural dislocation, an identity which displaces identity into likeness—­describes the structure of elegiac form as itself a contrary naming, naming which does not present what it names. Elegiac form is instructive here not as a form given to absence, but as given to non-­manifestation—­a loss of determinacy, a lost object as in the aesthetic philosophy I have considered, which provokes reading as “something.” Celan’s poetry presents an address to the non-­manifest which provides the futural, non-­determined space for criticism in the sense I have been exploring with Adorno and Blanchot. But this means that criticism becomes actively elegiac to the extent that it participates in elegiac form: in presenting what it loses of its object, in presenting the way its object is lost to its own procedures. And this loss—­tracked repeatedly in this book—­constitutes a critical common, a point of commonality and sharing, in reading as itself a relation. If we are going, as I have been insisting, to read Celan’s poetry not as silent, not as presenting nothing, but rather as presenting the indeterminacy of its own material presence as poetry, then imagining this space of reading as a shared space (rather than the poem as a space where criticism produces its interpretative meanings) will also require a sense of how criticism proceeds by forms that are necessarily indetermined.

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The previous chapter suggested that Celan’s poetry writes “something” which is material on the condition of a process of dematerialization. Writing you—­witnessing, imaging, addressing you—­meant losing you. The chapter further suggested that this presentation of materiality by way of its loss to representation conditioned a form of reading, it limited reading; and this limitation of reading was articulated in Adorno and Blanchot variously as something painful to think and as a condition of thinking itself. My contention here is that reading, at least as far as it is imagined by Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan, functions according to this structure of the image: that it functions by abstracting, dematerializing, and deleting what it reads precisely on the terms by which it mediates what it reads. Understanding poetic form to consist in such a mediation of the world, then, means understanding reading to inhabit limits that it constructs. In this chapter, this will be imagined in the images of snow, glass, and their various abstractions, as points of both materialization and dematerialization, movement and suspension, which configure a legibility as illegibility. These readings are elegiac in the sense that they take as their object of reading something illegible—­just as elegiac poetry pursues not an absent object but the absence of its object, the world after its object, without it. Understanding reading on these terms means thinking in detail the simultaneity—­the same space—­of materiality and immateriality in this poetry, but also in processes of reading themselves. The poem, we shall see, is the inorganic organization of inorganic matter, a “corpse” which criticism addresses as in elegy. This chapter traces this process by staging the encounter between Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan which I have so far only approached circumspectly. I read Adorno and Blanchot as direct readers of Celan, but further as elegists of him, or as thinking an elegiac form through him, indeed through his own elegiac thinking. If Celan’s poetry presents the necessary dematerialization of its object in its representation, or indeed takes as its object something deleted, erased, not manifest, then that essentially elegiac gesture will also characterize as elegiac Adorno’s and Blanchot’s different critical approaches to reading not as the interpretative manifestation of meaning in poetry, but as an approach to what reading, too, loses in reading its object. The elegiac object of literature which will emerge from this reading will, however, be characterized neither by presence nor by absence, but rather as a present limit, a present without presence which preserves the futural, indeed hopeful, temporality of indeterminacy outlined in the previous chapters. The production of an elegiac object in poetry is not only a contradictory activity—­making present what is lost, or presenting that loss, or compensating or symbolizing it—­but an activity which requires us to rethink the terms of reading if we are to imagine anything beyond a self-­defeating attitude of elegy itself. If elegy can only name the present nothing, as Angela Leighton argues in On Form, it assumes itself a “form” of “nothing,” the “nothing” of form.2 Reading “something” elegiacally means scanning the conditions of a

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form of reading that could, indeed, obtain something without such self-­defeat, but neither with the kinds of compensation afforded by a poetic something as a symbolically positive repudiation of loss or a sublimely negative reproduction of loss. Reading something as elegiac means reading the kinds of neutral limit-­material this book has so far been at pains to describe. Reading Celan not only as an elegist, but reading elegiacally means marking the ways his poetry becomes itself an elegiac something: not nothing, but something more like the mere terms of legibility without communication. Elegy, in this final chapter, therefore hopes to crystallize the kind of reading I have been working out through Adorno and Blanchot. “Crystallization” is indeed an operative term here. The point of poetic focus in these readings is snow. To think the materiality of snow in Celan is to think a nonorganic, proliferating, but provisional matter which exists as a point of translation and transition (mediation) rather than substantiation—­or which, indeed, is substantial in its immateriality. For Anne Carson, reading Celan through an “economic” model of poetic production in Simonides is felicitous for my own argument; snow is a symbol of “unloss”: the melting of words into presence in the poem “No more sandart” (“Keine Sandkunst mehr”) is an “art of snow” which “keeps a sense of its own economy. Which Celan emphasizes by paring the last word down gradually . . . to its merest constituent vowels. He permits us to see the name he is giving to reality then to see it melt away into the different whiteness of the page. Time is present in this whiteness as air inside snow.”3 This “economy of the unlost” is a relation of exchange where what is exchanged is lost, but in being exchanged, and lost, becomes visible. Melting into legibility is evocative for my own argument, and I want here to focus on this crystallizing work within the terms of this argument: what legibility, in the material sense outlined here by Carson, as white snow/page, could mark this page as a space of reading? What is the form of this whiteness, this crystallization? This whiteness will preoccupy each of Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan. To argue that “time is present in this whiteness” will mean, for this chapter, considering the inorganic materiality of snow, its form of crystallizing production by loss, as a form of reading. The three sections of this chapter move from Celan as translator and elegist, whose elegiac thinking is articulated by his poetics of imagery, to Adorno as “reader” of the inorganic in Celan, to, finally, Blanchot, in whose reading of Celan we find an encounter with a destabilizing indeterminacy of the form of reading itself.

“Detours from You to You”: Snow and Glass, Figuration and Translation, Elegy and Reading As Carson puts it, “Celan is a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.”4 Connecting translation to writing, in this way, means understanding

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writing to consist in an activity which is essentially figurative: it is both the rendering of something in other terms, and the transplantation of something into a new space. This, indeed, is the characteristic gesture of reading which I have been pursuing: an activity in which a new space emerges. This section considers the ways Celan’s poems imagine legibility to consist in a figurative movement or translation of crystalline spaces—­pages into glass, snow—­that themselves imagine forms of containment and movement. Celan’s poems imagine the terms of a reading to consist of such an inorganic production which, like elegy, like the poem’s own images, would be suspended from and by the poem rather than connected to it. Here we read Celan as elegist and as translator through his images, but also as a writer of reading: an address to something as if it were legible, to be read as if its materiality were, like language, something immaterial at the same time. From a consideration of the ways translation is conceived as a conjunction of figuration and reading (through the terms of aesthetic judgment), I will turn to the ways this conjunction is imagined—­through images and a poetics of imagery—­as a kind of movement. The point here is to think the poems as conditioning such a movement and figuration of their materiality as a suspension, and to think further the ways the poems imagine their legibility to consist in this movement of suspension. “Oversnowed / ​beauty” In his translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet V, Celan finds a rhyme between “snow” and “beauty”: Beauty o’er-­snow’d, and bareness everywhere: Then were not summer’s distillation left A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass

Überschneit die Schönheit. Und Entblösstes allerwegen. Dann, blieb der Sommer nicht als Sommers Geist im Glas zurück, verflüssigt und gefangen5

[Oversnowed beauty. And bareness everywhere. So does summer not remain as summer’s spirit behind glass, liquefied and trapped]

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“Überschneit / ​die Schönheit.” Überschneit, of course, is not quite “snow” but the verb form schneien turned into an adjective: “over-­snowed.” And Schönheit is not any beautiful thing, but abstract “beauty.” The verbal action of snowing is crystallized, suspended, into an adjective describing this displacing activity, like snow, of abstract “beauty.” This is not a literal landscape, then, but a concept that is snowed over. And no snowing, none of what W. S. Graham calls “the real unabstract snow.”6 So what is this snow, layered over this abstraction? The clue is perhaps given in its parallel image, the likewise crystal glass, glass which invisibly traps what it contains. Does snow contain beauty as glass contains summer’s spirit? And does Celan’s translation also contain what it translates? This question is pitched through two different metaphors for containment, for communication, for visibility—­for metaphor itself. Snow buries what it covers, whereas glass transparently displays what it imprisons. But snow that covers beauty covers up something already invisible, not real, abstract. After all, what would beauty be that we could not experience? What kind of judgment could be made (and both Shakespeare’s and Celan’s poems propose this) that there is beauty covered up, not apparent? This would be a negative aesthetic judgment: I attest to what I do not experience. The poem translates the presence of another poem—­moves it from one space to another—­but the presence it thus translates is itself a figure for that movement: glass or snow. We can trace the form of such figuration across this metaphor of a landscape that is exiled, displaced, in being translated. We should recall the different models of territorialization considered in this book, from Kant’s reflective field of judgment, to Adorno’s “no-­man’s land,” to the neutrality of the “not/beyond” for Blanchot. Just as there the spatialization of judgment was also its displacement from space, here the translation of a spatial metaphor (glass or snow) becomes a figure for the terms of its own translation—­in other words, for its reading, its movement from one space to another. This kind of translation as figuration outlines the movement of a form of reading. But the stakes of that reading are not clear. If they are elegiac, then the elegy exchanges loss for loss: its overdetermination of what it loses losing it again. And here this is linked not only with translating, but with aesthetic judgment. To judge beauty means to overdetermine a loss of determination. What is disquieting, here, is that beauty is “o’ersnow’d,” itself a snowy excess. To say something is beautiful is to mark a snowy space beyond what is determinately that something. It is reading as an elegiac activity: the determination of a space beyond determination which is, therefore, not a determinate space at all, the possibility of a different space in the space of the poem. This is the possibility of translation, but also reading: that reading could occupy both the space of the poem and its own space, and that it can occupy that space only by the elegiac articulation of a loss of determination.

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Translating the Future The translation encounter is thus a double encounter, which “o’ersnows” its object in the sense not of reconstituting its presence but of crystallizing it, like snow. To think the temporality of this is to engage with the kinds of suspension of determination, and materiality, that I have been tracing in this book. Much work on Celan’s translations has characterized them as an encounter with the past which configures the poetic present.7 But I would suggest that such translations also respond to the present’s incompletion, and therefore to the future. In translation, a poem’s present is repeatedly displaced from the future because it always supposes the possibility of another translation—­ and of another reading. If poems are translatable, and readable, then they are oriented by this non-­immanent futurity. This is internalized in Celan’s poetics. The poetic construction of “you” through address includes such translations. “You” is encountered in “detours [Umwege] from you to you,”8 detours that take place outside the poem’s present. The complex presentation of “you” in the poetry interrupts any presence in the poem. Yet this interruption also opens the poetry towards a future coordinated by this “you,” this externalization of poetic focus from its own singular utterance into a you—­an externalization which also parallels a transition from inscription to reading, and in which a poem is both a form of inscription and a surface for legibility. The duality of this form centers around the way Celan’s poetics conceive temporality. The “detours” we saw in chapter 5 can in this way be seen within the space of the poetic image itself. The poem, that is to say, imagines the conditions of its reading internally to the form of its images. In imagining a “you,” the poem is also imagining the possibility of its own translation or suspension. To think of the poem as a space means to think simultaneously of a space of inscription and of reading. And this is the space of the image, that Ort seen in chapter 2, in which (to reiterate) these detours are detours of images in which “the poem would be the place where all tropes and metaphors want to be carried ad absurdum.” The point here is to think the stakes of a reading community (as in chapter 2) and a reading object (as in chapter 5) in this space of the image. In The Meridian, the image “reaches” for some other—­or at least wants to, intends to, hopes to. Decisively, the figure is hoped for, a hope for the singularity of presence repeated over and over and therefore never reconciled with any reality. The “next time,” “once again,” of the present of reading is constituted by this hope. In a draft of The Meridian, Celan notes this place differently: “The poem is, also in terms of its semantic meaning, the place of the singular [der Ort des Einmaligen], the irreversible.”9 So while “the present in the poem is the presence of a person,”10 “the poet as person is given to the poem as its share [als Person mitgegeben].”11 The poem shares

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the presence of a poet. It shares in its singularity a repetition of the singular in dialogue with you, the future. This is the repetition of singularity. It does not pass over into something else. Absurdly, the poem must share this incompatibility because any singularity is “irreversible.” Absurdly, we enter the image-­time of repetition ad absurdum precisely because the poem is irreversibly singular. So the poem’s identity is shared. And yet neither pole of this sharing can be fully present in the poem, because the poem remains irreversibly singular. The poem shares the loss of presence in identity. What the poem means is “irreversible,” singular, necessary to the poem; but what it means is the relation it bears presently, of loss, to the “presence of a person.” Meaning does not exceed the poem. Meaning takes place in the poem. That meaning is non-­transcendent: it is bound to the poem’s space, and therefore bound to be lost to the poem because it has no ground to appeal for articulation outside it, even as it is outside it. “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.”12 Presence is added to the poem, the neutral, snow-­like covering which confirms its singularity. Reading is elegiac to the extent that it functions in this mode, not connected but excessive, always en route both to the poem and to the presence it promises. Figurative Present In a radio essay on Osip Mandelstam (whose poetry he extensively translated while working on The Meridian), Celan characterizes language in poetry as “actualization.” In poetry, language is “neither ‘analogy’ nor plain language, but language ‘actualized,’ voiceful and voiceless simultaneously, set free under the sign of an indeed radical individuation which however also remains mindful of the limits imposed on it by language and of the possibilities language has opened up.”13 This characterization is echoed in The Meridian, where this “radical individuation” sets language free, but at the same time “remains mindful of the borders language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.”14 This individuation occurs within the poem, even as it opens up possibilities of thinking outside it. In an image translated by Celan from Mandelstam, a poem is a “message in a bottle,”15 a message whose referent is not yet determined, and remains in the future. It is not, therefore, a figure without referent; it is a figure without-­yet a referent—­of indeterminate terminus. This futural presence of a referent is indeterminate. It is both the presence of writing, of language, and the presence of a referent-­to-­come. Arching between these incommensurable temporalities, the poem measures out a figurative economy. From the containment of snow and glass, we might therefore turn to images of movement. The bow, an image repeated throughout Celan’s poetry, acts as such an image for figuration, spanning the distances between the poem’s present and the presence of another in the poem. The ambiguity of this measurement is apparent in the poem “Lyons,

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Les Archers,” collected in Fadensonnen (1968; Threadsuns). The image of the archer draws on both Celan’s own birth sign as a Sagittarius (as Barbara Wiedemann notes) and, more specifically, on Pindar’s second Olympic ode.16 The bow also recalls Heraclitus’s punning fragment: “The name of the bow is life; its work is death,” biós tō tóxō hónoma bíos érgon de thánatos.17 “Biós” puns between “bow” and “life,” such that life is stretched like a bow into death, its work, and such that the bow’s work is both life and death. This figurative coincidence is repeated in the coincidence of the girl reading Camus’s L’Étranger (Der Fremde), who recalls the poet’s absent wife, to whom the poem is addressed. The poem imagines reading as interruption: the interruption of the strange girl, and the interruption of writing. To confuse the matter, Celan wrote this poem in Paris on October 29–­30, 1965, two days after having returned from a quite nomadic trip around France, ending in Lyon. So the poem stages in recollection a presence that recalls the absence (in the time of the writing-­recollection) of the now present wife, between the life of presentation and the death of negation, between writing’s inscription and reading’s legibility. “You” are drawn, a bow, between the singular and the plural, doubled from “du” to “euch.” you too, with all the instrangedness in you, instrange yourself, deeper, the One string tenses its pain between you, the missing target radiates, bow.

auch du mit allem Eingefremdeten in dir, fremdest dich ein, tiefer, die Eine Sehne spannt ihren Schmerz unter euch, das verschollene Ziel strahlt, Bogen.18

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“Auch du”—­you too are added to the poem (Auch deine / ​Wunde, Rosa). The “bowstring” spans between the singular and plural “you,” marking “you” becoming plural, both girl and wife. The image of the “one” string imagines this doubling presence. The “life” of the image, the addressed but distant wife, is also its work towards “death,” its undoing, in that it can only be alive in distance, in its presented absence. Without this distance, the figure simply is the object which it would instead imagine. It is only “you” in this distance. But in this poem, the coherence of the image of the “One string” is already disturbed by its distribution, as if by arrow flight, towards the other. And this addressed other remains equivocally both and neither the girl and the wife. We might recall Aris Fioretos’s sense of poetry’s promised materiality and promised legibility, as “nothing,” through the “arrowscript” in “Beim Hagelkorn.”19 Like Leighton, Fioretos reads the “promissory” nothing (like an arrow) as a future mark of reading. But reading, here, means constructing the terms of that futurity now—­not least in the image of the girl reading. The loneliness of the poem is this disturbing presence, not nothing. Legibility, figured, is always promised. And so are you, your presence in the poem. The poem’s figuration proposes the material condition by which, in the future, we can read it, by imagining a surface for the inscription of such presence. The stakes invested in reading a poem also lay out its not-­yet historical legibility, a future now where it might emerge into the discourse of critical interpretation; a possible legibility afforded precisely by its resistance to reading now. The legibility of this encounter can only be figured through its present illegibility, its present distance from meaning, which preserves such legibility as a future possibility, reflective and not yet determined. Figurative Presence In this configuration of legibility through its figuration into the poem, there are complex transactions between the poetic inside and outside. Celan insists that the poem could host a particular human presence,20 and yet that presence is futural, not present, “in addition.” It takes the form of the figure, in the sense that its presence is not identical with the presentation of the poem. Celan describes this doubling of the world’s illegibility in poetic language in another poem, “Unreadability [Unlesbarkeit] of this / ​world. Everything doubles.”21 Any readability of the world consists in its “un-­readability,” its “doubling.” Future legibility is preserved in present illegibility, which promises the “additions” of doubling, of the image, of figuration. In this doubling, the poem insists upon the objectivity of what it loses, and doubles it, presents it, in the kind of negative presentation I have been developing in Adorno and Blanchot as aesthetic. And from this, “You [Du], wedged in your deepest, / ​climb out of yourself [entsteigst dir] / ​for ever.” You climb from this doubling. The problem of representation of absence is more complex here than a sublime symbolic non-­representation, nothing.

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Climbing, as in “From the Moorfloor” and “The Poles,” steigen, is here a matter of dialogue—­the terms of relation for saying “we.” Reading is this movement, and the poem imagines the space of this movement as a neutralized space, as in another example of doubling from Schneepart (1971; Snow Part), “Largo”: the pair of blackbirds hangs out near us, under our together up there drifting along white meta-­ stases.

das Amselpaar hängt neben uns, unter unsern gemeinsam droben mit-­ ziehenden weißen Meta-­ stasen.22

A metastasis is a rapid change, but etymologically a rapid change of place, a translation. This transference, however, is figural: our being together (gemeinsam, “common”) is doubled into the “Amselpaar,”23 paired into one word. Not the world, the world “doubled” as in an image, but neither a negatively symbolic recuperation of loss. The transactions of such figuration are vital. And so the poems sing their own incapacity to represent, which means that they mark out the possibility of figuration, its space, a condition of reading. If the poem merely presented the unrepresentable as a negative space outside the poem’s figurative limit, then the poem would vanish, and so too would the possible legibility of that negativity. Illegibility, then, preserves legibility. We read in Celan’s poetry a vexed intrusion of this exterior space into figuration itself through the reflections of doubling. Celan’s poems, as Rochelle Tobias argues, figure spacing itself, in which the “absence of an original leads to the proliferation of figures in the text”24—­and, I would suggest, also leads to the proliferation of readings of the text. This is not the presence of the other in the torn gaps of figuration, it is not, then, the sublime ontologization of this caesura, but a lingering with this gap as describing the limits of presence and presentation itself. This opens up poetics to the political as I have been outlining it, the political which is not a transfigured

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or exchangeable absence or otherness, but a presentation of indeterminacy that is not exchanged, as presence and the present itself, the illegible as figure of this possibility. This is not distant from Adorno’s description of aesthetic “stylization” in his essay “Commitment,” where a certain “artfulness,” to use Celan’s word from The Meridian, transfigures an occurrence in order to invest it with meaning.25 Celan’s simulation contradicts such artifice. In “Commitment,” Adorno repeatedly argues that artworks present the unexchangeable, not the unrepresentable. As outlined in chapter 4, this is utopic: “The minimal promise of happiness which [artworks] contain, which refuses to be traded for any consolation.”26 The artwork is the “determinate negation of empirical reality,”27 the illegible world, which can be distinguished from “the mere positivity of a meaninglessness.”28 Making this distinction is crucial for how we understand the operations of doubling figuration, and of understanding an indeterminacy operative beyond meaninglessness, nothing. But it is also crucial for any aesthetics, and reading, of such figuration. Celan’s figures double the world’s illegibility, rather than disappearing into illegibility themselves. Tobias continues: “The poems push the figures they construct to the point of their collapse, so that they may be revealed as conceits that expose in space the poem’s vulnerability and exposure to time.”29 The exposure of figures to their doubled spacing in the poem exposes that spacing to an internal vulnerability. This exposure is repeated critically in the legibility afforded by those figures. Snow and Glass This unreadable world is presented in the first poem of cycle II in Schneepart. The to-­be-­restuttered world, whose guest I will have been, a name, sweated down the wall, up which a wound licks. Die nachzustotternde Welt, bei der ich zu Gast gewesen sein werde, ein Name, herabgeschwitzt von der Mauer, an der eine Wunde hochleckt.30

The illegibility of the world where everything doubles, whose doubling the poem inhabits, is here a stuttering world, after which the poem stutters, whose stuttering talk of continued involuntary repetition of sounds the poem doubles. Far from constituting a reality, the poem lags behind it, repeats it

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in its own stuttering intervals. We should notice, too, the way the poem collapses other Celanian figures together. The wound (Auch deine / Wunde, Rosa) that reaches up a wall (the wall into which the ram impacts), and also the guest, the hosting snow, the Schneetrost where “I lose you to you” in “Die Pole.” The poem stages the dissolution of its singularity. “I” will have been a “name” in this world, insubstantial, repeatable. “I” am not compatible with this world, which incompatibility “I” witness, stuttering after. The poem’s “I” contradicts the world formally in this incompatibility. The constraints placed on the “I” are witness to a straitened communicability of the world. This displacement is futural. The world is marked in the future, as where “I will have been” a guest. The poem is configured by this future displacement. The I, as a name, dissipates into other possible identities to come, other indeterminate names, you. This displacement is hosted by the poem. The poem presents the world in its displacement by the figural displacements it enacts upon the world, doubling, imagining, writing. We read this displacement in the preceding, eponymous poem of the collection: “Schneepart.” “Snowpart, arched [gebäumt], to the last, / in the updraft, before / the forever dewindowed / huts.”31 Looking, like reading through “de-windowed” glass, means acknowledging a mediating illegibility, Celan’s otherness, as the condition of reading. In this it traces a decoupling of aesthetics from nature by art; for Hans-Michael Speier, the intrusion of the “not human” into the lyric I as something through which “one can no longer see.”32 This “snowy” outside is marked by the missing glass of the windows. There is no transparency, no medium, that could present this world. And yet, we can trace a figurative relation through this disconnection. Glass is a threshold metaphor here between the inside and outside. The snow outside, arched like a tree (gebäumt), is a crystal form that should be repeated by glass, which is also crystalline. Glass, however, is artful, made. Precisely that construction has been removed here, is lost, “dewindowed”—precisely that visibility has been removed. And this acts as a meta-figure for figuration. Transparent communication is not adequate, here, to the stuttering relation between I and the world. So there is a negative relation, a repetition of crystallization: from snow to glass. This repeats the modulation from the outside to the inside. But it is incomplete here. Glass does not give views on the outside. It does not, then, communicate anything but its own incapacity to communicate. But through this incapacity, there is a gap of legibility into which the poem might be read, and into which, therefore, a future and you might enter. It is precisely the nonidentity of each pole of figuration that allows for this entrance. Between snow and glass, then, there is a disconnection, a repetition, and yet also a figuration. The poem opens up to critical legibility not by symbolically presenting what language otherwise negates (through silences, through gaps),33 but by proliferating, crystalline figuration. In this way, in imagining these reflective surfaces, glass, snow, the poem gives form to the legibility it affords.

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“The Passage into the Inorganic”: Adorno, Celan, Nature The terms of legibility imagined by Celan’s poetry in the preceding section consist of images of movement which are simultaneously images of containment and suspension—­snow, glass. This develops a poetics of imagery as imagining the formal conditions of that movement: its spatial and temporal description. These images become sites for such reading in Adorno. But Adorno’s reading also brings out their inorganic form: the ways they imagine connection, development, and the operation of writing itself to consist of inorganic rather than organic structures. Understanding this will mean thinking against the justification of aesthetic judgment by its organic telos, and instead about the artful, nonorganic displacement and translation by poetry. If organic means, in judgment, a connection of the present of judgment to its future by mere reflection, then nonorganic means the reflection without such connection. Thinking in such terms also radically reframes poetry’s own body, which will emerge, in Adorno, as itself an inorganic “something.” White and Green For Adorno, poetry—­Celan’s poetry—­marks the displacement of the natural world, not its symbolic embodiment or reconciliation with language. Writing is structured by the way it does not encounter the world. And, in response to Adorno, this failure is the subject of Celan’s prose piece “Conversation in the Mountains.”34 In the poems I just considered, this figuration was through snow and glass. Here, those figures are abstracted: white and green. Up here the earth has folded over, it’s folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there’s some water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from further, comes from the glaciers, now you could say but you shouldn’t, that that’s the kind of speech that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me—­ because I’m asking, who is it meant for then, the earth, it’s not meant for you, I’m saying, and not for me—­well then, a language with no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It, d’you see, pure They, and nothing but that.35

The earth’s “folding over” of time at the beginning of the passage becomes a folding over of pronouns at the end. This is not a dialogue between individuals—­I or Thou—­but “pure They,” that indeterminate numerousness of others which has repeatedly configured reading’s neutral orientation in this book. This folding, merging, is marked by colors. In water, green and

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white merge. This merging of identity is also a merging of times and spaces. The abstract white is from elsewhere, from some glacier, some glacial distance, some matter. This is a missed conversation in the sense that it depends on a language that traces the past of something, water. In conversation with something, language is not present to itself. Water takes on color provisionally. It is green, but also white: not only is it the illusion of light prismatically splitting from white into color that we call green, but the water was once, in these mountains, glacially white, ice and snow, suspended in crystals, themselves suspensions of the time of their freezing, and will become the organic green of the plants it feeds. Celan’s language articulates this history of abstraction and concretization, dematerialization and materialization. To be able to call water at once green and white would be to name its history: the white glacier which is its origin and the green grass which is its terminus. This language does not refer to a subjective experience, but to the “earth.” Language unfolds, neutrally, in a history incompatible with subjective experience. Missed conversation makes possible language operating outside the temporal parameters of conversation. “Conversation,” that is to say, partakes here of the temporal displacements associated with reading above. In “What Sews,” from Schneepart, there is again this modulation from green to white, again mediation through snow. But we should recall the “ash needle” of chapter 5: that “threading” activity of you is here imagined as a movement by snow, in which the threading needle, like snow, melts. What sews at this voice? On what does this voice sew hither, beyond? The chasms are sworn in on White, from them arose the snowneedle, swallow it

Was näht an dieser Stimme? Woran näht diese Stimme diesseits, jenseits?

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Die Abgründe sind eingeschworen auf Weiß, ihnen entstieg die Schneenadel, schluck sie,36

Voice is here “sewn” “beyond,” in “chasms” or “fissures” (Abgründe). This sewing is traced back from chasms to “White” to “the snowneedle.” A snowneedle, of course, would melt after sewing, disappear, erase its origin. You are asked to swallow this, to become the passage of this snow and this erasure. This snow has sworn, testified for, “white” in the “chasms.” “You” are asked by the poem to internalize, swallow, this witness to displacement, that dematerializing origin in snow, to let it thread/erase through you. This singular modulates into “euch,” “gewährt euch den Durchzug,” “grants you passage through,” you plural are granted passage, threaded by this neutral ground, just as the two you’s split in “Lyons, Les Archers.” Finally, a word with all its green enters itself, transplants itself, follow it

ein Wort, mit all seinem Grün, geht in sich, verpflanzt sich, folg ihm37

The word returns to green from white. Snow is threaded “through you” when you “swallow it”; you are instructed to “follow” the green in its transplantation. This needle-­passage has become a “word,” but the “white” has also translated into “green.” Just as the glacial white passes into green in the water, the snowneedle passes into a tree in a word. But there is no product from this transplantation. This is a self-­transplantation which you are asked merely to follow. In other words, you are displaced by this activity; but by this displacement you have become a kind of witness to displacement. So the work of testimony (swearing on white) at the start of the poem is “sewn” by the poem into you as the displacement of you. And this is figured as the displacement of du into euch, of the singular into the plural. In becoming witness, you become plural. The world is indeed abstracted here into a space of movement which is not growth, only the “ad absurdum” of the image. Reading is here a passage into this displacement of the world by the poem.

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Adorno: “Inorganic” Thinking the inorganic in Celan’s poems means thinking this space in the place of nature. And that means thinking, as Celan does here, the abstraction of nature—­white, green—­as the mode of its articulation. For Adorno, this will mean thinking through poetic images as abstractions. And it will also mean thinking the ways this abstraction is the condition of reading. Reading images will mean entering into a world of abstraction. As we saw in “Commitment,” Adorno is suspicious of the way aesthetic experience can be appropriated for the domination of nature, when the indeterminacy felt in aesthetic experience becomes an absence where meaning can be determinately imposed, the symbolic. For Adorno, art both articulates and contradicts this aesthetic appropriation. The Kantian conception of a teleology of art modeled on that of organisms was rooted in the unity of reason, ultimately in the unity of divine reason as it is manifest in things-­in-­themselves. This idea had to go. . . . The aesthetic concept of teleology has its objectivity in the language of art.38

We can no longer connect the teleological experience of nature with the reflective experience of art, because nature is the site of the multiple displacements of the natural by, first, expropriating capitalism and, second, mythic conceptions of the natural—­both of which, however, derive their form from the kinds of metaphoric and mimetic operations encountered in art. The form of a rational expropriation of nature is granted by figurative mimesis. So while art’s indeterminate reflection might contradict these displacements, such reflection is also complicit with those myths—­of reason or of nature. It is only through the negative dialectic of art that such myths can be contradicted.39 The radical expropriation of aesthetic experience from the subject to the artwork opens the possibility of reversing the subject’s domination of nature. And yet, this reversal remains a negative possibility, not a present one. Art is inextricably bound with reason; its objectification is not just impossible, it is a myth, just as a nature without subjectivity is a myth. “The further real domination of nature progresses, the more painful it becomes for art to admit the necessity of that progress within itself.”40 So that: Art’s affirmative element and the affirmative element of the domination of nature are one in asserting that what was inflicted on nature was all for the good; by re-­enacting it in the realm of the imagination, art makes it its own and becomes a song of triumph. . . . In doing so, art finds itself in inextricable conflict with the idea of the redemption of suppressed nature.41

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Art is objectification, and as such is complicit with the procedures of objectification by which nature is dominated. But in art, this pain is legible as pain (the expression of suffering), and the semblance character of objectivity is visible. The question of the form of legibility, and its construction in poetics, becomes crucial here because it marks the hinge between the occlusions of expression and its possible collaboration with an expression of suffering. Celan’s repositioning of figuration itself, then, can make this hinge legible by exposing the figurative and reflective myths of reason itself. This means that, for Adorno, art’s figurative role in representing nature must be abandoned when nature is exposed as a myth. Its figurative work must become negative. Art thus relinquishes immediacy as a myth, and passes into “the world of imagery.” Art is mimesis of the world of imagery [Bilderwelt] and at the same time its enlightenment through forms of control. The world of imagery, itself thoroughly historical, is done an injustice by the fiction of a world of images that effaces the relations in which people live. . . . Any solution demands the authenticity of a form of experience that does not lay claim to an immediacy it has lost.42

Rather than claim immediacy, this form would lay claim to the loss of immediacy. For Adorno, this is the non-­presenting work of poetry, Celan’s “anorganic aspect”: It yearns neither for nature nor for industry, it is precisely the integration of the latter that leads to poeticization, which was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making peace with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reaction, is no longer able—­if it ever was—­to embody pristine nature or the industry that has scorched it; the impossibility of both is probably the hidden law of aesthetic nonrepresentationalism [Gegenstandlosigkeit, “objectlessness”]. The images of the postindustrial world are those of a corpse.43

Such art imagines the futurity of nature, a postindustrial nature. Imagery cannot mythically restore any forgotten nature (or the myths of unity that come with that), but neither can it imagine the postindustrial world which has negated that mythic capacity to imagine. Imagery, in the present, is impossible, because the organic is impossible. As Paul Ricoeur notes, the figurative structures of metaphor are dependent upon the organic structures of the world.44 The inorganic world is unfigurable. A shift from the organic world to Adorno’s “inorganic landscape” thus also signals a shift in the structure of metaphoric transposition, a changed constitution of images. Reading Celan’s imagery means reading this inorganic space of the image. Images persist

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in imagining this “corpse”: not an impossible image, but a response to the impossibility of imagery. We can reconcile this, I think, with Adorno’s utopianism if we read it through Celan’s presence of the non-­present temporality of the poem. The present that must be imagined is the present that defies all imagining—­which is to say its bringing to presence. Imagination cannot exceed its present impossibility. But the postindustrial situation must be imagined. The utopia, the future of possible imagination, like the poem’s present, is conditioned by impossibility. The image is only possible on this condition: the condition of the corpse, the already negated (and no longer negatable) world. Discussing Celan’s apparently “hermetic” poetry and its relation to social reality,45 Adorno describes this mimetic, imaginative work of representing an inorganic topos. By Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The last rudiments of the organic are liquidated.46

Here the corpse that Adorno says art imagined itself “speaks,” speaks of an inorganic landscape. Stars, points of orientation, are spoken to, but have been spoken apart (dés-­astre). The landscape between this non-­ speaking noise and the spoken-­out stars is inorganic because it cannot be spoken to. This is a non-­dialogue, with a corpse. But, by reversal, the dead address what does not speak. Adorno continues: The language of the lifeless becomes the last possible comfort [Trost] for a death that is deprived of all meaning. The passage into the inorganic is to be followed not only in thematic motifs; rather, the trajectory from horror to silence is to be reconstructed in the hermetic works. . . . Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstraction of the landscape, progressively approximating it to the inorganic.47

We can recall, at the end of this passage, Adorno’s sense of art’s progressive impossibility discussed in chapter 4. The passage, the steps, that language takes in Celan’s work are not towards some reconstructed nature, but towards a reconstructed abstraction of nature. Art here affirms its domination of nature rather than mythically obscuring it. The only exit is not towards an apparently meaningful (but actually exterior, mythical) construction of

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nature, but towards a reconstruction of the painful process by which nature has become imagined as a corpse, the corpse of unity, of meaning; in which depletion, however, the possibility of futurity, of hope, is minimally reserved. Adherence to the displacement of meaning, to its depletion, makes imagery impossible, but reserves in that impossibility the possibility of another way of writing. Just as snow “oversnows” abstract beauty, not any landscape, so the figure “overwords” its own abstraction, not giving any presence except its own figurative abstraction.48

Blanchot: “Unfigurable Universe” Adorno finds in Celan the image or imagining of the world as a corpse: a present-­absent object, indeed, but one whose absence as well as whose presence is configured by the poems that imagine it. The poem is not reconstructing nature from its corpse. The poem reproduces the abstractions of the world and then asks us to read through them. Its mediations are also abstractions. The poetry dematerializes nature, rather than recompensing nature’s abstraction. In this final section, I will trace Blanchot’s own take on the material-­immaterial of poetry as a form of reading, his own reading of the world as images (Bilderwelt) and the world as corpse. Figures behind Glass In Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond, as in Celan’s Schneepart, glass configures a relation to the outside which reverses a subjective capacity to posit a world outside subjectivity, the real. As a form of mediation, then, glass is also a dematerialization. And for Blanchot, too, this configuration exposes the I to an objective plurality with which it is incompatible. On the threshold, coming from the outside perhaps, the two young names like two figures behind the glass about whom we could not say for sure whether they are inside or outside, since no one, except the two figures, who expect everything from us, could say where we are.49

Any location of us is displaced from us, “coming from the outside,” from “two figures” in dialogue. But like Celan’s “de-­windowed / ​huts,” glass is a threshold space here. Figuration becomes a condition of reading, a threshold space which both enjoins and prohibits an image and a reading. Images proliferate, indeterminately. By such proliferation of imagery, in 1966 Michel Foucault described Blanchot’s writing in similar terms: “one is outside the outside, which is never figured, only incessantly hinted at by the whiteness of its absence, the pallor of an abstract memory, or at most by the glint of snow through a window.”50 Yet, we have to be careful of such felicity. If we are to

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think of this proliferation, it has to be through the straitening conditions of interruption by which that proliferation is possible. This means responding to figuration as reflection. “To die: the reflection in the mirror perhaps, the mirroring of an absence of figure.”51 If there is responsiveness, reflection, it is coordinated by this exteriority: the exteriority of nature as a “corpse” that marked Adorno’s reading of nature. This exteriority marks an injunction against hopeful reading, which can be connected with Adorno’s prohibition on the “image” of nature, and with Celan’s figural outside. Blanchot writes: “Do not count on death—­on your own or universal death—­to found anything whatsoever, even the reality of this death. For it is so uncertain and so unreal that it always fades away ahead of time, and with it whatever declares it.”52 This fragment, referring to Celan, first appeared in 1977 and was later published in The Writing of the Disaster. As we saw in chapter 2, Blanchot’s thinking here revolves around the suicide of this “anonymous friend”: Celan, from “The Last to Speak” (1972/1983) to The Step Not Beyond (1973) and The Writing of the Disaster (1980).53 Blanchot was also responding, “after 1971,”54 as Leslie Hill writes, to the “impossibility” and “necessity” of remembering Auschwitz, a double relation made thinkable in the unavowable political relation without relation encountered in May ’68. But this is also a singular response to Celan’s singular death. And yet, Blanchot’s writing on Celan seems to enjoin us, like this fragment, not to make a meaning of death, not to elegize Celan. We should recall Blanchot’s cautioning of the danger that disaster will acquire meaning rather than a body. Responding to Celan means responding to death as impossible, as not present, depleted. Celan’s death demands a response, while precluding its possibility; it asks for a response to the poetry, not the man, it asks for an elegiac reading of the poetry, and withdraws death from experience. How might we respond to death “that fades away ahead of time,” that is “unreal”? Interpreting Celan, elegizing Celan, means translating Celan. And that means responding to the difficulties of translating presence which Celan outlines. Indeed, these difficulties are amplified in this critical elegy as translation. Blanchot responds to two demands: not to transcend what he reads, and yet still to read it in this suspension of transcendence. His injunction is against critical transcendence, against finding in the “image of the corpse” any opportunity to transform that death for meaning. Death recedes, it repeatedly displaces the future from which it approaches; and criticism—­subject to this work of death itself, proceeding by negating what it reads—­must adhere to and imagine this form of recession. The “Snowbed” In writing this elegiac criticism, an “expression of infinitude, expression of nothing” go together, “but without agreement.”55 This is coincidence without

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identity, contradiction. Blanchot maintains the two together, but distinct, against their transcendence. So Celan relates “the final nothingness which nevertheless occupies the same plane (without either preceding or succeeding it), as the expression which comes from the infinite, wherein the infinite gives itself and resounds infinitely.”56 Death interrupts the present, interrupting negation. And the figure interrupts presence, interrupting presentation. This is not, however, nothing, but its space, the “same plane” as nothing, which is infinite. How should we think this infinitely full space of “nothing,” not as nothing, but as a condition of reading? In his more substantial elegiac essay “The Last to Speak,” Blanchot again reads this through snow in Celan’s earlier poem “Schneebett” (“Snowbed”), from Sprachgitter (1959; Speech Grille). The poem’s words scatter through Blanchot’s essay, which offers facing pages of his own translations. The “we” with which the poem ends—­“We were. We are,” “In the passages, passages”57—­is marked out as a critical measure by which the poem is read together with criticism. The fragmentation of imagery marks out this “we” by which, displaced, the poem is read. This is the poem’s snowy work of figuration, reflecting snow: “crystal on crystal,” crystallization repeated, reflecting itself, proliferating. Snow offers a form, internalizes a form, for thinking its repetition in critical reading. It is not just snow but we who fall, “crystal on crystal,” “time-­deep,” “we fall” and then fall again even as we stay, the “snow-­bed” which is “under us” but which also is us, falling through time’s deepening “mesh.” “We” is not only figured by snow; the figuration is the process by which we make a “bed,” a foundation, for ourselves; and this dual role of figuration means it also disrupts itself, so that “we fall and lie there and fall” at the same time. Or not precisely at the same time, but in the repetition of crystal on crystal, falling on falling. “And fall.” This is a relation between “us both.” And the poem finds its poetic repetition, too, in “Die Pole.” The bed where, in that poem, we “lay” together “free,” is like this “snow-­bed,” “crystal on crystal”; the we who fall on that foundation, in this poem, are the we said without us, when “I lose you to you, that / ​is my snowcomfort.” The question remains of how to think this loss of you to you, how to think this future. If we adhere to Blanchot’s warning in The Step Not Beyond “not to hope” that we might find coherence in “writing that disunifies,” then we must understand his attention to poetry as itself a paradoxical intervention against hope and thinking of the future by thought which is itself oriented by futurity. So Blanchot asks: Can one say then that poetic assertion, in Paul Celan (always perhaps distanced from hope as it is distanced from truth—­but always in motion toward both) still leaves something, if not to hope for, then to think about, through brief phrases that suddenly illumine, even after everything has sunk into darkness?58

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The reading circles around this response to assertion of what remains unilluminated, non-­present. For Celan, this is a movement, something that happens over time: the poem immediately moves us towards blindness. Transcendence is turned outside into transgression. “The outside: there where eyes are focused—­eyes detached from the person, eyes one could think are solitary and impersonal.”59 This bodily transgression (eyes without any person to see) is a transgression of conceptual function (and a mimic of Kant’s critical maxim about the limits of conceptual and intuitive knowledge). Eyes turned outside are turned towards this dispersal of function. Turning to the outside has to be imagined from behind this dispersal of imagination: Would speaking be staying behind the bars60—­the bars of a prison—­ through which the freedom on the outside is promised (or refused) . . . or might speaking instead be thinking oneself provided with these bars, which makes one hope there might be something to decipher and, thence, to enclose oneself again in the illusion that meaning or truth might be free, over there, in the landscape where the trace does not deceive? But, just as writing is read in the form of a thing, of the outside of a thing condensing into such or such a thing, not to designate it, but to be written there . . . isn’t the outside also read as a writing, writing without a link, always already outside itself?61

The disconnections of writing reflect back into reading. No longer responding to the “landscape where the trace does not deceive,” reading can, in reading writing, only respond to the disconnections to which it is subjected in this relation. Reading here does not secure the operations by which it can simultaneously construct the truth it finds outside itself (recall here Adorno’s tower of subjectivity, the wall of the real). Writing always displaces presence, and its own first of all. Hope has to be drawn across this gap. In writing, the trace always deceives, always erases itself. But it is also always written in this outside, which for Blanchot is curiously material: writing is “in the form of a thing, of the outside of a thing.” Writing is material, therefore, outside the deception of presence, because it is radically inside its presentation, a form. And in this form of form, it inhabits the hope that language might not deceive by deceiving. The relationship with the outside, never already given, attempt at movement or progress, relationship without attachments and without roots—­this is not just indicated by the empty transcendence of empty eyes, but asserted explicitly by Paul Celan in his prose fragments as his possibility: to speak with things.62

The possibility of speaking with things depends on this outside, this impossible space of identity. We cannot speak of things, only figure speaking with

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them.63 Illumination here fascinates, suspends, what it illumines. This is again a space as a dematerialization of space. “Come, even if it’s nowhere, only there where—­in the fissures-­crevasses of dying—­the incessant light (which does not illumine) fascinates.”64 It is an incessant, repetitive light; a negative landscape which is not just nowhere but the place of “fascination,” of suspension of place. An inorganic landscape, perhaps, of snow, not organized by unity but by fissures of repetition, outside any transcendental surety of unity, but radically inside writing, not transcending it. Not one single rift or fissure, but an indefinite succession—­series—­of crevasses, something that opens up, always already closed again, and not the gaping of the abyss where one would only have to slide into the immense, unfathomable void, but rather those clefts or fissures whose narrow constraint, the narrowness of failing, seizes us, by an impossible breaking through, without allowing us to plummet in a freefall, even if it is eternal: that perhaps is dying, the hard growth in the heart of dying.65

Reading is exposed to this seriality of fissure, a seriality of loss, a seriality of spaces. Reading responds not to death but to dying, to the disconnection from death as an experience. What is experienced in writing is this indeterminate relation to dying, a repeated induction into what escapes and yet demands experience. Unfigurable Universe Blanchot’s outside of language is literature insofar as literature is the real, the world, under figuration.66 Literature mediates the real into a world. “The world” is not the same as the real because the world is already mediated by language. Literature, then, presents another space: it presents mediation itself, the world in figuration. Literature is the movement of what is outside language. It is figurative because its ends are outside the world and therefore outside determination. They do not refer to the real, but to its mediation. But there is no world without mediation. And, in literature, there is therefore no world without figuration: without the uncertain, indeterminate mediation of a real which is necessarily outside that mediation. Such figurative leaps are necessary for experience. Without mediation experience would be impossible. So literature establishes both the possibility of our experience of the world and the impossibility of our encountering it in language. We are compelled, then, to respond to the world in its impossibility. Blanchot calls such a world the “unfigurable Universe (a term henceforth deceptive); a Universe escaping every optical exigency and also escaping consideration of the whole—­essentially non-­finite, disunited, discontinuous.”67 Will humanity, Blanchot asks,

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ever be ready to receive such a thought, a thought that, freeing him from the fascination with unity, for the first time risks summoning him to take the measure of an exteriority that is not divine, of a space entirely in question, and even excluding the possibility of an answer, since every response would necessarily fall anew under the jurisdiction of the figure of figures? . . . That is, finally, is he capable of literature, if literature turns aside and toward [se detourne vers] this absence of a book?

The world outside transcendent security, outside illumination, the world fascinated, suspended in its own non-­transcendence: the world which resists address (resists questioning) as much as figuration. The question of the possibility of literature turns into a question of the possibility of the world as figurable; and so the question of the impossibility of literature turns into a question about the world as unfigurable, and the question of legibility turns into a question of illegibility. If, for Kantian aesthetics, beauty marks the world’s final figurability, even as indeterminate, even as it escapes our understanding, then for Blanchot writing marks the world’s unfigurability, and this marks its escape from legality, its insurrection of substance, its reserve of future indeterminacy. Responding to the world as indeterminate, Blanchot suggests, means transfiguring the subject, changing what we call human, displacing our sense of subjectivity, not reinforcing it. The fate of aesthetic experience, here, is to mark unfigurability, illegibility, but to preserve in that reversal the hopes that conditioned aesthetic judgment: the hopes for relation, for the future. The matter of literature is given in this preserved space of its written dematerialization, with its illegibility the condition of a legible, open, and available future. We can find this kind of material-­immaterial of words in Celan’s poetry and the ways it imagines or images nature, the real, materials like snow or glass of mediation, which finally become words. Reaching through Celan’s poems, serially, we find a serial relation of images that do not meet, or connect, but nonetheless repeat one another. In “Die Pole,” in the compound word “Schneetrost,” snow does not meaningfully add to comfort. They are thought together, in their polarity. Each word reaches for the other, just as “I lose you to you.” “Safety,” “confidence,” “comfort”—­Trost—­are brought together with snow. Snow is to host me, snow is to be my comfort. I am to put myself reflectively into snow, make myself into a snowfigure, a “Schneepart,” “Snowpart,”68 “Lösspuppen,” “Loessdolls,”69 naturally formed stone-­figures that resemble people. Snow, stone, natural forms, inorganic forms, form places to be, but also places of displacement: apparently natural forms that crystallize independently of us, but which draw us together, form places for hosting. In the “world to be stuttered after,” the “to-­be-­restuttered world,” the world whose stuttering the poem imitates and follows, the hosting which words can effect is like the “hosting,” the covering of things by snow. Such

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hosting, like reading, is crystalline, singular, but provisional. Snow is the figure for this legibility. Snow does not meet or disappear into comfort, then, but depletes it in matching it; no snow, no comfort, just a figure for how “I lose you to you.” The words remain outside one another, lost to one another. They are related like a guest to a host in their unfamiliarity and provisionality. Snow is a provisional form. Figures, like snow, hold that provisionality of meaning as their form. The figure, like snow, can hold to the seriality of this repetition in difference because it is formed by provisionality. It is related not to the natural world, but to the world “oversnowed,” to the nonorganic proliferation of the world in its snowy, crystalline form, repeated and serialized in the poem that mimics that snow, that serialization, and not the world, its abstraction, unfigurable. A figure, then, which covers, like “oversnowed / ​ beauty,” the materiality of its own displacement, which is nonetheless felt. This is the aesthetic that does not aestheticize nature, that does not take from nature a form of natural figuration, meaningful formation, but nonetheless relates to what is present as a form of displacement—­and thereby a form of hope: a place where, in my displacement, you might come, a place where the displacements of determinate meaning, of presence, become minimally hopeful sites of my reversal for you.

Conclusion

Legibility at the Limits of Materiality

This book has focused on the conjunction of two sets of ideas in reading poetry. The critical ideas of neutrality, fragmentation, and nonidentity have been read together with the poetic ideas of the image, space or surface, and movement in writing. I have traced the ways Celan’s poetics—­through images of space like the street or window, or of crystalline growth and connection like ash or snow, or abstractions like whiteness—­map onto but also disarrange the forms of reading that would apprehend them. That is to say, I have traced the ways Celan’s poetics image spaces, surfaces, or movements that are like reading. The models of non-­transcendent reading that occupy Adorno’s and Blanchot’s thinking thus enter into a dynamic, formative relation with their material, Celan’s poems. The result of this conjunction, however, has been to reveal the ways those poetic materials, in a strong sense, are indeterminate: dematerialized, immaterial, neutral, non-­manifest. Reading in such a limited space—­the space of aesthetic experience where what appears is not an object but a mere materiality at the limits of experience—­thus means recognizing a stringent limitation to reading. My suggestion is that this limitation is more general than these examples. The restricted grasp of literary materiality there emerges from an aesthetic ground which both enables, and indeed conditions, critical reading, and limits it. The literary object is itself a limit to reading, is in serious ways illegible. The materiality of literature is thus attenuated: far from marking an expansive continuity with other forms of experience of matter, literature presents the dematerialization and deletion of matter, and furthermore, presents this deletion as a condition of matter’s appearance to reading in ways that disarrange the possibilities of conjunction inherent in transcendental form. The experience of literary material’s dematerialization exposes us to a founding disjunction in experience. This should, perhaps, check the ambitions of a materialist criticism that wants to find precisely such continuity between text and context. Referenced matter, like literary materiality, is not something criticism can have or identify in writing because criticism itself proceeds by disunifying. The elegiac extreme of criticism represented here is one which loses the thing it reads in order to read it.

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The complicity of criticism, structurally, with dematerialization seems to me something with which criticism needs to come to terms. But this also reveals another version of materiality in literature. This version, indeterminate, is also futural, its non-­manifestation in the present a space in which a future might be thought without that future being manifest. This material-­ immaterial of language in poetry therefore opens up, as in aesthetics, a space for judgment which is itself a futural space. Rather than a politically motivated criticism finding its object, literature, to present or represent the kinds of politics that criticism seeks positively, it is precisely in this forbearance from the presentation of matter that a political space for thinking opens up: one which can bear both the reality of matter’s non-­appearance—­the appearance of a corpse of politics, its failures or non-­realization—­and can be oriented by a vision of the future, in matter, that is not manifest in the present. It is, to repeat, the forbearance from presentation, this critical reserve, that makes possible a thought of matter that is not included radically in what already exists. Adorno and Blanchot both, I have argued, think the possibilities of such matter, and the materialisms that emerge in their writing—­neutralized, de-­substantiated—­are nonetheless hopeful, and enable a form of criticism. Reading these together has therefore meant developing the reflective ways that Adorno’s and Blanchot’s theories of reading themselves take shape through their encounter with these poetics of writing. The complexity of this encounter consists in the ways both sets of ideas are sets of concepts of mediation. Understanding reading as an encounter between form and matter is not adequate to think this doubling. Instead, form and matter have themselves been posited as concepts of mediation. The result has been an attempt to think across these levels, and to think the space of that connection or articulation. This has meant considering the different spaces of that connection: the political space of community, the material space of the poem as an object among objects, and the critical space of reading itself as a legitimizing but abstract frame for these connections. What emerges from this picture is a theory of reading that is materialist to the extent that it handles and posits the dematerialized substance that is its condition; that is, the condition of that reading being itself a mediation. There are two conclusions to these readings of Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan, which we might abstract aside from the particulars of those readings. First, that the materiality of poetry is available under a concept of form, which that materiality both arranges and disarranges. In this relation, matter is also dematerialized—­a deleted, displaced material. But this makes it dynamic, rather than absent. Rather than “nothing,” we should understand this material-­immaterial of poetry to consist in a movement which produces the limits of its apprehension as the condition of its apprehension. Second, we might now see that the suspension of determination in judgment is itself a condition of appearance for matter, in the sense that this suspension is the space of non-­manifestation, the futural space which is the

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condition of material appearing if we understand material to consist in a dynamic movement. Materiality is preserved by the possibility of its reserve: the possible difference of an object (like art) is the possibility of its material being otherwise, and not only that it be read otherwise or in another context. This can be understood if we understand its materiality to consist in a dynamic but indeterminate presentation. This means that the non-­determination of an object reserves the space of being-­otherwise (rather than the “nothingness of being”) which is the condition of present appearance as a dynamic materiality, a matter that could also be otherwise. In poetry, this means reading occupying something like Celan’s space of the image, the “now” and “once again now” where images turn ad absurdum: reading images not as ending elsewhere, but as spaces of dynamic relation. These two conclusions can be thought together through the relation of reading to its object in poetry. My broadest conclusion is that the objecthood available to literature in reading is not continuous with other kinds of object, and that its tenuous, provisional materiality is constructed through procedures of idealization which underlie criticism. Poetry presents a certain objectivity, and it constitutes an object of apprehension itself. Reading, at least as practiced and theorized by Adorno and Blanchot here, therefore responds to a double demand: both to think the object of the poem as an object, and to think the ways that the poetic object itself mediates things like objects. I have focused here on poetry’s capacity to image the world, and on the resultant world of images which aesthetics grasps. I have also focused on the relational space imagined by this imaging which reading might itself occupy: a space of dynamic mediation, a neutral space, with consequences for what we think of as the limits of communication. The introduction to this book promised to consider the connection between Adorno’s and Blanchot’s theories of reading. But the argument has complicated the idea of that connection by suggesting that they each think the ways critically connecting also means obscuring, indeed deleting, what is connected. Thinking a connection without synthesis—­without dialectical negation and transcendence—­means thinking in a way that suspends the activity of thinking. It is not possible to think, for them, without negation. But that does not mean that one can simply invert the problem and grasp the negative itself. What emerges is a theory of reading painfully attuned to the ways it loses its object—­the way what it thinks is present to thinking as an attenuated, lost object. Thinking through this situation, however, has productively led to developing ways to think systematically with such loss—­with the ways, as Celan puts it, I lose you to you. I began this book by considering elegy, and the ways elegy might be thought an articulation of reading in the sense of apprehending a non-­object, a lost object. I also suggested that reading encounters the same problems as elegy. Just as elegy must deal with its lost object by substitution, compensation, or sublime evacuation (becoming nothing), so reading, in my characterization

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here, might respond to the ways its object does not materialize, to the ways it loses its object, without compensatory practices of materialization—­and do so without that object being nothing. If criticism turns to extra-­literary materiality—­principally historical—­to substantiate its object, then it does so in an act of compensatory substitution for this lack of substance. My attempt here has been instead to think about how we might read the literary object without attempting to locate its substantiality elsewhere, in other models of objecthood. If we can read “something” there, then we might approach the rich, limit-­materiality that runs through poetry which seems otherwise de-­ historicized, aesthetic, or merely lyrical. In my introduction, I considered the concept of form in Adorno, and in a slant reading in Blanchot, through this elegiac scope: “thinking through” the concept of form, for Adorno, without however transcending the object of art, meant thinking through its own reflective investments in form. It seems to me that this critical procedure, too, of reading form is notably elegiac: a practice which takes as its condition the limit of its object, the ways its object—­ art—­ is not totalized by the concept (form) that would understand it. If elegy takes form by this prompting indeterminacy, by this non-­object of address, then so does criticism in Blanchot, or aesthetics in Adorno, when it aims to think through the non-­totalized but still present object of art. As a mode of address, criticism is constituted by the ways its object remains non-­total—­nonidentical, fragmented—­in that address. The condition of criticism is this “something” which is not, however, fully present. This book has worked through this situation as itself a contested site of critical possibility. Now I want to turn to a final elegy in order to think through the consequences of this form of criticism, and in order to reflect again on the non-­object in poetry as an elegized, dematerialized, immaterial something. Celan has been the subject of much Anglophone elegy, which itself poses interesting questions as to how we think about the reception and dispersal of his thinking and poetics in Anglophone 1970s poetry.1 What does it mean to think poetics through a dispersing work of mourning, especially of a poet who I am claiming refuses so stringently to mourn? Robert Duncan’s elegy for Celan works through this problem as its own elegiac condition. Published after a significant gap in publication, a gap in protest against the war in Vietnam from 1968 to 1984, the collection Ground Work I: Before the War has as its second poem one of Duncan’s “Structure of Rime” poems: “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings,”2 in which “Something has wreckt the world I am in,” some disastrous “something” is in the world. However, I think  I have wreckt the world I am in. It is beautiful.

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The poem works through something like the conditions of an aesthetics, as I have understood it in this book, as an account of the conditions for there being something to address which is also, however, nothing in that address, “nothing there.” If there is “something” in the “world,” the poem proposes, then it has “wreckt” the world. “Something” is there, wrecking, as nothing. Something is there that is it.  Must be nothing ultimately no thing.  In the formula derived as I go the something is  Nothing  I know obscured in the proposition of No-­thingness.

The poem addresses the gap of its object, but also claims in a certain sense to occupy it. And the result is dynamic: “in the formula derived / ​as I go” in the world that, to be “something,” must be posited in its “no thingness.” Elegizing Celan here means reading through this world as “something,” and channeling in a sense that singing subject. The resultant “beauty” should make us pause. To say something is “beautiful” is to also say that it “wrecks” the world by being “nothing” in it. To say “something” is to say an excess of nothing, not “no thing” but the “more than” nothing that is “something.” It is nothing that has wreckt the world I am in so that it is beautiful,  Nothing in me being beyond the world I am in something in the world longs for nothing there.

In this final reading, then, we might see some of the futures glimpsed by this aesthetic conception of beauty as a condition for thinking something in the world held out to us by poetic form—­the “structure of rime,” rhyme as indeterminate, nonessential systems of structuring by which words, as mere sounds (Hegel’s materiality of poetry) connect without organic telos. Duncan urges us, here, to think something together with the ways thinking it means making it “nothing there.” Something has happened to the world which means that it is “wreckt,” and yet I am still in it, inside this wreckage. From the inside of this wreckage/world, I know something has happened, but I do not know what; it is a nothing, a blank history. The world is wreckt, and (yet) it is beautiful. Why should Duncan salvage the beautiful, beauty,

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not from the wreckage of the world but as the wreckt world? The world is, but it is also beautiful, and this dissonance of being (the world is not simply there, it is, in excess of being there, beautiful) sounds against the world, wrecks it. The question at the start of the poem—­what is this that has wreckt this world, what is this beautiful world?—­makes way, at the end, to self-­ alienation as the world. “Something is there that is it.” “It is nothing that has / ​wreckt the world I am in so that it is / ​beautiful.” There must be something there, outside, the world, but that something is a nothing in me, in my reflection of it. I empty myself to make room for this something. Except, it turns out, this something is ultimately also nothing, nothing but my making space for something itself. So there is “Nothing in me / ​being / ​beyond the world I am in.” I do not make any world, only the space for world, and that is not beyond me. And that wrecks the world, shatters it, fragments it. I am apart from the something of the world, but I am continuous with it to the extent that I can call it beautiful. Except that the something of the world is itself continuous with a nothing in me, an emptiness by which I am capable of judging it. So my relation to the world, these strange movements, strange transactions between the poetic voice and the world, turn out to be a relation of nothing to nothing, mere reflection. But significantly, this nothing does not simply disappear. Instead, “something / ​in the world longs for / ​nothing there.” Desire, the desire for relation, lingers; indeed, this “longing” is the beautiful, excessive relation to the world that wrecks it, finally. There would simply be a world, but it is beautiful, it does not fit with me, it is wreckt by me precisely because I find it beautiful. The world is beautiful, “it is totally untranslatable.” It cannot be relocated inside me, and I cannot simply be there in it, because of this indeterminacy, because it remains beautiful. Beauty wrecks the world. The propositional relation to the world is interrupted by this wreckage: “the something is Nothing I know / ​obscured in the proposition of No-­ thingness.” The something should be a “nothing I know,” I should be able to make sense of it; but in the poem, this knowing stalls so that the proposition becomes a nothing obscuring another nothing. The proposition of “No-­thingness” is not reconciled with the nothing outside that I know. The proposition can do nothing more than repeat the obscurity of this something as nothing, and I internalize this rather than any substantial world. If what I think is not meaningfully connected with what I know in experience, then the physical world I know is fated merely to repeat the metaphysics of what I think. Ironically, there is no “structure of rime,” no “song” sung from this structure of what I think that could make my experience of the world sing so long as the propositions by which I experience the world are a nothing repeating another nothing. Instead of a world there is wreckage. And, again, this is where beauty becomes decisive. For Kant, of course, beauty salvaged this gap by throwing itself over it, in the aesthetic judgment, as a bridge. But here beauty is what wrecks the relation between me and the world. The

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connection is this wreckage, a wreckt thing related to a wreckt me. So it is “nothing” that “has / ​workt this wreckage of me,” wrecking becoming working, working becoming a kind of wrecking (reckoning) of something into nothing. Beauty does not work to transport us, translate us, back into the world; it wrecks it and salvages itself as beauty from this wreckage. The world “returns / ​to restore me, overcomes its identity in me.” I do not reconcile the world with itself, I open up its internal nonidentity by its nonidentity with me. The world “overcomes,” surmounts, its identity in my own nonidentical relation with it, and that is what we must call beautiful. “Nothing in me / ​being / ​beyond the world I am in / ​something.” Nothing steps beyond this wreckt objectivity, and the poem calls this excess of nothing beautiful. Duncan’s poem reimagines the ground or relational space in which aesthetics functions. And it does so in a way that reprises the conditions outlined in this book. Reading something means reading the ways that something is also nothing, also wrecks the world. My hope is that reading Adorno and Blanchot has made this poem legibly a space for reflecting on those conditions of legibility, and that the something imagined here—­as imagined variously by Celan—­likewise becomes legible. But it is important to note its illegibility, its “total” “untranslatability” in Duncan’s poem. The terms of translation, of movement from figurative space to figurative space, as the movement of reading from the space of the page to the idealized, formal space of the subject in aesthetic judgment, are arrested here. Grasping this arrested movement—­ Celan’s “arresting-­arrested”—­means thinking through conjunction as, for Blanchot, “conjunction-­disjunction.” The political ends of such conjunction are disabling. If we read through a “conjunction-­disjunction” of form, in which matter is legibly material through its dematerialization in that reading, then any political grasp of a determinate political or historical content in such reading should be displaced by the terms of that reading. Reading for political representation would miss this body. Reading as a conjunction means also, in this sense, reading the limits of conjunction: it means being exposed to writing as the disastrous world, the unfigurable universe, the inorganic world as the image of a corpse, because it means imagining that corpse, that abstraction, that nothing as the work of imagining. Blanchot’s demand that we not imagine the disaster to be outside thinking is emphatic here, as is Adorno’s requirement that we not exteriorize the impossibility of thinking something like suffering. But imagining this within the body, imagining the something that is the other body, is also the mark of a utopian promise beyond sublime assimilation or dialectical synthesis, precisely by being not beyond it.

Abbreviations

AT

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004); Ästhetische Theorie, GS 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003).

BIT

Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

CPJ

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

CPR

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

HA

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).

IC

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

ND

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973); Negative Dialektik, GS 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003).

SNB

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

WD

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).

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Note on References and Translations

All references to both a translation and an original are included, with the first number referring to the translation page number and the second to the original page number in brackets. References to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason include the A/B version from the Academy edition. References to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment are to the Academy edition. Boldface emphasis in the original is replaced by italics. References to Adorno are to the Suhrkamp Verlag Gesammelte Schriften in twenty volumes. References to Blanchot are to the original Gallimard editions. I have amended Ashton’s translation of Negative Dialektik throughout, and marked where I have amended other translations. All translations without reference to an English edition are my own.



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Notes

Introduction 1. Celan, BIT 76–­77, 78–­79. 2. See Peter Szondi’s classic reading of “Eden” as a meditation on Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s murder, in Celan Studies, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Harvey Mendelsohn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 83–­96. 3. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., trans. Walter Kaufman (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1970); see Kaufman at 35, Buber at 55. 4. Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 2002), 152, 153. 5.  Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 19. 6. Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, trans. George Shriver (London: Verso, 2011), 1069. 7. Luxemburg, Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 1070. 8. Luxemburg, Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 1069. 9. We shall return to the vexed translation of this important word later. 10. A missing heritage drawn upon repeatedly, in Celan’s poetry, by the image of the horn, the buffaloes’ “hornslight.” 11. Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), 198. 12. Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 182. 13. Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 170. 14. Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 191. 15. Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 192. 16. “Cause and effect here continually change places” in revolution (Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 195). 17. Rosa Luxemburg, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1, ed. Peter Hudis, trans. David Fernbach, Joseph Fracchia, and George Shriver (London: Verso, 2013), 437. 18. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 39. 19. Jacqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 43. 20. As Simon Jarvis argues in “What Is Speculative Thinking?” Revue International de Philosophie 227 (2004): 69–­83, with reference to Adorno, this opens the way to thought’s speculative embodiment. “A thought which did not wish for anything would not be like anything, would not be a thought. The bodily, because it is at the ‘core’ of thinking, in its ‘innermost cell,’ is what allows thinking to interpret, without subsuming, the non-­identical. Thinking’s debt to the

203

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Notes to Pages 9–15

body allows it to own its debt to the object.” Thinking thought’s debt to its material means thinking speculatively against the negation which constitutes thought. This paradoxical activity makes thought possible, however, through the negative realization that thought does not merely embody itself, but is already embodied. 21. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–­1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 248. 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’ ” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919–­1046; see also Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 23. Kevin McLaughlin, Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 23. 24. McLaughlin, Poetic Force, xiv. 25. Christoph Menke, Law and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 26. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 30–­33. 27. Denis Thouard, Pourquoi ce poète? Le Celan des philosophes (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2016). 28. James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–­1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), offers the most extensive account of this relation. 29. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 1990). 30. Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2003). 31. Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 32. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 33. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 189. 34. Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154. 35. Eckart Förster, The Twenty-­Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 140–­49, 223–­27; Eckart Förster, “The Significance of §§76 and 77 of The Critique of the Power of Judgment for the Development of Post-­Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30, no. 2 (2009): 197–­217; and Eckart Förster, “The Significance of §§76–­77 of the Critique of Judgment for the Development of Post-­Kantian Philosophy (Part 2),” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 31, no. 2 (2010): 323–­47. 36. Galin Tihanov, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 37. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 58–­59. 38. North, Literary Criticism, 134.

Notes to Pages 15–19

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39. North, Literary Criticism, 116; see also 103. 40. Indeed, it is one way to think Michael Clune’s problem of aesthetics, with reference to North, as negotiating between incompatible claims to equality and to value. Michael W. Clune, “Judgment and Equality,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 4 (2019): 910–­34, 930. 41. Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (New York: Continuum, 2012), 9. 42. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 2–­5. 43. Emmanuelle Ravel, Maurice Blanchot et l’art au XXème siècle: Une esthétique du désoeuvrement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 148 (my trans.). 44. Vivian Lyska, “Two Sirens Singing: Literature as Contestation in Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno,” in The Power of Contestation, ed. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 80–­100, 98. 45. William S. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 73. 46. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity, 81. 47. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity, 193. 48. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 174. Drawing upon Bruno Latour as a model, see his “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–­48. 49. Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–­91, 375. This conception of close reading does not necessarily contrast the distant formalism of Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees (London: Verso, 2005), which advocates “a materialist theory of form” (92) as to take “a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations” (90)—­a history, then. 50. Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 650–­69, 661, 664. 51. Caroline Levine, Forms: Wholes, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. 52. Paul Hamilton, Historicism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 132. 53. Robert S. Lehman, “Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment,” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (2017): 245–­63. 54. Josh Robinson, Adorno’s Poetics of Form (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018), 142. 55. Gerhard Richter, Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 31. 56. As Michael Holland argues, one problem here is that “Blanchot’s work is currently cut off from history—­its own first of all, but also that of twentieth-­ century Europe, in which it is so deeply embedded,” Holland, “État Présent: ‘Maurice Blanchot,’ ” French Studies 58, no. 4 (2004): 533–­38, 537. 57. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20. 58. This essay is collected in Marjorie Levinson, Thinking through Poetry: Field Reports on the Romantic Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), together with this framing theory of form: 153, 2.

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Notes to Pages 19–22

59. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–­43, 9, 1–­2. In this volume see especially Pheng Cheah, “Non-­Dialectical Materialism,” 70–­91, for a different account of this “force” of matter in disarranging materialist synthesis; and Jason Edwards, “The Materialism of Historical Materialism,” 281–­98, for a non-­normative dialectics of historical materialism as describing a kind of “horizontal” organization. See also Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5, 131, and 210 for an account of this “forceful” outside of matter. 60. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 131. 61. Grosz, The Incorporeal, 210. 62. Adorno, AT 187 [213]. 63. Adorno, AT 187 [213]. 64. Blanchot, IC, xi. 65. Blanchot, IC, xii. 66. Blanchot, IC, xii. 67. Thouard, Pourquoi ce poète? 68. Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014). 69. See Dennis J. Schmidt, “Black Milk and Blue: Celan and Heidegger on Pain and Language,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 110–­29, for whom Celan was “drawn’ ”to Heidegger’s “kindred sensibility” (123). Classic works on the Heideggerian connection include Otto Pöggeler, Spur des Worts: Zur Lyrik Paul Celans (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1986), which elaborates this Heideggerian position, but also possible connections with Adorno’s “critique” of criticism. Peter Szondi’s Celan Studies is most helpful in developing this post-­Heideggerian critical vocabulary, indicating the relation of Celan’s poetics to real referents not by Heideggerian presencing but by “crystallization” (85–­89), a “formal” historicization of that reference by its poetic actualization—­ideas which will become clear in my own readings. Here we might also read Hans-­Georg Gadamer’s typically anti-­historicist historicizations of reading after Heidegger in Celan’s images—­snow, for example—­in Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Where Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). This is strained due not least to Celan’s Jewishness, on which see especially John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), and the necessity of naming but not profaning “what happened” (153). 70.  Lacoue-­Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 33. 71. Badiou, The Age of the Poets, 144. 72. See again Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. 73. Christopher Fynsk, “The Realities at Stake in a Poem: Celan’s Bremen and Darmstadt Addresses,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 159–­84. 74. David Nowell Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). On this, see also Charles

Notes to Pages 22–30

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Bambach, Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013), 213–­18. 75. Aris Fioretos, “Nothing: History and Materiality in Celan,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 295–­341, 300. Chapter 1 1. See again Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, which details the French inheritance of Hegel via Kojève and Hyppolite, and in which context of French Hegelianism and anti-­Hegelianism Blanchot’s thinking is anti-­ teleological on the level of the concept as well as dialectic (19–­21, 71). 2. Bruce Bridgeman, Derek Hendry, and Lawrence Stark, “Failure to Detect Displacements of the Visual World during Saccadic Eye Movements,” Vision Research 15, no. 6 (1975): 719–­ 22; B. W. Tatler and T. Trościano, “A Rare Glimpse of the Eye in Motion,” Perception 31, no. 11 (2002): 1403–­6. 3. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History 3, no. 2 (1972): 279–­99, 284. 4. Iser, “The Reading Process,” 280. 5. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 6. Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2, 265. 7. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 18, 207. 8. Susan J. Wolfson, “Form,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Ronald Greene et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 497–­99, 499. 9. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 83. 10. This argument is put forward in different terms by Christoph Menke in his reading of pre-­Kantian aesthetics, principally in Herder, as presenting a “force” which both underwrites the aesthetic subjective faculties by which the sensible is understood, and transforms it, is not identical with it. Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology, trans. Gerrit Jackson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 36. 11. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 89. 12. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 83. 13. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 128. 14. Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3; on de Man and irrealization, see 67–­ 71; on realism, see 160. On “inscrutability” and “obscurity,” see Daniel Tiffany, “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 72–­98. 15. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 90. 16. See Andrzej Warminksi, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), for a continuation of this rhetoric of materialism. 17. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 128.

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Notes to Pages 30–41

18. Lehman, “Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment.” 19. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 31. 20. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 32. 21. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 166. 22. de Man, Blindness and Insight, 177–­79. 23. Lytle Shaw, “Framing the Lyric,” American Literary History 28, no. 2 (2016): 403–­13; and Shaw, “lowercase theory and the site specific turn,” ASAP 2, no. 3 (2017): 653–­73. 24. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge, 1975), 162. 25. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 226. 26. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 227; an idea he first proposed in “Apostrophe,” Diacritics 7, no. 4 (1977): 59–­69. 27. Levinson, Thinking through Poetry, 248. 28. Levinson, Thinking through Poetry, 248. 29. Levinson, Thinking through Poetry, 2. 30. Levinson, Thinking through Poetry, 276. 31. Kant, CPJ 75 [5:189]. 32. Kant, CPR 366; A260 [B316]. 33. Kant, CPJ 27 [20:225]; see also 102–­3 [5:216–­17]. 34. Michel Chaouli, Thinking with Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), xv, 11, 174. 35. Kant, CPJ 26 [20:223]; see also 67 [5:179–­80]. 36. Kant, CPJ 192 [5:314]. 37. Kant, CPJ 81 [5:195]. 38. For an account of this conceptual ambiguity, see Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 86–­124. 39. Kant, CPJ 63 [5:175–­76]. 40. Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the “Critique of Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. 41. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty, 5. 42. Kant, CPJ 193 [5:315]. 43. Kant, CPJ 26 [20:224]. 44. Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13–­18. 45. Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 46. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35–­36, 85–­86. 47. See Eli Friedlander for an account of how aesthetic judgment works without producing a concept: Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 79–­82. 48. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 5. 49. Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 87–­88. 50. Ginsborg, Normativity of Nature, 88. 51. Ginsborg, Normativity of Nature, 89. 52. Ginsborg, Normativity of Nature, 93.

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53. Robert Brandom, “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism—­and Back,” in Kant und Die Philosophie in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Kant-­Kongresses 2010, ed. Margit Ruffing, Claudio La Rocca, Alfredo Ferrarin, and Stefano Bacin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 107–­26. 54. Kant, CPR A277–­78 [B333–­34]. 55. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History, and Education ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 344 [7:240]. 56. Rae Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139. 57. Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 225. 58. Allais, Manifest Reality, 227. 59. Hegel, HA 11. 60. This is an idea, indeed, which is articulated in G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Greek statues are seen now as “only stones from which the living soul has flown” (455) because of “the inwardizing in us of the Spirit which in them was still [only] outwardly manifested” (456). 61. Hegel, HA 4. 62. Hegel, HA 102. 63. See Robert B. Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (2002): 1–­24, for a discussion of Hegel’s relevance, again, to art “after” the end of art, specifically when its “figurative” work is overtaken—­after its figurative work of correspondence. 64. Hegel, HA 112. 65. Hegel, HA 38. 66. Hegel, HA 153–­54. 67. Hegel, HA 97–­100; see also “Absolute Knowing” in Phenomenology of Spirit, and The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), where Hegel distinguishes between “immediate” being (which in the aesthetic is associated with aesthetic experience) and the “essence” which is not beyond being, but mediated being (337). Nature’s immediacies are only true, “essential,” when mediated by spirit; a process which art leaves incomplete because it is tied to the appearance of the “immediate.” 68. Hegel, HA 20: “the inner shines in the outer and makes itself known through the outer, since the outer points away from itself to the inner”; and in beautiful organisms, too, there is this structural relation between inside and outside: human skin, for example, discloses “this swelling life,” even though merely functional: “skin itself, which permits the inner life to shine through it, is an external covering for self-­preservation, merely a purposeful means in the service of nature’s ends” (146). 69. Hegel, HA 8. 70. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 468, on art’s “Darstellung” compared with religion’s “Vorstellung.” Art is indefinite presentation. In its faithfulness, it is almost elegiac, in ways I will elaborate in the final chapter. “The work of art renders something, is faithful to something. But what it is faithful to it does not describe” (472).

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Notes to Pages 46–49

71. Hegel, HA 103: “the ‘after’ of art consists in the fact that there dwells in the spirit the need to satisfy itself solely in its own inner self as the true form for truth to take.” 72. Hegel, HA 10. 73. Hegel, HA 11. 74. Hegel, HA 2. 75. Adorno, AT 1. 76. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), argues that art as a history has come to an end, because its representational practices are now liberated; see also Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel and the ‘End’ of Art,” The Owl of Minerva 29, no. 1 (1997): 1–­21, for an alternative, more Hegelian reading. See also Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), who argues that Hegel’s historicization of beauty gives us a way to read modern painting’s own negotiations with history: the “problem” of beauty’s significance, worked out in painting, makes legible problems of social intelligibility. 77. Adorno, AT 1. 78. Hegel, HA 60. 79. Hegel, HA 36–­37: “He leaves it free as an object to exist on its own account; he relates himself to it without desire, as to an object which is for the contemplative side of spirit alone.” 80. See Patrick Gardiner, “Kant and Hegel on Aesthetics,” in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, ed. Stephen Priest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 161–­71; and Paul Guyer, “Hegel on Kant’s Aesthetics: Necessity and Contingency in Beauty and Art,” in Hegel und die “Kritik der Urteilskraft,” ed. H.-­F. Fulda and R.-­P. Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1990), 81–­99, for an account of this shift from nature to art, and of Hegel’s development of the transient “necessity” of art. 81. Hegel, HA 2. 82. Julia Peters, Hegel on Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2014). 83. Adorno, AT 341 [391]. 84. Adorno, AT 272 [309]. 85. Adorno, AT 273 [310]. 86. Adorno, ND 3 [15]. 87. Molly MacDonald, Hegel and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2014), 107. MacDonald indexes this through Freud, but it can equally be read through Levinas, Derrida, and Blanchot, and their different senses of the dialectical trace. 88. Furthermore, “in the presence of something other, I become other,” and in the work of literature, the production of writing, “the book . . . is precisely myself become other” (314). “Literature learns that it cannot go beyond itself toward its own end,” that “what asserts itself now is the very possibility of signifying, the empty power of bestowing meaning—­a strange impersonal light” (329). In the place of negation, then, literature asserts a negative indeterminacy that cannot posit an end. See Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). I want to trace this “not beyond” of literature in the later fragmentary writing as it responds to Kant’s indeterminate aesthetic. But see also

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Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), and his reflections on the way that writing marks death as both the possibility of negation (and therefore experience) and the impossibility of experiencing such negation. Is writing, dying, Blanchot asks, the experience of “radical reversal, where he dies but cannot die, where death delivers him to the impossibility of dying?” (100). 89. Blanchot, SNB 1 [8]. 90. Blanchot, IC 384 [563] (trans. amended). 91. Blanchot, SNB 2 [8]. 92. Hegel, HA 54: “Spiritual culture, the modern intellect, produces this opposition in man which makes him an amphibious animal, because he now has to live in two worlds which contradict one another. The result is that now consciousness wanders about in this contradiction, and, driven from one side to the other, cannot find satisfaction for itself in either the one or the other.” 93. Hegel, HA 54–­55. 94. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 76, 77. Chapter 2 1. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63. 2. Kant, CPJ 104 [5:219]. 3. Kant, CPJ 175 [5:295]. 4. Kant, CPJ 101 [5:216]. 5. Kant, CPJ 173 [5:293]. 6. Kant, CPJ 174 [5:294]. 7. The judger “does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of satisfaction because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them” (Kant, CPJ 98 [5:212]). 8. Arendt, Lectures, 63. 9. Arendt, Lectures, 73–­74. 10. Arendt, Lectures, 58. 11. Arendt, Lectures, 43. 12. Arendt, Lectures, 74. 13. Arendt, Lectures, 72. 14. Paul Hamilton, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. 15. Hamilton, Realpoetik, 74–­75. 16. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 13. 17. Christoph Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 175 (my trans.). 18. Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst, 172. 19. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 277. 20. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 183. A complementary account is given by Julian Bourg in From Revolution to Ethics (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2007), who, through a reading of Deleuze that parallels this history, argues that ’68 grounded

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Notes to Pages 58–67

an orientation to “ethics” in the social sciences of the 1970s. But the problems of political consensus which emerged after ’68 are also problems in historiography. 21. Henri Meschonnic, Pour sortir du postmoderne (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 2009), 107. And, if the “myth of May ’68 remains contemporary, it is because the problems that myth cover remain contemporary, too” (114). 22. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4; for Schmitt the “state remains, whereas the law recedes” (12). 23. Todd Sheppard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 83. 24. Sheppard, Invention of Decolonization, 95–­97. And this repeats a deeper bifurcation surrounding left and right partisanship with regard to the war. 25. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: NLB, 1976): the aesthetic “recasts historical contradictions into ideologically resolvable form” (114). 26. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 85–­90, 113–­24. 27. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 73–­74. 28. Schmitt, Political Theology, 14. 29. We can think here as much of Adorno’s concern to distinguish the truth content that is dialectically operative through the complex of form and material in the artwork against meaningful subjective intention, whereby intentions are objectively as well as subjectively situated (AT, 196–­99 [223–­27]), as we can of the broader strokes of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) and Blanchot’s concerted separation of the writer from the written in The Space of Literature, and “Literature and the Right to Death” in the 1950s. 30. Robert Kaufman, “Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 682–­724, 724. 31. Robinson, Adorno’s Poetics of Form, 142. 32. Richter, Thinking with Adorno, 65. 33. Kant, CPJ 67 [5:180]. 34. Kant, CPJ 173 [5:293]. 35. Kant, CPJ 123 [5:239]. 36. “Any relation of representations, however, even that of sensations, can be objective . . . ; but not the relation to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (Kant, CPJ 89 [5:203]). 37. Kant, CPJ 95 [5:209]. 38. Kant, CPJ 97 [5:211]. 39. Adorno, AT 12 [22]. 40. Adorno, AT 450 [527]. 41. Adorno, AT 296 [335]. 42. Adorno, AT 71 [87]. 43. Adorno, AT 273 [310]. 44. Kant, CPJ 62 [5:175]. 45. Kant, CPJ 61–­62 [5:174]. 46. Kant, CPJ 63 [5:175]. 47. Kant, CPJ 63 [5:176]. 48. Kant, CPJ 63 [5:175]. 49. Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959), ed. and trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 21, 22.

Notes to Pages 68–74

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50. Theodor Adorno, Kulturkritic und Gesellschaft, GS 10.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 305. 51. Adorno, AT 28 [40]. 52. Adorno, AT 285 [324–­25]. 53. Adorno, AT 132 [199–­200]. 54. Isabelle Ullern and Pierre Gizel, eds., Penser en commun? Un “rapport sans rapport” (Paris: Beauchesne, 2015), consider Blanchot through Jean-­Luc Nancy and Sarah Kofman in ways which usefully situate this conversation in its contemporary French thinking. 55. Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings: 1953–­1993, ed. and trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 85. 56. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 169. Bruns usefully connects this foreignness to the “ontology” of the work of art, though I want to consider it as a relational condition of form—­space itself. 57. Reproduced in Jean-­Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 61 (my trans.). See also Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Disavowed Community, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 58. Michel Surya, “L’Autre Blanchot,” Lignes 43 (2014): 7–­62, 44 (my trans.) 59. David Amar, “D’une politique impossible,” Lignes 43 (2014): 140–­52, 141 (my trans.). Surya and Amar argue much like Jeffrey Mehlman, in Legacies of Anti-­Semitism in France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), that Blanchot’s work is formally antisemitic. Leslie Hill, in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (Oxford: Routledge, 1997), however, argues that accusations of fascism, in turn, risk “entirely misrepresenting the politics of radical dissidence Blanchot attempts to put forward” (40–­41). See Michael Holland, “N’en déplaize. (Pour une pensée conséquente),” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 3 (2014): 149–­62, for another critique of Surya’s arguments. 60. Blanchot, IC 45. 61. Blanchot, SNB 130 [169]. 62. See Leslie Hill, “ ‘Not In Our Name’: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 141–­59. See also Hannes Opelz, “The Political Share of Literature: Maurice Blanchot, 1931–­1937,” Paragraph 33, no. 1 (2010): 70–­89, for an account of how in the 1930s Blanchot moved towards situating the political as a negation of empirical experience, which set the ground for the later turn I am concerned with towards the non-­negated negative as a political relation. 63. Martin Crowley, ‘Even Now, Now, Very Now,” in Blanchot romantique, ed. John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 247–­62, 248. 64. Blanchot, Political Writings, 15. 65. Blanchot, Political Writings, 29. 66. Blanchot, Political Writings, 18. 67. Blanchot, Political Writings, 79. 68. Blanchot, Political Writings, 86. 69. Blanchot, Political Writings, 87. 70. Blanchot, Political Writings, 85. 71. Blanchot, IC xii [VII–­VIII]. 72. Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 473.

214

Notes to Pages 74–80

73. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 474. 74. In this year France prepared for the first time to elect its head of state by universal suffrage; see Hill, “ ‘Not In Our Name,’ ” 147–­48, which describes the ruptural mood of equivocation then between legal progress and illegitimate coup d’état. Hill suggests that Blanchot’s politics in this essay are “not simply a matter of replacing a political discourse with a literary one. . . . It was to testify to a radically different relationship to the law. . . . what spoke now . . . was something other; it was the loquacious, neutral silence of the absence of all laws . . . law as the neutral suspension of all laws” (148). As I have been arguing, writing is here characterized as a discursive displacement, and not a discursive replacement, of a suspension of law. 75. Blanchot, IC 222 [330]. 76. Blanchot, IC 226 [336]. 77. Blanchot, IC 48 [68–­69]. 78.  Jean-­Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, trans. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire, and Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. 79. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 343 [7:240]. 80. Kant, CPJ 116 [5:231]. 81. Kant, CPJ 116 [5:232]. 82. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988), 29–­30. 83. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 30. 84. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 45. 85. Marguerite Duras, La Maladie de la mort (Paris: Minuit, 1983), where love (with l’amour the hidden rhyme to “la mort”) is a dissymmetrical relation: “You look at this form, you discover there at the same time an infernal power, abominable fragility, weakness, the invincible force of weakness without equal” (30; my trans.). In reading that récit, Blanchot establishes a critical relationship with the book that doubles the weakness of the lovers’ relationship in its own reading. 86. Duras, La Maladie, 20. 87. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 3. 88. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, 6. 89. Étienne Balibar, “Blanchot l’insoumis,” in Blanchot dans son siècle, ed. Monique Antelme et al. (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), 288–­314. 90. Maurice Blanchot, “ ‘Two Letters to J.-­B. Pontalis,” trans. Leslie Hill, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 23–­25, 24. 91. Blanchot, SNB 130 [169]. 92. Blanchot, SNB 129 [176]. 93. Blanchot, IC 384 [563] (trans. amended). 94. Blanchot, SNB 119 [163]. 95. Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 213. 96. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 30. 97. Blanchot, SNB 91–­92 [127]. 98. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 502–­4. 99. Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 503. 100. Kofman, Smothered Words, 7; see also 76.

Notes to Pages 80–93

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101. Adorno, ND 367 [358]. 102. Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—­Drafts—­Materials, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 10. 103. Paul Celan and Gisèle Celan-­Lestrange, Correspondance (1951–­1970), 2 vols., ed. Bertrand Badiou (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 294 [§267] (my trans.). 104. On Celan’s development of a poetics of images in relation to cinema—­ and this film—­see Jacob McGuinn, “ ‘Into without Image’: Paul Celan Reading the Moving Image,” Modern Language Notes 136, no. 5 (2021): 1237–­60. 105. Celan, BIT 372, 373. 106. Werner Hamacher, “HÄM: Ein Gedicht Celans mit Motiven Benjamins,” in Judisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès, ed. Jens Mattern, Gabriel Motzkin, and Shimon Sandbank (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk, 2000), 173–­97, 173 (my trans.). 107. Hamacher, “HÄM,” 177. 108. Hamacher, “HÄM,” 178. 109. Kant, CPJ 182 [5:303]. 110. Adorno, ND 361 [352]. 111. Celan, BIT 220, 221. 112. Celan, BIT 352–­54, 353–­55. 113. Celan, The Meridian, 3. 114. Celan, BIT n.590. Chapter 3 1. Blanchot, IC 77–­78. 2. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 63. 3. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 123. 4. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 185–­86. 5. Leslie Hill, Radical Indecision (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 203–­4. 6. Fynsk, Last Steps, 3. 7. Fynsk, Last Steps, 170. 8. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 300. 9. Blanchot, WD 41 [71]. 10. Blanchot, WD 30 [53]. 11. For work on this period, see Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary; and Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity. 12. Blanchot, IC 48 [68–­69]. 13. Blanchot, WD 75 [121]. 14. Blanchot, WD 40 [68–­69]. 15. Blanchot, WD 29 [50]. 16. Kant, CPR 175 [A24; B37]. 17. Kant, CPR 180 [A33; B49–­50]. 18. Kant, CPR 385 [A294–­95; B350–­51]. 19. Blanchot, IC 26 [37]—­“L’espace de neige évoque l’espace de l’erreur”—­a formal coincidence between snow and error which will become operative in chapter 6.

216

Notes to Pages 93–102

20. Blanchot, SNB 71 [100]. 21. Blanchot, WD 220 [146]. 22. Blanchot, WD 206 [136]. 23. Blanchot, WD 55 [92] (trans. modified). 24. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 236. 25. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997), 58. 26. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 69. 27. Blanchot, SNB 33 [49]. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 134. 29. See Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity, 137–­38, for an account of Blanchot’s interruptions of ontology, also in reference to Levinas. 30. Blanchot, SNB 42 [61]. 31. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 64–­65. 32. Blanchot, IC 209 [310]. 33. Blanchot, IC 158 [237]. 34. In a taxonomy of its various iterations in The Step Not Beyond, Hill shows that the concept always plays at the border of conceptuality, weakening its authority rather than imposing it. Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 186–­90. 35. Blanchot, WD 78 [125]. 36. Blanchot, WD 120 [184]. 37. Bertrand Renaud, “Le Passif de mort ou l’éthique à l’impossible: Sur L’Écriture du désastre,” in Maurice Blanchot et la philosophie, ed. Éric Hoppenot and Alain Milon (Paris: Presses Universitaire de Paris Ouest, 2010), 259–­77. 38. Blanchot, WD 7 [17]. 39. Blanchot, WD 139 [211]. 40. Kevin Hart, “From the Star to the Disaster,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 84–­103, 92. 41. Hart, “From the Star,” 92. 42. Hart, “From the Star,” 95–­96. 43. Here, as with my reading of Adorno in chapter 4, I do not want to dismiss or diminish the importance of that event for shaping all the texts I am reading, which it certainly did decisively; indeed, any reading of Celan that did not take the Holocaust into account would be shamelessly violent, careless of history. However, I think that this makes it all the more important to take Blanchot at his word here, as we will Adorno on the “impossibility” of lyric poetry after Auschwitz. The decisive, singular importance of the Holocaust requires us not to treat it as singular in a sublime sense, as some evental interruption which we can single out and deal with without recognizing the complicity of all thought with disaster, the disastrous inside of thought. My desire to treat the disaster here as transcendental rather than exceptional is, I think, in this sense in line with these writers’ projects. 44. Blanchot, WD 1 [7]. 45. Blanchot, WD 1 [7]. 46. Blanchot, WD 41 [71].

Notes to Pages 103–114

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47. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 338. As Paul Davies suggests, the rereading of the trace here is coordinated through Levinas. Davies, “A Fine Risk: Reading Blanchot Reading Levinas,” in Re-­Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (London: Athlone, 1991), 201–­27, 210. For greater context, see again Baugh, French Hegel, 19–­21. 48. Blanchot, SNB 17 [28]. 49. Blanchot, SNB 59 [73]. 50. Blanchot, WD 1–­2 [7]. 51. Blanchot, WD 4 [12–­13]. 52. Blanchot, SNB 15 [26]. 53. Blanchot, SNB 2 [8]. 54. Blanchot, SNB 86 [120]. 55. Blanchot, WD 20 [38]. 56. Blanchot, WD 61 [100]. 57. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2008): 1–­21, 12. 58. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 174. 59. Blanchot, WD 38 [65]. Chapter 4 1. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber-­ Nicholsen and Shierry Weber-­Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34. 2. Paul Celan, Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen, ed. Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), §214. 3. Szondi, Celan Studies, 74. 4. Werner Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan’s Poetry,” trans. Peter Fenves, in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 219–­ 63, 243. 5. Josh Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), 64. 6. Howard Caygill, “Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz,” in Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (London: Continuum, 2006), 69–­83. See 69–­71 for a discussion of Adorno’s modifications of phrashing “poetry after Auschwitz” in various essays from 1949 to 1967. 7. Caygill, “Lyric Poetry,” 71. 8. Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999), 487–­ 95; “Après coup,” in Après coup, précédé par Le Ressassement éternel (Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 83–­100. 9. Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 494; “Après coup,” 98. 10. Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 494; “Après coup,” 98. Compare with Blanchot, WD 1 [7]: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact [laissant tout en l’état]. It does not touch [il n’attaint] anyone in particular; ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside.” 11. Blanchot, “After the Fact,” 494; “Après coup,” 98. 12. Adorno, AT 358 [413].

218

Notes to Pages 114–126

13. Adorno, AT 352 [404–­5]. 14. Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 168. My claim is rather that it is the decisive disconnection between art and philosophy that indexes the kinds of unreconciled, non-­transcendent utopian experience which Adorno opens for us, and which, read alongside Blanchot, allows for art’s immanent material fragmentation to collaborate with political discontinuities. 15. Adorno, ND 28 [39]. 16. Adorno, AT 57 [74] (trans. amended). 17. Adorno, AT 233 [263–­64]. 18. Adorno, AT 265 [301]. 19. Adorno, ND 11 [22]. 20. Adorno, ND 11 [22]. 21. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 166, 167. 22. See Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 170. 23. See Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz, 37. 24. Adorno, ND 180 [182]. 25. Adorno, ND 181 [182]. 26. Adorno, ND 139 [143]. 27. Adorno, ND 174 [176]. 28. Adorno, ND 175 [177]. 29. Adorno, ND 140 [143]. 30. Adorno, ND 140 [143]. 31. Adorno, ND 141 [144]. 32. Adorno, ND 139 [143]. 33. Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126–­35. 34. Claudia Brodsky, “Framing the Sensuous: Objecthood and “Objectivity,” in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. J. M. Bernstein et al. (Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2010), 69–­115, 81. 35. Adorno, AT 358–­59 [414]. 36. Adorno, AT 359 [414]. 37. Adorno, AT 183 [209]. 38. Adorno, AT 349 [401]. 39. Adorno, AT 349 [400]. 40. Adorno, AT 222–­23 [253]. 41. Adorno, ND 15 [26–­27]. 42. Adorno, ND 31 [41]. 43. Adorno, ND 17 [29]. 44. Celan, BIT 58, 59. 45. Celan, BIT 96, 97. 46. Adorno, AT 189 [216]. 47. Adorno, AT 275 [313]. 48. Adorno, AT 187 [213]. 49. Adorno, AT 183 [208].

Notes to Pages 126–137

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50. James Gordon Finlayson, “The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno,” European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2015): 392–­419, 406–­10, 395. 51. Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst, 53. 52. Thierry de Duve, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant,” in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. J. M. Bernstein et al. (Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2010), 249–­99, 259. 53. Adorno, AT 393 [461]. 54. Adorno, AT 178 [205]. 55. Raymond Geuss, Reality and Its Dreams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 56. Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz, 4. 57. Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz, 25. 58. Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz, 53. 59. Alexander García Düttmann, “Without Soil: A Figure in Adorno’s Thought,” trans. Robert Savage, in Language Without Soil, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 10–­16, 10. 60. Adorno, ND 407 [399]. 61. Adorno, AT 227 [259]. 62. Adorno, AT 335 [384]. 63. Gerhard Richter, “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” in Language Without Soil, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 131–­46, 140. 64. Adorno, AT 269 [305]. 65. Adorno, AT 343 [394]. 66. Aleš Erjavec, “Aesthetics and the Aesthetic Today: After Adorno,” in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. J. M. Bernstein et al. (Berkeley, CA: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2010), 182–­209, 191. 67. Adorno, ND 202 [202]. 68. Adorno, ND 404 [396]. 69. Adorno, AT 265 [300–­301]. 70. Adorno, AT 200 [229]. Chapter 5 1. Blanchot, IC xxi [xxii]. 2. Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 5 [14]. 3. Blanchot, WD 72 [118]. 4. Blanchot, IC 303 [447]. 5. Blanchot, IC 360 [528]. 6. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 20; 42. 7. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 20; 43. 8. Blanchot, IC 76 [107]. 9. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 27; 55–­56. 10. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 15; 32–­33. 11. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 15; 32–­33. 12. Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion, 10; 23. 13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6.

220

Notes to Pages 137–150

14. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 164. 15. Adorno, ND 27–­28 [38]. 16. Adorno, ND 33 [43]. 17. Adorno, ND 17–­18 [27]. 18. Adorno, ND 18 [27]. 19. See Simon Jarvis on Adorno’s “aporetic” reconstruction of materialism in such negativity, and in bodily affect. Jarvis, “Adorno, Marx, Materialism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79–­100. 20. Adorno, ND 158 [161]. 21. Adorno, ND 34 [44]. 22. Adorno, ND 135 [139]. 23. Adorno, ND 138 [142]. 24. An ironic response, perhaps, to Heidegger’s “Was heißt denken?” 25. Adorno, ND 5 [17]. 26. Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–­ 1965, ed. and trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 55. 27. Adorno, ND 137 [141]. 28. We might begin in this way to think beyond Lyotard’s focus on Kant’s sublime as configuring the “empty” signification of the ethical in post-­modernity, coordinated not least by the Holocaust. 29. M. J. Bowles, “Kant and the Provocation of Matter,” in The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), 1–­18. 30. Blanchot, WD 41 [71]. 31. Blanchot, WD 30 [53]. 32. Celan, BIT 336, 337. 33.  Lacoue-­Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 33. 34.  Lacoue-­Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 19. 35. Michael G. Levine, “Silent Wine: Celan and the Poetics of Belatedness,” New German Critique 91 (2004): 151–­70, 169. 36. Amir Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other: History, Poetics, Ethics,” New German Critique 91 (2004): 57–­77, 71–­72. 37. Anna Glazova, “Poetry of Bringing about Presence: Paul Celan Translates Osip Mandelstam,” Modern Language Notes 123, no. 5 (2008): 1108–­26, 1109. 38. Buber, I and Thou, 55. 39. Celan, BIT 102, 103. 40. Celan and Celan-­Lestrange, Correspondance, 274/§253. 41. Celan, BIT 102, 103. 42. Celan, BIT 100, 101. 43. Celan, BIT 98, 99. 44. Celan, BIT 104, 105. 45. Celan, BIT 96, 97. 46. See Hamacher, “Second of Inversion,” 241, for an account of Celan’s suspensions of lyric dialogue. 47. Yves Bonnefoy, “Paul Celan,” trans. Joel Golb, in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander, Acts 8/9 (1988): 9–­14, 11, 12. 48. Celan, The Meridian, 6, 6.

Notes to Pages 150–154

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49. Nicholas J. Meyerhoffer, “The Poetics of Paul Celan,” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 1 (1981): 72–­85, locates in this dialogue poetry’s distancing from art as communication. 50. We should bear in mind the political “reorientation” developed in the 1960s through identification with the global South and the colonized other, in Vietnam or in Algeria. 51. Celan, BIT 394, 395. 52. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 76, 77. 53. Roger Laporte, “Readings of Paul Celan,” trans. Norma Cole, in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander, Acts 8/9 (1988): 222–­27, 225. 54. Laporte, “Readings of Paul Celan,” 226. 55. Laporte, “Readings of Paul Celan,” 227. 56. Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, Vol. II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber-­Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 131; Theodor Adorno, GS II, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 471. 57. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 127; Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, 467. 58. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” 141; Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, 474. 59. Celan, BIT 64, 65. 60. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1998), 256, 257. 61. Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, 184, 185. 62. Tod Samuel Presner’s account of Heideggerian truth on spatial terms in Celan’s poetry—­return not as “Rückkehr” but as countering—­is useful in this reading of Hölderlin’s “backwards” image. Presner, “Traveling between Delos and Berlin: Heidegger and Celan on the Topography of ‘What Remains,’ ” The German Quarterly 74, no. 4 (2001): 417–­29. 63. Tomis, now Constanța in Romania, where Celan holidayed, was the Black Sea site of Ovid’s exile, from which he wrote his elegiac letters in Tristia and his Letters from the Black Sea (Epistulae ex Ponto); here again the locus of poetic exile. In Tristia, 3.2: “Pontus, seared by perpetual frost, holds me” (l.8)—­a Schneetrost, perhaps, as we shall see. 64. Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters, trans. and ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 231. This is the hope of “intellectual intuition” which underwrites much post-­Kantian aesthetic thinking: that aesthetic judgment might be cognitive precisely by its separation from cognition because of its immediate intellectual intuition of phenomena. The startling thesis proposed here by Hölderlin, however, is that this kind of unity can be intuited only because of separation, division, or, in “Der Ister,” “incision,” “furrowing,” an initial separation which makes any subjectivity possible. 65. Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, 256, 257. 66. Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy: Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 8. 67. Celan, BIT 2, 3.

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Notes to Pages 154–166

68. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 222–23. 69. Georg Trakl, Georg Trakl: The Last Gold of Expired Stars, trans. Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt (Sykesville, MD: Loch Raven, 2010), 179. 70. Celan, BIT 64, 65. 71. Jacques Derrida, “Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” trans. Outi Pasanen, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 65–96, 77. See also Derrida’s essay on witnessing in Blanchot, “Demeure,” in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See also Pierre Joris, Justifying the Margins (Cambridge: Salt, 2009), 79–86. 72. Celan, BIT 16, 17. 73. Celan, BIT 18, 19. 74. Celan, BIT 18, 19. 75. There is a further modulation at work in “unumstößliches,” which picks up on “Stoß” in poem 14, meaning shock. Thus, “Dein vom Wachen stößiger Traum,” “Your dream, butting from the watch” (12–13), turns into a “horn” which “Der letzte Stoß, den er führt,” “The last butt it delivers.” So, in poem 21, your “witness” does not fail to impact, like a ram’s horn, to deliver, to arrive. Witnessing’s serial quality, its self-deferral and interruption of presence, is structured by Celan’s serial poetics here: witnessing occurs through poetic borders, singularly but in the poems’ seriality. 76. Celan, BIT 76, 77. 77. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 268, 269. 78. Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 240, 241. 79. Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, 256, 257. 80. Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, 325. We might also think of the trait (mark) that haunts Blanchot’s connection-disconnection in le pas au-delà: the hyphen that marks the (not) beyond. 81. In a letter to Ilana Shmueli, Celan says, “That Jerusalem would be a turning point [Wende], a caesura in my life”: Hölderlin’s caesura; Celan’s Atemwende. Quoted in Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 174. 82. Celan, Meridian, 9, 9. 83. Celan, BIT 438–40, 439–41. 84. Hamburger has it: “as though without us we could be we” (333); Felstiner, like Joris, has: “as if without us we could be we” (363). 85. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 16. 86. Blanchot, SNB 76 [107]. 87. Celan, BIT 16, 17. 88. Celan, BIT 14, 15. Chapter 6 1. Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 9. 2. Leighton, On Form, see especially chapters 5 and 12 on nothing, and chapters 10 and 11 on elegy as “both a container and content” (243).

Notes to Pages 167–174

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3. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 116. 4. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 28. 5. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Schriften Band V: Übertragungen II. Zweisprachig, ed. Beda Allemann (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 324–­25 (my trans.) 6. Of course, Graham’s image, taken from Malcolm Mooney’s Land (1970) and its eponymous poem, read in the full, contains exactly this dialogic, dialectical, reversible relation between image and language, and its radicalization between language and the real: “Words drifting on words. / ​The real unabstract snow.” The words drift above the snow, in the line above, overwording the snow on the page, but also preceding snow. Words might be abstract, but only ever as abstract as the real snow they contain, figure, move above. The two lines reverse into one another. W. S. Graham, New Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 157. 7. Joel Golb, “Translating Tradition: A Reading of Paul Celan’s ‘Huhediblu,’ ” in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander, Acts 8/9 (1988): 168–­80; Leonard Olschner, “Anamnesis: Paul Celan’s Translations of Poetry,” in Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France, ed. Benjamin Hollander, Acts 8/9 (1988): 56–­89; Anna Glazova, “Poetry of Bringing about Presence.” 8. Celan, Meridian, 11, 11. 9. Celan, Meridian, 118, 118. 10. Celan, Meridian, 113, 113. 11. Celan, Meridian, 116, 116. 12. Celan, Meridian, 9. 13. Celan, Meridian, 215. 14. Celan, Meridian, 9. 15. Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, 396. 16. See Wiedemann’s commentary on “Lyons, Les Archers” in reference to a letter Celan sent to René Char on March 22, 1962: in Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), n.758. See also Mark Payne for an account of how this becomes a meta-­critical image for communication: Payne, “Lyric Communication: Pindar and Paul Celan,” Modern Philology 105, no. 1 (2007): 5–­20, 13. 17. Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, ed. and trans. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 64–­65. 18. Celan, BIT, 130, 131. 19. Fioretos, “Nothing: History and Materiality in Celan,” 300. 20. This marks one point of differentiation from Heidegger, for whom language and not any poet speaks in the poem. See Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 118–­21. 21. Celan, BIT 326, 327. 22. Celan, BIT 342, 343. 23. Recalling the “Simili-­ / ​dohle,” the “simulate” Jackdaw from “Frankfurt, September,” the “simulate” brother Kafka, the jackdaw (kavka); the title of which reflects “Tübingen, Jänner,” where Hölderlin doubles into Celan, looking with the gulls into the pool beneath his tower. 24. Rochelle Tobias, The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 9. Figuration does not mark

224

Notes to Pages 175–184

language’s grasp of any reality; rather it constructs the space by which this incapacity to grasp might be marked by time. The poem voices this incapacity. 25. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. II, 88. 26. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. II, 90. 27. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. II, 89. 28. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. II, 91. 29. Tobias, Discourse of Nature, 12. 30. Celan, BIT 334, 335. 31. Celan, BIT 334, 335. 32. Hans-­Michael Speier, “Paul Celan, Dichter einer neuen Wirklichkeit. Studien zu ‘Schneepart’ (I),” Celan-­Jahrbuch 1 (1987): 65–­79, 72 (my trans.). 33. Amir Eshel goes so far as to argue that “Celan’s poem does not wish to speak through comparisons and metaphors. His other is not figured, but rather is present in pauses, intervals, and muted breath coronas.” Eshel, “Paul Celan’s Other” (74)—­precisely the kind of symbolic presentation, grasping the negative, which I think these poetics resist. 34. See Felstiner, Paul Celan, 139, for an account of Celan and Adorno’s testy relationship, but in which Celan relates being “stricken” at the news of Adorno’s death in 1969. 35. Felstiner, Paul Celan, 142. 36. Celan, BIT 326–28, 327–29. 36. Celan, BIT, 330, 331.. 38. Adorno, AT 185 [210–­11]. 39. Adorno, AT 185 [211]. 40. Adorno, AT 207 [237]. 41. Adorno, AT 210 [240]. 42. Adorno, AT 285 [324–­25]. 43. Adorno, AT 285–­86 [325]. 44. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge, 1978), 39–­43. “Lively expression is that which expresses existence as alive” (43); that is, the animation of metaphor expresses (not represents) the animation of organic nature. 45. A hermeticism that Celan emphatically rejected—­not least in a misplaced note of inscription to Michael Hamburger, to whom Celan incorrectly attributed a review in the Times Literary Supplement stylizing his poetry as hermetic: his poetry, Celan insisted, was “Ganz und gar nicht hermetisch.” See Hamburger’s notes in Poems of Paul Celan, xxix and 351–­54. 46. Adorno, AT 405 [477]. 47. Adorno, AT 405–­6 [477]. 48. “Words drifting on words. / ​The real unabstract snow,” “Überschneit / ​die Schönheit.” 49. Blanchot, SNB 100 [138]. 50. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” trans. Brian Massumi, in Foucault Blanchot (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1987), 7–­60, 29. 51. Blanchot, SNB 94 [130]. 52. Blanchot, WD, 90–­92 [143].

Notes to Pages 184–194

225

53. See Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, n.295, for this bibliographic information. 54. Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 209–­21; also linked explicitly, by Hill, to Adorno’s double injunction, 220. 55. Blanchot, WD 91 [144]. 56. Blanchot, WD 91 [144]. 57. Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 96, 97. 58. Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 77. 59. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 63. 60. The poem’s “Sprachgitter,” speech-­grilles. 61. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 59. 62. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 67–­68. 63. Just as, for Blanchot, in community’s non-­presentability, we cannot speak of friends, but only speak with them. 64. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 85. 65. Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere, 85. 66. See Anne-­ Lize Schulte Nordholt, Maurice Blanchot: L’Écriture comme expérience du dehors (Geneva: Droz, 1995), 113. 67. Blanchot, IC 350 [514]. 68. Celan, BIT 334, 335. 69. Celan, BIT, 376, 377. Conclusion 1. See Jacob McGuinn, “Form, Elegy, and the Inorganic: Geoffrey Hill, Paul Celan, Ice,” Twentieth-­Century Literature 68, no. 4 (2022): 389–­410. 2. Robert Duncan, The Collected Later Poems and Plays, ed. Peter Quartermain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 439–­40.

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Index

absence, 21, 22, 173–­74, 175 “absolute formalism,” 30, 31–­32, 35, 70 abstraction, 9, 16, 17, 69–­70, 118, 139–­40, 141, 166, 178, 197; Celan and, 177–­79; figurative, 183; of nature, 180, 182–­83; reading and, 180 address, 151, 170; criticism as mode of, 194; figurative space of, 10; second-­person, 144–­49, 151, 159, 163–­64, 170, 173, 176, 179; space of, 144–­49, 150 Adorno, Theodor, 3, 8, 10–­11, 15–­17, 52, 57, 177, 194, 197, 212n29; aesthetics and, 3–­4, 27–­ 52, 61–­70, 80, 82, 111–­32, 114; Celan and, 166, 167, 177, 180–­83; contradiction of reality in, 119–­ 24; criticism and, 12–­17, 133–­34, 165, 206n68; dialectics and, 111, 134–­42; dynamics of subject and object and, 116–­18; equality and, 62; figure of the wall in, 125; formalism and, 17–­21; form and, 18, 19, 20, 124–­25, 194; Hegelian dialectics and, 27, 28; Hölderlin and, 152; Holocaust and, 112–­13, 216n43; idealism and, 15; image of wall in, 119; the inorganic and, 180–­83; Kantian aesthetics and, 3–­4, 27–­52, 61–­70, 80, 82; legibility and, 44–­51; from long-­ 1960s perspective, 53; materialism and, 17–­21, 192; materiality of poetry and, 134–­42; nature and, 177–­83, 184; negative aesthetics and, 173; negative dialects of, 115; neutrality and, 53–­54, 55; “no

man’s land” and, 61–­70, 71, 169; painful expression in, 137–­39; prioritization of the object and, 19, 111, 115; “promise of happiness” in, 126–­27; reading and, 11–­ 12, 21, 27–­28, 166, 191–­97; recuperative poetics of, 16; space of contestation and, 16–­17, 19, 21; student-­worker uprisings and, 57; theory of reading and, 11–­12, 27–­28, 191–­97; utopia and, 182, 218n14. See also Adorno, Theodor, works of Adorno, Theodor, works of: Aesthetic Theory, 2, 20, 46–­47, 66, 111, 112, 115, 119–­24, 126–­ 27; “Commitment,” 175, 180; “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 27–­28; Negative Dialectics, 2, 48–­49, 111, 112, 115, 116–­18, 128–­29 aesthetic experience, 12, 15–­16, 48, 111, 128–­29, 141, 180–­83, 188, 191 aesthetic judgment, 34–­36, 55, 59, 61–­62, 64, 123, 169, 177, 188, 196–­97; aesthetic indeterminacy, 47–­52; common sense and, 54, 62–­ 64; communicability and, 63–­64; form and, 42, 124; indeterminacy and, 25–­26, 35–­36, 92; intellectual intuition and, 221n64; Kantian aesthetics and, 34–­36, 61–­63; limit experience and, 98; negative presentation of, 51–­52; as nonconceptual, 40, 41; object of, 2, 39–­41; reconciliation and, 126; singular universality and, 54–­55; subjective paradigm of, 13–­14, 36–­39 237

238 Index

aesthetics, 14, 15, 52, 70–­71, 121, 124, 126, 180, 194, 207n10; aesthetic crisis, 58–­61, 115; aesthetic jurisdiction, 65–­68; aesthetic politics, 54–­55, 57; aesthetic reconciliation, 126–­27; aesthetic thinking, 47, 129–­30; art’s promise and, 127–­28; conditions of, 195–­97; critical, 48 (see also criticism); form and, 20, 125–­26; future possibility of, 126; legitimacy as philosophical field, 36–­39; of negativity, 16–­17; politics and, 57, 58–­61; post-­Kantian, 56–­57, 221n64; pre-­Kantian, 207n10; provisionality of, 129–­30; regime of, 57. See also aesthetic experience; aesthetic judgment; art/artwork(s); Hegelianism; Kantian aesthetics Algeria, 78, 79; Algiers Putsch, 58; decolonization and, 1, 2, 56–­57; extraterritoriality of, 73; student-­ worker uprisings in, 1; war of Algerian independence, 53, 58–­61, 73 Allais, Lucy, 42, 43 Allen, William S., 16–­17 Allison, Henry, 39 Amar, David, 71, 72 anonymity, 74; community and, 70–­ 71, 72, 75; extraterritoriality and, 73; friendship and, 92; literature and, 70–­71, 72; politics and, 71, 72; writing and, 72, 74, 79–­80 apostrophe, 32–­33, 150 the archer, 172–­73 Arendt, Hannah, 8, 54, 55–­56, 59, 69 art/artwork(s), 3, 14–­16, 18, 21, 44–­ 45, 62, 111–­12, 114–­15, 126–­29, 180–­81, 209n70, 218n14; Adorno and, 46–­47, 62–­70, 80, 111–­32; after Auschwitz, 127; body of, 124–­ 31; common sense and, 63–­64; the Concept and, 47, 48; contradiction and, 119–­24, 125–­31; crisis of criticism and, 125–­26; dialectic and, 45, 47; disciplinary rationalization of, 15–­16; ends of, 44–­47; futurity

and, 111, 112, 125–­29; as “gap” in temporal and historical continuity, 46; happiness and, 126–­27; Hegel and, 44–­47; history and, 51, 63–­ 65, 70, 124, 210n76; the Idea and, 44–­45; impossibility and, 124–­31; intentions and, 212n29; legibility and, 61, 126; objectivity and, 47, 64, 111, 112, 120–­22, 124; philosophy and, 46–­47, 48, 111, 121–­22, 218n14; promise of, 126–­ 30; promise of happiness and, 127; provisionality and, 48–­49; reality and, 119–­24; reconciliation and, 44–­45, 126–­27; social character of, 61–­65; Spirit and, 45–­46; spirit and, 46–­47; subjectivity and, 64, 120–­22, 124; theory and, 128–­29; transience of, 48–­49; truth and, 44–­45, 51, 114–­15; the unexchangeable and, 175; utopia and, 124–­31 ash, 1, 9, 146, 153, 191 Aufhebung, 48–­49, 92 Auschwitz, 184. See also Holocaust Ausländer, Rose, 4 authority, dissolution of, 60–­61 autonomy, history and, 15 Badiou, Alain, 21, 22 Barthes, Roland, 212n29 Baudrillard, Jean, 58 Baugh, Bruce, 13, 207n1 the beautiful, 36, 195–­96. See also beauty beauty, 47, 49, 51, 123, 126, 168–­69, 183, 188, 195–­97, 210n76. See also aesthetics Benjamin, Walter, 9, 46 Berlin Wall, 122 Bident, Christophe, 74, 79 Bilderwelt (‘images-­world’), 8, 69, 183–­84 Bildverboten, 69 Bishop, Claire, 57 Blanchot, Maurice, 8, 10–­17, 57, 85, 151, 197, 205n56, 210n87, 213n54, 214n85, 215n19, 218n14; aesthetic thinking and, 129–­30;

Index

Celan and, 79–­80, 166, 167, 183–­ 89; criticism and, 12–­17, 133–­34, 165, 194; dialectics and, 27, 28, 90, 91–­92, 96, 134–­42; “explosive communication” and, 75–­76, 122; figuration and, 187–­89; formalism and, 17–­21; fragmentary writing and, 49–­50, 71–­72, 87–­110; friendship and, 70–­71; glass and, 183–­84; Hegelian dialectics and, 27, 28; history of literary criticism and, 12–­17; Holocaust and, 216n43; injunction against critical transcendence, 184; intersubjective relations and, 53–­54; Kant and, 3–­4, 71; Kantian aesthetics and, 27–­52, 92; legibility and, 44–­51; le pas au-­delà and, 88, 96–­100, 103, 105, 109, 136–­37; from long-­1960s perspective, 53; material-­immaterial of poetry and, 183–­84; materialism and, 17–­21, 192; materiality and, 87–­110, 134–­42; May ‘68 and, 71, 75–­76; negative aesthetics and, 173; not/beyond and, 169; “not shared” and, 55; politics and, 70–­72, 76, 88, 213n59, 213n62, 214n74; reading and, 11–­12, 21, 27–­28, 79–­80, 89–­ 90, 95–­102, 166, 191–­97; “relation without relation” of poetry and, 70–­ 71; signs “Manifesto of the 121,” 73; space of contestation and, 16–­ 17, 19, 21; student-­worker uprisings and, 57; territory of literature and, 73–­75; theory of reading and, 11–­12, 27–­28, 89–­90, 191–­97; “unavowable” common sense and, 70–­80; the “unfigurable universe” and, 183–­89; war of Algerian independence and, 73; writing and, 46, 49–­50, 71–­72, 87–­110, 113–­14. See also Blanchot, Maurice, works of Blanchot, Maurice, works of: “After the Fact” (Après coup), 113; Awaiting Oblivion, 136–­37; The Infinite Conversation, 2, 20–­ 21, 49, 74, 89, 90–­91, 98, 136;

239

“Interruption,” 136; “The Last to Speak,” 184, 185; letter to Roger Laporte, 71, 79; “L’Idyll,” 113; “Literature and the Right to Death,” 48–­50; The Space of Literature, 210–­11n88, 212n29; The Step Not Beyond, 2, 49, 72, 78, 89, 97, 99, 104, 183–­84, 185–­86; The Unavowable Community, 71, 76–­ 77, 79; The Writing of the Disaster, 2, 89, 91, 94, 98, 100, 101–­2, 104, 114, 135, 184 Boden, 66–­67, 82 the body, 115, 126, 130, 131, 141–­42, 186, 197 Bonnefoy, Yves, 150 Book, materiality of, 21 Bourg, Julian, 211–­12n20 the bow, 171–­73 Bowie, Andrew, 114 Bowles, M. J., 141 Brandom, Robert, 41, 43 Breslau, 5, 6, 7 Brodsky, Claudia, 118 Bruns, Gerard, 70 Buber, Martin, 5, 143–­44 Büchner, Georg 84 buffaloes, 4–­6, 11 Bukowina (Bukovina), 6–­7, 151 Camus, Albert, 173 capital, 140 capitalism, 180 Carson, Anne, 167 Caygill, Howard, 113 Celan, Paul, 1, 3, 11–­13, 27, 52, 55–­ 57, 79, 112, 166, 181, 221n63; in 1968, 80–­85; abstraction and, 177–­ 79; Adorno and, 166, 167, 177, 180–­83; Blanchot and, 79–­80, 166, 167, 183–­89; counter-­Heideggerian reading of, 22; death of, 79, 184; disorientation in, 142–­64; Duncan’s elegy for, 194–­97; the east and, 151–­55, 157, 161; as elegist, 167–­ 76; exile and, 6–­7, 150; figuration and, 167–­69, 171–­75, 191, 223–­ 24n24 (see also specific figures);

240 Index

Celan, Paul (continued) Heidegger and, 21–­23, 142–­43, 206n68; hermeticism and, 182, 224n45; historical position of, 10; “history and materiality” in, 22; history of literary criticism and, 12–­17; Hölderlin and, 151–­58, 159, 223n23; Holocaust and, 216n43; illegibility and, 2, 134; imagery and, 80–­85, 181–­82, 193 (see also specific imagery); the inorganic and, 177, 180–­83; insurrection and, 141, 142, 143–­49; Jewishness of, 206n68; limits of reading and, 21–­ 23; from long-­1960s perspective, 53; loss and, 193; loss of objectivity and, 133–­34; on Mandelstam, 171; materiality and, 12, 22, 133–­34, 166, 188; meridians and, 142–­64; mute path of the object in, 123–­ 24; nature and, 177–­83; otherness and, 142–­43, 224n33; Paris, France and, 4–­5, 142; poetics and, 12, 14, 22, 81, 162; politics and, 6, 143–­ 49; “provocation” of philosophy by, 21; reading and, 142–­64, 166; representation and, 54; resistance to interpretation, 2; as Sagittarius, 173; second-­person address in, 144–­49, 163–­64, 170, 179; social reality and, 182; “something” and, 134–­42, 166–­67; student-­worker uprisings and, 57; surfaces and, 22; translation and, 167–­76; witnessing and, 155–­58, 222n75. See also Celan, Paul, works of Celan, Paul, works of: “Ashglory,” 154–­55, 157–­58; Atemwende (Breathturn), 144, 152–­53, 154–­57; “Breathcrystal,” 156–­57; “Coagula,” 4–­7, 9–­10, 11; “Conversation in the Mountains,” 177–­78; Die Niemandsrose (The No-­One’s Rose), 5; “Die Pole,” 176, 185, 188; Fadensonnen (Threadsuns), 172; “Imagine,” 83; “Largo,” 174; late poetry of, 17; “Lyons, Les Archers,” 171–­73, 179; The Meridian, 147,

150–­51, 170–­71, 175; Meridian speech of, 1–­2, 81, 82, 84, 159; “From the Moorfloor” (Ohnebild), 81–­82, 83, 174; poem n. 112, 84–­85; “The Poles,” 159–­63, 174; protest, 143–­49; “Psalm,” 5; “Radix-­Matrix,” 112; “Ram” (“Widder”), 119, 123–­ 24; “Schneebett” (“Snowbed”), 185; Schneepart (Snow Part), 174, 175–­ 76, 178–­79, 183; “Solve,” 157–­58; Sprachgitter (Speech Grille), 185; translation of, 184, 185; translation of Shakespeare’s sonnet V, 168–­69, 170; “What Sews,” 178–­79 change, 105, 174. See also transformation Cixous, Hélène, 165 class consciousness, 7 Clune, Michael, 205n40 cognition, 43, 125 Cohen, Josh, 112–­13, 116, 127 Cole, Andrew, 13 color, 177–­78 Comité, 73–­74 common sense, 55, 62–­64, 75; aesthetic judgment and, 62–­ 64; aesthetic space of, 56; art and, 63–­64; Blanchot and, 70–­80; community and, 72; intersubjectivity of, 64; judgment and, 54; Kant and, 54, 61, 75–­76; Kantian aesthetics and, 62–­64; “unavowable,” 70–­80 communicability, 54, 55, 61, 63–­64 communication, 54–­55, 56, 75–­76, 122, 151, 193 community, 55, 61, 70–­78, 80, 136, 192 compensation, 166–­67, 194 concentration camps, 113. See also Holocaust the Concept: art and, 47, 48; intuition and, 92–­93 concepts: conceptual synthesis, 39, 41; modified by bodies they think, 116 “conjunction-­disjunction,” 74, 85, 92 “constructivism,” 62, 69 contestation, space of, 16–­17

Index

context, text and, 191 contradiction, 50–­51, 68–­70, 80, 111, 115–­16, 119–­24, 125–­26 Coole, Diane, 19 corpse, nature as, 180–­83, 184 corpse, figure of, 11, 166, 182, 183, 184, 192, 197 critical theory, 10, 12–­13, 16–­17, 35. See also theory; specific theories criticism, 3–­4, 25, 27, 52, 57, 133, 165, 173, 191, 194, 206n68; birth/ death periodization of, 16; at boundary of poetic force, 9–­10; crisis of, 112–­15, 125–­26; critical agency, 62; critical autonomy, 14, 17; critical history, 12–­17; critical interpretation, 3; elegiac extreme of, 191; “ground” of, 12–­13; history and, 12–­13, 15, 17; indeterminacy and, 4, 28–­34; limits of, 11, 18, 21, 23; as limit space, 17, 21, 23; literature and, 10, 27–­52; marking and, 102–­9; materiality and, 21, 102–­9; as mode of address, 194; as negative procedure, 121–­22; neoliberal transformation of, 15–­ 16; philosophy and, 27–­52; politics and, 9, 10, 192; reading and, 35, 93, 106–­9, 165; thinking, 21, 111; transformation of disciplinary institution around 1970, 12–­13. See also critical theory Crowley, Martin, 72 crystallization, 167, 169, 170, 176, 185, 188, 189, 191, 206n68 Culler, Jonathan, 13, 31–­32, 33, 34 Czernowitz, 4, 151 danger, 89, 102, 114, 141 Danto, Arthur C., 210n76 Davies, Paul, 217n47 death, 184, 185, 187, 210–­11n88 Debord, Guy, 57 decolonization, 1, 62; of Algeria, 56–­ 57; jurisdiction and, 53 deconstruction, 10, 13, 16 de Duve, Thierry, 126 de Gaulle, Charles, 57, 58, 60

241

deletion, 21, 166, 191 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 211–­12n20 De Man, Paul, 28, 29–­32, 33–­34, 35, 39, 46, 70 dematerialization, 1–­2, 11, 17–­19, 23, 43, 85, 104, 178, 183, 188, 192, 194–­97; Adorno and, 111, 112, 119, 121, 125; Blanchot and, 87, 89–­90, 102–­4, 107–­8; Celan and, 133–­35, 158, 164, 166; materialization and, 3, 10; reading and, 23, 107–­8 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 13, 103, 156, 210n87, 217n47 désoeuvrement, 16, 46, 94 determination, 3, 10, 13–­14, 17, 44, 52, 189 deterritorialization, 66 dialectic(s), 8, 17, 45, 96, 98–­99, 105, 111, 115, 210n87; art and, 45, 47; dialectical materialism, 13; dialectical mediation, 62; dialectical thinking, 90, 134–­42, 164; negation and, 139–­40; negativity and, 48–­51; pain and, 134–­42; poetry and, 134–­ 42; reflexive basis for, 44; sound in, 134–­42; writing and, 91–­92 dialogue, 134–­36, 137, 150, 174 disarrangement, disaster of, 94–­95 disaster, 90–­95, 98, 107–­9, 114, 141, 197; body of, 102, 107–­8; experience and, 100–­102, 101–­2; futurity and, 104; possibility and, 102; thinking and, 91, 101, 102; writing and, 88, 95–­96, 102–­3 disconnection, 52, 176 discontinuity, 61, 113, 114, 124, 136–­ 37, 218n14 disorientation, 150–­53 displacement, 7, 56, 62, 75, 91–­95, 102, 144, 155, 177, 179, 183, 188, 189 doubling, 173, 174, 175–­76, 192 Duncan, Robert, 194–­97; Ground Work I: Before the War, 194–­97; “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings,” 194–­97; “Structure of Rime” poems, 194–­97

242 Index

Duras, Marguerite, 76–­77, 214n85 dying, 187, 210–­11n88 dynamic suspension, model of, 27 dynamism, Kantian aesthetics and, 34–­44 Eagleton, Terry, 13, 59 earth, 177–­78 the east, 151–­55, 157, 161 economy, financialization of, 15 effacement, 103, 104 Eisenstein, Sergei, October, 81 elegiac reading, 4–­6, 8, 9, 10, 133–­64, 167–­76, 183–­87, 194–­97 elegy, 11, 13, 165–­76, 193–­94, 209n70. See also elegiac reading equality, 57–­61, 62, 73, 78, 205n40 erasure, 3, 9, 10, 103–­4, 107–­8 Erjavec, Aleš, 129 error, 215n19; time and, 92–­93 Eshel, Amir, 143, 224n33 eternal recurrence, identity and, 96–­98 exchange, 105, 151, 155 exile, 3, 6–­7, 79, 80, 106, 150, 152, 162, 164, 221n63 experience, 101, 115; of art, 111 (see also aesthetic experience); critical limit of, 43; disaster and, 100–­102; gaps in, 35; indeterminate, 2–­3; legibility and, 115; limits of, 104; poetic, 151; of reading, 95–­102, 103; resistance to, 17; subjectivity and, 116 “explosive communication,” 75–­76, 122, 151 externality, 103, 186–­87 fascination, 8, 187, 188 Felski, Rita, 18, 108 field, 66–­67, 76, 82 figuration, 181, 186–­87, 197; Blanchot and, 187–­89; Celan and, 167–­69, 171–­73, 191, 223–­24n24; doubling, 175–­76; legibility and, 168; literature and, 187–­89; poetry and, 171–­72; reading and, 183–­84, 191; reflection and, 184; translation and, 167–­76; writing and, 168

figurative presence, 173–­75 the figurative present, 171–­73 financialization, period of, around 1970, 15–­16 Finlayson, James Gordon, 126 Fioretos, Aris, 22, 173 Fish, Stanley, 29 formalism, 17–­21, 18, 19 form(s), 12, 30–­31, 33–­34, 111–­12, 124–­26, 194; aesthetic judgment and, 42, 124; as condition for being historical, 22–­23; definitions of, 124–­25; double demand of, 20–­21, 23; double movement of, 20; doubling of concept of, 19, 20; materialist history of, 16–­17; materiality and, 11, 17–­21, 23, 39, 44, 164, 192; meaning and, 114–­ 15, 128; mere form, 39, 43–­44; in philosophy, 111, 116; poetics of, 11–­12, 116; subjective faculties as, 125–­26; thinking through concept of, 11–­12, 20, 111, 126. See also formalism Förster, Eckart, 14 Foucault, Michel, 18, 183 fragmentation, 16, 94, 103–­4, 119, 191; of communication, 56; poetic form as, 90–­95; system and, 114–­ 15; writing and, 49–­50, 56, 71–­72, 74, 95, 105, 106, 210–­11n88 France, 78; 1958-­1968, 57–­61; decolonization and, 1–­2, 56–­57; Fifth Republic, 53, 57, 58–­61; state of emergency, May 1958, 2; student-­worker uprisings in, 56–­57; universal suffrage in, 214n74 freedom, 74 Freud, Sigmund, 210n87 friendship, 70–­71, 76, 78, 80, 92, 108 Frost, Samantha, 19 Fukuyama, Francis, 58 the future, 104–­6, 114, 115, 127, 170–­71, 185. See also futurity futurity, 91–­92, 94, 101, 104, 115; art and, 111, 127–­29; break with, 108–­ 9; disaster and, 104; of happiness, 131; indeterminacy and, 105;

Index

interrupted, 127; meaning and, 131; negative trace of, 128–­29; possibility and, 98; reading and, 93, 97, 115, 173; unachievable, 127; writing and, 98, 102 Fynsk, Christopher, 22, 79, 80, 88, 93 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 206n68 gaps, 13–­14, 15, 28, 34–­35, 71, 174; in articulation, 26–­27, 44, 49; in determination, 13–­14; Kantian aesthetics and, 55–­56; legibility and, 26–­33, 176; in models of reading, 26–­27; of negativity, 48; reading and, 43; temporality and, 32–­33. See also indeterminacy García Düttmann, Alexander, 127–­28 Gasché, Rodolphe, 39 Geist, materialism and, 13–­14 German idealism, 13–­14 German Romanticism, 56 Germany, 153–­54 Geuss, Raymond, 127 Ginsborg, Hannah, 40, 41, 43 glass, 1, 167–­76, 177, 183–­84, 188 Glazova, Anna, 143 gold standard, 15 Graham, W. S., 169, 223n6 green, 177–­78 Grosz, Elizabeth, 19 the guest, 176, 189 Guyer, Paul, 39, 40 Hamacher, Werner, 82, 83, 112, 161 Hamburger, Michael, 157, 224n45 Hamilton, Paul, 18, 56, 80 Hammermeister, Kai, 13 happiness, 126–­27, 130, 131, 175 Hart, Kevin, 101–­2 Hegel, G.W.F., 8, 13–­14, 29, 151, 209n67, 209n68; affirmation and, 139; art and, 44–­47; critique of, 44–­ 51; historicism of, 51; historicization of beauty and, 210n76; phenomenology of consciousness, 48–­49; sound and, 134; turn away from, 27, 28. See also Hegelian dialectics; Hegelianism

243

Hegelianism, 12–­14, 207n1, 209n70; Hegelian aesthetics, 14; Hegelian dialectics, 12–­14, 16, 27, 28, 45–­52, 96–­98, 116; Kantian critique of, 47–­51. See also Hegelian dialectics Heidegger, Martin, 10, 21–­23, 142–­ 43, 152, 206n68 Heraclitus, 173 Hill, Leslie, 16, 72, 88, 98, 99, 184, 213n59, 214n74 historicism, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 23, 51, 97 historicity, modes of, 17 historiography, 58, 59, 60–­61, 211–­12n20 history, 15, 33–­34, 63–­65, 93, 124; criticism and, 12–­13; historical determinism, 59; historical interpretation, 31; Kantian aesthetics and, 47; literature and, 15, 25, 31–­32, 72; lyric poetry and, 31–­32; poetry and, 25, 31; reading and, 18–­19, 33–­34; society and, 64–­65 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 151–­55, 221n64; “Being Judgment Possibility,” 154; Celan and, 152–­58, 159, 223n23; “Der Ister,” 153, 154, 157, 159, 221n64; “Die Wanderung,” 153 Holland, Michael, 205n56 Holocaust, 9, 80, 102, 143, 216n43; as caesural event of modernity, 16; impossibility of poetry after, 112–­ 13; impossibility of remembering, 184 hope, 104–­6, 108, 127, 128–­29, 170, 184, 185, 186, 189 hosting, 155, 176, 188–­89 the “I,” 176 the Idea, art and, 44–­45 idealism, 13–­14, 15, 17, 27, 36, 41, 42–­43, 44, 114 identity, 14, 74, 96–­98, 118, 140, 171, 176, 186–­87 “ideology” of the aesthetic, 13 illegibility, 9, 10, 35–­36, 126, 134, 158, 166, 173–­76, 191–­97

244 Index

illumination, 186–­87, 188 image(s), 9, 85, 181, 191, 223n6. See also Bilderwelt (‘images-­world’) imagination, 40–­41, 42, 159, 181, 182 immateriality, 12, 19, 107, 139–­42, 164, 166, 191 impenetrability, 43, 44, 105, 108 impossibility, 90–­93, 95, 99, 107, 109, 111–­15, 119, 124–­31, 158, 181–­82, 187–­88, 197 “in-­between” space, 3, 17, 19, 99, 148 indeterminacy, 98, 104, 119, 124–­26, 133, 140–­41, 164, 169, 175–­76, 180, 188, 191, 194; aesthetics of, 13, 25–­26, 35–­36, 50–­52, 92, 140; criticism and, 4, 28–­34; futurity and, 105; judgment and, 34–­35; Kantian aesthetics and, 34–­44, 210–­ 11n88; literary politics and, 56–­57; literature and, 4, 210–­11n88; in the lyric, 28–­34; materiality and, 3, 13, 26, 28, 43, 44, 52; poetics of, 8, 9, 14; political, 8–­9; reading and, 25–­52, 80; reflecting judgment and, 36–­39 the inorganic, 180–­83, 188 inscription, 3, 95, 104, 107, 170, 173 insurrection, 141, 142, 143–­49, 151, 159 interruption, 134–­35, 185 intersubjectivity, 53–­54, 55, 62–­63, 71, 92 intuition, 92–­93, 221n64 Iser, Wolfgang, 29, 33, 34 I-­Thou relation, 143–­44 Jackson, Virginia, 32 Jarvis, Simon, 116, 203–­4n20 Jerusalem, 122, 151, 159–­61, 162, 163 Joris, Pierre, 9, 157, 161 judgment(s), 53, 126, 154; “common sense” and, 54; idealizing practices of, 36; indeterminacy and, 34–­ 39; materiality and, 34–­35, 36, 43; movements of, 42–­43; non-­ intelligibility and, 57; normativity of, 41, 43; object and, 25, 39–­41;

reflecting, 36–­39, 55; spatialization of, 28, 62; subjective, 47, 50, 51; suspension of determination in, 192–­93; of taste, 54, 55; theory of reading and, 34–­35. See also aesthetic judgment jurisdiction, 53, 60, 61, 62, 65–­68, 73–­74 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 3–­34, 44, 47, 52–­ 53, 69, 71–­72, 82, 100–­101, 141, 186; account of communicability, 35; account of the aesthetic as non-­determination of material, 12; account of transcendental conditions of experience, 95; categorical imperative and, 127; “common sense” and, 54, 61, 75–­76; criticism and, 35; Critique of Pure Reason, 67–­68, 92–­93; Critique of the Power of Judgment, 27, 50; subjective faculties and, 125–­26. See also Kantian aesthetics Kantian aesthetics, 12–­14, 18, 25–­52, 54–­55, 188, 196–­97; Adorno and, 61–­70, 82; aesthetic autonomy and, 3; aesthetic judgment and, 61–­ 63 (see also aesthetic judgment); Blanchot and, 92; common sense and, 62–­64; critique of Hegel and, 47–­51; dynamism and, 27, 34–­ 44; gaps and, 55–­56; Hegelian dialectics and, 45–­47; history and, 47; indeterminacy and, 34–­44, 210–­ 11n88; intersubjectivity and, 62–­63; judgment and, 25, 55, 57, 59–­60, 126 (see also aesthetic judgment); organicism and, 123; radicalization of, 120–­22; theory of reading and, 43–­44; validity and, 75 Kantianism, 19, 73, 98, 141. See also Kantian aesthetics Kaufman, Robert, 62, 69 Keynesianism, 15 Klossowski, Pierre, 96 Kofman, Sarah, 79, 80, 213n54 Kramnick, Jonathan, 18

Index

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 5, 21–22, 142–43, 159 Langton, Rae, 42 language, 3, 10, 22, 23, 150, 171, 187, 223n6 Laporte, Roger, 71, 79, 151 law, 9, 21, 59–61, 73. See also legality the Left, 59 legality, 59–60, 62, 72 legibility, 10, 17, 23, 44, 79, 126, 166, 181; Adorno and, 44–51; art and, 61, 126; Blanchot and, 44–51; Celan and, 167–76, 177; conditions of, 197; experience and, 115; figuration and, 168; form and, 23; future, 173; gaps and, 26–33; at limits of materiality, 191–98; literature and, 23, 44, 56, 164; negativity and, 36; poetry and, 23, 44, 164; politics and, 53–54; reading and, 51–52; resistance to, 10–11; theory of, 27; writing and, 35–36. See also reading Lehman, Robert S., 18, 30 Leighton, Angela, 19, 166–67, 173 le pas au-delà, 88, 96–100, 103, 105, 109, 136–37 Levinas, Emmanuel, 97, 103, 210n87, 217n47 Levine, Caroline, 18 Levine, Michael, 143 Levinson, Marjorie, 19, 32, 33, 34, 101 liberty. See freedom limit(s), 20, 43, 104; critical history and, 12–17; limit experience, 98– 100, 107; limit space, 17, 21, 23, 143, 159; of materiality, 3, 191– 98; periodization and, 12–17; of reading, 21–23; thinking of, 43 literary autonomy, 12, 14 literary criticism, 11–17. See also criticism literary form, 16, 18. See also form(s); poetic form literary politics, in 1960s, 53–86 literary theory, 11–12, 13. See also critical theory; theory; specific theories

245

literature, 12, 56, 107, 166, 191–97, 210–11n88; anonymity and, 70– 71, 72; autonomous study of, 15; community and, 78; contestation of, 21; criticism and, 10, 27–52 (see also criticism; literary criticism); disciplinary rationalization of, 15– 16; figuration and, 187–89; history and, 12–13, 15, 72; indeterminacy and, 4, 210–11n88; literary materials, 14, 17; mediation and, 187–89; objecthood of, 1, 2, 16– 17; philosophy and, 27–52; politics and, 10, 71–72, 80; reading and, 25, 56 (see also reading); space of, 18, 73–75. See also literary criticism; literary form; poetry loss, 7–8, 131, 162–67, 169, 171, 185–86, 187, 193, 194 Love, Heather, 18 Luxemburg, Rosa, 4–11, 163 the lyric, 26, 28–34, 93. See also lyric poetry lyric indeterminacy, 28–34, 44 lyricism, 112 “lyricization,” 29, 32 lyric poetry, 27–28; history and, 31– 32; legibility and, 44; materiality and, 33–34, 44; “now” of modernity and, 46; temporality and, 31–32, 31–33 lyric reading, 32, 33 “lyric rhetoric,” 32 Lyska, Vivian, 16 MacDonald, Molly, 48, 210n87 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 31 Mandelstam, Osip, 171 “Manifesto of the 121,” 73 mark(s)/marking, 102–9. See also inscription Marxism, 7, 12 mastery, suspension of, 78–79 material, 2–3, 16, 17, 18, 19, 33–34, 35, 42–44. See also materialimmaterial; materiality material-immaterial, 107, 109, 121, 133–64, 166, 183–84, 188, 194–97

246 Index

materialism, 14–­21, 44, 192; critical, 26; empirical, 41; formalism and, 17–­21; Geist and, 13–­14; idealism and, 17, 27; indeterminacy and, 13; of the limit, 20; materialist aesthetics, 17, 25–­52; materialist criticism, 191; materialist dialectic, 140; materialist poetics, 25–­52; materialist reading, 3, 43 materiality, 1–­2, 16, 19, 22, 42–­ 43, 87–­110, 133–­34, 164, 166, 173; art as contradiction of its own, 125–­31; criticism and, 21, 102–­9; dynamic activity of, 23; as dynamic and virtual, 20; as empirical materiality of poem as linguistic artifact, 26; form and, 23, 39; immateriality and, 19; indeterminacy and, 3, 12, 26, 28, 39; judgment and, 34–­35, 43; levels of, 26–­27; limits of, 3, 12, 191–­98; of literature, 12, 14, 17, 26–­27, 33–­34, 44, 191–­97; marking and, 102–­9; non-­negated, neutral, 19; nonobjective, 35–­36; poetic, 25–­52; poetry and, 12, 14, 17, 26–­27, 33–­ 34, 44, 192; sound and, 134–­42; of text, 18–­19 materialization, 3, 10–­11, 18–­19, 23, 33–­35, 85, 112, 119, 121, 158, 164, 178, 194 matter, 42, 141; deletion of, 191 (see also dematerialization); dynamics and, 41–­44; form and, 192; immateriality of, 139–­42; indeterminacy and, 2, 43; limited presence in poetry, 133–­64; limits of, 2, 42; poetry and, 133–­64; as referential material of poetry, 26–­ 27; signification and, 19; spirit and, 44. See also materiality McLaughlin, Kevin, 9–­10 meaning, 114–­15, 128, 130, 131, 151, 171, 183, 189 meaninglessness, 175 mediation, 44, 62, 116, 119, 121, 124–­25, 151, 159, 163, 166–­67, 183, 187–­89, 192–­93

Menke, Christoph, 9, 57, 60, 126, 207n10 mere form, 43–­44 meridians, 3, 122, 150–­51, 159, 163 Meschonnic, Henri, 58 metaphor, 181, 224n44. See also figuration mimesis, 180–­81, 182 mobility, of art, 114–­15 modernity, 46; lyric poetry and, 46; temporality of, 31–­32 mourning, 194–­97. See also elegy movement, 42–­43, 177, 191 naming, 107, 159, 162; poetic, 90–­91 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 75, 213n54 narration, impossibility after Auschwitz, 113–­14 narrative voice, 113 nature, 180, 188, 224n44; abstraction of, 180, 182–­83; Adorno and, 177–­ 83, 184; aesthetic experience and, 180–­83; Celan and, 177–­83; as corpse, 180–­83, 184; domination of, 180–­83; futurity of, 181–­82; mythic conceptions of, 180; postindustrial, 181 negation, 52, 93–­95, 96, 99–­100, 139–­41, 185, 193, 210–­11n88 negative dialectics, 16, 115, 116–­18, 119, 124–­25, 140–­41, 180 negativity, 16–­17, 36, 48–­51, 104, 114, 174–­75 neoliberalism, 15, 16 Nersessian, Anahid, 18 neutrality, 55, 66, 70–­72, 78, 92, 95, 101–­2, 105–­9, 171, 191, 193; dialogue and, 135–­36; politics and, 80; reading and, 90–­95, 107–­8; sound and, 135; waiting and, 137; writing and, 71, 88–­89 New Criticism, 15 New Formalism, 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96–­98, 103 1968, 58–­61, 62, 66, 71, 73–­76, 144, 184, 211–­12n20 “no man’s land,” 61–­70, 151, 169 non-­determination, 12, 14, 15–­16, 51

Index

nonidentity, 106, 118, 125, 140, 191, 197 non-­manifestation, 92, 191, 192–­93 non-­presence, 151, 182, 186 North, Joseph, 15, 16, 18, 205n40 “nostalgia culture,” 58 “not beyond,” 169, 210–­11n88 object, 116–­18; absence of, 166; judgment and, 39–­41; of poetics, 22; of poetry, 193; priority of, 116; of reading, 18–­19, 193; subject and, 112, 116, 124–­25. See also objectivity objectification, 138–­39, 181 objectivity, 141, 193; art and, 64, 111, 112, 120–­22, 124; loss of, 36, 133–­34; prioritization of, 115; subjectivity and, 115, 120–­22, 130; weight of, 141, 142 O’Connor, Brian, 116, 119 the organic, 177 organicism, 123 orientation, 151–­52, 159. See also the east otherness, 88, 100, 101, 103, 109, 134, 142–­43, 175, 176, 224n33 the outside. See externality Ovid, 221n63 pain, 134–­42, 166 painful expression, 133–­34, 137–­39 paronomasia, 165 parataxis, 152 Paris, France, 1–­2, 159, 163; Celan and, 142; student-­worker uprisings in, 53, 57–­58 passion, 72 the past, presence of, 143 periodization, 12–­17, 23 Peters, Julia, 47 philosophy, 44; art and, 46–­47, 48, 111, 121–­22, 218n14; configured by its opposite, 121–­22; contradiction and, 50–­51; criticism and, 27–­52; form in, 111, 116; literature and, 27–­52; poetry and, 116; reflection and, 50–­51

247

pleasure, happiness and, 131 poetic form, 1, 27, 30–­32, 33; as condition for being historical, 22–­23; as fragmentation, 90–­95; language and, 22; legibility and, 164; mediation and, 166. See also form(s) poetics: definitions of, 3; of form, 11–­ 12, 18; Heideggerian limits of, 22; object of, 22; “poetic force,” 9–­10; poetic inside and outside, 173–­ 75; poetic language, 162; poetic representation, 10 poetic space, transformation of, 147–­ 49, 150 poetry: after Holocaust, 112, 216n43; contradiction and, 115; criticism and, 25, 112–­15; dematerialization of, 4; dialectics and, 134–­42; figuration and, 171–­72; form in, 116; future of, 114; history and, 25, 31; as ideal “object” of its disciplinary structure, 26, 27; impossibility and, 112–­13, 114, 115; indeterminacy and, 14; legibility and, 10; legibility of, 3, 23; limit space of, 10, 23; as linguistic artifact, 26; materiality and, 12, 14, 17, 26–­27, 133–­64, 166, 192, 194–­97; non-­object in, 194–­97; object of, 193; otherness and, 134; pain and, 134–­42; philosophy and, 116; politics and, 10; presence and, 25, 170–­71; as “pure thinking,” 22; “relation without relation” of, 70–­71, 90, 102; representational failure and, 25; as representational “material” for judgment, 26, 27; as self-­organizing system, 33; sound and, 134–­42; spacing and, 26–­27, 35; temporality of, 182 Pöggeler, Otto, 206n68 polarity, 116–­17, 161 poles, 145–­47, 151, 158–­64 politics, 21, 22, 55, 87, 174–­75, 197; aesthetics and, 57, 58–­61; anonymity and, 71, 72; Blanchot and, 213n59, 213n62, 214n74;

248 Index

politics (continued) Celan and, 6, 143–­49; criticism and, 9, 10, 192; indeterminate form of manifestation of, 10; legibility and, 53–­54; limits of, 22; literary, 53–­86; literature and, 10, 71–­72, 80; neutrality and, 80; poetry and, 10; political crises, 58–­61; political ethics, 88; political impediment, 71–­72; political indeterminacy, 8–­9; political mediation, 53; political sovereignty, 58–­61; political suspensions, 58–­61; reading as discontinuous with the past, 56; sociability and, 63; socialist, 6; space of political appearance, 53; spectacular, 57; as spectation, 55; of suspension, 60–­61; writing and, 62, 71–­72, 74 possibility, 90–­91, 94–­95, 98, 100–­ 102, 105, 107, 113, 115, 125–­26, 154, 164, 188 presence, 20, 22, 25, 98–­106, 111, 143, 151, 164, 170–­75, 182–­83 the present, 98–­100, 105–­6, 115, 175, 185; disarrangement of, 106–­7; figurative, 171–­73; repetition of, 98–­100; writing and, 103 presentation, 10, 43, 98, 101, 185 “present impossibility,” 112, 115, 125 Prins, Yopie, 32 progress, 105 promise, 173; of artworks, 129–­ 30; of happiness, 126–­28, 175; temporality of, 130; truth of, 128–­ 29; utopianism of, 197 protest poems, of Vietnam war, 194–­97 provisionality, 35, 48–­49, 51, 76–­77, 158, 189 “public space,” spectating and, 54 “radical formalism,” 28, 30, 39, 46, 52 Rancière, Jacques, 57, 62 Ravel, Emmanuel, 16 reading, 32, 43–­44, 94, 97, 106, 109, 112, 115, 135, 180, 186–­87,

191–­97; Adorno and, 11–­12, 27–­28, 166; Blanchot and, 11–­12, 27–­ 28, 166; Celan and, 142–­64, 166; criticism and, 19, 106–­9, 112, 192; dematerialization and, 23, 107–­8, 112; dialogic, 134–­35; displacement and, 95, 179; dynamic movement and, 80–­81; dynamics of subject and object and, 43; elegy and, 166, 167–­76, 193–­94; experience of, 95–­102, 103, 107; figuration and, 183–­84, 191; formal conditions of, 112; form of, 18–­19; futurity and, 93, 97, 115, 173; history and, 33–­ 34, 97; hopeful, 184; immanence and, 106; impenetrability and, 43, 44; indeterminacy and, 33–­34, 80; legibility and, 51–­52 (see also legibility); as limit experience, 106–­ 7; limits of, 21–­23, 191–­97; in the lyric, 28–­34; materialist theory of, 51; as mediation, 112; neutrality and, 90–­95, 106–­9; object of, 193; principles of, 77; processes of, 166; provisionality and, 76–­77; repetition and, 106; space and, 10, 18, 22–­23, 26–­27, 35, 96, 165, 193; suspension of mastery and, 78–­79; temporality and, 31, 90–­95, 96, 97, 105, 115, 173; theories of, 11–­12, 27–­28, 43–­44 the real, 116, 183 realism, 41, 42, 43 reality, 116, 119–­24 “Realpoetik,” 56, 80 récit, 113–­14. See also narration reconciliation, 115, 126 reflecting judgment, 36–­39, 41–­42, 55, 59–­60, 63, 93 reflection, 14, 48, 50–­51, 140, 184. See also reflecting judgment Renaud, Bertrand, 101 repetition, 97–­100, 103, 105, 106, 176 representation, 2, 25, 54. See also figuration; meaning; mimesis resistance: contested politics of, 21; to determination, 3, 17; to experience,

Index

17; to interpretation, 2; to legibility, 10–­11; poetics of, 21; to presentation, 21; to representation, 2 revolution, 10, 85; revolutionary politics, 7–­8; revolutionary space, 144–­45. See also insurrection Richards, I. A., 15 Richter, Gerhard, 19, 62, 128–­29 Ricouer, Paul, 181, 224n44 Robinson, Josh, 18, 62 Romania, 6–­7, 11, 221n63 Romanticism, 56 Rose, Jacqueline, 8 rose motif, 5–­6, 10 Ross, Kristin, 58, 59, 66 Russian Revolution, 7, 11 saccade, 43 saccades, 28, 32, 34 Scarry, Elaine, 137–­38, 138, 140 Schiller, Friedrich, 44, 69 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 56 Schmitt, Carl, 61 Schoenberg, Arnold, 62 second-­person address, 144–­49, 151, 159, 163–­64, 170, 173, 176, 179 self, 79; anonymizing of, 79; repetition and, 106. See also “I” self-­criticism, 121 self-­displacement, 6–­7 self-­identity, 97, 108 sense, sharing, 75. See also “common sense” separation, 158–­59, 163 serialization, 189 Shakespeare, William, sonnet V, 168–­ 69, 170 Shaw, Lytle, 32 Sheppard, Todd, 58–­59 Sherratt, Yvonne, 118, 128 Shoah. See Holocaust the shofar, 123–­24 signification, 19 Simonides, 167 singularity, 75, 94, 171, 176, 189 singular universality, 54–­55, 73 Smith, David Nowell, 22

249

snow, 1, 3, 167–­76, 177, 183, 184–­87, 188, 189, 191, 215n19 sociability, 55, 60, 62–­63, 75–­76 society, 16–­17, 64–­65, 125, 182 “something,” 134–­42, 194, 195–­96 sound, poetry and, 134–­42 sovereignty, 60–­61, 72 space(s), 3, 43, 44, 57, 191; “in-­ between,” 3, 17, 19, 99, 148; border space, 53; contestation and, 19, 21; disarrangement of, 90–­95; of disorientation, 142–­64; emergent limit in, 21; erasure of, 3; exilic, 93, 150, 152, 162, 164; fragmentation in reading, 96; futural, 192–­93; of images, 80–­85, 193; indeterminate, 3; insurrectionary, 144–­49, 150, 151; interruption of, 9; Kantian, 42; labyrinthine, 105; limitation of spatial determination, 53; movement of, 156; neutralized, 53–­54, 174; organization of, 54; “outer sense’’ of, 92–­93; political conceptions of, 53; public, 54; of reading, 3, 56, 193; separation of, 158–­59; seriality of, 187; spatial metaphors, 169; spectating and, 54; time and, 92–­93, 94, 100–­101, 107; transformative, 158–­59; wounded, 89, 141; of writing, 104. See also spacing spacing: figuration of, 174–­75; poetry and, 35; process of, 26–­27; reading and, 35 spatiotemporal unity, displacements of, 94 spectating, 54, 55 spectatorship, aestheticization and, 57 Speier, Hans-­Michael, 176 Spirit/spirit, 50; art and, 45–­47; matter and, 44 spontaneity, 7–­9, 10, 11, 14 Stendhal (Marie-­Henri Beyle), 127 the street, 191 the street/streets, 1, 3, 22, 53, 76, 82, 83, 87, 88, 145, 191 student-­worker uprisings, in Paris, France, 1–­2, 53, 57–­58

250 Index

stuttering, 175, 188 subject: object and, 112, 116–­18, 124–­25, 128–­30; “transaesthetic subject,” 121. See also subjectivity subjectivity, 138, 183, 188, 221n64; art and, 64, 120–­22, 124; the body and, 141–­42; experience and, 116; objectivity and, 115, 120–­22, 130–­31; political, 106; subjective faculties, 125–­26; subjective particularity, 115; suffering and, 138–­39; tower of, 186. See also intersubjectivity the sublime, 30, 36, 143, 173, 174 suffering, 106, 109, 123, 130–­31, 134–­35, 137, 181, 197. See also pain surfaces, 22, 191 surfacing, 54 Surya, Michel, 71 suspension, 21, 151, 168, 169, 170, 177 symbolism, 173, 180 synthesis, 103, 124 the System, 108, 109, 114–­15 Szondi, Peter, 112, 206n68 Tambling, Jeremy, 154 temporality. See time territory, 60, 61, 62, 66–­67, 73–­74, 76, 169. See also space(s) text: context and, 191; materiality of, 18–­19; phenomenological features of, 18; reading and, 32 theory: artwork and, 128–­29; “birth” of, 14; “death” of, 14; displacement of, 128–­29; of form, 19; of knowledge, 115; “radical historicity” to, 14; of reading, 34–­ 35, 43–­44, 191–­97. See also critical theory; literary theory; specific theories thinking, 108, 203–­4n20; dialectical, 115; disaster and, 91, 101, 102; negation and, 193; painful, 135; public nature of, 55; speculative embodiment of, 203–­4n20; thinking exteriority, 138

Thouard, Denis, 10, 21 threading, 178–­79 Tiffany, Daniel, 30 Tihanov, Galin, 14–­15 time, 170, 182; bracketing of, 33–­34; disarrangement of, 90–­95; erasure of, 3; error and, 92–­93; exilic, 93; exposure to, 175; fragmentation of, 96; gaps and, 32–­33; history and, 93; “inner sense” of, 92–­93; lyric poetry and, 31–­33; marking of, 93; perception and, 81; reading and, 31, 90–­95, 96; space and, 92–­93, 94, 100–­101, 107; suspension of, 34; “utopian,” 127; writing and, 90–­95, 96 Tobias, Rochelle, 174 trace, 103–­4, 107, 210n87 Trakl, Georg, 155 transformation, 147–­49, 150, 151, 153–­54, 157, 158–­59, 163 transgression, 151, 186 transition, 167 translation, 167–­76, 177, 184, 185, 197 truth, 44–­45, 47, 49, 51, 128–­29, 212n29 unavowable sense, 76–­79 undecidability, 13, 104 the unexchangeable, 175 the “unfigurable universe,” 183–­89, 187–­89 United States, 74, 78, 79 universality: Kantianism and, 73; singular, 54–­55, 73 utopia, 124–­31, 182, 218n14 Vietnam war, 2, 62, 194–­97 vita activa, 55 waiting, 136, 137 wall, figure of, 1, 76, 119, 121–­25, 131, 176, 186 war of Algerian independence, 53, 58–­ 61, 73 white, 177–­78 whiteness, 160, 161, 167, 183, 191

251

Index

Wiedemann, Barbara, 173 windows, 1, 3, 5, 22, 176, 183, 191 witnessing, 155–­58, 156, 159, 222n75 Wolfson, Susan, 29 words, body of, 103 world, as corpse, 180–­83 wounds, 4–­5, 78, 89, 141, 163, 175, 176 wreckage, 195–­97 writing, 21, 46, 56, 107, 168, 192; anonymity and, 72, 74, 79–­80; committed vs. autonomous, 71; community and, 74–­75; death and, 210–­11n88; dialectics and, 91–­92; disaster and, 95–­96, 102–­ 3; equality and, 57–­61; erasure and, 106, 107; experience of, 95, 99–­101, 105; fragmentation and, 49–­50, 56, 71–­72, 95, 96, 105,

108, 210–­11n88; futurity and, 98, 102, 112–­13; history and, 93; impossibility as condition of, 113–­ 14; inscription of, 107; legibility and, 35–­36; localization of, 74; as “mark,” 90–­95, 103 (see also inscription); materiality and, 36; of May ‘68, 60–­61; neutrality and, 71, 88–­89; otherness and, 103, 109; politics and, 58, 62, 71–­72, 74, 106; presence and, 103, 106; reading and, 186; “relation without relation” of, 75; repetition and, 103, 105; space and, 74, 94, 104, 133; temporality and, 90–­95; as trace, 103–­4; transcendence and, 21; transgression and, 21; on walls, 76, 122 Zuckert, Rachel, 38, 41, 47