The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason 3031123131, 9783031123139

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Part I: A Limited Legitimation for Romantic Poetics
1: Reason, Poiesis and Paraphysics
1.1 Getting Started
1.2 Methodology of Reading
1.3 Outline of the Overall Argument
Bibliography
2: Benjamin/Schlegel: Cavell/Wittgenstein
2.1 Benjamin/Schlegel
2.2 Cavell/Wittgenstein
2.3 Cavell’s Source: The Literary Absolute
Bibliography
Part II: The Poetic Subject
3: Lacan’s Freudian Subject in the Écrits
3.1 Subject, Sign
3.2 Lacanian Diagrams
3.3 Desidero: Cogito of Desire
Bibliography
4: Looking Back: A Genealogy of the Subject-(dis)-continuum from Pascal to Lacan
4.1 De Man’s Pascal
4.2 Lacan’s Subject, Once Again
Bibliography
5: Analysis as Opposed to What?
5.1 Fundamentals
5.2 The Thing
5.3 A Seminar
5.4 Envoi: Lessons of the Ghost Trumpet
Bibliography
6: Between Psychoanalysis and Structuralism
6.1 Exit from the Modern
6.2 Symbolism, Structure and the Esoteric
Bibliography
Part III: The Logic of Lyric and Poetic Legitimation
7: The Logic of Lyric (Part One)
7.1 Stopping By the Woods / Because I Could Not Stop
7.2 Our Journey Had Advanced
7.3 Calasso’s Vedic Context
7.4 Return to Dickinson
7.5 Frost, Again
7.6 Three Poems
7.7 Domination in Black
Bibliography
8: The Logic of Lyric (Part Two)
8.1 Toporov’s Vedic Poetics
8.1.1 Linguistic Bifurcation and the Anagram
8.1.2 From Combinatorial Transformation to Deformation Theory
8.1.3 The Poetic Locus: Hymn to the Word
8.2 Jakobson, and a First Deduction of Poetic Reason
8.3 A Return to the American Scene
Bibliography
Part IV: The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason
9: Priming the Deduction: The Medium of Reflection and The Poetic Subject
9.1 Reflection in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence
9.1.1 Reason and Negation
9.1.2 The Attainment of Notion and the Position of Essence
9.1.3 The Three Forms of Reflection
9.1.4 Essence
9.1.5 The Determinations of Reflection
9.1.6 Ground
9.1.7 Ground and Condition
9.1.8 Coda on Peirce
9.2 Lacanian Extraction: Deduction and the Poetic Subject
Bibliography
10: Modernity and the Transcendental Deduction of Poetic Reason
10.1 Sublime, Locative and a Poetics To Be Legitimated
10.2 Romanticism and the Status of the Modern
10.2.1 Derridean Homework
10.2.2 Derridean Arguments
10.2.3 From Modernity to the Cut
10.2.4 From the Cut to Modernity
10.2.5 Gram-materialism and the Logic of Lyric
10.3 From Modernity to Poetic Reason: Modifying Blumenberg’s Argument
10.3.1 Self-positioning as the Explicitation of Systematic Human Self-assertion Conditions
10.3.2 Poetic Reason and the Dynamical Extension of Blumenberg’s Legitimation Argument
10.3.3 The Subject-(dis)-continuum as Replacement for Self-positioning
Bibliography
11: The Esoteric Geometry of Poetic Reason
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason O. Bradley Bassler

The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason

O. Bradley Bassler

The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason

O. Bradley Bassler University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-12313-9    ISBN 978-3-031-12314-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

OTTO CALL BASSLER 15 December 1932, Highland, Illinois 27 July 1998, Nashville, Tennessee

Acknowledgments

Two groups in particular have contributed to work on this book, and I hope mentioning them here can stand for the many others over the course of decades with whom I’ve discussed these ideas. Valerie King, Isadora Westlake, Keaton Wheeler and I met up to the beginning of the pandemic in a collective seminar we referred to as Paraphilosophical Praxis. This work was the inspiration for Chap. 5, “Analysis as Opposed to What?” Oleg Gelikman, Virgil Lualhati McCorgray and I have formed a second group for the last year, working through a number of Lacan’s seminars, most especially Seminar X on anxiety. Those conversations inform all the discussions of Lacan below; I’m also grateful to the students in a course I taught on ethics of psychoanalysis my last semester of teaching at UGA, in which we read Lacan’s Seminar VII. The two chapters on the logic of lyric, which are at the center of this book, go back to conversations and poetry-work with Patrick Fadely, who has been my closest companion in all things poetic. I have done my best to indicate the manifold contributions of Oleg Gelikman throughout the book. Conversations with Virgil Lualhati McCorgray have included very helpful discussions of the prospects for poetic reason, especially with respect to German Idealism. As always, my family has been a consistent presence

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and unanimous in their support for my writing. And I greatly appreciate the help of Brendan George, Steven Fassioms, Sudha Elite Vanath and everyone at Palgrave who has helped shepherd this manuscript into publication. Thanks to all. Athens, Georgia, USA January 2022

Contents

Part I A Limited Legitimation for Romantic Poetics   1 1 Reason, Poiesis and Paraphysics  3 2 B  enjamin/Schlegel: Cavell/Wittgenstein 27 Part II The Poetic Subject  45 3 Lacan’s Freudian Subject in the Écrits 47 4 Looking  Back: A Genealogy of the Subject-(dis)continuum from Pascal to Lacan 77 5 Analysis as Opposed to What?109 6 Between Psychoanalysis and Structuralism133

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Part III The Logic of Lyric and Poetic Legitimation 155 7 The Logic of Lyric (Part One)157 8 The Logic of Lyric (Part Two)199 Part IV The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason 239 9 Priming  the Deduction: The Medium of Reflection and The Poetic Subject241 10 Modernity  and the Transcendental Deduction of Poetic Reason283 11 The Esoteric Geometry of Poetic Reason327 I ndex347

Part I A Limited Legitimation for Romantic Poetics

1 Reason, Poiesis and Paraphysics

1.1 Getting Started Hegel wrote that philosophy takes flight on the wings of Minerva at dusk (Hegel 1967, 13; Blumenberg 1983, 43–44). What would be required for philosophy to alight at dawn? It would require, for starters, the identification of a source of reason which is common to the arts and the sciences. Until we identify a common rational source of making in all human endeavor, the current commitment to a narrowly analytic and critical rationality will persist even in those cases that claim to overcome it. In this book, I begin to locate the provision of a legitimation of the rationality of poiesis, of creative making. I will refer to this rational source as poetic reason. This work is directed to anyone interested in working toward such a transformation of the conditions of reason. Most philosophical accounts of reason are geared toward providing rational justifications ex post facto rather than accounting for the role reason plays in actu in the process of creative work. Moreover, when in actu accounts of reason are given, they are usually either too narrow to describe, in anything other than a reconstructive way, the sort of high-level creative © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_1

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work that is involved in the composition of poetry or the creation of a scientific theory. In this volume I focus on the case of poetic composition and reserve a broader account of rational poiesis, understood as rational making, for a subsequent volume. Hans Blumenberg has identified how a focus restricted to poetic composition in the narrow sense is both a historically natural and also a conceptually treacherous specification (Blumenberg 1983, 534–5). Should we take poetic composition as typical we run a grave risk, in particular, of failing to identify those features which are fundamental to technological making (and hence in particular to scientific poiesis) generally. My intent, however, is to identify a specific “poetic function” which is primary for all making, and hence common to the arts and sciences. I focus on poetic composition because the history and reception of it is extensively developed, and I do not take poetic composition to be typical per se. I am most interested in the underlying “making function” it discloses, and I believe that with care such treachery may be averted. In so proceeding, I am in fact adopting Blumenberg’s own functional approach to the specification of a minimum rationality necessary to sustain the modern enterprise. However, I argue that Blumenberg has himself underestimated the minimum this sustenance requires: a full stabilization of modern self-assertion requires not just an underlying analytic/critical instrumental rationality but one which extends to a rationality of making as well. An account of “maker’s reason” in general terms is needed which avoids the two poles of merely modeling such processes, on the one hand, and amounting to an account of intentional creation ex nihilo on the other. A tradition of maker’s knowledge is already well developed in medieval philosophy, but where the account of making remains classically teleological in its orientation. The rudiments of a post-classical, distinctively modern account are found among the German Idealists and Romantics, especially in the philosopher-novelist-critic Friedrich Schlegel and the philosophical poet and novelist Friedrich Hölderlin. In what follows, I will use the term ‘German Idealism’ to indicate by implication the body of work that takes German Idealism proper as its point of departure. Although I will continue to use the term ‘Romantic’ as a broad, generic marker, as in the title of this section, the reference to a set of works influenced by German Idealism is a more precise description than is speaking of Romanticism,

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since on the one hand the works at issue in the Romantic tradition are vitally effected by German Idealism either directly or indirectly, and, on the other, some of the works at issue which are influenced by German Idealism should not be considered Romantic in a precise sense. In particular, Dieter Henrich insists that Hölderlin’s poetry should not be considered Romantic (Henrich 2003, 227). Since Hölderlin’s work is of central importance both for Henrich’s project and my own, this objection carries considerable weight regardless of whether it is ultimately accepted or not. For a legitimation of poetic reason, the German Idealist ventures remain rudimentary in their ambition because they are subject to the secularization critique that Hans Blumenberg has provided in his work, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. This critique provides a strong prima facie argument that such (implied) accounts of poetic reason are indefensible. Confronting Blumenberg’s secularization critique and his associated legitimation of modernity with a conception of poetic reason deriving from German Idealism will require revisions both on the side of German Idealism and on the side of Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age. The work of Lacan occupies a special position within what I will call “endgames of German Idealism,” where by the latter phrase I intend late receptions of German Idealism that bring the limitations identified by the secularization critique to an extremal state, either by manifesting these limitations in extreme form and/or by identifying the points at which they must be overcome. It is often the case that in these endgames the limitations generate tensions which become so manifest that they result in near-paralysis and/or hints for exit strategies. Because it makes the stakes so clear, Lacan’s endgame is especially suited to furnish the initial ground upon which a legitimation of poetic reason can be mounted. Although this work is therefore written under the star of Jacques Lacan, I do not intend it as a contribution to Lacanian theory or analysis. Lacan’s primary value for my project is that as a central part of his own version of “endgames of German Idealism,” he promotes what I will call a subjective solution to the continuum problem. This leads to a conception of the Lacanian subject that will be essentially adequate to the attribution of poetic reason, though some perspectival modification is required to move

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from Lacan’s focus on the psychoanalytic encounter to the poietic act. In conversation, Oleg Gelikman has rightly insisted that the psychoanalytic encounter and the poietic act generally, and in the case of poetry composition in particular, occupy drastically different arenas.1 I will need to address this concern when refashioning Lacan’s analytic subject for an account of poiesis. At this point, all these characterizations and descriptions are simply advance advertising, and the terms involved will be explained in what follows. I argue, then, that a subjective solution to the continuum problem is a necessary first step in providing a legitimation and rudimentary account of poetic reason. That the roots of a subjective solution to the continuum problem are to be identified, among other places, in German Idealism is not a coincidence, for as Dieter Henrich has argued persuasively, it is part and parcel of the project of German Idealism to provide a ground-laying out of the subject, a Grundlegung aus dem Ich (Henrich 2004). Henrich’s extensive documentation of this philosophical development provides a deep historical-philosophical context for the legitimation of poetic reason, and Hölderlin is a privileged example for this project (Henrich 1992). In particular, Henrich’s characterization of Hölderlin’s praxis constitutes the strongest antecedent articulation of poetic reason I have found. Henrich calls this “constructive rationality,” but it is a good first approximation of the poetic reason I seek to legitimate. This rationality, Henrich says, opens up and brings to consciousness new domains of inquiry and makes their significance felt, at which point critical reasoning can then apply itself. Once such problems have arisen, it is again in virtue of this kind of thinking that they fall into substantive constellations, so that they can— again as Plato said—play off one another. But above all, often suddenly, yet only after long contemplation, such thinking opens new paths of insight that seem clear and compelling, however poorly they may fare in the long run. (Henrich 1997, 218)

Henrich’s passage already marks a number of the cruxes an account of poetic rationality must face, and it will be one of the main projects of this volume to confront them.

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1. Poetic rationality is a rationality of novelty. Karl Popper wrote a book called Logik der Forschung (Logic of Investigation/Research) that was Englished as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 1959). But in fact in this work Popper tells us that there is no logic of scientific discovery. There is, rather, only a logic of the fallibilization of scientific hypotheses, which takes hold only after these hypotheses have been generated. Where one gets the hypotheses is not so much irrelevant as it is unconstrained: that is to say, it is not just that there is nothing to say about how one acquires them: beyond that, there is nothing to say about their production at all. As such, it is the reverse of Tom Lehrer’s dramatizing that where the rockets come down was “not the department” of Werner von Braun (Lehrer 1981, 125). Popper’s logic is a thoroughly and exclusively critical one, designed to filter antecedently proposed hypotheses. To mention another example: philosophers have provided very little to account for what makes for a productive axiom system; the discussion has been limited largely to the question of whether axioms systems are consistent, i.e. will not generate a contradiction. The latter problem is a problem where critical rationality finds some traction, though even here it rapidly shows its limits. The former problem is a problem of the rationality (or lack thereof ) of novelty. Many, like Popper, would despair of (or even despise) any attempt to provide a rationality of novelty; and even among those who are sympathetic, no one I know of would think the problem simple or straightforward. To the extent that this is investigated in the contemporary intellectual community, it often goes under the rubric of “heuristic methods,” and the extent to which such heurisis is inclusive of any rational component is left largely unresolved. In general, such study is limited to finding good ways to guess; what I intend by poetic rationality is both broader and deeper than that. In order to provide it, I will have to look at an altogether different level, with no disrespect intended towards the often brilliant work that has been done on patterns of plausible inference (Pólya 1990). I am also sympathetic to many of the claims of Michael Polanyi in his main work, Personal Knowledge (Polanyi 1964), but Polanyi espouses a personalist intuitionism in which the ability to create is referred to “tacit knowledge” and abilities possessed by individual humans. This is not so much

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wrong as it is unenlightening: such appeals yield relatively little in explanatory value. In this regard, Andrei Rodin’s account of the acquisition of mathematical intuition is prospective (Rodin 2014, 215–34), but I seek a much more general account of the conditions of poiesis, focusing here on the case of poetry in the traditional sense. 2. Critical rationality presupposes poetic rationality. Although Henrich does not make the claim explicitly in this way, the passage cited above motivates it. I will ultimately argue that poetic rationality presupposes critical rationality as well, and so I will need to face the potential circularity in insisting that each is consequent on the other. For now, the assertion is that there is no accounting for either one without the other. Since virtually all extant accounts of critical or analytic rationality proceed without appeal to poetic reason, the implication is that all these accounts are intrinsically defective. It follows as well that what we have taken to be critical or analytic rationality is gravely mistaken. A defense of these last two claims is not required to provide a legitimation of poetic rationality, but a partial defense of them emerges naturally from the context of the legitimation I offer. 3 . Poetic rationality generates the taxonomy of problems. A defense of this claim is also not strictly required for the legitimation of poetic rationality. What endorsing Henrich’s observation does require us to recognize is that poetic rationality cannot be given as a rationality of problems (or a rationality of questions), as it is again antecedent to both. Such a rationality of problems generally falls prey to other forms of intuitionism in the broad sense, as in Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson (Deleuze 1988, 1994). We may summarize Claims 2 and 3 together by saying: criticism and taxonomy presuppose poetic reason. (Although I will in general stop short of writing ‘poietic reason’, I will use the spellings ‘poiesis’ and ‘poietic’ when I wish to stress the active, making character of this rationality.) 4 . A key manifestation of poetic rationality is embodied in the phenomenon of sudden insight, often following a long period of intense preparation. That poetic rationality sometimes manifests itself in this way indicates that it cannot be understood in terms of the application of an antecedent methodology. But more pressingly, this example calls for a thorough revaluation of the subject who reasons poetically. More traditional

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philosophical conceptions of the subject shipwreck on the alternative that such sudden insight is either irrational or intellectually intuitive. In the first case, there is no poetic rationality, and in the latter case, there is generally no accounting for this intuition as an autochthonous human endowment. I am more sympathetic to the latter horn than the former, but I insist that both approaches are the consequence of being saddled with an account of the rational subject which is indefensible because overly restrictive, and unnecessarily so. Often, as well, the problem of “inspiration” is shunted onto another faculty, such as the productive imagination, and this typically ends up being a version of either the former or the latter horn, or some mixture of the two. Indeed, much (though not all) of German Idealism remains locked in at this level, and these limits are reflected in the various “endgames of German Idealism” I attempt to identify. An account of poetic rationality must be provided which is not only compatible with but motivates the observation expressed in Claim 4. Such an account will overcome the impasse generally associated with endgames of German Idealism. 5 . New paths opened by poetic rationality may seem powerfully right in the short term and turn out in the long term to be wrong. While unreservedly accepting this observation, the key is to identify exactly what challenge it poses. We might begin by noting ways of over- or under-­ estimating the challenge. With regard to over-estimation: in general terms what Henrich asserts should not be surprising, nor should it be viewed as serious cause for concern: for it is possible for the other forms of rationality listed above (e.g., analytic, critical, taxonomic) to go astray as well. The difference, it seems, is that when, e.g., critical rationality goes astray we are likely to identify the problem as not one specific to critical rationality itself, but rather as a faulty application of it. There is some truth to this, but I will insist on a certain amount of revisionism here, too: an obsessive application of critical rationality, for example, is not just a fault in application, it is an intrinsic opportunity invited by critical rationality itself. To be sure, this does begin to indicate how what I understand by critical rationality does not coincide with how it is understood typically. Along these lines a broadly psychoanalytic

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orientation becomes apparent. Once we start seeing the fault-lines in analytic, critical, taxonomic and other rationalities as inherent to these rationalities themselves, it will make more sense to see them as presupposing poetic rationality. If we view this challenge as one faced by poetic rationality that is elsewhere absent, we are likely to overestimate (and more fundamentally, simply mis-estimate) the challenge posed. On the other hand, we must not underestimate the problem either. Recognizing that it is a problem faced by other forms of rationality helps here as well. The history of false proofs of Fermat’s Last Theorem is a sobering object-lesson in this recognition (Ribenboim 1999, 383).2 Here, once again, we must seek a balanced view: if there were no such problem with poetic reason, then a subsequent inspection and evaluation according to the terms of critical rationality would not be required. Of course, at this point in the project, such an observation entirely begs the question, for it assumes that poetic reason can be legitimated. But for now my point is merely to indicate what such a legitimation most basically requires, and that task takes the form of the question: assuming we want to argue for poetic reason, what must we show? The frontal problem is: how can we legitimate something that intrinsically leads sometimes in the wrong direction? Indeed, what would it even mean to argue that such a thing is legitimate? One begins to see why mistakes in critical rationality are taken to lie only in its application, and why, even more fundamentally, there is such an incentive to deny that such a thing as poetic reason makes any sense. (A highly purified form of this strategy may be seen in Peirce’s philosophy when he argues that misinference is impossible.) Part of the revaluation of analytic and critical rationality will involve seeing these mistakes as a possibility inherent in these forms of reason themselves, and not simply to be shunted onto issues of “application.” The passage I cited above occurs in Dieter Henrich’s extended essay, “The Course of Remembrance,” an extended investigation into Hölderlin’s poem Andenken (Henrich 1997, 143–249). Consequently, Henrich’s characterization of “constructive reason” is geared in particular to his need to account for remembrance in the context of Hölderlin’s poem. “If we are to explain how remembrance is possible,” Henrich asserts,

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then we ought to be able to conceive of discourse, the concentration of consciousness, and emotionally charged experience all as a unity and all constituting a kind of thinking. But then we also ought to be able to say more about what thinking is in general, and about what thinking in the form of remembrance is in particular. (Henrich 1997, 218)

From this passage, in which I take remembrance in particular to exemplify the logic of poetic reason, I extract the following minimal condition for an account of poetic reason: it must take into account, in their manifold relation, discourse, the concentration of consciousness and emotionally charged experience. Psychoanalysis is important for my project because it offers a candidate conception of the subject for such an account. Essentially, Henrich’s argument will be that such an account of the thinking subject is already exemplified by Hölderlin’s poetic/philosophical praxis. I am in qualified agreement: what is needed is an extraction of a core from such accounts that resists Blumenberg’s secularization critique. Once such a core has been identified, it will be possible to reconstruct a fuller account of poetic reason along lines which are similar in spirit if not in letter. It is no coincidence that Henrich himself generates this description of constructive rationality in the context of interpreting a poem by Hölderlin, and one in which he sees Hölderlin exemplifying the structure of the stages according to which constructive (poetic) rationality itself may be taken—in the case of remembrance—to proceed. What Henrich goes on directly to say is at once even more profound and more challenging: This kind of thinking makes immediately clear what would otherwise appear to be no more than an unfounded assumption, namely that thought and consciousness constitute a unity, not in a trivial but in an emphatic sense. Moreover, both unfold with the same swiftness—consciousness like a sudden awakening and spontaneous thinking in a mode of increasing wakefulness, beyond reflective comprehension. (Henrich 1997, 218)

This passage consolidates a number of points toward which Henrich’s essay builds, and it also points to further reflections in his essay, “Selfconsciousness and Speculative Thinking,” in the collection Fluchtlinien

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(Henrich 1982, 125–81). For now, I bracket the notion of “speculative thinking,” noting only that it appears in fn. 110  in “The Course of Remembrance” (Henrich 1997, 296), where Henrich indicates that the structure whereby “all places can be present in terms of their descent from a single origin” is to be understood as speculative in Hegel’s sense. Thus, for Henrich, the connection to the notion of the speculative brings Hölderlin’s thinking into connection with Hegel. Figuring out how Hegel’s account of reason is related to the notion of poetic reason would be a major task on its own, and one I will only broach tangentially much later in this work. A first clue to recognizing the emphatic unity of thinking and consciousness is provided by the swiftness associated with both. In the philosophical tradition, this swiftness is suddenness of insight, which emerges “in a flash (ἐξαίφνης)” (Henrich 1997, 219).3 In order to understand this emergent flash, which for Hölderlin is the “divine instant,” we must return to Hölderlin’s doctrine of harmonic modulation (Wechsel der Töne). This harmonic modulation, which occurs in both poetry and in life, linking them together, is subject to an interruption, in which “the entire sequence is brought together, surveyed, and at once compared with what is new, which can already be sensed and which announces itself as the other of what has come to completion. This is the divine moment, the transcendental instant” (Henrich 1997, 136). In calling it both the divine moment and the transcendental instant, Henrich indicates that this interruption is beyond our volitional control. Yet it is also affiliated with Hölderlin’s transcendental philosophical orientation, which in fact distinguishes Hölderlin from Hegel despite the connection to the speculative. It is in this divine moment, this transcendental instant, that thinking and consciousness find their emphatic unity, for it is here paradigmatically that thought comes to consciousness. It is because they are thereby tied together originally that the unity is “emphatic.” I take it that for Henrich this is a condition for identifying critical thinking as a derivate of, and so consequent upon, constructive/poetic rationality, since in critical thinking concepts are given specifically to consciousness. If thinking were not originally grounded in the emphatic

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unity of thinking and consciousness then the conscious (though derivative) character of critical thinking could not be secured. Yet this only explains, at most, why thinking and consciousness would need to be emphatically united, not how they are so. Henrich does not purport to offer a full account of constructive reason. As he says, “if one wished to exercise a kind of will to theory in investigating and shedding light on what has here only been laid out schematically, one would come across a field of problems as yet uncultivated and unsurveyed” (Henrich 1997, 217). And yet here Henrich is unnecessarily modest, for his various excavations of Hölderlin’s thinking in this essay and elsewhere, most notably in the magisterial Der Grund im Bewußtsein, make a great deal of headway and already suggest many “systematic” morals. Henrich’s insistence on the emphatic unity of thinking and consciousness may also be taken as a tacit critique of the Heideggerian appeal to being-in-the-world as ontologically grounding: the fundamental experiences of conscious life, like the drives toward the conflicting self-interpretations they foster, are not to be conceived in terms of a prior unity of primordial being-in-the-world. The unity can only be gained in an extension and a transcendence toward ultimate understanding, and hence as a conclusion. Although Hölderlin understands his own basic metaphysical ideas as constituting a fundamental philosophical doctrine, he takes account of the actual relation of experience to the knowledge of its foundation by not deducing the distinction between the vital tendencies from the putative ground.

In this way, Henrich defends Hölderlin against the accusation of employing a Fichtean-style deduction of the unity of conscious life. Instead, Hölderlin drew “the basic tendencies of conscious life from life’s own experience of itself, and relied on principles only in arranging them in relation to one another. In the end, such a procedure has a greater degree of philosophical legitimacy” (Henrich 1997, 238). It leads, however, to the conclusion as well that conscious life “can never be wholly satisfied in any of its orientations or tendencies” but must straddle them all without relinquishing “the knowledge of order, origin, and truth.” Entering into

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all of these tendencies, such knowledge is transcendental, and “since it can unite the tendencies and their moods only as they resound with feeling, it is therefore not thinking but poetry alone that is the locus of genuine transcendental insight” (Henrich 1997, 222). The implication of Henrich’s reading of Hölderlin is that transcendental insight must be supported in feeling and that poiesis is therefore its fundamental form. Hölderlin’s poietic procedure and the argument for its legitimacy are sketched in Henrich’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s poem. As such, his essay has the right form to constitute a legitimation of Hölderlin’s particular conception and praxis of poetic reason as a rationality immanent to poetic making. Furthermore, the case Henrich considers is unique by virtue of the philosophical nature of Hölderlin’s poetic making: as Henrich puts it, “Hölderlin is probably the only poet in any language for whom philosophical insight is itself an underlying condition for true poetic form” (Henrich 1997, 212, my emphasis). It is not just, as with many poets, that Hölderlin’s poems concern themselves with philosophical ideas or issues; it is, rather, that their very nature as poems is a consequence of Hölderlin’s philosophical commitments. While we should not expect to excavate a general, systematic account of poetic reason from Hölderlin’s case, it is a privileged example by virtue of the way that a philosophical commitment to poetic reason is itself a poetic precondition for Hölderlin’s work. It is therefore no coincidence that Henrich supplies the closest antecedent to an explicit articulation of poetic reason and in precisely this context. Confronting the questions Henrich’s passage opens will require getting much clearer about the sense in which I claim to be providing a legitimation. The two obvious requisites are to explain the sense of poetic reason at issue and the nature of the legitimation which is demanded and which will be provided. The project of providing a legitimation of poetic reason is the central pillar in the project that I have previously developed under the name paraphysics. In providing such a legitimation argument I set the ground for a more systematic presentation of paraphysics in the future. An alternative title for this volume would therefore be: Prolegomena To Any Future Paraphysics.

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1.2 Methodology of Reading Although Henrich’s constructive rationality is the closest analogue I have identified for the poetic reason I seek to legitimate, the pieces of the argument I lay out also build on the work of many others. Consequently, I organize large portions of this work in terms of reading, both to draw on and pay tribute to other work for its insight and its representative value, but with the ultimate end of heightening those aspects of these works, and particularly their arguments, which point in the direction of a legitimation of poetic reason. At first blush the choice of these works may seem haphazard, and so I do my best to alert the reader to how the readings piece together into a larger argument for the legitimation of poetic reason. The specific roles played by these various texts and readings obviously cannot be laid out fully in advance since it depends on their respective trajectories in specific ways. But to provide some general indications about how I will proceed, I want to begin by drawing a distinction between a narrower and a broader way of reading. This may be understood as a distinction in scope. Preeminently among a multitude of others, Ernst Robert Curtius has emphasized the need for philological analysis as a fundamental instrument for literary science (Curtius 1953), and I am primarily engaged with reading specific texts. Since almost all these texts are manifestly about other texts, a distinction in scope is required between the texts themselves and the texts which the “texts themselves” are about. Philology must apply directly to the texts themselves, and only indirectly to the texts these texts are about. Hence the narrower scope of reading is the one which focuses on the texts themselves, while the wider scope of reading focuses on the texts about which the texts themselves speak, and evaluates what it has to say about them against the texts it speaks about. I deliberately refrain from speaking of the “texts themselves” as “secondary texts” and the texts they are about as the “primary” ones. This is prejudicial in any number of different ways, but in particular as all too often implying a moribund conception of “scholarship.” Rather, since it is not scholarship which is at issue here (moribund or otherwise) but rather reception history, the distinction to be drawn is between a

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narrower consideration of a variety of consequent texts receiving antecedent texts, and a broader consideration which extends not only to the antecedent texts but, by implication, to a temporally even more extensive tradition. Since I do not wish to speak of secondary texts about primary texts, I will speak instead about receiving and received texts. This linguistic modulation translates the observation that no text is without antecedent reference, but what is at stake is not just a change of linguistic register. Rather, the shift is from a canonical scaling of textual reception into two tiers (already problematic since some “first tier” texts themselves have the status of commentaries) to a relativization in which received and receiving texts illuminate each other in mutually reinforcing ways. Adopting the distinction does not imply that texts cannot be ranked into levels of influence. Rather, the insistence is only that the dynamics of reception must antecede any such ranking. Many of the texts I consider are either implicitly or explicitly receiving the legacy of German Idealism. Thus, in a narrow sense, this book may be viewed as a study of “The Varieties of Reception of German Idealism,” or as I have referred to them above, “endgames of German Idealism.” In the wider sense, this book should be viewed as a response to the challenges that German Idealism has set us insofar as we face our condition as “modern,” and in an even broader sense the approach by way of German Idealism, though privileged, is not the only possible mode of access to a historical legitimation of poetic reason. The thesis of the book is clear and vested: a necessary but not sufficient condition for the continued promotion of our condition as modern is a radically new, broader and deeper conception of reason. At the center of this broadening and deepening lies the legitimation of poetic reason. Absent not just the activity of such poetic reason but a guiding of it explicitly in these terms, I believe our culture is bound to fall into a protracted condition of scientific-­ technological scholasticism toward which it is already well on its way. It is for this reason that I view the task as being of cultural urgency. Insofar as I focus on the reception of German Idealism as receiving texts rather than German Idealism as a body of received texts, the claims made in this book are lodged at the narrower level of reading. Yet I will argue for a bridge from the narrower to the wider reading as well, for I argue that the receiving texts which I consider have a privileged status. So

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far from simply being representatives of our cultural condition (which they are), they are much more pressingly expressions of the sort of enterprise according to which our modern culture condition may be marked to succeed or fail. The criteria according to which they can be evaluated will only become clear in the course of this enterprise, but I will argue that their success or failure serves as a primary indicator of whether the lapse into a cultural condition of scientific scholasticism can be averted. On this point I remain largely skeptical, at least in the short or middle term, but the work I offer is intended as a hopeful gesture. By an indicator I mean neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition per se, but rather something which has a representative status which requires critical evaluation. In a rough and ready way, I speak of these works as indicators in a way analogous to how we would speak of indicators of economic health or its absence. In reading these texts as indicators, I pursue two complementary functions at once. The consideration of these texts primes the field for the provision of a transcendental deduction of poetic reason which will secure its legitimation. Yet, once this legitimation has been floated, their consideration retrospectively serves to fill out a portrait of the poetic reason for which they set the stage. The movement is, in this very general sense, dialectical.

1.3 Outline of the Overall Argument The argument of this project has taken on a life of its own, and since it is somewhat intricate, in this section I provide a highly schematic outline. Some readers will find it helpful to have a sense where they are headed; other may wish to follow the argument in its immanent unfolding. For these latter, this section may be read afterward or skipped altogether. I simplify by restricting attention to a register in which the narrower and wider senses I have indicated above converge. By framing the argument directly in terms of the “endgame texts” on their own merit, bracketing their reflection back onto conclusions that may be drawn about German Idealism itself, it will be possible to schematize the argument in a way which renders it definite if also narrow; the body of the book can

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then move from this schematization to the fuller argument in which levels resonate with and echo each other. Although there are many “endgame” texts that appear throughout the book, here I will narrow consideration to key players: Benjamin, Cavell, Derrida, de Man, Brown, Boon and Lacan. Hans Blumenberg and Roberto Calasso necessarily play distinct roles from this previous group. Though there are senses in which their work may be viewed as endgames of German Idealism as well, that will be my focus neither here nor in the body of the work. Instead, I am interested in the complements they have to offer which allow the endgames of German Idealism supplied by the others to be set in relief. In his work on the Athenaeum circle generally and the Schlegels more specifically (Benjamin 1996), Walter Benjamin identifies a way in which the German Romantic account of poetic reason can be extricated from the frame in which it is first posed. In particular, and ironically, this account first becomes clear in the transition to a more manifestly religious presentation, and Benjamin shows how this religious frame is neither required nor perspicuous (and is, I will suggest, de-legitimating) for the account of poetic reason on offer. Instead, the German Idealist account of poetic reason is more naturally supplied in terms of the cultivation of a reflective medium, and I return to this at a later point in the book in considering Hegel’s account of reflection in the doctrine of essence from the Science of Logic (Hegel 1969). Cavell’s work in This New Yet Unapproachable America (Cavell 1989), written in the context of his reading of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy on German Idealism (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988), establishes several important points for the larger argument of this work. As I show, Cavell is able to convey the broad purport of endgames of German Idealism by showing how such diverse figures as Emerson and Wittgenstein may be read in these terms. He also indicates the way that surveying the playing field in this way makes it possible to see the general strategy as one which may be mounted in terms of the provision of transcendental arguments, and such will be the course I steer. Finally, Cavell shows how this orientation opens the question not just of the relation of German Idealism and Romanticism to what follows them, but how what follows does so in a way which has specific implications for the understanding of the relation between Old World philosophy and New World culture. Taken together,

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Benjamin’s and Cavell’s responses to German Romanticism and Idealism set the terms not just for the provision of a legitimation of poetic reason, but also provide a broad sense of what is at stake. Among certain circles in the latter part of the twentieth century, it became something of a commonplace that humans do not speak language but rather that language rather speaks the human. Whatever literal sense can or cannot be made out of such a claim, it points in the direction of a concern that was vital well beyond these particular circles: to what sort of subject may the notions of reasoning, speaking and agency be applied? There was a widespread concern that the traditional philosophical conception of the subject was radically inadequate and that some massive overhaul was needed, which often amounted to calling reason, speaking and agency into question themselves. If poetic rationality is to be cultivated reflectively in a poetic medium which is understood to be, in some sense, “outside” the traditional subject, what implications does this have in particular for the legitimation of poetic reason? To whom or what is such reason to be ascribed? One might be tempted to ascribe such poetic reason (if at all) to some level either above or below the traditional subject: either some supra-­ subjective world-spirit or zeitgeist, on the one hand, or some subterranean demonic force or will to power on the other. As I see it, both of these alternatives trivialize the problem: what is required is some subject to which poetic reason is ascribed, yet one which is radically non-­ traditional. The first obvious candidate to consider as an approximation for such a poetic subject is the psychoanalytic subject, and nowhere is the psychoanalytic subject considered with such depth and precision as in the work of Jacques Lacan. Much of the work in this book will involve the cultivation of the Lacanian subject to the ends of a legitimation of poetic reason. A preliminary, orienting observation is that Lacan’s subject is not so much located as it is locating. As this verbal distinction already indicates, the active power associated with the subject is what I will call locative, and this leads to an identification of a locative poetics appropriate to the legitimation of poetic reason. In shorthand, we may say that it is only at this depth that poetic reason is subject to the sort of legitimation provided. The sense of locus at issue is associated with but not reducible to the sense of a physical location, and Lacan will attempt to capture this

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association in the development of his graphs and, more generally, his appropriation of topology. For “locative reasons,” spatial signifiers occupy a privileged place in Lacan’s work. The philosophical implications of this transition in the conception of the subject are most helpfully rendered in terms of the way they both force and (hence) allow for a different conception of the way extension is composed. Instead of seeing extension as a physical or mathematical continuum either composed out of points or not, the question becomes one of the subject as itself a (dis)-continuum in search of its own composition. Here Paul de Man’s reading of Pascal indicates that this Lacanian concern has a long prehistory—and the role Pascal plays is not entirely surprising if one recognizes Lacan’s own roots in Jansenism. What is suggested is that the poem as we usually conceive of it is an ejectum deriving from a larger process of poiesis. The question then becomes one of the extent to which we can reconstruct the logic of this process from the poem conceived of as artifact in its productive context. In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that “romantic” poetics was significantly broader in its import than more recent formalist poetics: it was inclusive of the dimensions that would now be consigned to the realm of “external factors” such as psychological inspiration and poetic biography (McFarland 1981, Staiger 1946). Something was lost in the process which needs to be recovered, but scoured of its potential to be put to the use of a poetic de-­ legitimization of the modern condition. To the end of reconstructing the larger poetic act, I turn to an extended, quasi-empirical investigation of the logic of lyric on two radically distinct and yet uncannily associated fronts, keeping in mind that the presentation is more narrowly and tightly understood as one about the reception of two radically distinct poetic traditions. On the one hand, following Toporov, Kuiper and Calasso, I consider the logic of Vedic lyric and in particular the way it constitutes a departure from the sense of the Ancient Aryan verbal contest. In this context, these readers of Vedic poetry lead me to identify what I will call the “esoteric function,” which in the course of the larger argument will be identified as a limiting kernel of the poetic function itself. The second context I consider is the symbolist and post-­ symbolist lyric generally and the nineteenth and twentieth century American lyric in particular. Here again the esoteric function presents

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itself in a particularly explicit, even exoteric, way, and James Boon’s treatment of the structural relation between symbolist poetry and structuralism itself is critical in this regard. I identify Emily Dickinson as the ultimate American poet of the esoteric and compare her to Frost, Stevens and Ashbery. Frost and Ashbery, though undeniably powerful, fail to preserve the esoteric function in its Dickinsonian purity, and this leads to Gnostic, and ultimately anti-modernist strains in both cases. The case of Stevens is more particular and, ultimately, even more troubling. Hans Blumenberg has mounted his own legitimation argument, in his case for the legitimacy of the modern age (Blumenberg 1983). He does so by arguing that modernity is the second, and first successful, overcoming of Gnosticism. In previous work (Bassler 2012), I have argued that Blumenberg’s attempted legitimation remains unstable because, while it is statically convincing, i.e. for any given point in time, it fails to achieve dynamical stability. I identify the source of this problem in Blumenberg’s retention of an excessively narrow conception of rationality, which he identifies as the minimal rationality necessary for his narrowly conceived legitimation. If we pursue the argument to the point where dynamical stabilization can be secured, this requires a broader conception of reason, and I argue that this broader conception must extend precisely to poetic reason itself. Hence the repair of Blumenberg’s argument becomes simultaneously an improved legitimation of modernity and at the same time a legitimation of poetic reason as the requisite extension of rationality needed to secure the legitimation of the modern age. A key implication is that although the poetic function is an integral part of all language use, hence culturally universal, the modern age is intrinsically poietic in its legitimation conditions. Here, of course, poiesis needs to be understood in the broader sense of the poetic function and not restricted to the domain of poetry narrowly conceived. In both strength of argumentation and in architectonic terms, I view this argument as the core of the legitimation project I conduct in this volume. However, without dramatically exceeding the scope of this project as it is set, the argument can necessarily only be partially supplied, for a full legitimation would require an extensive historical documentation that would constitute a book-length project all on its own. The argument as given here is thus lacunary, though I believe it is enough to indicate

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what would be required for a full historical justification. Because of this gap and also because of its intrinsic value, I pursue an alternate route as well, which offers a distinct vantage on the legitimation of poetic reason and so opens up other dimensions of poetic reason itself. This second vantage is one more directly connected to the logic of lyric, the cultivation of the Lacanian subject and the conception of language which is underwritten by both. Here, Jakobson’s account of the primary linguistic functions allows me to build a bridge from the logic of lyric, particularly as the structurally-influenced Toporov understands it, via an explicitation of the transcendental derivation of the Lacanian subject, to an alternative legitimation of poetic reason, and one which is modeled quite closely on the Kantian transcendental deduction of the table of categories in the First Critique. This argument can be given completely on its own terms, but it presupposes a particular account of language drawn from Jakobson, whose schematization plays a role analogous to Kant’s appeal to the table of the logical function of judgments in his transcendental deduction of the categories of the human understanding. I view the former argument, extending and repairing Blumenberg’s legitimation argument, as more fundamental and the latter, working relative to Jakobson’s linguistic functions, as more satisfying in the transparency of its logical structure. I do not pretend that these two arguments together entirely resolve the problem, but they go some considerable way toward legitimating poetic reason. Various endgames of German Idealism may be taken to pose challenges to the legitimation of poetic reason as I propose it. As I prefer the idea of “advanced modernism” to postmodernism understood as some alternative to or overcoming of modernism, I will enlist “advanced structuralism” as an umbrella term which may encompass such strange bedfellows as Jakobson, Boon and even Derrida and de Man. The latter two pose a prima facie challenge to my enterprise because they contest any positive value being ascribed to the term ‘modernism’, and this potentially throws the main legitimation of poetic reason I provide into question. I respond to this potential (and quite interesting) challenge by insisting that in fact the motivation for contesting ‘modernism’ is in Derrida’s case part and parcel of a strategy which may ultimately be seen as running in tandem with the secularization critique which provides

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Blumenberg’s motivation for seeking a legitimation of the modern age in the first place. This, in turn, allows us to see how Derrida’s own “endgame” of German Idealism converges with Blumenberg’s strategy, which may seem anything but an endgame of German Idealism. At this point, it is in fact meaningless to extend the category of “endgames of German Idealism” further: the argument for the legitimacy of poetic reason is intended as an exit from this philosophical condition—which is of course not at all to say that it leaves it utterly behind. Although I am merely sketching the overall argument of the book here, there are a number of conspicuous absences in what has appeared so far. In particular there has been no mention of the work of Norman O. Brown, nor has the contribution of the chapter “Analysis as Opposed to What?” been assigned its place in the larger argument of the book. Starting with the latter, it is clear that the exoteric answer to the question is: “as opposed to poiesis.” But this answer is in fact a stopgap, and behind it lie a whole host of questions concerning what I have called above the esoteric function. Rather ironically, the work of the “Chicago Californian” Brown illuminates more dramatically than any European philosophical source I know a condition endemic to large sectors of the European philosophical tradition, which I describe in terms of a radical bifurcation of the exoteric and the esoteric. On this basis we can understand Brown’s celebration of Islam, of Finnegans Wake as the condition of possibility which makes Islam intelligible to the Western avant-garde, and of the identification of the roots of philosophical communism in the work of Spinoza. In all of this Brown is brilliant but brutal where Lacan is brilliant but subtle. The consideration of Brown indicates one way, and not a trivial or immediately unattractive one, in which the legacy of Freud may go. It is in its own way the radical riposte to the conservative appropriation of Freud by the community of American ego-psychologists and the paleo-conservatism of Philip Rieff, and it points to the role Marcuse, Brown and others would play in the Californian wing of the “student revolution.” It is clear to me, though less equivocally so to Cathérine Clément, that Lacan averts the pitfalls of Brown’s brutalism, which becomes praxically contradictory when Brown attempts to publicize, hence exoterize, the traditionally esoteric. James Boon asks, “Can

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anthropology elucidate the esoteric?,” and I suggest that Lacanian psychoanalysis is itself a practice of the anthropology of the esoteric among the everyday. This leads us to the edge of what this book transacts, and so I end this digest, as the book itself will end, on a prospective note.

Notes 1. In the unpublished seminar on the psychoanalytic act (Seminar XV) Lacan does make some passing suggestions about the relation between the psychoanalytic and poetic acts. However, the seminar itself is truncated, and these suggestions are not developed. 2. For a methodology incorporating such mistakes see (Lakatos 1976). 3. This suddenness will return below in reading a central poem by Emily Dickinson.

Bibliography Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prarhan: re.press, 2012). Benjamin, Walter. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard, 1996), 116–200. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). Cavell, Stanley. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson and Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989). Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953). Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988). Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia, 1994). Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford, 1967). Hegel, G.  W. F. Science of Logic, trans. A.  V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1969).

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Henrich, Dieter. Between Kant and Hegel, ed. David Pacini (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003). Henrich, Dieter. Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992). Henrich, Dieter. Fluchtlinien: philosophische Essays (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982). Henrich, Dieter. Grundlegung aus dem Ich: Untersuchungen zum Vorgeschichten des Idealismus, Tübingen-Jena (1790–1794) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004). Henrich, Dieter. The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford, 1997). Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, SUNY, 1988). Lakatos, Imre. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, ed. John Worrall and Elie Zahar (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1976). Lehrer, Tom. Too Many Songs (New York: Pantheon, 1981). McFarland, Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton, 1981). Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). Ribenboim, Paulo. Fermat’s Last Theorem for Amateurs (New York: Springer, 1999). Rodin, Andrei. Axiomatic Method and Category Theory (Cham: Springer, 2014). Pólya, George. Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton, 1990). Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959). Staiger, Emil. Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Zürich: Atlantis, 1946).

2 Benjamin/Schlegel: Cavell/Wittgenstein

In this chapter I look at two very different receptions of German Idealism, first Walter Benjamin’s of the Jena Circle and especially Friedrich Schlegel, and then a much more wide-ranging reception of German Idealism passing through the Jena Circle and Wittgenstein on its way to Stanley Cavell. I will use these two very different receptions of German Idealism, both by way of the Jena Romantics, to set up different concerns in the confrontation with “endgames of German Idealism.” Benjamin, Cavell, Wittgenstein (as read by Cavell), and Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (through whose work Cavell receives the Jena Romantics) play out endgames of German Idealism in quite different ways, and this will allow me to explore a range of issues.

2.1 Benjamin/Schlegel Hans Blumenberg has provided a criticism in terms of which many readings of the nature and status of modernity as secularizations of some historically antecedent condition are seen to imply that modernity is illegitimate. Secularization hypotheses read key modern developments as secularizations of corresponding pre-modern antecedents, with the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_2

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consequence that the legitimacy of modernity is undermined by these narratives. Many romantic characterizations of the modern fall to this secularization critique, with the consequence that those who take Blumenberg’s secularization critique seriously have a strong incentive to view romanticism as recidivist with respect to the project of modernity as a legitimate historical condition. Although Blumenberg himself does supply a highly contextual explanation for some of the concerns and aspirations of romanticism in the later Work on Myth (Blumenberg 1985), he stops well short of identifying a legitimate core of the romantic project. In his thesis, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” (Benjamin 1996), Walter Benjamin identifies a crux in the project of the German critics that is not subject to Blumenberg’s secularization critique, yet only after he identifies an alternative way to construe this crux. What Benjamin identifies is an alternative way to develop a key insight from Friedrich Schlegel. Since this development is different from the one Schlegel himself followed, we may call this Benjamin’s “fortification” of Schlegel’s insight. This fortification shores up Schlegel’s insight in precisely such a way that the force of Blumenberg’s secularization critique, which is broadly applicable to the work of the German Idealists and Romantics, can be averted. Just as the legitimation of poetic reason requires not only a correction of German Idealist positions in light of Blumenberg’s secularization critique, it will also require a correction of Blumenberg’s associated notion of legitimation as well. Over the course of this book I incrementally build these requisites, which lay the ground for the central legitimation of poetic reason in Chap. 10. Benjamin’s passage may not look like much at first: Friedrich Schlegel, especially around 1800, did provide definitions of the content of the true work of art; these, however, rest on the already mentioned covering up and obscuring of the basic concept of the medium of reflection, in which the concept loses its methodological potency. Where he defines the absolute medium no longer as art but as religion, he can grasp the work of art from the side of its content only in an unclear way. (Benjamin 1996, 156)

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I focus on the following points. For Benjamin: 1. The primary contribution of Schlegel’s account of the work of art lies in the role ascribed to the medium of reflection. 2. The absolute medium must be defined as art, not religion. This leads to a clear assessment of the content of this medium. 3. In contrast, the definition of the absolute medium as religion leads to grasping its content unclearly.1 The focal issue is the status of the medium of reflection. Benjamin’s contribution is to open up the prospect for a reading of the core of the German Romanticism of the Jena Circle not in terms of secularization (as according to the religious conception of the medium of reflection) but in terms of the provision of the systematic assertion conditions for a very specific piece of “cognitive technology,” namely: the capacity to poetize, understood here focally for poetry in the narrow sense. Blumenberg characterizes modernity as providing the systematic conditions for the promotion of human self-assertion generally; Jena Romanticism would then follow up by articulating the systematic conditions for a crucial capacity for self-assertion through poetic (self-) expression. This is a specific piece of “technology” neither required nor (therefore) legitimated by Blumenberg’s legitimation argument. Benjamin’s identification of the status of the medium of reflection as fundamentally poetic rather than religious opens up the possibility for such an account, since, as I will argue, the identification of the medium of (poietic) reflection in art, construed as a domain of self-assertion, escapes the secularization critique. However, this is not just one additional piece of cognitive technology among others, for it also serves to account for the possibility of a specific intensification of the capacity for and experience of self-assertion. Benjamin understands the Jena characterization of the work of art in terms of the medium of reflection on analogy with Fichte, for whom reflection manifests itself as “the mere form of knowledge” (Benjamin 1996, 156). For this reason, the transcendental characterization of the work of art (i.e. in terms of its conditions of possibility) is also purely formal: “Thus, form is the objective expression of the reflection proper to

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the work, the reflection that constitutes its essence. Form is the possibility of reflection in the work” (Benjamin 1996, 156). The key innovation is to transfer the role previously played by the egological field to what we might call the poetological (or poietic or, henceforth, simply poetic) field, understood as the reflective medium of the poetic work. As Benjamin puts it, with the cultivation of “a theory of art as a medium of reflection and of the work as a center of reflection,” Schlegel “secured, from the side of the object or structure, that very autonomy in the domain of art that Kant, in the third Critique, had lent to the power of judgment” (Benjamin 1996, 155).2 In a strict sense, the articulation of art as the medium of reflection is nowhere to be found explicitly in Schlegel. In those early passages which are in harmony with this commitment, it is not made explicit, and when the commitment is made explicitly it is no longer a commitment to art as the medium of reflection per se but rather to religion. So we must attribute the explicit development of art as the medium of reflection to Benjamin’s reconstruction. In the process of this reconstruction, Benjamin shows how in some regards Novalis is closer to an explicit articulation than Friedrich Schlegel, as in a passage where Novalis declares that “Poetry is, indeed, only the more resolute, more active, more productive use of our organs, and perhaps thinking itself would be something not much different—and thinking and poetry therefore are one and the same” (cited, Benjamin 1996, 150). This passage bears a clear resemblance to a passage from Schlegel’s later Windischmann lectures, which Benjamin also cites: “There is a kind of thinking that produces something and therefore has a great similarity of form to the creative capacity which we ascribe to the ‘I’ of the nature and the ‘world-I.’ This form of thinking is, namely, poetry, which in a way creates its own material” (cited, Benjamin 1996, 149). Benjamin introduces Part Two of his thesis, on “Criticism of Art,” in a first section on “The Early Romantic Theory of the Knowledge of Art,” with these words: Art is a determination of the medium of reflection—probably the most fruitful one that it has received. Criticism of art is knowledge of the object in this medium of reflection. Thus, the following investigation aims to

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show what bearing the conception of art as a medium of reflection has on the knowledge of its idea and its formations, as well as on the theory of this knowledge. (Benjamin 1996, 149)

In this formulation we recognize a structural analogy with Kant’s project in the First Critique, in which the conditions of the possibility of our experience coincide with the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of experience, and the one is investigated by way of the other (Kant 1996, 228 (A 158/B 197)). In Benjamin’s reconstruction, the work of art assumes the structural position of experience and criticism that of our knowledge of experience, and their conditions are if not coincident at least co-implicated. The picture which emerges is one of what might best be called a critical monadology, where the monads are works of art. Instead of having no windows, as in Leibniz, they stand in generative relations to each other (where criticism is now understood, of course, no longer in the Kantian but in the romantic sense: this is the sense of monadology suggested in Northrop Frye (Frye 1957, 115–128; 2002, xxii). Instead of viewing the critical impulse as directed toward the work of art from outside, it is instead identified as the work’s own “critical germ,” to quote Novalis once again (cited, Benjamin 1996, 151). Criticism is then the further cultivation, the eclosion and integrative synthesis, of the artwork itself (Bochner 1969), and so the relation between poiesis and criticism is understood in organic terms. The tendency of the work of art and the standard of its criticism coincide immanently in the artwork itself, and this impulse, at once tendency and standard, is “not so much a standard of judgment as, first and foremost, the foundation of a completely different type of criticism—one which is not concerned with judging, and whose center of gravity lies not in the evaluation of the single work but in demonstrating its relations to all other works and, ultimately, to the idea of art” (Benjamin 1996, 159). We might indeed call this vision superorganic, with each work always tending in the direction of the “superwork.”3 In the limit this superwork resolves itself into the Literary Absolute (Benjamin 1996, 159). The deeper sense of reflection is therefore interpenetration in the medium of artistic form. This interpenetration is closely associated with philosophy, which Novalis describes as “ a mystical … penetrating idea

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driving us in every direction” (cited, Benjamin 1996, 139). Here we plunge into the full metaphysical depth of Jena Romanticism. Whether it is a sign of its insufficient independence or a confirmation of its insight, these depths resonate extensively with some of the deepest waters of the Kantian philosophy, and favorably viewed we may say that they constitute a promotion of the Kantian platform to a new region of thinking. Such resonances are surely transmitted via the medium of Fichte, and the extent of and detail in this Kantian resonance makes it altogether unlikely that these echoes are coincidental. As Benjamin notes, Novalis introduces the idea of the “mediality” of the absolute (which we may here understand as the capacity of philosophy to penetrate and permeate the work of art in all directions as the simultaneous communication of its critical germ), and then “for the unity of reflection and mediality, he coined the excellent expression ‘self-­ penetration,’ and again and again he prophesied and demanded such a condition of spirit” (Benjamin 1996, 133). This self-penetration is closest in the Kantian scheme to the notion of self-affection, which constitutes an extremal form of self-positing, or, as I have translated Kant’s Selbstsetzung in previous work, self-positioning (Bassler 2018). Benjamin continues: “The possibility of all philosophy …—namely, that the intelligence, by affecting itself, gives itself a movement in accordance with its own law, that is, gives itself a form of activity all its own” (in other words, reflection), is at the same time “the beginning of a true self-penetrating of spirit, a process that never ends.” The “chaos that penetrated itself ” is what he [i.e. Novalis] calls the future world. (Benjamin 1996, 133; compare Bassler 2018, 240–1)

While Benjamin’s formulation is that self-affection is given as the provision of reflective form, this endowment is consonant both with the commitment to a metaphysics of form, on the one hand, and to the unity of reflection and mediality, on the other. That such a reflective self-affection outstrips every traditional (including Kantian) conception of thinking is signaled precisely in the sense in which we are to understand self-­affection. On the one hand this must be understood as philosophical ­ (inter)

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penetration, and yet on the other it must equally be understood as pure feeling. Benjamin recognizes this latter in Schlegel’s declaration that “the essence of poetic feeling lies perhaps in the fact that one can affect oneself wholly from within oneself,” which Benjamin glosses as meaning that “the point of indifference for reflection, the point at which reflection arises from nothing, is poetic feeling” (Benjamin 1996, 150).4 This, we may say, is the condition of chaos from which emerges the continuum of forms (whether it be ultimately in the form of an “ergodic,” or “multifractal” continuum as in Leibniz, or some subject-(dis)-continuum as in Pascal and beyond). Novalis in particular will speak of mysticism, and Benjamin insists that in this Novalis and Schlegel “are at one” (Benjamin 1996, 139). Yet this mysticism should not be understood as a form of irrationalism, as the genesis of the continuum of poetic forms is equally declared to result from the critical kernel (this emphasizes the presupposition of critical reason by poetic reason, which must ultimately be balanced by the inverse presupposition). Poetic feeling, like the feeling of respect in Kant’s moral philosophy, is therefore a purely intellectual feeling, and Novalis’ notion of mediality can only confirm this. In Kant’s system strictly construed, there would be no way to differentiate the two. As for the continuum of forms, this resonates backwards to Kant’s declaration datur continuum formarum (Kant 1996, 631 (A 659/B 687)) and points the way for these metaphysical speculations to rejoin the Romantic theory of art. For as Benjamin asserts, “the Romantic idea of the unity of art lies in the idea of a continuum of forms,” and he finds this claim expressed in the famous 116th Athenaeum fragment, in which it is declared of the poet that “ingeniously he can gather forms toward the higher form in a delicate web” (cited, Benjamin 1996, 166).5 This returns us to the question of the status of genres and the capacity to pass among them, as in Hölderlin’s doctrine of the modulation of tones (Ryan 1960).

2.2 Cavell/Wittgenstein In This New Yet Unapproachable America, Stanley Cavell suggests that the transcendental modulation of forms be extended to the crossings between every word in our language (Cavell 1989, 81). In this arena the (Romantic)

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novel assumes a special role as the supersession of generic form, for “art is the continuum of forms, and the novel, in the interpretation of the early Romantics, is the comprehensible manifestation of this continuum.” The novel, that is to say, is the genre of the “manifest superwork,” and its medium is prose because “the idea of poetry is prose” (Benjamin 1996, 173). By a commodious vicus of recirculation, we return to the permeation of the artwork by philosophy, and the novel becomes the philosophical manifest. Such a voyage suggests an association with the crossing from old world to new. Cavell’s strange and wonderful suggestion naturally leads on to the truly wild idea that in the wake of romanticism philosophy must first supplant the Kantian transcendental deduction of the categories with a transcendental deduction of literary genres, which would ultimately yield in extremis to the “genre” of every word in the language. Wittgenstein’s investigation of “language games,” it seems, would supply preliminary examples to work from. I’ll begin by marking those places along the trajectory of Cavell’s (sometimes tacit) development of this claim, where the Jena Romantics crop up in all their wildness as elective precursors of this new yet unapproachable America. Cavell’s motivation is, as usual, contextual: in a way it’s all because he happened to be reading The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988). The plane was leaving for California and a summer seminar at Santa Cruz, and Stanley had to pick up some books, from “an ambitious pile of possibilities and necessities” (the virtual and the real), to carry along on the plane for summer reading, always under the umbrella (come rain or come shine) of preparing for fall classes. So he found himself, “under a clear July sky, sitting on a redwood balcony that looks toward the harbor on the coast of California, at Santa Cruz” (Cavell 1989, 1–2), revising his Chicago lectures from an earlier and colder spacetime, participating in a summer seminar, and reading The Literary Absolute, which accompanies Cavell like a weird Doppelgänger throughout his own book. In this seminar, and especially in the questions of Cavell’s younger colleagues about the institutional context in which they were asking questions about their institutional context, wondering about Kurt Fischer, a

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German philosophy professor and master of the Great Tradition who came to this new yet unapproachable America to teach at a small liberal arts college and quickly fell into the Borgesian experience of his canon becoming unteachable, unreadable, unrecognizable, Cavell reads the opening of The Literary Absolute, on the dialectic between fragment and work, on the problem of presentation and its connection to Bildung, “education, cultivation, constitution” (Cavell 1989, 8), in the quest for an appropriate philosophical literacy. “Here are materials strewn,” says Emerson, and Hölderlin’s “A sign are we” tacitly rings in recognition. So how is what Tzvetan Todorov calls “The Romantic Crisis” in his book on theories of the symbol (Todorov 1982) taken up into this New World condition? And how, further still, into the Beckett-world of Wittgenstein? Asking how Wittgenstein’s Investigations may be taken to depict a culture, Cavell remarks: “(My question here is meant to invite comparing, eventually, the logic of the detail with that of the romantic fragment)” (Cavell 1989, 59). But which logic of the detail? Wittgenstein’s, no doubt, but what of the logic of the bureaucratic detail (as also in: being put on kitchen detail) that has taken over this new yet all too approachable America? (Beck 1992) Stranger and more wonderful still is the way Cavell reads what we might call the foreground of the literary absolute, especially in the work of Kant. Here he truly outdoes his European counterparts, these latter still living in some reality insufficiently virtual, not yet fully “on screen,” not yet reading the Matrix of the New World Contemporary. Here the relevant background is Cavell’s previous essay, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” in which he reads Emerson’s essay, “Fate,” as demanding (though Cavell uses the weaker, neo-Kantian language of ‘as if ’) a transcendental deduction, not of the categories of our understanding but of “any and every word in our language” (Cavell 1989, 81). This remark seems more readily pointed in the direction of Wittgenstein’s diversification of grammar in the Investigations, which begins with the insistence that words do not all mean in the same way. (Cavell says Wittgenstein overcomes the Kantian system “systematically,” with paradox intact. But I have argued that this systematic architectonic is Kant’s version of visionary design. What system replaces it in Wittgenstein?) In what sense, then, could we hope for a transcendental deduction? Are the Investigations a travel guide to the

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ruins (another Romantic topos (McFarland 1981)) of Kantian transcendentalism? The conversation between Emerson and Wittgenstein is ongoing in Cavell’s book, and some pages later he remarks, again parenthetically, comparing Wittgenstein’s Investigations with Kant’s First Critique: “(Say Wittgenstein has discovered the systematic in the absence of unity)” (Cavell 1989, 87–8), which must surely be taken to refer back to the Romantic preoccupation with system and fragment, but perhaps also looks ahead to Wittgenstein’s suggestion in the late manuscript On Certainty: “Here once more there is needed a step like the one taken in relativity theory” (Wittgenstein 1972, §305, 39e). It is back in the focus on Emerson that we meet the crisis point, the aversive moment in a discussion of conversion narratives, where the literary absolute finally pulls Cavell down to Romantic sea-bottom. In a fancy enumeration of etymologies, so densely compacted as to become un-reconstructable, Cavell “suggests” that the (historical, but not past) synthesis named by and named in the word “experience” is reproduced, or recounted, or resynthesized in Emerson’s essay of that name. This recounting would be an alternative to Kant’s of his idea that “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the possibility of the objects of experience (Critique of Pure Reason, A 158; B 197). Kant’s demonstration requires what he calls a “schematism” to show how objects are subsumed under or represented to [sic] a concept. Emerson’s schematism, let me call it, requires a form or genre that synthesizes or transcendentalizes the genres of the conversion narratives, of the slave narrative, and of the narrative of voyage and discovery. (Cavell 1989, 101–02)

Cavell’s proposal is more specific, in its New World Contemporaneity, than the Romantic replacement of the transcendental deduction of the categories by a transcendental deduction of the literary genres tout court, and yet the appearance of a contraction of this Romantic problem may be hazardous in turn in its underestimation of Cavell’s boldness, following on Emerson’s. For in targeting traversal narratives (which for current purposes I use as a general term to subsume conversion, slave and voyage of

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discovery narratives), Cavell is identifying what, following the Jena Romantics, we might call a critical germ cell for the genre of the American novel, and in particular of the “American Renaissance.” If we then take the novel to be the (philosophical) supergenre identified by the Jena Romantics, in scope the transcendental deduction of this germ cell would constitute, in a very real sense, more, not less, than a transcendental deduction of the traditional literary genres. It would effectively become a transcendental deduction of the genre of the superwork, from which deductions of the traditional genres would flow, at least in principle. We may hazard that in this way the Emersonian deduction of the supergenre and the Wittgensteinian deduction of “every word in the language” become mutually reinforcing limits. Cavell goes on to note that as Kant’s schematism consists of transcendental time determinations, so Emerson’s new schematism will consist of a transcendental determination in which the time at issue is that of stepping over from the Old World to the New, with a division of such temporal stepping into conversion, freedom and discovery dovetailing with the novel forms listed above.6 We have nothing less than a transcendental deduction and determination of our New World Contemporary, all following from a willingness to sink into the undertow which the crisis of Romanticism announces. This implies that our continent is the ultimate Romantic homeland, uncanny in its unavailability, always already withdrawn from us—narratives of journeys to the West, starting with discovery, moving on to trails of tears and the decline of the frontier. Cavell compactly summarizes the narrative of discovery, still, and so already, in its first stage: “(arrivals, hence departures, abandonings)” (Cavell 1989, 102). We have “reached” this new, yet unapproachable America in the only sense in which we can, and this landscape coincides in many, if not all, its details, with the strange landscape Wittgenstein (read, perhaps, as the last of the Jena Romantics) presents to us.

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2.3 Cavell’s Source: The Literary Absolute What’s going in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s (LL/N’s) book, not just in Cavell’s reception of it, but really? That, too, deserves some consideration. The answer is, of course: many things. But it will be useful to focus on the way in which The Literary Absolute addresses the (ill-posed) question: what is Romanticism? LL/N’s answer is that “Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute” (LL/N 1988, 12). We’ve already met the literary absolute above in the superwork as limit genre. In the Jena Circle, the genre of the literary absolute is what I will call the Novel/Matrix (LL/N 1988, 88). LL/N assert in particular that Romanticism is neither literature, nor theory of literature, but rather “theory itself as literature or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory.” Most important, perhaps, is that romanticism is itself understood as a literary operation: “The literary absolute is also, and perhaps above all, this absolute literary operation” (LL/N 1988, 12), the operation of literary production. But what is the work of this production? Romanticism so understood remains a poetics of genre, but it pushes genre poetics to its limit, as in Hölderlin’s modulation of genres. What I have elsewhere called a locative poetics (Bassler 2018) becomes visible at this limit, or perhaps even better, taking the lead from a suggestion of de Man, this place where vocative poetics becomes (evocatively) locative. It pushes the poetics of genre to the limit in two closely related senses: it manifests a pull from the work to the superwork, and in so doing it cultivates a genre which is at the same time a supergenre. This is the generic “aspect” (face, visage) of the work of Romantic literary production. Secondly, the literary absolute is understood as a fusion in multiple dimensions, including the fusion of masculine and feminine form (LL/N 1988, 77). It is also the (paradoxical) fusion of fragment and system, both of which become key operational terms in Romanticism (McFarland 1981). The force of this fusion is to inter-convert the roles of system and absolute, as expressed in the passage where LL/N declare: “the systematic vision of the absolute and the absolute vision of the system face each other, stare at each other, and in a certain sense disfigure each other7 in

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the same satire of the work, in what amounts to a double parody of theory—or of religion—in the Work” (LL/N 1988, 80). (A crucial instance would be to read Finnegans Wake (Joyce 1939) as a parody of Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky 1972)). The mixing of genres/genders is at issue, but it is never just an issue of mixing. Romanticism is not just “a mixer”—how dreary—though it may devolve into one. “Rather, at the very most, through its equivocity, the motif of mixture, without being or producing mixture itself (since it does not exist) leads to the extreme edge of what it mixes: genre, literature, philosophy. It may lead to the edge of what unmakes or interrupts the operation, to the edge of what could be called, with deliberate equivocity, the ab-solution of the literary Absolute” (LL/N 1988, 123). This passage may be taken as a master-citation from LL/N’s work: everything in their book can be made to orbit around it. What is at issue is a matter of edges—indeed, edge effects—and very precisely the edge of the operation of literature/philosophy, of Romanticism, of the ab-solved literary Absolute. This operation was first introduced as the operation of “literature producing itself as it produces its own theory,” or more succinctly the operation of “theory itself as literature” (LL/N 1988, 12). To exemplify what is at stake, and at stake especially for Romanticism in the crossing from Old World to New, I turn briefly to an exemplary interchange between Paul de Man (New World European) and M. H. Abrams (Old World American). Following a talk de Man gave on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” Abrams offers (what he calls) not an opposition to de Man’s “claim” nor even a complement to it, but “simply to provide a different perspective, just so we can settle the matter in another way” (de Man 1986, 99), the matter at issue here being the opposition of language to the human. Abrams goes on directly to oppose to this opposition the view that language is the “most human” thing in the world, as it is (quintessentially?) the product of human beings. (The key human ability is the ability to be transported into another; language is but a synecdoche of this ability.) He next glosses de Man’s view as the view that language is something opposed to the human and opposed to meaning, and opposes (!) to it the view that as the most human of things language “makes its meanings, to which it cannot be opposed [!!]—unless you establish alternative

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criteria of meaning which make it opposable [!!!] to what language in fact says.” In doing so, Abrams feels de Man falls into the trap of “the people you oppose [!!!!]” (de Man 1986, 99). A psychoanalytic excavation of Abrams’ opposition hardly seems necessary.8 What interests me above all is the trajectory of the proceeding exchange, which, however, I will not map out in detail, choosing only to identify its points of departure and arrival. In fact, de Man begins to respond to Abrams by conceding the desirability of Abrams’ alternative view, but then insists that “we” return to Benjamin’s text. In counter-response Abrams focuses on two claims (as he understands them) that de Man makes, but what is crucial is the upshot which Abrams identifies when he says: It puzzles me that one tends, in making language problematic, to project upon language claims that seem to me rather to be applicable to theories of language. One such claim, for example, is that language deconstructs itself, when one seems actually to be claiming that no theory of language that anyone has ever proposed is unproblematic, so that all theories are self-­ deconstructive. And so while I could accept everything you’ve said, I would put it in this form: What’s problematic is the theorization; language only becomes problematic when we theorize about it. (de Man 1986, 101)

To this pseudo-Wittgensteinian riposte, de Man’s ultimate and decisive response is: “The only people who believe that language is not theoretical are professors of literature” (de Man 1986, 102). And what about Wittgenstein? Whose influence on the emergence of a distinctive English language literary criticism should not be underestimated. So, what about Wittgenstein? “121. One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word ‘philosophy’ there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word ‘orthography’ among others without then being second-order” (Wittgenstein 2009, 49).9 Here we have a powerful angle from which to reconsider the insistence on the interconversion of literature and theory of literature in the Jena Romantics, and also, of course, Cavell’s Wittgensteinian reception of Romanticism and his Romantic reception of Wittgenstein. What follows should provide a

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general context for evaluating how they would play out; for the moment it must suffice to say that a stricture on the “second order” amounts to a stricture on a particular reading of crossing, with all the constraints this implies for Cavell’s roster of crossings. We will find a critique of Wittgenstein’s “rigorism” in the thought and writing of Jacques Lacan, and his particular version of the “endgame of German Idealism” is the one I will identify as most likely to provide an exit strategy. To this end, I turn to the foundations of a theory of the poetic subject, grounding this in a reception of the psychoanalytic subject as presented by Lacan.

Notes 1. The English translation is ambiguous. The German reads: Wo er das absolute Medium nicht mehr als Kunst, sondern als Religion bestimmt, erfaßt er das Kunstwerk von der Seite seines Inhalts nur unklar … (Benjamin 1980, I, 1, 73–4). The German makes it clear that what is meant is that the religious medium obscures the content of the work of art as given in the medium (conceived as religious). 2. If the autonomy of the power of judgment in Kant is the autonomy of a rational power, then is the autonomy of the poetic work equally the autonomy of a rational power? I insist that the answer is yes. However, this ultimately extends beyond the bounds of the task I’ve set myself here and into the “general theory” of poetic reason. The conception of critical rationality that is supported by the Jena Circle’s insistence on the inseparability of poetry and critique establishes a first bridge whereby the arts may be joined to the sciences, since the same conception of critical rationality may be extended into this latter domain. Angus Fletcher’s late project on the poet (represented by Walt Whitman) and the scientist (represented by David Bohm) may be read in this light (Fletcher, unpublished). 3. That Shakespeare’s work, in particular, lends itself so readily to such an orientation may help to explain the central role the translation of his work played in Friedrich Schlegel’s development; the comparison to Beethoven is also important. 4. This appeal to pure feeling is not (obviously) compatible with Lacan’s critique of the appeal to affect; see for example Écrits in English translation

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(Lacan 2006, 578, 598). But one should also consider those passages where Lacan identifies anxiety as the root affect, as in (Lacan 2014). 5. “A myth is the ‘mesh’ of a ‘spider’s web,’ and not a dictionary entry” (Marcel Mauss, cited in Calasso 2009, 217). 6. Cavell has tacitly moved from the notion of a transcendental deduction to a transcendental time determination; the tools for filling in the transit are available in (Bassler 2018). 7. Compare Paul de Man in “Shelley Disfigured” (de Man 1984, 93–123). On the other hand, in his work on the resistance of theory in The Resistance to Theory (de Man 1986), de Man has little to say about the interconvertibility of theory and religion, as in Schlegel’s later development. This issue returns us to Benjamin’s central claim that this latter interconvertibility is graded: the direction from religion to theory opens the possibility of the legitimation of Romantic production in modern terms, while the direction (back) from theory to religion, as is already in evidence in Schlegel’s 1800 lectures, obscures this potential for legitimation by returning to a defense of theory in religious terms. In this sense, legitimation and defense are inverses. 8. Also in his response to de Man’s lecture on Kant and Schiller, Abrams begins: “I didn’t see anybody else raise his hand. What I want to say now is not at all in opposition …” (de Man 1996, 155). 9. In a related, yet distinct spirit, Lacan insists that there is no metalanguage. This insistence dovetails with Wittgenstein only up to the point at which Lacan identifies the spirit of Wittgenstein’s writing as psychotic (Lacan 1991, 69–71).

Bibliography Bassler, O.  Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Beck, James. The Tyranny of the Detail: Contemporary Art in an Urban Setting (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1992). Benjamin, Walter. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996), 116–200. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980).

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Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1972). Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985). Bochner, Salomon. Eclosion and Synthesis: Perspectives on the History of Knowledge (New York: Benjamin, 1969). Calasso, Roberto. Tiepolo Pink, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Knopf, 2009). Cavell, Stanley. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson and Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989). De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1996). De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1986). De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia, 1984). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton, 1957). Frye, Northrop, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye 1964–1972, ed. Michael Dolzani (Toronto: Toronto, 2002). Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1996). Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006). Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, SUNY, 1988). McFarland, Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton, 1981). Ryan, Lawrence. Hölderlins Lehre vom Wechsel der Töne (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960). Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell, 1982). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty, trans. G.  E. M.  Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1972). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Part II The Poetic Subject

3 Lacan’s Freudian Subject in the Écrits

In this chapter, I initiate the task of securing an account of the subject adequate to the legitimation of poetic reason. Much as I have identified Henrich’s account of constructive reason in Chap. 1 as the closest precursor to poetic reason, I identify the Lacanian subject as the most adequate antecedent to the full account of the poetic subject that must eventually be supplied. Lacan’s subject, however, remains an analytic subject (specifically, of the psycho-analytic type), and so a deduction of the poetic subject from the analytic (Lacanian) subject must be provided. A descriptive account of Lacan’s psychoanalytic subject will be sufficient for the early stages of the project, and in Chap. 9 I provide a transcendental deduction of the causal role of the objet a (“object little a”) that is sufficient to convert the subject psychoanalytically construed into a poetic subject. This makes the status of the Lacanian subject critical for this project, and I follow it out in the requisite detail. The trajectory toward the transcendental deduction of the specifically poetic subject is laid out in Chap. 9. This occurs, in fact, between two different transcendental deductions which seek to secure the legitimacy of poetic reason; since the former is transacted on the grounds of the linguistic subject, it is only in the second deduction that the poetic subject comes to play its full role. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_3

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3.1 Subject, Sign If one is interested in Lacan’s own account of the psychoanalytic subject, his essay, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” is an auspicious portal, not because it is introductory in any traditional sense, but because it is such a pregnant distillation of Lacan’s shamanic mix of wisdom and irony. Lacan makes some appeal to his earlier work on the Mirror Stage, but the key background lies in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. What Lacan develops begins as a Freudian rationality of the dream-logic, witnessing simultaneously his profound Freudian orthodoxy and his revolutionary extension of Freud’s original insight in cultivating an account of the subject entering into the psychoanalytic encounter. Together, we may call these Lacan’s strong misreading of Freud. Indeed, Lacan’s reference is to Freud’s Copernican revolution: key to Freud’s Revolution According to Lacan is that a new conception of rationality is promoted. On the one hand, this new conception of rationality is already in place in our culture; indeed, it permeates and saturates it. On the other hand, an account of this rationality is still outstanding, though already implied by Freud. The rejection of Freud in academic psychology, even if defensible in terms of a narrow empiricism, is at once psychologically irrelevant and profoundly culturally noxious, bureaucratically reinforcing the capacity for post-Freudian rationality to be set in the hands of cultural forces unchecked by any critical account of the rational capacities at work. Contemporary philosophical work on rationality solidifies this state of siege. We are deep in the trenches of a cultural counter-revolution. Following Lacan’s lead, the conception of rationality I seek to cultivate is poetic, creative. The aptitude of Lacan’s work for this cultivation is reflected in his insistence that in the substitution of signifier for signifier, which is the primordial mechanism in the generation of the Lacanian subject, “a signification effect is introduced that is poetic or creative, in other words, that brings the signification in question into existence” (Lacan 2006b, 429). In short, signification presupposes poiesis. This poetic creation of signification already makes the Lacanian subject proto-­ poetic, and we will confirm that the psychoanalytic subject ultimately

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presupposes the poetic (and vice versa). We note that this signification effect is synthetic (compositional) and its figure is therefore metonymy; identifying the relation between this compositional effect and the analytic effect, associated with metaphor as figure, will allow us to establish the link between Lacanian and poetic subject along lines set out in Roman Jakobson’s reception of Saussure’s linguistics/semiotics. Thus Freud/Lacan’s first Copernican displacement is the (metonymic) displacement of the signifier. The second Copernican displacement is the consequent displacement of the subject, and one much more radical than the one instituted by Kant. The “place that I occupy as subject of the signifier” is eccentric in a sense which moves from astronomy to Hölderlin’s excentrische Bahn (Lacan (2006b), 430–32). In the course of twenty years (from Traumdeutung to Jenseits der Lustprinzip) Freud (re) charts the eccentric path from Hölderlin’s nostos (Heimkunft) to Kierkegaard’s repetition. Lacan’s own account of the subject is a consequence of his reading of Freud’s metapsychological trajectory, extending crucially beyond Beyond the Pleasure Principle to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, where this latter is understood not as an application of metapsychology but an integral part of it. So, as residents of the New World Contemporary, we want to know: how does it work? And Lacan is not going to tell us. Because he can’t, or because he won’t? Badiou says the former (Badiou 2018): Lacan doesn’t have a method. But Lacan remains committed on principle to what he calls mi-dire, half-speak. So we’ll have to work it out for ourselves, which means: I’ll do some work, and then you’ll have some work left over to do, too: Lacanian homework. Following Jakobson, Lacan takes metonymy and metaphor as master tropes. We have already met metonymy in the primordial “signifier effect.” On the other hand, the formula f(S′/S)S ≅S (+) s is Lacan’s “equational” presentation of metaphoric structure, as given in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (Lacan 2006b, 429). As he tells us, the signifier S′ has been substituted for the signifier S, so we see that metonymic displacement is embedded in the equation for metaphor itself. Yet the language of substitution is equivocal, so we must follow Lacan closely. We begin with (which is to say, as if we understood) the diagram:1 S/s, which expresses the relation between the signifier and the signified,

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what we would in the Anglo-American context (“disquotational semantics”) exemplify as the relation between the symbol-string ‘cat’ and the cat to which ‘cat’ refers. Everything is to be gained from noting that Lacan does not describe it this way at all, but rather as the algorithm which defines the topography of the unconscious in the substitutional relation between signifiers. This should give us pause both about how Lacan sees signification and also how he sees the unconscious. Next, Lacan transforms this algorithm into f(S)1/s; this latter form stresses “the impact of the signifier on the signified.” Taking Lacan at his word, I therefore suggest we read the symbolism ‘f( )’ as ‘impact of ” and the symbolism ‘1/ ’ as ‘on the’, the latter being understood as a structure of dependency, where the notion of dependence (as we shall see) includes the notion of hanging down over something, “pending.” One of the ways Lacan describes the crossing of the threshold to the modern is in terms of the replacement of circular motion by falling motion, with all the implications of this displacement. In the phrase ‘a/b’ I will refer to ‘a’ as the dependent and ‘b’ as the depended. This language of dependency accords well with the English translation which follows, in which Lacan refers to the “elements of the horizontal signifying chain” along with its “vertical dependencies;” the latter translates the French attenances verticales. Attenance specifically means dependency in the sense of an appurtenance to a house, such as stables, dog-kennels, etc. (OED, I, 689, 4d), so that in this sense the “vertical dependencies” are the “outliers” of the horizontal signifying chain. But the vertical nature of these dependencies points to the fact that we have to do here with a hanging down: as we shall see, the metaphorical verticalism of signifier substitution (where I now use the term ‘substitution’ to refer specifically to metaphorical replacement, as opposed to metonymic displacement: a “metaphorical metonymy,” if you will) metaphorically antecedes the (false) literalism of any vertical dependence of signification. Hence we have the (metonymic) displacement of the vertical structure 1/s to the side of the signifying function f(S). Lacan’s next diagram is most naturally read as a diagram that relates horizontal to vertical structure: f(S … S′) ≅ S(−)s; I will call this the metonymy machine, since now the (horizontal) signifying chain from S to S′ is represented explicitly. In contrast, I call the first equation (in its

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first form, f(S′/S)S ≅S (+) s) the metaphor machine. In the metonymy machine, the signifying chain, on the left, is “homologized” (Lacan calls the sign ‘≅’ congruence) to a negative signification effect, on the right, “using the signification’s referral [renvoi] value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that it supports” (my emphasis).2 The maintenance of the bar ‘−’ “denotes the irreducible nature of the resistance of the signification as constituted in the relations between signifier and signified” (Lacan 2006, 428, my emphases). I read this as the assertion that the structural identification of the signifying chain with the (metonymic) displacement of signification creates a state of desire which is the absence of achieved signification. Roughly: the metaphor machine has a positive valence, the metonymy machine a negative one. This negative valence will be identified specifically in terms of the logic of castration, which is not the logic of a physical act, but rather the logic of the way a privileged object is taken up with a negative valence within the signifying chain. The privilege of this object (“phallus”) is precisely that its valence is negative: nothing more, but nothing less. That this displacement of signification is metonymic indicates the rationale for referring to this as the ‘metonymy machine’. But what then is this signification which is absent? It is only in the presence of metaphor that this question admits of an answer, and this is the ultimate ground for calling the first equation the metaphor machine: f(S′/S)S ≅S (+) s. In the metaphor machine we have the explicit displacement of a signifier below the line of signification: the signifier S “stands in” for the signified s, and as such the signifier S also stands as the depended of the signifying function (presumably the equation is meant to suggest that fractionally the two appearances of S “cancel each other out,” but also that the second S now plays the role of the dependency 1/s in the other form f(S)1/s). On the right hand side of our homology, S (−) s has now been replaced by S (+) s, and Lacan says the + sign “manifests here the crossing of the bar, −, and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of signification” (Lacan 2006b, 429). Clearly, the positive valence then presupposes the negative one: the bar cannot be crossed until there is a bar to be crossed. But does this crossing contradict the previous insistence on the “maintenance of the bar”? Has the

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maintenance (−) been replaced by the crossing (+) of the bar? And does this then mean that the bar has now no longer been maintained? Does the bar vanish once it is crossed? If so, might we then admit that it is only created in the crossing, existing neither before nor after? The first step in response lies in the recognition that these diagrams indicate two different structures. In shorthand, we may say that metonymy reflects the resistance to signification and metaphor the emergence of signification. The fundamental recognition, as I see it, is that these two structures can only be linked by way of the psychoanalytic account of desire, and even more focally, the subject of desire. We have already seen how desire’s metonymic structure involves the investment of signification with “the desire aiming at the lack that it supports.” But if the two structures are to be linked by way of desire, then although the connection to metonymic structure is at least prima facie clear, we need some account for what desire has to do with metaphorical structure. In the essay, “In Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism,” Lacan defines metaphor in the following terms: We must define metaphor by the implantation in a signifying chain of another signifier, by which the one it supplants falls to the rank of the signified, and as a latent signifier perpetuates there the interval by which another signifying chain can be grafted onto it.3 (Lacan 2006b, 594)

The supplanted signifier holds up a lack, and this lack is the (paradoxical) “object” of desire. We have derived the “birth” of the notorious object a from the structure of signification. In Chap. 9, the transcendental deduction of the Lacanian subject will require precisely the demonstration of the object a as the cause of desire. It is this transcendental identification as cause which effects the transit from analytic to poetic subject. Before turning to the example which Lacan uses to illustrate his point, let us revisit the considerably more pedestrian (and therefore ultimately more opaque) example in which ‘cat’ is taken to refer to (signify) a cat. Once we remark that “cat” and ‘a cat’ are themselves two signifiers, we see that the signification “effect” in this description consists of the replacement of one signifier by another, which is taken to be the object of

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signification (the depended). There is, manifestly, no physical cat in the sentence, “‘Cat’ refers to a cat.” In a quite vapid (and yet still metaphorical) sense, we may say that this sentence “desires” to refer to a cat which is manifestly absent. More relevantly, yet even more insistently metaphorically, the desire at issue is the desire to signify signification. (Advanced exercise: on this basis, rewrite (Field 2001).) Lacan, on the other hand, more floridly (and perspicuously) enlists the example of Punchinello, who exemplifies the “dominance of the signifier” in its “most materially phonemic form” through “falsetto and the morphological anomalies of this personage,” beyond which “it is clearly homophonies which, condensing in double exposures, like witticisms and slips, most surely give us away—it is the phallus that he symbolizes” (Lacan 2006, 598). That is not the sort of example one would find enlisted by Hartry Field! This symbolization is perpetuated through a chain of signific deferrals: “to find the dagger, stake, or blunt instrument he dissimulates,” the “winged phallus” or “universal key” that fits all doors, the “unconscious fantasy of the impossibilities of male desire” (Lacan 2006b, 598 and 601 fn. 25; Bassler 2005). Punchinello is not the phallus, but the absence of the phallus, its difference and deferral, its différance, to enlist Derrida’s gloss. What this example gives us is a picture of the complicity of metonymy and metaphor in the topological dynamics of desire (Bassler 2012, 186). Seen from a static, logical perspective, the formulas for metonymy and metaphor contradict each other; from a dynamic perspective they complement each other, and the mark of this dynamism is that each formula is always open. This open, dynamic relation is the fundamental nature of the Lacanian subject, and yet I will ultimately suggest that Lacan does not find adequate tools to do justice to the dynamism he has identified, in a way similar to Blumenberg’s inability to stabilize his legitimation of the modern age dynamically. The formula for metonymy is open in the creation of a lack, and the formula for metaphor is open in that by (metaphorically) crossing the bar of signification, it in fact only perpetuates the lack it (metaphorically) “fills.” Deleuze and Guattari would seek to show how this “dialectic” of metaphor and metonymy is still quite limited. In particular, they attempt to replace the vertical/horizontal model with a smooth/striated model, but this does not appreciably improve matters.

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The deeper need is to find a way to escape such a reliance on binary distinctions which are taken as primitive. René Thom’s catastrophe theory might be invoked to such effect. In “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Lacan gives us another formula for metaphor, or, as he puts it here, “for signifying substitution”: (S/$′)  ⋅  ($′/x)  →  S  (1/s) (Lacan 2006b, 464), where I understand ‘substitution’ once again to refer, in the language I have used above, to replacement, not (metonymic) displacement. This new formula advances on the previous one in marking explicitly the “elision” of the signifier S′, “represented in the formula by the fact that it is crossed out,” which is “the condition of the metaphor’s success” (Lacan 2006b, 465). This elision is what Lacan has previously referred to as the signifier S′’s latency; that latency is represented here by the signifier S′ being given under erasure. x, Lacan tells us, is the “unknown” signification and s is the “signified induced by the metaphor.” As an example to fill this out, Lacan gives the signifier ‘Name-of-the-Father’, which displaces the signifier ‘Mother’s desire’.4 The former signifier is promoted to a metaphor through the displacement of the latter, with the consequent replacement of the unknown signified by that induced by the metaphor (phallus). However, the example also complicates matters, for in it we witness desire at the level of the signifier, whereas previously, the metaphor machine was invoked to implement the dynamics of desire, and there the distinction between these two levels must be maintained (at least while the bar is, albeit paradoxically, being crossed). To follow Lacan’s account further, we must return to the subject of desire and its relation to the metaphor and metonymy machines. Lacan begins by “conflating” the passage from signifier to signified with the position of the subject, and goes on to remark, “[i]t is the position of the subject, thus introduced, on which we must now dwell since it lies at the crux of our problem” (Lacan 2006b, 429)—the problem, I take it, of “Reason since Freud” announced in the subtitle to Lacan’s essay. This reason demands nothing less than a revision of the Cartesian cogito, to which Lacan now turns. While casting doubt on the simple affirmation of a transparent relation between a transcendental subject and its existential affirmation, Lacan does not contest the establishment of some such link. But insisting on the (Cartesian) reduction to transparency only

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serves as witness to an acknowledgment of the pervasive role played by affirmation in the name of a subject which is “indispensable even to the workings of a science such as strategy in the modern sense, whose calculations exclude all ‘subjectivism’.” Precisely in such a case the linkage between subject and affirmation cannot be taken transparently. Behaviorism is the counter-revolution of psychoanalysis. The Freudian revolution aggravates the question opened by Copernicus when he questioned “the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe” (Lacan 2006b, 429). The Copernican question may now be posed in the form: “[i]s the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?” (Lacan 2006b, 430) Clearly, Lacan opts for the eccentric relation. As Lacan says in his earlier lecture, “The Freudian Thing,” Freud discovered that the “veritable center of human beings is no longer at the place ascribed to it by an entire humanist tradition” (Lacan 2006b, 334); where then is this center, or is there one? The “radical eccentricity” Freud discovers is encapsulated in his apothegm, “Wo es war, soll ich werden” (cited, Lacan 2006b, 347). But this displacement, it seems, is so radical, so eccentric, that we may no longer identify the subject’s path as an orbit: it is rather a divergence.5 How can a subject be constituted through divergence? The challenge Freud poses to Lacan is that the game of signification must go on where I am not. Focusing on metonymy and metaphor, respectively, provides us with two complementary insights. From the perspective of metonymy, in resolving to be “only what I am,” I cannot escape the fact that I am (only) in this resolutive act. From the perspective of metaphor, resolving to become what I am, how can I doubt that, “even if I were to lose myself there, I am there”? (Lacan 2006b, 430) This paradoxical, and metaphorical, “out of focus locus”—available only through metonymic displacement and/or metaphoric identification—is the locus of an impossible (yet actual!) act of signification—impossible because it cannot be literally accomplished, but only virtually through the ruses of metonymy and metaphor.6 It is the locus of the desire to signify signification, and in psychoanalytic terms it is the desire for the absent phallus. Indeed, such is the only locus we can identify for the Freudian subject: hence we find the central role played by the logic of castration.

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This locus is, specifically and ineliminably, the locus of desire. It is, equally specifically, not the locus of thinking, for “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking” (Lacan 2006b, 430). Thinking has been eccentrically displaced by desire. We have reached our first major result: the desire to signify signification is not a function of thinking. Rather, thinking, and therefore the thinking subject, is a function of this desire. Suppose we try to signify signification by saying: “‘The cat is on the mat’ is true if and only if the cat is on the mat.” Then the brutality of the definition militates for a form of thinking in which: a) there is a sharp distinction between language and metalanguage, and b) we assume that we understand the relation S / s because it is transparent. Enlisting Lacan (for whom, notoriously, there is no metalanguage) we may argue that we have committed ourselves to a purely formal (and thereby incoherent) model of thinking. Mathematics is formal, thinking is not. For, when we assume that there is an ‘object language’ in contradistinction to the metalanguage, this object language is in fact a) a formal construct and b) in fact no language at all. Truth as “disquotation” is a model of thinking as the uncovering of the referential conditions of purely formal “expression.” But ‘formal expression’, if understood literally, is a contradiction in terms. It only makes sense on the basis of the provision of metaphor and metonymy machines. And that, by implication, already commits us to the foundational role played by desire. Another way Lacan puts this decentering is that the previous assumption that the human could be identified as being located along that “common axis” which the signifier and signified occupy is voided by the recognition that the signifier and the signified are not even located in the same plane; their common axis is, therefore, “nowhere” (Lacan 2006b, 431). The radical eccentricity of the subject is reflected in the fact that not only does it not “orbit” around some other, it is in fact even eccentric with respect to itself (Lacan 2006b, 435). And indeed, even this formulation is ineliminably metaphorical. What, then, is the conception of Freudian reason which follows from this displacement? It is the conception of (psycho)analysis, understood first and foremost as an embodied praxis. With this recognition, the entire question of the

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domain of psychoanalytic praxis is reopened, and so there is everything left to say. In particular, the entirety of Lacan’s Écrits must be read as an attempt to address this question, and any attempt to localize it within Lacan’s work risks reduction to just that fallacy of conceptual transparency which he identifies as the pretension of the Cartesian cogito. Such a pretension is motivated, and as such always a function of an antecedent dynamic of desire it is precisely the aim of Freudian rationality to disclose. Moreover, there is nothing elusive or fleeting about this recognition: I have stated it clearly and explicitly right here. It is no less, but also no more mysterious than the articulation of (so-called) logical paradoxes. Logical “paradoxes” are only paradoxical when they are taken literally, in the absence of the metaphor and metonymy machines.7 For present purposes, it is most pressing that there is everything left to say about how the psychoanalytic act compares to the poetic act. Like Freudian rationality as Lacan presents it, poetic rationality is equally a rationality of desire first and foremost, and only secondarily a rationality of thinking. We have already seen how Lacan’s account of the subject discloses a poetic “moment.” Furthermore, the promotion of poetic reason can draw great inspiration from the Freudian investigation, especially as extended by Lacan, in the comparison of the constitution of the field of the poetic work with those of the dream-work and the work of analysis. In each case it is a “logic of the work” which is at issue, and this links these considerations back to Schlegel’s innovation in displacing the egological field by the (poetic) work field. A first recognition must be that, especially in the case of post-Romantic poetry, the work fields of poiesis and criticism ideally coincide, as the Jena Romantics already realized. Therefore, the field of the poetic work is most readily comparable to a fusion of the dream- and analytic- work, which is ineliminably at play in Freud’s own self-analysis. At the same time, I take Lacan’s insistence that the Freudian unconscious is not the unconscious of romantic poetic creation (Lacan 1978, 24) as a welcome caution, since in fact romantic conceptions of the imagination are insufficient to bear the load of poetic reason Benjamin’s reconstruction of Schlegel’s point opens. The more explicit articulation of the relation between poetic and psychoanalytic subjects must await the provision of a transcendental deduction of the psychoanalytic subject in Chap. 9.

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For the time being, and absent an analysis of every aspect of Lacan’s Écrits, we can gain some oversight by attending to the various diagrams which extend those of the metonymy and metaphor machines. The trajectory along which Lacan presents these diagrams provides a kind of skeletal backbone (if not key) for the development of Lacan’s research. I will not try to discuss all the diagrams which appear in the Écrits, but will focus rather on those which most overtly pick up on the metaphor and metonymy machines. At this point I turn to a reading from Lacan’s Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. This has in particular the advantage that it is more directly transactive than the Écrits. I will present the most basic of Lacan’s diagrams as topologically “translating” (really, as we will see, more closely: grounding) the metonymy and metaphor machines. For now, I leave the Écrits, with a final quotation: … we cannot confine ourselves to giving a new truth its rightful place, for the point is to take up our place in it. The truth requires us to go out of our way. We cannot do so by simply getting used to it. We get used to reality [réel]. The truth we repress. (Lacan 2006b, 433)

3.2 Lacanian Diagrams Lacan offers his topological diagrams in an attempt to provide a more direct representation of the “place” of truth in which we must “take ourselves up.” That the diagrams are themselves spatial does not mean that they give a direct transcription of this “place” as spatial. This place is the “place” of the subject of truth. At such it is not literally spatial, but, as I will explain, is the place of a variable: while a variable is not itself metaphorical, its place is not literally spatial. Here it may (or may not) help to contrast Quine’s dictum that “to be is to be the value of a variable.” To my mind, this leads naturally to a question Quine himself does not ask, so far as I am aware: but then what is a variable? If asked, I suspect Quine would have simply replied that it is the value for another variable. I insist instead that the variable is the value’s place. To many this will seem curious, to begin with, because we do not typically think of values (say, for

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example, numerical values) as contextual. My claim is that, in fact, mathematical values are always contextual, and that this commitment is supported by Lacan’s own conceptual orientation, though I am not sure he recognizes the full extent of its implications. For what is the place of the subject if the subject’s place is created through the displacement of signifiers? This implies, I take it, that the subject only has a place in the context of the displaced and displacing signifiers. Thus, the place of the subject is intrinsically contextual. The place is in itself nothing, and so following Lacan’s dictum that anxiety is not without an object, we might do better to say that the subject is not without a place. Along this line, we should be able to envision that the bar between signifier and signified exists in and only in its crossing. Why then, or indeed how, even, may we represent this place in terms of a spatial diagram, for this would seem to conflate the notions of physical and subjective place that Lacan is at pains to distinguish? When we consider these diagrams we must keep in mind that these topological diagrams themselves always already have the status of (proto-)signifiers— in more general terms, they are symbolic. This recognition will ultimately require us to ask about the place of more traditional notions of linguistics within a larger domain of semiosis. Lacan makes clear the sense of “fundamental concept” that figures in the title to his seminar when he remarks on Freud’s use of the term ‘Grundbegriff’. In the article on Trieb und Triebschicksale Freud asserts that drive (Trieb) is a fundamental concept, a Grundbegriff (Lacan 1978, 162). Lacan has himself begun his seminar by cautioning his audience that drive will be so difficult to approach that he does not think he “can do more this year than touch upon it after we have dealt with the transference” (Lacan 1978, 19). As it was to turn out, the presentation of drive is quite extensive and is enveloped within a larger discussion of transference rather than following on the full treatment of the latter. Lacan asserts that the success or failure of drive as Grundbegriff will depend on its success or failure in tracing “its way in the real that it set out to penetrate” (Lacan 1978, 163), and I take it that Lacan intends each of his four concepts—unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive—as fundamental in just this sense.

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What I propose to do is to show how the fundamental topological diagram Lacan introduces in Seminar XI gives us a picture—thus, traces—just this penetration of the real that Lacan ascribes to Freud as the fundamental work of the Grundbegriff. This demonstration goes well beyond anything Lacan himself provides explicitly, and so it will be all the more important to pay attention to the ways my proposal is anchored, on the one hand, in Lacan’s diagram, and, on the other, in Lacan’s description of the metonymy and metaphor machines. In so doing, it will be especially important, in treating Lacan’s fundamental topological diagram, to distinguish consistently between the tracing which is the penetrating of the real and the way that this tracing itself represents penetration in the diagram. Like stroke notation for numbers, diagrams represent not only other representeds, but also themselves: ∣∣∣∣∣ both is a five (of strokes) and a notation for the number five. But is this ‘number five’ something distinct from what represents it? No: at this level, the strict separation of signifier and signified cannot be maintained even at the conceptual level. In the diagram, I take the real to be given as the surface of inscription in its blankness. This blankness is the only possible ascriptor for the real, given that the real is precisely that which cannot be directly symbolized— in the metonymy and metaphor machines it was only “achieved” indirectly, and paradoxically at that. If we take the blank spatial field to symbolize the real, any inscription on this surface will constitute a penetration of it. The success or failure of which Lacan speaks will not, then, lie merely in whether the spatial field of the real is penetrated by this diagram, but whether it is penetrated in such a way that the work of the fundamental concept in penetrating the real is accomplished. The diagram is, after all, meant to be a diagram of a fundamental concept, in the current case the concept of the drive. The diagram at issue presents an elliptical rim through which an arrow passes, first in, then around an “objet petit a” (more on this momentarily) and finally back out again. The trajectory of the arrow is the “aim” and the successful traversal of this aim is the “goal.” Such, in its totality, is our diagram (Lacan 1978, 178). Simple enough? No, not simple at all. But let’s begin by enumerating the things that can be said more or less simply. First, as to ‘aim’ and ‘goal’: the aim, Lacan tells us, is the “way taken.” The goal is a bit more complicated. Although Lacan says the French but

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may be translated by the English ‘goal’, they are not the same: in archery, the goal is not “the bird you shoot” but rather it is “having scored a hit and thereby attained your but” (Lacan 1978, 179). Thus, both aim and goal emphasize process, in related but distinct ways. Next, as to drive: the arrow which rises and descends, crossing the surface of the rim, represents a “tension” which cannot be separated from its return through the “erogenous zone” (rim, understood as Quelle, source, “the so-called erogenous zone in the drive” (Lacan 1978, 179)). Finally, the objet petit a which the arrow “circuits” is “in fact simply the presence of a hollow” (Lacan 1978, 180). It therefore refers, in the diagram, to the region of space around which the arrow travels. Lacan exemplifies this in terms of the oral drive, in which the objet petit a is not the “origin of the oral drive” introduced as “the original food,” but rather is introduced “from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object” (Lacan 1978, 180).8 How does the diagram relate to the metonymy and metaphor machines? The diagram represents an interior surface, where the distinction between interior and exterior is defined by the trajectory of the arrow: we will say the arrow traces from exterior to interior and back again. The transit in either direction reflects a flux, whose net value across the entire circuit would appear to be zero (shades of Stokes’ Theorem). And yet Lacan tells us that in the interior of this surface the arrow transits around an objet petit a which is, however, nothing but the void of the interior itself. This well represents the fact that from the perspective of “real signification” there is no net value, and yet from the perspective of “virtual signification” the transit nets a value which is reflected in the circuit “around” the objet petit a which is at the same time the (virtual) creation of this object (beyond Stokes’ Theorem). The distinction between the two reflects Lacan’s insistence both that the process is what is at issue, not some trophy which is brought home as a bounty object, and that the objet petit a itself stands for the impossibility of any ultimate satisfaction of the drive. (Analogously, the poem as ejectum will be neutralized when it is socially reduced to a trophy.) In this way, the negative valence of the metonymy machine is captured: the transit of the chain of signifiers S … S′, here reflected by the transit of the arrow, is congruent to a negative relation between signifier

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and signified, not to be identified with the objet petit a, but for which the objet petit a represents by reflecting the absence of the “eternally lacking object.”9 But if the diagram reflects the metonymy machine, how can it also reflect the metaphor machine? Following on the discussion above, we cannot expect it to do so unless we take the “dynamics” of the diagram into account, for the metaphor and metonymy machines are themselves related dynamically. Here it is best to work from right to left, beginning with the + sign on the right hand side of the metaphor machine’s equation. Lacan says it manifests “the crossing of the bar, −, and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of signification.” In the diagram, the bar that is crossed is precisely the rim which is traversed by the arrow, and in traversing this bar signification emerges: this is the dynamic effect the diagram represents. The crossing of this bar, from outside to inside, and the subsequent transit back from inside to out, is the creation of the objet petit a (otherwise simply a void space, hence an indeterminate stretch of the real) as (virtual) “signification effect.” What, then, is the signifier that is displaced, the original S which is displaced by S′ in this reading of the diagram? Several possibilities present themselves, but the one I favor takes its cue from the right to left reading of the equation f(S′/S)S ≅S (+) s. If the + indicates the crossing of the bar and its constitutive value, then we must take crossing to reflect the displacement of S by S′ on the left side of the equation. This displacement is reflected in the crossing S′/S of the boundary of the rim from outside (S) to inside (S′), and back to the outside, S, giving us the left side of the equation, f(S′/S)S.  Positionally, the two appearances of S “cancel”: we start on the outside and we end on the outside, and in this sense we have “gone nowhere.” And yet, dynamically, we have effected a transit—just as much as when we leave home and later return we have “gone on a vacation.”10 In the more sophisticated versions of Lacan’s diagram to come, we will see that circuits (squares) are formed which may be traversed in their entirety. The two readings of the diagram are not compatible: in the first, metonymic, reading, the transit is reflected in the directional passage S … S′ from S to S′. In the second reading, the transit is reflected in the return from S, through its displacement, to S itself. This incompatibility should

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be expected: the diagram itself is a geometric object, not a dynamical one, and only the two incompatible interpretations will reflect the dynamics Lacan describes fully. We have, then, a kind of “complementarity” not entirely unlike that found in quantum dynamics (it is reflected already in the association of canonical variables in a classical dynamical formalism as well, but there the problem of incompatibility does not arise). Could we trace this complementarity through, in quantum dynamics as well, in terms of signification effects? I return to issues of “quantum Lacanian psychoanalysis” below. We are now in a position to read the formula for “signifying substitution” as well: (S/$′) ⋅ ($′/x) → S (1/s). This formula is richer than either of the two considered previously, and the reading I propose sheds light on this formula only from one angle. Taking the distinction between outside and inside as point of departure, we may read the formula for signifying substitution as providing an explanation for the creation of a signification effect through displacement occurring both outside and inside the rim. In this reading, each side gives us an outside followed by an inside. On the left-hand side, (S/$′) ⋅ ($′/x) denotes first (reading left to right) that the outside S (in S/$′) displaces the signifier S′ of the internal trajectory, where the barring represents the passage of this signifier into the interior “black-hole” of signification, sight unseen. On the inside (i.e. in $′/x) the barred signifier $′ displaces in turn the real signification x in achieving virtual signification only. On the right-hand side of the formula, therefore, S must once again represent the outside and 1/s the virtual signification produced inside the rim through “signifying substitution.” This formula encompasses both metonymic and metaphorical dimensions: the metonymic placement of outside and inside is reflected at each stage, and the metaphoric dimension is represented in the “vertical” production of virtual signification that connects the two sides (i.e., in → ). For this reason, the formula is not an equation expressing the equivalence of the two sides, as in the case of the metonymy and metaphor machines, but a functional (or we could say promotional) relation, represented by the arrow. So far, we have focused exclusively on the changes demanded by a post-Freudian rationality in terms of the need to account for signification effects, but this is only a first step in dealing with the comparison between

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the rationality of the “Freud-work” and the rationality of the poetic work. Above, I have made the preliminary suggestion that we begin to think of the poetic work in terms of the fusion of the dream-work and the analytic work. To assess the relation between dream-work and the work of analysis will involve a consideration of the Freud-work both in theoretical and practical terms. If we read The Interpretation of Dreams as a work, largely and ultimately, of Freud’s self-analysis, then we may already view this challenge in the context of the dream-work itself, so that there is no real simplification, but only a consolidation, indeed a condensation, in this case. In Lacan, we can identify three stages in the consideration of this problem. First, whatever Lacan has to say about Freud is rooted in his conviction that The Interpretation of Dreams is already a manifesto of (post-)Freudian reason. The revolution already occurs, so to speak, in the context of Freud’s self-analysis. Second, there is what Lacan has to say about the role of the training-analysis. Third, and finally, there is the focal role played by the fundamental concept of the transference. Only by traversing this circuit would we be in a position to evaluate the significance of the Freud-work for the legitimation of poetic reason in terms of a poetic work. This comprises the work of Freud’s “first revolution;” the “second revolution” à la Freud is initiated with the introduction of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, though Lacan will trace the roots of this second revolution back to the metapsychological work which Freud begins around 1915, and in particular in the essay “On Narcissism.” This second revolution deepens all aspects of the circuit previously described, and this deepening is integrated into Lacan’s presentation in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Anxiety. Working backwards, I begin by looking at the discussion of transference that surrounds the discussion of drive in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Anxiety, since it is the enveloping context in which the diagram we have considered above appears. Lacan condenses his position in the following passage: In order to give you formulae-reference points, I will say—if the transference is that which separates demand from the drive, the analyst’s desire is that which brings it back. And in this way, it isolates the a, places it at the greatest possible distance from the I that he, the analyst, is called upon by

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the subject to embody. It is from this idealization that the analyst has to fall in order to be the support of the separating a, in so far as his desire allows him, in an upside-down hypnosis, to embody the hypnotized patient.11 This crossing of the plane of identification is possible. (Lacan 1978, 273, my emphases)

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduces hypnotism in the midst of a three-way analogy with self-observation, which must displace criticism in the process of dream-analysis, and falling asleep: in all three cases, the “distribution of psychical energy” (Freud 1953, IV, 102) is similar. In all three cases, involuntary ideas are allowed to emerge, which are transformed into visual and acoustic images; what distinguishes selfobservation from falling asleep, and presumably also from hypnosis, is that in self-observation these involuntary ideas can be converted (back) into voluntary ones. A complex analogy results: waking ↓ sleeping

waking idea

criticism

↓ hypnotized

voluntary

↓

↓

image

self-observation

↑ involuntary

The upward arrow in the last column is meant to indicate that when criticism is displaced by self-observation the path is opened for involuntary ideas to be converted back into voluntary ones. We thus establish a circuit: Criticism ↓

← voluntary ↑

self-observation → involuntary

Lacan’s emphasis on hypnosis derives from his focus on Freud’s chapter, “Hypnosis and the State of Being in Love,” from Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He first translates Freud’s description of hypnosis into his own framework and then distinguishes it from analysis on lines comparable to Freud’s. In Freud’s chapter hypnosis is presented, as

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Lacan sees it, by an identification of the ego ideal and the object of the ego, what Lacan will call the objet petit a. This identification is accomplished by making the gaze of the hypnotist identical with the object a itself; as Lacan says, in hypnosis the function of the gaze may be fulfilled by a crystal stopper or any shining object.12 Hypnotism then, in its most “assured structural definition” is the confusion of the “ideal signifier in which the subject is mapped” with the object a. In his diaries, Kafka speaks of a special dream in which there is a comparable fusion: “a wildly branching dream, which simultaneously contains a thousand correlations that all become clear in a flash.” As Roberto Calasso comments, “Such dreams are one way the mind may represent a certain quality of wakefulness, a quality that wakefulness itself has difficulty attaining, clouded as it is by an indomitable will to control.” Calasso insists that in this case the dream-image is itself “a trick of wakefulness” (Calasso 2005, 281). This gives us another figure of fusion: in this case of dreaming and waking themselves, in the previous case of ideal signifier mapping the subject and object a. In both cases we must understand this fusion as work: in the first case the dream-work, in the second, the work of analysis. These observations suggest that identifying fusion dreams with waking is not so much a matter of synthesizing them together as it is of identifying the penetration of each into the other which is already at work. The difference between dream-work, analytic work and poetic work then becomes one of understanding the various “topologies” of interpenetration between dreaming and waking. And yet, Lacan will go on to insist that unlike hypnosis, analysis maintains the distinction between the I of identification and the object a. In what sense, then, is it to be understood as an inverted hypnosis, and how is this distance maintained in the analytic relation, particularly in the context of the transference? Lacan insists that it is in falling from the position of ego ideal that the analyst isolates the object a and distances it from the ego ideal which the subject takes the analyst to embody in the transference. This fall is accomplished through the desire of the analyst, and this fall is what constitutes an inverted or counter-hypnosis. In so doing, the analyst “embodies” the hypnotized patient, and takes the patient as the object a for an inverted or counter-identification; in this way the need for a hypnosis of the analysand is averted. The “gaze” has been “crossed,”

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and this crossing, Lacan declares, is the crossing of the plane of identification itself, the possibility of which is verified in any training analysis which Lacan carries to its end (Lacan 1978, 273). Is the language of counter-hypnotism as used here, then, metaphorical? My concern is not with how Freud takes hypnosis in his chapter but with how Lacan uses it. Lacan understands the function of the transference, in separating demand from desire, as opening the subject of the patient which otherwise remains opaque. In this opening, the “nodal point by which the pulsation of the unconscious is linked to sexual reality must be revealed” (Lacan 1978, 154). This opening is accomplished through the identification of the analyst and the objet petit a, and this is what is likened to a (counter-)hypnosis. Hence there is an identification, but it is not an identification of the analysand’s ego and the object a. Instead the role of identification is assumed by the analyst, and this constitutes an entering of the plane of identification, which is prerequisite to its crossing. In the crossing, the analysand’s identification is broken, but the effect is not simply to return the patient to the previous state. What happens when the patient is made the object of the analyst’s gaze? In the counter-hypnosis, Lacan says, desire is brought back to demand, but with the difference that the object a is now placed at the greatest distance from the subject (analysand). I suggest that we look at this full process as the creation of a virtual signification. This means that in the previous diagrammatic presentations, and despite their appearances, a full virtual signification has not yet been achieved. What remains lacking? The diagrams do not represent our looking at them; they remain the object of our gaze. Is there some way to “embed” this gaze within the diagram itself? Barring some physical or metaphysical program, there is no way to create a diagram whose status is independent of our looking at it (i.e., independent of the “code of desire” we use to gaze upon it), but this does not preclude the possibility of a diagram which embeds this gaze symbolically within its representation. Our gaze at such a diagram will then be of a higher order, and this point cannot be made in the context of any program (such as Wittgenstein’s) in which permission to distinguish between orders is denied (repressed).13 There will be two distinct ways to interpret this “higher order” diagram, as indeed there must be: either as the displacement of the Other into the position of the I, or as the higher level at

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which the semiotic signal is viewed as an enunciation (act) rather than as a message. What I have called the counter-hypnosis should not be considered a counter-transference, for the apportionment of the transference effect into two distinct units or even vectors would indicate a displacement of the original transference onto a new one that could only pose as many problems as the first one did previously. (The need to avert this dynamic disequilibrium points to the crucial role of the training analysis.) Lacan protects himself further, but I think unnecessarily, by speaking only of an “upside-down” hypnosis, but if we understand that such a counter-­ hypnosis is a part of the expansion of the transference, we avoid the cul-­ de-­sac while also pointing to the very real risk involved in this gambit. Lacan was himself quite aware of these risks, as indeed with any maneuver that reopened the revolutionary potential of Freud’s thinking in its force (Lacan 1978, 23). The crossing of the plane of identification is something we can represent, but it is not something we can simply think: it is of the order of experience, not concepts. And like the crossing of the bar of signification, it is created and annihilated in crossing it. In a poetic context, Harold Bloom has presented a comparable crossing of election, a poetic analogue of the crossing of a threshold in a rite of initiation (Bloom 1977, 2). Nor is the resonance of initiation in the analytic context inappropriate. This ultimate risk is embodied in Lacan’s assertion, with which he ends the seminar, that the analyst’s desire is a desire “to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it.” Yet this latter relation of what we may call, with manifold resonance, utter subjection on the part of the patient, is also the context in which a love unhampered by narcissistic identification may emerge: “there only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law, where alone it may live” (Lacan 1978, 276). It is in this sense that a possibility is opened for considering the counter-hypnosis as literal. The paleo-conservative Philip Rieff would no doubt have a fit right here, and yet I do not see that Lacan has done anything other than to introduce, in the terms Rieff uses, love as a God-term. Lacan’s treatment of Freud cannot be accused of the “triumph of the therapeutic” Rieff

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rightfully levels at so many of Freud’s followers (Rieff 1966). Nor yet does it follow Rieff in the authoritarian interpretation of Freud as conservative moralist (Rieff 1961), albeit leaving the ultimate question of Freud’s and Lacan’s cultural conservatism open. The table of analogies drawn above from The Interpretation of Dreams remains valid and yet incomplete, for it does not yet in any way motivate the reversal of arrow from the involuntary to the voluntary. The working out of this reversal in the analytic situation will constitute a considerable part of Freud’s effort to develop psychoanalysis, and specifically, analytic practice, over the course of his career. In self-analysis, at least on Lacan’s account, this reversal remains at best mysterious, since it requires the recognition that “desire is the desire of the Other,” and who is the Other here? Oneself as another? This must also lead us to ask: who is the Other in the case of the poet? The muse? Some light is shed on this below. On the face of it, it looks like we must either develop a poetics of influence along Bloom’s Freudian lines or else make do with the recognition that the poem-work fails to fit Lacan’s analytic model. (Or, of course, we could also simply deny the Freudian/Lacanian account altogether, as most everyone does sooner rather than later, with the same result so far as the poem-work is concerned: let the counter-revolution begin!) This amounts, essentially, to asking the question: is the poem-work, if not the work of the dream-(self-)analysis, the work of the analytic encounter, or not? In the case of a positive response, it seems the demand is for the best Freudian theory of the poem-work we can muster (with Bloom as leading candidate), and in the second case it seems the work of analysis has nothing to offer to our investigation (and rational legitimation) of the poem-­ work (Lacan). But the dichotomy is false. This is because the work of Freudian analysis, and especially its presentation in Lacan, calls into question the egological field by virtue of the cultivation of the psychoanalytic subject, and yet the philosophical consequences of this displacement outstrip the Freudian/Lacanian context, as Lacan himself humorously insists (Lacan 2017, 40). The question of the poem-work not only motivates but in fact requires such an outstripping. We can see this motivation in Bloom’s Freudian theory of poetic influence precisely insofar as he embraces the poet as exceptional, as when he invokes the crossing of election, but what

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such an outstripping demands is never clearly revealed. Nor are the philosophical implications of Lacan’s reading of Freud fully revealed, even in the context of the work of psychoanalysis. Of course, philosophy is the interest of neither Lacan nor Bloom per se, though both shed great light on the challenges. We must not confuse an application of Freudian thinking to poetic or philosophical programs with a philosophical revaluation of either in the light of “reason since Freud,” especially if we understand this reason as poetic. To get clear on the challenge, we must come to as sharp a sense of post-Freudian reason as possible. In particular, we must confront, in the fullness of its philosophical implications, the Freudian insistence that desire is the ground of thinking. Here we find the ultimate root of Freud’s revolution.

3.3 Desidero: Cogito of Desire Lacan identifies revolution in “reason since Freud” with the displacement of the Cartesian cogito. Where Descartes’ cogito is modern, Freud’s desidero is hypermodern, decentered and eccentric. Freud’s desidero is a “cogito” of desire. Lacan’s replacement of the Cartesian cogito by the Freudian desidero is motivated by a treatment of the so-called liar’s paradox. Lacan is resolute in his insistence that no one (save philosophers, need it be said?) is taken in by the notion that there is an antinomy here. And although Lacan admits a “paradox,” he insists that what is said is “perfectly valid.” What there is, is a bifurcation of the statement onto two different levels: levels that we are all required to recognize on a regular basis to make our way in and with language. Lacan calls these two levels the enunciated (statement) and the enunciation (saying): it is the enunciated which conveys a truth, and the enunciation which indicates a lying. What this bifurcation into two levels does introduce is a deferral, in this case a displacement which indicates that the levels of enunciated and enunciation cannot coincide temporally. Yet so far from such difference being a linguistic anachronism, Lacan (following Saussure) sees it as constitutive for language itself. The subject temporally defers itself, so that in the statement (enunciated) “I am lying,” the subject predicated of the predicate ‘am

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lying’ is already the subject of the Other—in this case the temporally deferred ‘I’ which is lying. Example: “I went home for lunch. No, I’m lying.” This identification of the Other as the Other Subject is what coordinates the two different readings of Lacan’s extended diagram mentioned above. Only a philosopher would insist that ‘I’m lying’ be replaced by ‘I was just lying’. Lacan’s point about the Other Subject can be seen in the exact parallel, tense and all, to the following example: “A: I went home for lunch. B: You’re lying.” Not: “You were just lying.” At the level of the enunciated this deferral is registered in the dependence of the ‘I’ on the predicate ‘am lying’, which itself receives its sense only through what I will call the “backward capture” of the enunciation: the retrieval of the level of what is temporally projected in the service of the “present” of the enunciation. We may now put the point made above in a second way: the philosophical insistence on translating ‘is’ into ‘was just’ is in fact a deflection of attention from the fact that fundamentally the backward capture is a displacement of signifiers (signific deferral), and only secondarily a temporal lapse (temporal deferral). Since the subject of this statement is “secondary in relation to the signifier” (Lacan 1978, 141), Lacan will designate ‘am lying’ by $, as we have already seen above. Lacan subjects the Cartesian cogito to the same analysis. It is at the level of the statement (enunciated) that we have an “ego” of which thinking is predicated; at the level of the enunciation, the cogito is rather an “event.” Yet it is this event which Descartes enlists to “prove” the indubitability of the cogito, and in so doing he recaptures the deferred sense of the cogito for the present cogito without recognizing the deferral involved. Once this deferral is reopened, we are led in the direction of replacing the Cartesian cogito with the Freudian desidero. For “the function of desire is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject” (Lacan 1978, 154), and it is “at the level of analysis” that this desire is revealed. But what is this level of analysis? This brings us back, on the one hand, to our question about the status of the upward arrow in Freud’s extended analogy, and, on the other, to the consolidation of Freud’s praxis by Lacan in the description of the transference. I suggest that the reversal of arrow—which Freud already indicates as the desired outcome of dream analysis—can be understood, in Lacanian terms, as the backward capture I have just described. Lacan comes closest

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to articulating this explicitly when he remarks on the inadequacy of a stimulus-response model: What enters by the sensorium must leave by the motorium, and if the motorium does not work, it goes back. But if it goes back, how can we conceive that this constitutes a perception—if not by the image of something which, from an arrested current, makes the energy flow back in the form of a lamp which lights up, but for whom? The dimension of the third party is essential in this supposed regression. It can only be conceived in a form strictly analogical with what, the other day, I drew on the blackboard in the form of the duplicity between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. Only the presence of the desiring and sexually desiring subject, brings us that dimension of natural metaphor from which the supposed identity of perception is decided. (Lacan 1978, 154, my emphases)

Lacan introduces this passage rather casually, it seems, as a remark about the impossibility of a mechanical model of regression on the reflex arc, yet it constitutes a crux for his entire discussion. At issue, first off, are the status of dream images, and I enlist them here to illustrate Lacan’s point. Are they hallucinations, and if so, in what sense? The answer I draw from this passage is most philosophically provocative. First, dream images are hallucinations. Second, dream images, as the somatization of non-­ motorized flow, are the source of what Lacan calls natural metaphor. Third, this dimension of natural metaphor antecedes any level at which the identity of veridical perceptions may be decided.14 To schematize: in a dream, we start off with a demand: this is the root of why Freud will insist that a dream is a wish-fulfillment. But the demand cannot be satisfied directly: the direct pathway from stimulus to response is blocked (deferred). So the energy associated with the stimulus must flow back into a projected image, which is to say, a hallucination. But for whom is this image projected? Is it the subject of the original stimulus? No, it is a deferred subject: this is the root of the Freudian revolution as it outstrips Copernicus, Kant and Darwin. Lacan will give this subject the name subject of desire, and this subject’s desire is the desire of the Other. Which Other? Simply: the subject which is not the subject of the original stimulus, but its deferral. The dreaming subject desires because the

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dreaming subject’s desire already is the desire of the Other (with the implied ambiguity indicated by the possibility of construing the genitive either subjectively or objectively). But this is not, can no longer be, a point made within the artificially restricted context of the Cartesian cogito, because the proof of the indubitability of the cogito just is the enunciation of the absence of desire. The Cartesian cogito effectively says (enunciates): “I am not desiring.” Unlike demand, desire cannot be made directly present. But this absenting is (formally) reflected in the bifurcation of levels which the Cartesian proof asserts (in this instance) coincide. Yet if they coincided generally there would be nothing to prove. And so even the Cartesian proof itself indirectly verifies that this bifurcation of levels is a precondition for the identity of thinking which the cogito, ergo sum asserts. While at the level at which Descartes works, this bifurcation can only be identified formally, Freud will insist that we return its content to it as well: such constitutes Freud’s eccentric path. This content is what Lacan identifies as the domain of natural metaphor. (The athlete Derrida will have a field day racing around on this primal field.) The implication is twofold. First, metaphor precedes conceptual predication. Second, conceptual predication, and the criterion of identity associated with it, retains the trace of its metaphorical precondition. But is natural metaphor only metaphorically metaphorical? As we will see, Lacan does not deny a certain primacy of the literal, yet I will argue that this does not conflict with the primacy of natural metaphor he identifies here. It might seem, then, that we cannot distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical, between hallucination and veridical perception, between sleeping and waking. Yet, when one considers this concern as a function of Freudian analysis, it is clear that conceding this would constitute an explosion of Freud’s entire program. Here once again, the prospect for paradox is not one to fret: waking can only be identified against the background of sleeping. And again, who ever really thought otherwise, except for some speculating philosophers? We should also happily concede that any one of us could be a speculating philosopher in one of our modes: as Lacan himself in fact insists, philosophy is what everyone always thinks about without realizing they’re doing so. Only “philosophers” in the stricter sense are brave, or foolhardy, enough to do so in full,

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frontal consciousness: philosophy is thinking made graphic. It is conceptual pornography, a making obscene of the desire to know. Given that the conceptual can only be identified against a background of the metaphorical, the worry is that all sense of the conceptual will be lost, yet this is a worry only to such full frontal consciousness, as awkward in its kind as the construction of this sentence itself. This only starts us on the grand odyssey of identifying (!) the subject of desire: it not does even foretell the port towards which we head. How could the adventure be of any interest otherwise?

Notes 1. For another account of Lacan’s diagrams the reader may consult (Fink 2004). 2. The most plausible reading of this last phrase is to take the final ‘it’ to refer to the desire; however, grammatically, it could also refer back earlier in the sentence to the signifier. But in any case the signifier is the witness to the desire. 3. The French makes clear that the final ‘it’ must refer to the interval: thus it is the interval which makes possible the graft, and the interval is also that onto which the graft is grafted. 4. ‘Désir de la Mère’, which I would translate ‘desire of the Mother’ to preserve the ambiguity between subjective and objective genitive. 5. One way Lacan understands this is in its mathematical sense, as the flux across a boundary, especially when it takes the form of a rim; see (Lacan 2006b, 718 and 721 fn. 3). I note the connection to the central preoccupations of electromagnetic theory, and return to the general issue below, though Lacan will ultimately identify this picture as limited due to its residual commitment to the notion of field. 6. This provides a first indication of impossibility as the fundamental logical modality for Lacan, a priority Lacan will understand Frege to share. Frege begins with unrestricted concept-formation which falls prey to Russell-­style contradictions. Frege himself abandoned hope in face of Russell’s paradox, but Lacan will imply that it only shows Frege his own true colors. 7. For an elegant presentation of the Anglo-American route to the linguistic dissolution of paradoxes, see (Bell 2016).

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8. The English translation is awkward. The French reads: L’objet petit a n’est pas l’origine de la pulsion orale. Il n’est pas introduit au titre de la primitive nourriture, il est introduit de ce fait qu’aucune nourriture ne satisfera jamais la pulsion orale, si ce n’est à contourner l’objet éternellement manquant (Lacan 1973, 201–2). 9. I take it that the notion that the objet petit a represents for the negative relation is equivalent to recognizing it as a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, a representative standing for the negative representing relation between signifier and signified. 10. The distinction is analogous to one Angus Fletcher has emphasized in his book, The Transcendental Masque, between chastity and virginity. “The virgin is a person whose integrity, whose being as an undivided, unsplit self, as an individuum, authorizes the one-directional flow of time. One does not get a second chance at being a virgin” (Fletcher 1972, 213). Virginity requires chastity, but the opposite does not hold. 11. “Si l’on peut dire que l’analyse a consisté en la rupture avec l’hypnose, c’est peut-être pour une raison bien surprenante à la considérer, c’est que dans l’analyse, du moins sous la forme ou elle stagne, c’est l’analyste qui est l’hypnotisé” (Lacan 2006a, 278). Significantly, Lacan suggests elsewhere that in the Seminars he stands in the position of the analysand. I take it that he means by this that his teaching in the seminars exemplifies (allegorically?) the passage of the analysand through the stages of a psychoanalysis. 12. Dorothy Shakespear in conversation with Ezra Pound: “‘Have you ever seen things in a crystal’ I asked—And he looked at me, smiling, & answered ‘I see things without a crystal’” (Longenbach 1988, 12). Such is the enhanced aptitude for visionary projection of the poet proper. 13. Wittgenstein can be seen as the aversion of type theory. Type theory in Russell is introduced for completely ad hoc reasons: it is introduced to block a contradiction. But this lack of causal motivation need not imply that type theory is therefore incoherent any more than it implies that it is coherent. In any case, the response of type theory is a way of pursuing what Lacan takes to be Frege’s espousal of impossibility as the fundamental logical modality. 14. This leaves open, as it seems the entire psychoanalytic project does unless it simply denies its existence altogether, whether dreamless sleep constitutes an even deeper level, somehow beyond “natural metaphor.”

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Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia, 2018). Bassler. O.  B. “Marlene and Maria,” Southern Humanities Review 39 2 (2005), 167–70. Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prahran: re.press, 2012). Bell, J. L. Oppositions and Paradoxes (Peterborough: Broadview, 2016). Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977). Calasso, Roberto. K., trans. Geoffrey Bock (New York: Knopf, 2005). Field, Hartry. Truth and the Absence of Fact (New York: Oxford, 2001). Fink, Bruce. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2004). Fletcher, Angus. The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus (Ithaca: Cornell, 1972). Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. IV and V (London: Hogarth, 1953). Lacan, Jacques. D’un Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006a). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006b). Lacan, Jacaues. Formations of the Unconscious, trans. Russell Grigg (Malden: Polity, 2017). Lacan, Jacques. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973). Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford, 1988). Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (New York: Doubleday, 1961). Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper, 1966).

4 Looking Back: A Genealogy of the Subject-(dis)-continuum from Pascal to Lacan

We are (not) converging on the (divergent) Lacanian subject of desire. The route goes back by way of Paul de Man’s reception of Pascal.

4.1 De Man’s Pascal In the previous chapter, I have begun the process of reconstructing the Lacanian subject in such a way that it can be transposed to the field of poiesis, creative work. Since creative work is traditionally assigned to a subject—admittedly possibly inspired from outside—it is a significant but not implausible step to suggest instead that creative work occurs in the (now, philosophically non-traditional) subject insofar and only insofar as the subject is understood as the field of creative work itself. It is this field of creative work that I will refer to as the subject-(dis)-continuum, with the parenthetical term recognizing that, as in the case of modern physical theories, the extensive field of creative work is itself likely to contain discontinuous, singular ruptures. Like a quantum field, it is a “field” incorporating aspects of both continuity and discontinuity (Schwinger 2003, 1–25). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_4

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Paul de Man’s essay on allegory in Pascal might seem an unlikely place to find a toehold, but in fact it offers vital clues for an appreciation of what I have called above a subjective solution to the continuum problem. Yet is would be better to call it the continuum problem as subject, for this is not a solution to the continuum problem in which the continuum is given as something ineliminably presented to a subject. Rather, it is a solution in which the continuum is itself subject, as opposed to object, of investigation, so that an even more precise but somewhat unwieldy description would be: the continuum subject as problem. But what is the continuum problem, and how could a subject-(dis)-continuum be a solution to it? And what does any of this have to do with allegory? A continuum is something which, as continuous, is extended, and so the continuum problem is, simply: what is the status of such a thing? Does it have parts, and if so, what is the nature of these parts? Is the continuum composed out of its parts? More generally, how does it stand in relation to them? And, if there are none, no parts at all, how can we say anything at all about the continuum? Are we reduced to a “strongly connected” continuum and a hyper-Parmenidean silence? So, if there is a continuum subject (or subject continuum), in what sense is it extended? But that, it seems, is not nearly a sufficiently challenging problem to pose, for we must immediately deal with the contingency that, while extended, the subject is not entirely continuous, and is as such a (dis)-continuum subject. But (at least in the one dimensional case) how can something be extended and yet not continuous without breaking into fragments which form no continuum at all? Leibniz, who had his own bead on Pascal, spoke of two great labyrinths of philosophy: the labyrinth of free-will and determination, which governs practical philosophy since it forms the metaphysical frame for considerations of choice, accountability, and finally election; and the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum, which governs theoretical philosophy, and so serves as the background, in particular though not exclusively, for the foundations of physics, and so science. The two problems find their common philosophical root in the metaphysical status of the infinite, and yet the way this connects the two of them is not readily apparent in Leibniz’s own work beyond the broadest philosophical generalities. Erich Heintel wrote a book called The Two Labyrinths of Philosophy

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(Heintel 1968), but in general philosophers have not been much exercised by bringing these two labyrinths together, at least explicitly. We might see Bergson in his Essay on the immediate givens of consciousness (Bergson 1910)1 as doing so, and in my view much of the power and radicalism of his philosophy lies here. Indeed, the poetic reason I will promote amounts, in a way, to the notion of a rational installation in change, which is to say, an identification of the sources of reason in some analogue of Bergson’s durée. But, for all that Pierre Trotignon has shown that Bergson’s “philosophy of life” constitutes a massive overhauling and advancement on Kant’s critical philosophy (Trotignon 1968), we must in fact go even further and draw the moral (peculiar though it may sound) that Bergson’s philosophy is ultimately a relatively conservative extension of Kant’s. The appeal to intuition is deepened, but the capacity for an identification of the sources of reason is not radically improved.2 This is the central motivation for turning to Lacan’s identification of a Freudian revolution in the conditions of and for rationality. It is here that Pascal can serve as motivating precursor in a way that Paul de Man has identified in the context of his consideration of Pascalian allegoresis. For Pascal’s identification of the root of the problem ultimately goes further than anything in Leibniz. De Man’s characterization of the function of allegory bears directly on its relation to the subject of truth, with the genitive understood in both subjective and objective senses: “Allegory is the purveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an epistemological order of truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of persuasion” (de Man 1996, 52). This attaches directly to the issue of demand, and so by one further step we reach the Freudian-Lacanian wedge driven between demand and desire. This wedge is already in evidence in the very reason for allegory itself. Allegory would be unnecessary in a condition of stable signification, for as de Man observes, “it would not occur to a mathematician to call his proofs allegories” (de Man 1996, 52). And yet perhaps mathematical proofs should be called allegories, if signification is ultimately no more stable in the domain of mathematics than it is in language at large.3 The relation between truth and persuasion is a concern, among others, for rhetoric, and leads to the internal division de Man recognizes between rhetoric as inventio and as dispositio. A rhetoric which

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attended only to the disposition of terms without their discovery, their finding, would amount only to a grammar of etiquette. If we restrict rationality to disposition, if we refuse a rationality of inventio, then in an analogous way rationality amounts (merely) to a grammar of logical etiquette as well. This is in fact the gambit of ratio as logos, the logical-­ proportional fitting of terms, and its implication is that inventio is extra- or ir-rational. This in turn has the rather breath-taking implication, usually unnoticed or at least glossed over, that insofar as a scientific theory remains standing, its logical status is ungrounded. Are scientific theories, then, the allegories simply left standing at the end of any given modern day, our best narratives of difficult modern truths, as against the truths themselves, which are quite strictly nowhere to be found? And if this is so, or even might be so, then what of the modern, scientific subject of truth—in both its subjective and objective senses? On such radically and reductively nominalist ground—if we can even speak of grounds in such a context—there is none. We begin to understand, I hope, why Lacan insists that the post-Freudian subject is the modern subject par excellence, and along with that what this might have to do with a mathematician-­ rhetorician such as Pascal, and even with allegory as vehicle for confronting difficult truths. William Empson said that metaphors are bad equations (Empson 1951, 331–49). We might say that allegories are bad proofs. If allegories are extended metaphors, which is still essentially de Man’s view, but which, following Angus Fletcher (Fletcher 1964, 71–5), I dispute, then proofs are extended equations, which is a thoroughgoingly analytic conception of proof. So on this extension of Empson’s view the relation between metaphor and allegory turns out to correspond to a question about whether logic and by implication reason are exclusively analytic. They cannot be in any unproblematic sense; but more pressingly still, are bad proofs the only kind to be had? And ultimately we must face the question: analytic as opposed to what? The argument of de Man’s essay on Pascal begins with a presentation of Pascal’s “objective” solution to the continuum problem, under the rubric of ésprit géométrique, and then goes on to identify the major “break” in Pascal’s essay on the ésprit géométrique and the ésprit de finesse (Pascal 1974). In this latter, understood as the domain of persuasion, hence

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rhetoric, de Man identifies a second solution to the continuum problem, and this time a subjective one. In Pascal we are not yet to the point of a subject-(dis)-continuum; for this we must turn to Lacan, who will promote Pascal’s subjective solution to a subject-(dis)-continuum. De Man himself does not speak overtly of Pascal’s rhetoric as a subjective solution to the continuum problem, but the analogy with the objective solution is implied. The reading of Pascal’s subjective solution proceeds in two stages: a first stage of rhetorical complication, and a second, which only redoubles the complication. When the complication is redoubled, a rift appears which de Man gives, at the very end of the essay, the name of allegory. The characterization of allegory as the purveyor of difficult truths is thereby exemplified, and the solution to the continuum problem is first among them. With this road map in place, we’re ready for an investigation of the terrain. First, as to the objective solution (all from the gospel of Pascal according to de Man): the crux of the objective strategy (like many historically, so nothing new yet) is to distinguish between numerical unit and unit of geometrical extension. The novelty of Pascal’s solution comes in his interpretation of the numerical unit and its relation to extension. Yet ultimately the source of novelty lies still further back, in the way that Pascal enlists the distinction between nominal and real definition. The reliability of geometrical (i.e. mathematical) reasoning lies in its exclusive recourse to nominal definition. But Pascal then “glides almost imperceptibly” from nominal definitions to “primitive words,” not subject to definition, and whose intelligibility is guaranteed by the “natural light” (de Man 1996, 56). The upshot, as de Man sees it, is that geometry makes use of primitive terms which cannot be defined, for “the nominal definition of primitive terms always turns into a proposition that has to, but cannot, be proven” (de Man 1996, 57). The implication is that the definition of nominal definition itself cannot be a nominal, but must be a “real” definition, one that relies on an appeal to an antecedent relation between term and thing “termed.” Hence it cannot be brought under the reliable rubric of geometric reasoning, which is itself restricted to the domain of nominal definition (we are very close here to the desire to signify signifying). This opens a cleft in the ésprit géométrique that marks ruptures in Pascal’s discourse itself and will send us to the ésprit de finesse.

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De Man’s presentation of Pascal’s objective solution is historically anachronistic in assuming the presence, or at least the vocabulary, of a mathematical calculus whose formation was still underway, in part in Pascal’s own mathematical work, but I do not see that this vitiates his essential insights into Pascal’s strategy. Central to this strategy is his invocation of the one, the “indivisible unit of number,” which he sees both as the principle of number (the “traditional” sense of unity as principle of number) and as itself a number (the “non-traditional” sense of one as numerical unit). This latter is handled in terms of the principle of homogeneity, which is exemplified in the observation that a house is not a city, yet a city is made up of houses, and that in the case of adding one more house to a city, it remains a city. De Man/Pascal identifies the generic form of this principle of (quantitative) homogeneity in the infinitesimal—for adding any (finite) number of infinitesimals to a (finite) quantity does not change this quantity. The key to de Man’s argument is that he then identifies this generic homogeneity as a synecdochal structure, where in identifying the infinitesimal as a quantity, or unity as a number, we take a part for the whole. (In the latter case, the addition of a unit does change the quantity, but it does not change its nature as extension. In particular, the addition of a unit to a finite quantity preserves finitude.) This opens Pascal’s strategy onto the domain of rhetoric, and more specifically it makes the distinction between real and nominal definition one that is itself ultimately irreducibly rhetorical: The interest of the argument is, however, that it has to reintroduce the ambivalence of definitional language. The synecdochal totalization of infinitude is possible because the unit of number, the one functions as a nominal definition. But, for the argument to be valid, the nominally indivisible number must be distinguished from the really indivisible space, a demonstration that Pascal can accomplish easily, but only because the key words of the demonstration—indivisible, spatial extension (étendue), species (genre), and definition—function as real, and not as nominal, definitions, as “définition de chose” and not as “définition de nom.” (de Man 1996, 58–9)

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I leave aside the task of assessing the validity of de Man’s interpretation, which would at a minimum require some further reconstruction. Take it, if you like, as a “strong misreading” of Pascal, for the point is to identify a strategy, whether it is ultimately Pascal’s or de Man’s as inspired by Pascal. What is novel and of most interest is the way this platform establishes a context for going on to read in proto-rhetorical terms what Pascal has to say about zero. Unlike the one (and the infinitesimal), both homogeneous to the order of extension, the zero is heterogeneous to the order of number; its equivalences must be found in the orders of time and motion, in instant and stasis (repos). This introduces a discontinuity into Pascal’s solution, one which is a necessary precondition for the continuous extension it disrupts; as de Man puts it, “the continuous universe as held together by the double wings of the two infinites is interrupted, disrupted at all points by a principle of radical heterogeneity without which it cannot come into being” (de Man 1996, 59). Noticing the redoubling of language, we could say that the continuum is pierced at each point by a point. For, at the genetic level, number, which is divisible into units, and space, which is indivisible into such units, cannot be unified without the bridge which the zero and its counterparts in the domain of extension (the instant and stasis) supply. The zero as condition is, further, not transcendental but linguistic: it is a sign whose exclusion from the system of quantity guarantees this very system’s coherence. “There can be no one without zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero” (de Man 1996, 59). In contrast to Alain Badiou’s ontological treatment of the void (Badiou 2005), de Man’s Pascal’s is rhetorical. At this point there is a break in Pascal’s text, in the discontinuous jump to the subjective solution. And yet with de Man’s reading in hand we can see this is not a case of “and now for something completely different,” as the rhetorical ground for Pascal’s subjective solution has already been prepared in the (reading of the) objective one. Before jumping ahead, however, some parting remarks about this reconstruction of Pascal’s solution are in order. In a way, what Pascal has accomplished, on this reading, is a novel version of a quite traditional observation, namely that if (indivisible, inextensive) points are given in a line, then the points cannot be parts

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which are homogeneous with the line itself. More simply put, points and lines are two different kinds of things (this observation will be complicated in interesting ways in the tradition of projective geometry, whose Founding Father, Desargues, just predates Pascal). And once we recognize this difference there are really only two basic alternatives: either we can deny there is any composition of the continuum out of parts not homogeneous with it (i.e. points), or we must come up with some way to explain how one thing can be built up out of another thing which is heterogeneous to it. The problem, in the second case, is not just with the composition of something out of parts heterogeneous to it, but with how such a composition could ever generate something with the attribute of continuity rather than a mere discrete aggregate of points. It is difficult to see how continuity could be built out of aggregation of entities with no toehold in the domain of the continuous, and to forge some answer along these lines is the brilliant radicalism of Georg Cantor’s much later approach, which comes with all the concomitant complications.4 A recognition of the challenges is already implied in Aristotle’s insistence that points are not parts of the continuum at all, but only the terminations of the continuum’s extensive parts, segments which themselves all possess the attribute of continuity. The traditional nature of the problem motivates de Man’s insistence that the novelty of Pascal’s solution lies in its rhetorical self-­consciousness: its recognition, first, that the entire exercise is an application in the distinction between real and nominal definition, and second, how in its treatment of the one and the zero, the strategy follows out the rhetorical gambits which the original distinction between real and nominal definition poses for the continuum problem. We could generalize in a rather crude way by saying that the novelty of the modern mathematical orientation, taking Pascal here as an instance, lies in the rhetorical status of modern mathematics. That would be provocative, but I will insist that the right strategy is not only to meet the provocation but, in a way, surpass it. The rhetorical figure fundamentally at issue in the subjective solution is chiasmus, or the figure of crossing (Bloom 1977, Longenbach 1988, 248 fn.). De Man gives us the following example, drawn from Pascal: the distinction between nature and culture is understood on analogy with

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that between first and second and that between constant and erasable, giving us the extended analogy: nature

first

constant

custom

second

erasable.

But then “it is said that fathers fear, apparently with good reason, that natural feelings of filial affection can be erased, thus coupling the natural with the erasable and, consequently, with secondness” (de Man 1996, 62). This leads to a crossing which de Man represents by retaining the figure of the above extended analogy but drawing crossed lines. Rather than indicating the crossing diagrammatically, I represent it in terms of the inversion of the terms in the second and third set: nature

second

erasable

culture

first

constant.

So far, so good: but such a chiasmatic structure may be further “complexified” in a way that radicalizes the rhetorical issue. De Man introduces this complication in the context of a second extended analogy, which is clear enough from its figural representation: people

doxa

false

geometer

episteme

true.

However, the popular saying, “Vox populi, vox dei,” serves as matrix (Riffaterre 1978, 19–20) for the chiasmatic inversion, which again affects the second and third pairs: people

episteme

true

geometer

doxa

false.

This chiasm, however, “is only the beginning,” for Pascal introduces a further complication in the context of an extended analogy which will not be inverted but rather asymmetrized:

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justice without power

impotent

open to contradiction

power without justice

tyrannical

stands accused.

Pascal goes on to assert that (to avoid both impotence and tyranny) “justice and power must therefore be brought together,” (cited, de Man 1996), 67), but inverting the places of justice without power and power without justice is neither warranted nor helpful. Instead, the relevant crossing “takes place in one direction but not the other” (de Man 1996, 67): since we cannot make the just strong, Pascal asserts, we must make the strong just. The relation between justice and power (strength) is asymmetric because it has a preferred direction. This asymmetry is itself a function of the fact that the terms justice and power (i.e., might) may align themselves with the original distinction between knowledge (ésprit de géométrie) and persuasion (ésprit de finesse) itself, effecting a redoubling of the concern for persuasion, and hence rhetoric: justice

(power of) knowledge

geometry

might

(power of) persuasion

rhetoric.

Because justice (in itself ) does not have the power to persuade, we must apply might to the power of knowledge. This rhetorical dimension runs in parallel to the zero introduced into the geometric regime above. Yet whereas the introduction into geometry of a pure sign, referring to nothing, introduces a first level of rhetorical complication, here we have an application of rhetoric in a context where rhetoric (government) already pertains. Hence a transition is induced from the figure of chiasm, already (rhetorically) appropriate in the geometric domain, to the higher figure of irony, which constitutes an asymmetrization of the chiasmus. This elevates us from the level of (traditional) rhetoric to a rhetoric which de Man will call performative (de Man 1996, 68). The distinction between the two bears a strong resemblance to Lacan’s distinction between the levels of the enunciated and the enunciating, as discussed previously. To translate into Lacanian terms, we could say that we have ascended to the level of the desire of the Other.

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What is rhetorically fortified in the process described above is the very language of demonstration itself. Pascal says, “Thus (ainsi), not being able to make the just strong, one has made the strong to be just” (cited, de Man 1996, 67, my emphasis; see also 67, fn. 18). Yet as de Man points out, “this ‘ainsi’ must now be said to be ironical, that is to say, disruptive of its own deductive claim” (de Man 1996, 69). For what sort of demonstration is the demonstration of force, if not a self-ironizing one? It is thus intrinsically performative, miming the status of its own necessity, making it so in the same way that the utterance, “I baptize this ship the Queen Christina” does, and yet ironizing itself in a way which the latter utterance is not taken to, at least in its usual role as philosophical illustration. To illustrate with a more homely example: when a child asks, “Why?” and a parent responds “Because,” the answer to the subsequent question, “What kind of answer is that?” is: it is the final answer. But then, what kind of answer is, “It is the final answer”? Compare the common endpoint of philosophical exchange: “I guess we just have different intuitions,” or Wittgenstein’s remark: “Our spade is turned.” This limit to providing reasons is the intuitionistic complement to the discursive restriction of logic to critical rationality. An account of poetic reason must overcome both limitations, and in overcoming either one it will necessarily overcome the other. Irony indicates a difference of levels, and in de Man’s case it is what he calls the difference between cognitive and performative language. “Language, in Pascal, now separates in two distinct directions: a cognitive function that is right (justesse) but powerless, and a modal function that is mighty (forte) in its claim5 to rightness. The two functions are radically heterogeneous to each other” (de Man 1996, 69). De Man establishes the fourfold analogy: cognitive

right (juste)

canonical rules of persuasion (by proof )

truth

modal

mighty (forte)

eudaemonic values at the pleasureof despot

seduction.

De Man calls the upper level “tropological” and the lower level “performative,” and their heterogeneity marks an ultimate decision between truth and seduction. When Pascal says, “Figure porte absence et presence” he speaks according to the tropological rhetoric of homogeneity

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that also governs the treatment of infinitesimals. When he says, “Figure porte plaisir et déplaisir,” the four terms presence/absence and pleasure/ displeasure cannot be inscribed into a homogeneous “geometrical” proportion: asymmetrization has already intervened. This impossibility is something of which we cannot have knowledge in the strict, geometrical sense, and so de Man calls our awareness of it an “(ironic) pseudoknowledge,” and the pretension to order this pseudoknowledge in a sequential narrative that is “actually the destruction of all sequence,” de Man announces finally, is “what we call allegory” (de Man 1996, 69). So ends de Man’s argument, and his essay. (Lacan makes a further step: at the analogous point in his investigation that he will re-open the question of the logical modalities.) Yet de Man’s reconstruction leaves unresolved the sense in which we should identify this characterization of allegory with the previous one that allegory is “the purveyor of demanding truths, and thus its burden is to articulate an epistemological order of truth and deceit with a narrative or compositional order of persuasion” (de Man 1996, 52). What we see immediately is that this former characterization is now in need of revision: the “demanding truths” allegory purveys are in fact not truths at all in the strict, traditional sense. They are, rather, ironic truths which are themselves the “truth” of irony: rhetorically, allegory only has one persistent, disruptive message, the message of difficulty itself, the difficulty that truth, in itself, is powerless. It is only in such terms that the “order of truth” can be articulated in terms of the “order of persuasion”: the overtness of this rhetorical condition both complicates rhetoric, moving it from a tropological to a performative level, and exemplifies the impossibility of this task. And yet the alternative, a presentation of the order of truth without recourse to the order of persuasion, is equally impossible. The key recognition, itself fully tainted by the power of rhetoric, is that these two possibilities are not symmetrical: the passage from the one to the other is irreversible. I end this section with some speculations extending de Man’s trajectory. What consequences should we, in fact, draw if the domain of geometric signification is no more stable than that of narrative? This would not disqualify it, and might even qualify it preeminently as allegorical.

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But, on this assumption, the geometric domain now introduces a new and yet deeper order of difficulties. It is toward this root difficulty, I argue, that Lacan’s topology drives. We may ask also: despite the impossibility of a reinscription of the rhetoric of performativity in the geometric domain, is there a geometry which may model the impossibility of a geometric rationalization of their difference? I conjecture that the answer to this is ‘yes’, and that it is to be found in the notion of non-commutative geometry. On this proposal, non-commutative geometry is an adjoint to allegory (Connes 1994; Bassler 2018, 163–81). With this, the entire traditional notion of geometry must be re-visioned; the re-visioning of allegory already begins with Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Fletcher 1964).6 In turning back to the consideration of the Lacanian subject, we may keep two residual questions in mind from our trajectory through de Man’s Pascal. First, is the sense of allegory as the purveyor of demanding truths related to the notion of demand in Lacan, and the way he distinguishes it from desire? Second, how, if at all, is the pleasure of Pascal’s despot related to the Lacanian conception of desire?

4.2 Lacan’s Subject, Once Again It may not yet be entirely clear in what sense Pascal’s second “solution” constitutes a solution to the continuum problem at all. This is not a concern of de Man’s essay per se, which is devoted to a derivation of the rhetorical conditions of allegory in Pascal’s argument, but rather for my reconstruction of it. Pascal’s argument begins with a first half which is manifestly devoted to an analysis of the status, and specifically the definitional, hence rhetorical status, of geometrical extension. The second half of de Man’s Pascalian argument does present an extended, indeed quite complicated, analogy with the first. So if we are to excavate a “subjective solution” to the continuum problem from this second half, it will help to begin by rendering this extended analogy explicit. I propose to do so in the following way, inching toward Lacan:

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geometry

nominal

chiasmus

knowledge without power

persuasion

real

irony

power with (pseudo)knowledge

We continue the analogy: extension

zero

tropological

reversible

sequence

rhetoric

performative

irreversible.

On this basis I propose to reconstruct (de Man’s) Pascal’s subjective continuum as allegory. Allegory is a sequential progression and, as such, an irreversible extension, unlike geometry which in general has no preferred extensive direction. As the geometric continuum is everywhere interrupted by its genetic condition (zero/point), so allegory is everywhere disrupted by its genesis in rhetoric. As the zero is essentially tropological, this means that the geometric continuum is interrupted by a genetic principle which is rhetorical: the definition of zero is ineliminably nominal, there is no thing (except “nothing”) to which it corresponds. On the other hand, the genetic principle of allegory is not simply rhetorical, it is in fact rhetoric itself. This implies that allegory is heterogeneous with classical, tropological rhetoric, and this heterogeneity requires that we attribute it a new (rhetorical) status, the one which de Man will call performative. If metaphor is taken to be part of classical tropology, the implication is then that allegory cannot be understood as continued metaphor, since the classical figures are heterogeneous with respect to allegory in their rhetorical status. And yet, if we take metaphor to be the “zero point” of allegory, then we could understand metaphor to be its genetic principle, though heterogeneous to what it generates, just as a point may be taken to generate a line through its motion. To see allegory as a homogeneous extension of metaphor on these terms would be to make metaphor allegory’s “one” rather than its “zero.” In that case the two domains of rhetoric coincide and metaphor would become allegory’s unit of measure. This homogenization, which may be taken to figure allegory as extended metaphor, is incompatible with de Man’s reading of Pascal’s rhetorical radicalism.

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If we say that the Pascalian subject is the subject of this allegorical extension—with all the manifold resonance the genitive encompasses— then how does it stand in relation to the Lacanian subject? We recall that the subject is represented by Lacan as $, “in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier” (Lacan 1978, 141). The subject is a “signifier-effect,” and we have seen how this disrupts the ego of the Cartesian cogito. But what is the subject of desire? Still in the context of his treatment of the Cartesian cogito, of how it stands at the levels of enunciation and enunciated, Lacan tells us that “whatever animates, that which any enunciation speaks of, belongs to desire,” but that desire, “in relation to what Freud contributes here, goes further” (ibid.). Lacan begins to indicate this ‘further’ in identifying the libido as “the effective presence, as such, of desire” (Lacan 1978, 153), but what is the libido? This will take us into the heart of Freud’s desire, and so into the Lacanian subject. The libido, Lacan tells us, is an organ, both in the sense of an organ of the organism and as an instrument (Lacan 1978, 187). We might say that it is the organ which allows us to move from the narcissistic field of love to the field of the drive, and as such registers a transition from the imaginary to the symbolic. Lacan translates Freud’s Trieb, English drive, as pulsation (pulse/pulsion), which he explicitly distinguishes from poussée, push, by which he translates Freud’s Drang (Lacan 1978, 162).7 I propose to read the Lacanian subject as the subject of the temporal Trieb/drive/pulsation/pulse/pulsion. As subject of temporal pulsation, the Lacanian subject gives us a locus for the rational installation in change. I begin by enlisting the following passage: The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject. There, strictly speaking, is the temporal pulsation in which is established that which is the characteristic of the departure of the unconscious as such—the closing. (Lacan 1978, 207)

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Borrowing from the language of de Man’s essay, we may identify the signifier as the zero in the field of the Other: the continuum at issue is the continuum of the Other. The subject is manifested in this Matrix-­ continuum as a signifier-effect (the subject is Matrix philosophy manifest, subject of and to expiration, dead on the arrival of this philosophy …). But to identify the signifier in the field of the Other is to pick out a point in the continuum, to destroy the suppleness of its continuity. This destruction is registered as a vanishing temporal pulse (to which we might compare Berkeley’s (rhetorical) description of infinitesimals as the “ghosts of departed quantities”), and the temporal arrest associated with locating the signifier in the Matrix-continuum of the Other is the closing of the subconscious. We should think of the pulsing of opening/closing as the valvular structure of the subject in its relation to the unconscious, comparable in this regard to a valved brass instrument such as a trumpet. No single state of the trumpet captures its valvular structure. The function of analysis, specifically identified with the role of the transference, is to reopen this valve in those cases where it has become fixed shut. In so doing, analysis opens a praxical gap in the Matrixcontinuum of the Other which we may identify as the unit of the subject(dis)-continuum. This unit is itself already a subject-(dis)-continuum. What, then, is the zero of the subject-(dis)-continuum? It is the desire of the analyst as Other. The Other of the subject-(dis)-continuum is more fundamentally the otherness of other subjects than of the World in any sense which would antecede such subjects. In this way, the self/Other distinction is more fundamental than any self/World distinction, along lines similar to the position that the dreaming/waking distinction is more fundamental than the appearance/reality distinction (Bassler 2017). Does this make the philosophy which is proposed a subject-oriented philosophy? Most definitely yes, if what is meant is that subjects in the Freudian-Lacanian sense are more fundamental than any objects, which are always objects-for-­ subjects. Most definitely no, if what is meant is subjectivism as opposed to objectivism in any traditional philosophical sense. In particular, the proposed philosophy is in no sense idealist. This is why, though we live in a Matrix, a field-of-Otherness-as-given-to-the subject, there is no pejorative sense in which this Matrix is either mental or unreal, and yet it is also

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true that “all of reality” is “happening in your mind.” And, to begin with, we should note that the subject is, strictu sensu, a function of this field-of-­ Otherness, which makes the field-of-Otherness more fundamental than the subject. The subject-(dis)-continuum is a (paradoxical) (dis)-continuum produced as a gap within the field of the Matrix-continuum (Randall 1997, 2001, 2009). The Freudian subject, the subject of the desidero, manifests itself in the vanishing of a temporal pulsation within the Matrix-continuum, dead on arrival, a pulsation the praxis of psychoanalysis would hold open and, in so doing, suspend the Freudian subject, for a time, living on: borderlines (Derrida 1979), reflecting also the structure of the paraphysical bracket. We may phrase this suggestively by saying that psychoanalysis constitutes a temporal dilation (with resonances of Einsteinian relativity welcome), and this may lead us to ask whether psychoanalysis is one such (paraphilosophical) praxis of temporal dilation among others, and also whether, in particular, philosophical praxis could be conceived along analogous lines by way of a philosophical praxis of the paraphysical bracket (Bassler 2017, 100–06). This latter question would first involve a more explicit assessment of the status of “reason since Freud.” And what then, of the poem-work? As Lacan puts it, Freud says “The voice of reason is low, but it always says the same thing” (Lacan 1978, 255). If we take this literally, then being reasonable amounts to hearing voices, or somewhat more conservatively, hearing a voice: “the voice of Reason.” (I will settle for “hearing a many-­ voices.”) Is this to make reason a function of hallucination? Suitably understood, and on either the multiple or singular construal, I think the answer is in fact: yes. Let’s look for a moment at what Lacan has to say about hearing voices. First, Lacan tells us that the ear always listens to the Other, without ceasing. Second, Lacan insists that “it is impossible to conceive of the phenomenology of verbal hallucination if we do not understand what the very term that we use to designate it means—that is to say, voices.” So what are these voices? Tellingly, Lacan refers us to the example of Socrates: “the inflexible purity of Socrates and his atopia are correlative. Intervening, at every moment, there is the demonic voice” (Lacan 1978, 258). We are not so inflexibly pure as Socrates, and so voices do not explode our subject-­continuum completely into smithereens, but such is the ideal of

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“pure reason” (the cartelization of the continuum from Socrates to Kant and beyond, we could say). This daemonic voice of reason (most tellingly identified by Kant in the moral tone of the Second Critique as respect) shatters all continuity of the continuum-subject (no less than does Allah in the religious experience of the Muslim (Brown 1991, 96–102; Lasswitz 1984, I, 134–50). Is there another, alternative conception of rationality? Above, I asserted that the signifier served as zero in the continuous field of the Other, and that to allow the signifier to solidify constitutes a rupturing of the continuity of this field. It follows that the voice Socrates hears is the one that speaks to the perennial vanishing of desire from this field: Socrates constantly attends to the death of desire, and this is confirmed in the voice only telling Socrates what not to do. From Socrates to Kant and even Freud in his self-revisionist impulses—and beyond, the voice of Reason is constituted as the evacuation of desire. This is why the traditional morality associated with Freud, best exemplified in its reading by the hyper-intelligent paleo-conservative Philip Rieff, is a morality of sublimation, from the sublime to the sublimed (Rieff 1961). Such a reading is not without serious support in Freud’s work. Yet Lacan contests it, for while this reading does justice to Freud at the level of the enunciated, it is a travesty of Freud’s enunciating, and is therefore conservative in the reductive sense of being derivative. Ironically, Rieff’s reading of Freud becomes yet one more exhibit in the “deathworks” whose lament he sings so fiercely in his own late work (Rieff 2006). Wittgenstein’s version of rationality as the repression of desire is reflected in his refusal of what is often called “semantic ascent” (an assertion Wittgenstein would refuse to make explicitly, as it praxically contradicts the refusal it seeks to express), but this refusal is better characterized simply as a refusal to distinguish levels of or in language. For Lacan, analysis becomes in Wittgenstein’s work ferociously psychotic (Lacan 1991b, 69. This, however, is only the beginning of the story, for it must be distinguished from Lacan’s insistence that “there is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other” (Lacan 2006, 688; Fineman 1991, 26 n. 27, 36, 140). Lacan’ refusal is a refusal of any psychoanalytic “view from nowhere,” a “domain of the transcendent signifier” but not a denial that the signifiers are themselves “indices of an absolute

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signification” (Lacan 2006, 691). Type theory must be distinguished from transcendental theory. So what would a reason of desire, and so one which countenances the “rational installation in change,” look like? Clearly, it would involve some approach which would free the signifier rather than freezing it. It would be a “liberation semiotics” (Bassler 2017, 190–5). And what would allegory look like if we no longer conceive of it as something which is exploded at every point, blown to smithereens by rhetorical complication? (Hazo 1963) So far, we have identified the signifier effect as something which is directed in a way which resembles the sequentiality of narrative, yet attending to Lacan and particularly to his diagrams we can see that the characterization of this directionality in temporal terms leads to paradox, for in such a depiction it relies on a backward capture which would temporally move from the future to the past. (Physicists have no problem with this; they call it “conditioning on the future.” But then, physicists have no problem with reversible theories, either–until they get to thermodynamics. What does get a bit funky is Lawrence Shulman defining the arrow of time in terms of conditioning on the future (Schulman 1997)). So we can either say that the signifier effect is temporally paradoxical or we can choose to identify its representation in temporal terms as inadequate. This latter option returns us to a geometric representation, where directionality is not implied. In general terms, we can specify a geometry antecedent to choosing an orientation; but even such an orientation, in any case, is still more general than a unidirectional temporal flow—reversible flows in general remain compatible with the choice of a geometric orientation. I have referred above to backward capture, and this capture is already in evidence in the primitive diagram Lacan uses to map the Cartesian cogito in the distinction and relation between the levels of enunciated and enunciation. What is identified as the “paradox” of the utterance, “I am lying,” is only paradoxical if we expect the flow to proceed univocally in the direction from the enunciation to the enunciated. Instead, the “liar paradox” makes clear how the enunciated exercises a backward capture on the enunciation itself (following de Man, we could call this backward capture “performativity”). For starters, the enunciated indicates the

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temporal displacement of the relation between enunciated and enunciation, as we have already seen. “I am lying”—now, or just before or just after? In fact, the temporal “reference” must be equivocal, to now and to its displacement, and whichever direction we point this displacement, the latter must be captured by the former. But here, in this backward8 capture, we see the potential for the subject-(dis)-continuum not to be smithereened to points: the backward capture is the fundamental glue of the signifier effect. At this point, we dive into the details of Lacan’s complex series of graphs of the subject, and the reader who is satisfied to understand the subject-(dis)-continuum along the lines presented to this point should feel free to skip to the beginning of the next chapter. For the intrepid and/or aficionado, I proceed to a more in-depth analysis. In Lacan’s later diagrams, giving a fuller picture of the Lacanian subject, backward capture continues to play an indispensable role. Jumping to the end of the line, at least so far as the Écrits are concerned, consider the diagram Lacan gives in the essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (Lacan 2006, 671–702). The diagram is developed in three stages. In the first, the armature is laid out in terms of two fundamental trajectories, or vectors: a vector S.S′ representing the signifying chain, and a vector Δ.$; Lacan does not tell us what the Δ in this latter vector refers to, but only that the vector itself represents “the indefinite sliding of signification” which is arrested by the trajectory of the signifying chain. $, on the other hand, we recognize as the previously appearing signifier which is “pushed under the bar” in the “signification effect,” and in so doing manifests the appearance of the subject 1/s. In suggestive shorthand, call the former vector, S.S′, the enunciating vector, and the latter, Δ.$, the enunciated vector. Crucially, the two vectors are oriented in opposite directions: reading the diagram from left to right, the forward trajectory of the signifying chain arrests the indefinite backward slide of signification. The arrest (crossing) occurs first in the signifying chain, whereas it occurs second in the slide of signification. In the context of a sentence, the effect is a retroactive sealing of the meaning of the sentence’s terms only with its last: the terms of the sentence move forward, but the indefiniteness of meaning is only arrested on the completion of these terms, with the subsequent assigning of

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meaning to each of the terms in the sentence. This is analogous to the way we experience the unfolding of a melody in time and yet possess it only upon its temporal completion. Lacan says this graph may be called the “elementary cell” of desire, and it articulates the “button tie” (point de capiton, which we might simply call stitch) by which indefiniteness is recaptured for meaning, brought back from its black hole, in a way quite similar to that I’ve considered above from Lacan’s approach in Seminar XI. I will also refer to this diagram, understood as a proto-circuit, as the square of deformation. The next graph introduces further complications, not the least of which is that Lacan reverses the position of $, moving it from the beginning to the end of the enunciated vector. The first thing to keep in mind is that the directionality of the vector has not changed vis-a-vis the enunciating vector: their orientations remain opposed. Lacan tells us that the diachronic structure is well-represented by the first graph (what we might call the “vectorial progression of the sentence” in the case illustrated), but the synchronic structure is more subtle. The second graph is designed to illustrate this. The next thing to notice is that, in a way, the figures on the enunciation vector have also been reversed, but only by virtue of being “promoted” at the same time. Instead of the trajectory from prior signifier S to posterior S′, we move from punctuation s(A) to field of signifiers A (which latter is constituted differentially, not referentially, and so does not depend on the referential code). Since punctuation is a privileged set of signifiers which complete the field (locus) of signification, we may identify it as the zero-point of this field, drawing on the analogy to de Man’s discussion of Pascal above. We may then see this as a reversal of the trajectory from S to S′ but promoted from the level of individual signifiers to the entire field. In suggestive language, in moving from the first to the second graph (from the diachronic to the synchronic) we reverse arrows and functorialize on the chain of enunciation. The move from the second graph to the Complete Graph (for the moment I skip over Lacan’s third-stage graph) is accomplished by introducing i as the absence of a zero. If s(A) is the punctuation, the zero signifiers of the field of signifiers A, then its “promotion” to the next level, S(/A/), is the “zero of the zero,” which Lacan tells us is the signifier of the

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lack in the Other (A). (Recall that Lacan tells us there is no Other of the Other; equally, there is no zero of the zero.) This is perhaps most easily understood by viewing the way s(A) stands in relation to A on analogy with the way that S(/A/) stands in relation to what plays the role analogous to A (its “promotion”) here: ($♢D). This latter complex symbol, which Lacan associates with the fantasm, requires some unpacking. ($♢D) is first the signifier for drive—of the four basic concepts of psychoanalysis, this, Lacan tells us in Seminar XI, is the most challenging. $ we have met before, and D signifies demand, which must be distinguished from desire. The lozenge (or diamond) signifier ♢ is a special ‘or’ (with the combined function of and/or) which Lacan exemplifies in terms of the demand: your money or your life. This is not an ‘or’ in a simple logical sense, for as Lacan observes, if you opt to hold onto your money, you end up losing both your money and your life. The lozenge ◊ is in this case to be thought of as a “composition” of the ‘or’ (∨) and ‘and’ (∧) symbols; in other contexts it can also be thought of as a composition of the less than () symbols, which signify relations of yielding. Rather than trying to fathom all the intricacies of this complex signifier-­constellation, for now let’s lean on Lacan’s declaration that “the drive is what becomes of the demand when the subject vanishes from it” (Lacan 2006, 692). So for our current purposes, we may read ($♢D) as the forced choice of D “conditioned” by the theft of S, i.e. its being erased. And this is what stands in relation to S(/A/) as A stands in relation to s(A). We can begin to follow the analogy by observing that (to the extent that the analogy holds) S(/A/) is the completion of ($♢D) on analogy with the way that the punctuation completes the trove of signification, but it is also (along the signifying chain moving from left to right) the antecedent signific condition for the field of signifiers represented by ($♢D). The drive only accedes to the level of enunciated when it is “punctuated”—here we might even say punctured—by the signifier of the lack in the Other S(/A/). This “puncturation” is the result of following the trajectory of desire, which Lacan does in the intermediary stage-three graph. Desire, we know, is desire of the Other, ultimately in both the subjective and objective senses of the genitive. In the trajectory of desire there is what Lacan

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calls a fading or eclipse of the subject: this indicates that when we move from the level of the other A to the level of the drive ($♢D) we are ascending to the level at which the subject of desire has vanished, we might say, into its desire. In psychoanalysis, this desire is played out in fantasy, which Lacan represents here as ($♢a). Here it is the object choice a which is attenuated by the vanishing of the subject, opening up the free play of fantasy (Lacan (1978), 209]). This fantasy “promotes” the ego m to the subject s(A) through the work of desire, and is the symbolic fruit of the work of desire on analogy to the way the ego is the imaginary fruit of the work of the specular image i(a).9 As the zero-signification (punctuation) is the completion of the signific condition for the ego m, so the signifier of the lack in the Other S(/A/) is the completion of the signific condition for the fantasy. The ego is a product of the imaginary (or better; imaginal) work of the mirror stage; the fantasy is a product of the symbolic work of psychoanalysis (or of symbolic work more generally). As Voice establishes the signific threshold for the imaginary and registers its transition to the symbolic (modeled by the crossing of the rim of the black hole in the button tie), so Castration establishes the signific threshold for the symbolic and registers its transition to the real. This leads us to the point which may be the chief stumbling block for many in the reception of Lacan, though in fact for my part I think the concern would be better directed at the extent to which Lacan’s account of the symbolic bootstraps on his account of the imaginary. For many readers, the chief concern will be that not only does Lacan retain the Freudian emphasis on castration, he endows it with the ultimate role in his insistence on the Reality of psychoanalysis and its methods. But what does the Reality of the castration complex entail? In fact, it is the Reality of the castration complex that will free psychoanalysis from the Oedipal complex, for as Lacan says, “psychoanalysis is not the Oedipal rite” (Lacan 2006, 693; compare Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 217, 353). How does the Reality of the castration complex make this liberation from the Oedipal rite possible? It is precisely in the castration complex not having the status of a myth that it opens up the possibility for “subversion,” specifically the subversion (both) of the subject and the dialectic of desire. The castration complex is real, not metaphorical. The reality of castration lies in its regulation

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of desire, in both the normal and abnormal cases, as analytic experience attests. In this sense the castration complex is the condition of possibility of desire: “Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire” (Lacan 2006, 700). This, it seems, is the only fundamental sense in which Lacan would be willing to speak of a requirement of renunciation or a sense of sublimation in Freud’s thinking: a sublimation which is precisely not automatically a subliming of the sublime. The Reality of the castration complex is a subversion of the subject because it grounds desire, and desire is always the fading or eclipse of the subject of desire, what we might ironically call the subject’s “valve block.” It subverts specifically the dialectic of desire because it grounds the specifically Freudian sense of negation, which outstrips any dialectical sense of negation. And so the Reality of the castration complex grounds desire in a sense which supports the Law of desire only in a dynamic sense which is always subject to repair. This will be crucial for the legitimation of poetic reason, for it provides a model of a psyche whose stabilization must be inherently dynamical, not merely functional or structural. Lacan tells us that the castration complex is the only indication we have of the infinitude of jouissance, “which brings with it the mark of its prohibition, and which requires a sacrifice in order to constitute this mark: the sacrifice implied in the same act as that of choosing its symbol, the phallus” (Lacan 2006, 696). Lacan is asserting that the castration complex is the trace of infinite jouissance, and the only imprint of it we have: to renounce it would be to renounce the only connection we have to this infinitude (/parafinitude), and to renounce it is precisely to fall back into a commitment to a pre-Freudian renunciation—as it seems historically speaking Freud himself did on many occasions. On Lacan’s account, the irony is that it is just the hyper-conservatism of Philip Rieff’s interpretation of Freud which fails to do justice to the castration complex, and it shares this conservatism with, say, any feminist renunciation of the insistence of the castration complex by identifying it as a residual artifact of male oppression. The wonder, then, should be not that Lacan’s Freudian “orthodoxy” on this point would be found objectionable, but that there would be any continuing interest in such a purportedly recidivist program. If, on the other hand, we take the extended interest in

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Lacan seriously, not least among feminist thinkers even when they take Lacan as an object of criticism, then we must seriously entertain the possibility that Lacan’s insistence on the Reality of the castration complex, which he views as central not only to his own enterprise but, antecedently, as “truly audacious” (Lacan 2006, 696) on Freud’s part, is at the heart of what makes Lacan’s work of continuing relevance. Lacan himself indicates this relevance when he asserts in the 1954–1955 Seminar that the symbolic value of the phallus as image is a function of the fundamentally androcentric perspective that all cultures (including those of matriarchal descent) have historically shared; yet Lacan gives no indication that he takes this perspective to be essential, historically or otherwise (Lacan 1991a, 261, 272). If Lacan is correct, then an understanding in depth of the source of its pervasiveness would be a precondition for any speculation on its dislocation. The castration complex is the cause (to follow this path we must not be metaphysically faint-hearted, either) of the mark of the prohibition of jouissance’s infinitude, which jouissance brings along with it(self ). The mark is not self-producing, but requires a sacrifice. This sacrifice is “implied” not just by the nature of the mark but equally by the choice of the symbol for this mark of prohibition. The chosen symbol is the phallus, the “image of the penis,” and this image is situated negatively within its specular context. The introduction of this non-dialectical Freudian sense of negation antecedes the dialectic of desire and is the condition both of its possibility and of its potential for destabilization, its “subversion.” The “principle of sacrifice” is symbolic, and the provision of the (negative) image serves it, but in a way which veils it at the same time it “gives it its instrument” (Lacan 2006, 696), and so allows jouissance to be “prosecuted” according to the Law of desire. The castration complex is intimately bound to the provision of this “instrument.” The imaginary function is narcissistic, and so is intimately bound to the domain of the autoerotic. In the transfusion of the body’s libido onto an object, a part is conserved from this immersion in the object, “concentrating in itself the most intimate aspect of autoeroticism,” and this part takes the form of a “pointy extremity” which is predisposed to the fantasy of falling off. In its exclusion from the specular image it constitutes a prototype for the world of objects (Lacan 2006,

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696–7), which receives rather weak reception in Melanie Klein’s notion of the detachment of part objects. It seems quite likely to me that Lacan’s reference to a “pointy extremity” points to the pointe acérée de l’infini memorialized in Baudelaire’s poem, and later taken up by Celan (Pöggeler 1986, esp. 318–34). It is also worth remarking explicitly that the phallus presents itself here as the symbol of a remainder, and a remainder with a negative valence. It is, specifically, what as retained is lacking from the image-of-the-Other. In the limiting case that we take this Other to be our own body, this lack just is the castration complex. I can only form an image of my remaining part in a negative valence: this is the radicalism of Freudian negation, and specifically what makes it non-dialectical, at least in any traditional sense of dialectics. This non-dialectical negation lies at the core of Lacan’s critique of Hegel, inspired by Freud, which I view as a precondition to Lacan’s cultivation of his own form of dialectics. In fantasy, the subject has already been suppressed and the image of the objet petit a thereby supplied with a negative valence. The associated signifier along the track of jouissance is therefore already the trace of a lack in the image of the Other: S(/A/). Along the chain of jouissance this signifier moves to the drive, represented in terms of the way the struck signifier—here the Name-of-the-Father—has been suppressed as condition for a conversion of demand into drive: ($♢D). But along the reverse trajectory of “backward capture,” the “catastrophe” of the drive is the locus for the real capture of the moment of jouissance. The reality of this capture depends on the reality of the castration complex, and to renounce the reality of the latter is to abandon the reality of the former. I close this section as well with a speculative suggestion. There is a strong analogy to be made between the passage from the symbolic to the real levels in Lacan’s Complete Diagram and the passage from classical symbolism to quantum reality in physics. I suggest this analogy in fact motivates Lacan’s understanding of i, the square root of −1, as the (impossible) “zero of the zero.” Just as a classical “state” must be decomposed into a complex pair of initial and final quantum actions in David Finkelstein’s approach to quantum reality (Finkelstein 1996), so Lacan understands zero, the ground of the “classical symbolic,” to stand in relation to i as the ground of the “quantum real.”10 The vanishing of the state

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in Finkelstein’s Quantum Relativity Theory (QRT) corresponds to the fading of the subject in Lacan’s Quantum Psychoanalytic Theory (QPT). This zero of the zero is castration as the principle of sacrifice as itself ground of the castration complex. The complex conjugation is registered in the way imagination is internalized within fantasy: “fantasy contains (-ϕ), the imaginary function of castration, in a hidden form that can switch from one of its terms to the other” (Lacan 2006, 699), what we may call its “complex conjugate.” The objet petit a is the agalma, the “inestimable” treasure, the “marvel,” because, as Lacan says, Socrates does not allow Alcibiades to see his prick (Lacan 2006, 699). In the limiting case of the zero of the zero, its statement is equal to its signification: it is pragmatic, but not performative in the sense of “I am lying,” since it points to no temporal dislocation. In fact, it is the zero-­ point of the zero point of temporal dislocation which is registered in the moment of capture at s(A), the “puncturating” zero point of the field of signifiers. If s(A) is the zero-point of the signifier, then S(/A/) is beyond the zero (Pynchon 1973), and so we may assign it a value of −1. Then using the equation S  signified 

s  signified 

 s  statement 

and assigning the value S = −1, we have s = √−1, that is, i. A final question: the subject is “missing in thinking he is exhaustively accounted for by his cogito,” so who is this ‘I’ that is speaking? Lacan says: “I am the place from which ‘the universe is a flaw in the purity of Non-Being” is vociferated” (Lacan 2006, 694). This flaw is in fact a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum, and it is from such quantum fluctuations that the universe emerges. The great theater director Peter Brook detects this idea in the plays of Shakespeare (Rosenbaum 2006, 379–85), and so we may wonder if Shakespeare discovered the castration complex and the formation of desire long before Freud. The Lacanian critic Joel Fineman in fact argued that it is Lacan who is Shakespearean, rather than Shakespeare who is Lacanian, (Fineman 1991, 113, 145, 159), and this

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motivates the suggestion that behind the Lacanian subject, behind Romantic poetic theory, before even Pascal, we must ultimately return to the Shakespearean Superwork. This is a project for another book, and another time. For now, we must remain with these observations as suggestive out-croppings of our cultivation of the (Lacanian) subject-(dis)continuum as field for the creative (poietic) work.

Notes 1. I have preferred a more literal translation of the original French title. 2. A full account of the acquisition of intuition is not even in the offing; for a rudimentary attempt, see (Rodin 2014, 215–34). 3. I am not suggesting that even if we identify instabilities of signification in the mathematical domain these instabilities themselves should be directly identified with instabilities in the poetic domain generally. A first description of instability in the domain of mathematical proof is given by the revisionary proof-theory of Yessenin Volpin and David Isles, which I have discussed in (Bassler 2017). As a context for thinking about allegory and mathematics, see (Fletcher 2006). 4. The depth of Cantor’s grounding of his solution in Catholic theology is insufficiently appreciated; see (Ferreirós 2007, 261). 5. Stanley Cavell entitles his major work, The Claim of Reason (Cavell 1979); but how can reason claim? I suggest that the transition to a subject-(dis)-continuum is already implied (or should be). I take this to be reflected in Cavell’s work, though not developed explicitly. 6. Early in the tradition of European literature, allegory is considered as a figure, and before figural language is associated with rhetoric, it is associated with grammar. See (Curtius 1953, 44–5), who also notes the association of antiquarianization and allegorizing in passing at 74. 7. Sheridan translates: Drive (pulsion) is not thrust (poussée). Hewing more closely to the French, I suggest instead: Pulsion is not push. 8. To clarify: the capture is always backward relative to the direction in which the geometric vector is pointing, though this vector may itself point either to the past or to the future, or, in a limiting and more difficult case, to a doubling of the present. Here even the relativistic treatment of simultaneity is ruptured, and the relevant physical analogue would be problems in black hole physics.

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9. On the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, compare (Lacan, 1991a, 324–5). The two levels of this graph are schematized in terms of the simpler “Z-diagram” Lacan gives at 243. However, in the Z-diagram the levels of the imaginary and symbolic are crossed, so that the imaginary relation proceeds along the diagonal from top right (objet petit a) to bottom left (ego), and the unconscious proceeds from bottom right (“big Other” A) to top left (Subject-Es S, i.e. Id). The Z-diagram tacitly informs Lacan’s “magic-lantern” description of the cathode, anode and “transode” at 323 as well: here again we see analogies to the visionary design of electromagnetism. 10. In fact, the story is more complicated, since one can pass from real to complex formulations of quantum theory, but I defer these complications for present purposes.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005). Bassler, O. Bradley. Diagnosing Contemporary Philosophy with the Matrix Movies (Cham: Palgrave, 2017). Bassler, O.  Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave, 2018). Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. R. L. Pogson (London: Macmillan, 1910). Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977). Brown, Norman O. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley, California, 1991). Cavell, Stanely, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford, 1979). Connes, Alain. Noncommutative Geometry, trans. Sterling Berberian, ed. Marc Rieffel (San Diego: Academic, 1994). Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953). De Man, Paul. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minnesota, 1996), 51–70. Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Borderlines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1), trans. Hurley, Seem and Lane (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1983). Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions, 1951). Ferreirós, José. Labyrinth of Thought: A History of Set Theory and its Role in Modern Mathematics, 2nd revised edition (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007). Fineman, Joel. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991). Finkelstein, David. Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas of Einstein and Heisenberg (New York: Springer, 1996). Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell, 1964). Fletcher, Angus. “Allegory Without Ideas,” boundary 2, 33 1 (2006), 77–98. Hazo, Sameul. Smithereened Apart: A Critique of Hart Crane (Athens: Ohio, 1963). Heintel, Erich. Die beide Labyrinthe der Philosophie; systemtheoretische Betrachtungen zur Fundamentalphilosophie des abendländishen Denkens (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1968). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006). Lacan, Jacques. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (Book II) (New York: Norton, 1991a). Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). Lacan, Jacques. L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991b). Lasswitz, Kurd. Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton, 2 vols. (repr. Hildesheim: Olds, 1984, originally 1890). Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford, 1988). Pöggeler, Otto. Spur des Worts: zur Lyrik Paul Celans (Karl Alber, 1986). Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Vintage, 1973). Randall, J. K. “Gap 2, Gap 3, Gap 4, Gap 5,” OPEN SPACE CD 8, (Red Hook, 1997), two discs. Randall, J. K. “Gap 6,” on OPEN SPACE CD 13 (Red Hook, 2001). Randall, J. K. “Gap 7,” OPEN SPACE CD 25 (Red Hook, 2009), four discs. Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (New York: Doubleday, 1961). Rieff, Philip. My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlottesville: Virginia, 2006). Riffaterre, Michel. Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana, 1978).

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Rodin, Andrei. Axiomatic Method and Category Theory (Cham: Springer 2014). Rosenbaum, Ron. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (New York: Random House, 2006). Pascal, Blaise, Réflexions sur la géométrie en général; De l’esprit géometrique et de l’Art de persuader, included in Jean-Pierre Schobinger, Kommentar zu Pascals Reflexionen über die Geometrie im Allgemeinen (Basle: Schwabe, 1974). Schulman, L.  S. Time’s Arrow and Quantum Measurement (New York: Cambridge, 1997). Schwinger, Julian. Quantum Mechanics: Symbolism of Atomic Measurements, ed. Berthold-Georg Englert (Berlin: Springer, 2003). Trotignon, Pierre. L’idée de vie chez Bergson et la Critique de la Métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1968).

5 Analysis as Opposed to What?

No more turkey sandwiches. One morning I woke up and I knew I would never eat a turkey sandwich again. For years, I’d eaten them every day for lunch. Sometimes two for lunch. Maybe sometimes for dinner, too? And then: no more turkey sandwiches. And then my life came completely apart: it turned out it wasn’t so easy doing without turkey sandwiches. But I wasn’t exactly doing without, because I never wanted to eat one again. It just wasn’t clear whether there was going to be any life after turkey sandwiches.

5.1 Fundamentals Lacan calls his Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, and at the beginning he makes some pregnant remarks about fundaments and fundamentals. Early on, he notes that fundamentum is multivalent, and that in the Kabbalah it is one of the modes of divine manifestation, “which, in this register, is strictly identified with the pudendum.” Lacan says the pudendum would take the form of the bottom parts, “were it not that those parts were to some extent already exposed” (Lacan 1978, 5; © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_5

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Lacan 2014, 161–3). Howsoever this may be, Lacan’s focal question in the seminar is, “What are the fundamentals, in the broad sense of the term, of psychoanalysis? Which amounts to saying—What grounds it as praxis?” (Lacan 1978, 6) There is a correlative question which Lacan asks a few pages on, and it will emerge as central in what follows. It involves “the presence of the analyst in the Great Work,” something integrally concerned in “what our training analysis seeks.” I may even seem to have been saying the same thing myself in my teaching recently, when I point straight out all veils torn aside, and in a quite overt way, towards that central point that I put in question, namely—what is the analyst’s desire. (Lacan 1978, 9)

More fundamental to psychoanalysis than the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis is the psychoanalytic pudendum which Lacan brings into the light: the fundamentum, the zero-point, which is the analyst’s desire.1

5.2 The Thing What would the Thing be like, were it to enter into our experience? The Thing is the opposite, the enantiadrome, of a turkey sandwich. Catherine Clément’s book, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan (Clément 1983), 1983), first published in French in 1981 (the year Lacan died), stresses several points from and about Lacan’s seminars (especially Seminar VII on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis): the centrality of desire, its relation to ethics, and the insistence on the preoccupation with feminine sexuality. Already in his early work on hysteria, Freud asked what does woman want, “Was will das Weib?” Lacan asks, what did Freud want, “Was wollte Freud?” But the fundamental polarity in Clément’s portrait is between Lacan as prophet and shaman, and the paradoxical relation in which they stand relative to Lacan’s reception. For Clément it was the outward, “prophetic” side of Lacan that dominated his reception, but that was ludicrous, and so she is at especial pains to restore the balance of the shamanic, to provide,

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as it were, a “private” (even esoteric?) reading of Lacan’s words. So, also, she frames her book by conversations with her daughter about Lacan. According to Clément, Lacan becomes increasingly prophetic in the latter part of his career, especially after the “break,” a praxical event which is first reflected in Seminar XI’s transposition to a new lecture hall (later transpositions were also to follow), a new audience, under a new aegis (Fernand Braudel’s, for a time). At this point it is no longer a seminar addressed predominantly to analysts in training, but becomes all the more an ongoing reflection for a broader audience on the paradoxical status of the training analyst, and of the analyst in training: attending Lacan’s seminars, now in a sea of others, and, in many cases, training with him individually. And yet, Clément tells us, Lacan was also a shaman. What does this mean? Lacan tells us that he was brought to teaching against his will—whatever Lacan desires, it is not teaching, and most especially not academic teaching. By the end of Seminar XVI, as he is about to be kicked out of the lecture hall at the École Normale, he tells us that it’s no big surprise, as his discourse is fundamentally “anti-university” (Lacan 2006, 402). What is the desire of the analyst—and specifically, in this case Lacan? What changes in the analyst’s desire when the analyst is hauled into teaching? Hauling is important to Lacan, and it’s more than just being pulled along. It is what is reflected quintessentially in the German verb ziehen, to draw (out, along). A unary trait, ultimate point of identification, is a haul: ein einziger Zug. Adopting alchemical language, Lacan says that it is perhaps to maintain the Great Work that the training analysis seeks (Lacan 1978, 9). How does the training analysis relate to the Great Work? Is it the antechamber? Is it already the Great Work itself? The boundary is blurry, like the boundary between Kant’s critical philosophy and post-critical metaphysics, or between paraphysics and matrix philosophy (Bassler 2017). Lacan is hauling the training analyst to the Opus Magnum: no wonder he was thrown out of the Academy. Then he goes straight on to ask the question: what is the analyst’s desire? But we might go even further and ask: what is analytical desire? And: analytical desire as opposed to what?

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I learned from Chris Byron about the following extraordinary passage from the analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen: When you call what you do non-bullshit Marxism, you seem to imply that all other Marxism is bullshit, and, therefore, that your own Marxism is uniquely legitimate. In fact, there exists Marxism which is neither analytical nor bullshit, but once such (as we may designate it) pre-analytical Marxism encounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical or become bullshit. (Cohen 2000, xxv–xxvi)

What is clear in context is that bullshit Marxism includes (but is not limited to) “dialectical” Marxism—as soon as it (dialectically?) recognizes itself. In response, Byron rightly asks: analytic as opposed to what? (For we may say, tongue well placed in scholastic cheek, that analysis is not opposed to dialectics, it is either a part of dialectics, comprehensive of dialectics, or stands in relation to dialectics as analysis does to synthesis.) I suggest that a better name for analytic Marxism would be Anglo-­ Imperial Marxism, which would at least make it known (dialectically) for the contradiction in terms it truly is. Here’s a first stab at an answer to our question: Analytical desire is desire as opposed to what: it is desire of and for the Great Work, and is as such shamanic. This provisional answer is meant to open a space for thinking about philosophical praxis in a locus we may as well call paraphilosophical praxis, since, for example, Lacan sheds much more light on it than G.  A. Cohen. Lacan’s insight, which reboots the philosophical legacy extending all the way back to its shamanic roots,2 is that what is needed is a praxical reintegration of desire. The remark Clément cites which attaches to the center of Lacan’s Seminar VII is this: “Once he said in passing: ‘An ethics is taking shape, converted to silence, not through fright but through desire’” (Clément 1983, 147). As I take it, the central question of Seminar VII is: what is an ethics which is consonant to the fundamental fact of human desire? And Lacan gives us a kind of ethical maxim, in the form of a question, which responds to this demand: “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” (Lacan 2008, 314) But why (and in what sense) should we take this question to be ethical, or even to point to the transcendental

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conditions for a possible ethics? And in what sense should we take it to be a maxim? For it clearly cannot function in the same way maxims function in Kant’s ethics. We can begin to answer, or at least face, these questions, by tracing Lacan back. The immediate context is this: And it is because we know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire, which is at the heart of this experience [of human action], that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? (Lacan 2008, 314)

Why do we know better? We know better because we come after Freud, because he has (begun to have) instructed us in the nature of desire. This is the third of our Copernican revolutions: “of course not without simplification” (Blumenberg 1983, 374), we may say that the first (Copernicus) displaces the astronomical center of the human, the second (Kant) displaces the cognitive center of the human, and the third (Freud) displaces the subjective center of the human.3 Therefore the three revolutions correspond to: astronomy, knowledge and action respectively. We may also put this: in the first Copernican revolution it is the astronomical subject who is displaced, in the second the knowing subject and in the third the acting subject. There is no definitive historical point at which any of these revolutions is “established”, and a given figure may stand on either or both sides of these respective revolutions in various regards.4 The manner in which the third revolution is identified makes Lacan’s Seminar XV, on The Psychoanalytic Act (unpublished), especially critical, and all the more so in the current context given the implied comparison to the poetic act which runs through it. Unfortunately, in the event, the seminar was cut gravely short, which makes reconstruction of Lacan’s intended trajectory challenging. We may call the ethics Lacan posits an apocalyptic ethics in the sense that the key question (which, although we have identified above, we have yet to identify in its specifically ethical dimension) is one that we ask from the “point of view” of the Last Judgment. This is because for Lacan

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the point of view of the Last Judgment is the point of view of the relation of action to desire, for as Lacan puts it somewhat earlier, the question of realizing one’s desire “is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition” (Lacan 2008, 294). If there is a good in this ethics (and there is, but it is surpassed by a beauty which, however, does not transform it into an aesthetics), it is a good beyond all goods. Kant’s ethical universalism already begins to put us on this track. But it is not commensurate to the challenge which desire poses for ethics. To understand the challenge of desire we must understand the desire to eat the book which John describes in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse). It is on this note that Lacan closes the entire seminar: Of him who ate the book and the mystery within it, one can, in effect, ask the question, “Is he good, is he bad?” That question now seems unimportant. The important thing is not knowing whether man is good or bad in the beginning; the important thing is what will transpire once the book has been eaten. (Lacan 2008, 325)

What will transpire when the book is eaten?

5.3 A Seminar A paraphilosophical praxis is one in which the absolutely parafinite is created in this world as the condition of the Great Work. Lacan tells us, rightly or wrongly, that the Great Work can only be accomplished by the Master, whom Clément identifies as the shaman, not the prophet. Undertaking the creation of the absolutely parafinite as a condition of the Great Work is what, as I understand it, we worked on in the paraphilosophical praxis meetings of the four horsems during the Spring of 2020 (Wheeler, Westland, King, Bassler). This would be my description. Sometimes it takes blindfolds. Here is some of what I learned: The book that is eaten is what I have previously called the absolute parafinite. The eating of the book is what I will henceforth call paraphysical and/or paraphilosophical praxis. The absolutely parafinite is rhetorically (locally) exemplified in the

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hypercomplications of a figure, and the experience of this hypercomplication is a rhetorical experience of the sublime. I mapped out the hypercomplications of a figure in a work of John Ashbery in the last chapter of The Pace of Modernity, “Trading Places” (Bassler 2012, 205–16). Here I want to look at some further exemplifications of this process, leading back to Lacan. “Rhetoric is the art of style; there we shall discover the heart of Lacan’s teaching” (Clément 1983, 42). Indeed, Clément finds the beginnings of Lacan’s entire enterprise in his preoccupation with the style of certain psychotic women (Clément 1983, 56). And she exemplifies Lacan’s possession of and by rhetoric in the following passage: The discourse of truth concluded with a very dangerous definition of the psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst compared himself to Actaeon, who was guilty of having surprised the chaste goddess Artemis in her bath, stark naked. Taken aback, the goddess transformed him into a deer on the spot, and his dogs then devoured him. A fine subject of painting. “Actaeon, too guilty to hunt the goddess, the prey that traps, O huntsman, the shadow that you become, let the pack pass without hastening your step. Diana will recognize the dogs, for what they are” [citing (Lacan 2002, 436), OBB]. There are several allusions here for our apprentice psychiatrist to make out: one to Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune [whose last line is “je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins,” I go to see the shadow you became—trans.]. And another to a famous remark made by a Dominican inquisitor. [The story is told that, during the Albigensian crusade, siege was laid to a heretic stronghold. When the town was taken, the commander of the Inquisition’s troops asked the inquisitor which of the inhabitants of the city were to be put to the sword, since some Christians had been held within the walls by the Cathari. “Kill them all,” the Inquisitor replied. “God will recognize his own.” In French, the last phrase is “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” At Lacan’s hands, this became, in the passage cited above, “Diane … reconnaîtra les chiens.” [Diane will recognize the dogs—OBB]] Once our apprentice has deciphered these allusions, he will understand that he is being asked to expose himself to the snarling hounds. Pagan passion; Christian passion— “take and eat, this is my body,” the latent message of a man who never ceased defending himself. (Clément 1983, 47)

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Does Clément accuse Lacan—in later, prophetic years, at least—of a Christ complex? Though I have already cited it at some length, I curtail the passage to pose the question: but what happens when it is a book that speaks to us and says, “take and eat”? (And for later, the more mundane but equally difficult question: what happens when Lacan’s penchant for puns goes entirely—one might even say apocalyptically, Joycefully—out of control?) As such, there is nothing terribly new in the sort of explication de texte which Clément supplies, and indeed, at one point she overtly recognizes this as her old school modus operandi. Northrop Frye supplies something similar, in his reading of an exemplary passage from Shakespeare in his book on William Blake (Frye (1958, 374). His emphasis is on the pace of association in Shakespeare’s lines, and (more esoterically) on the “lost art of reading poetry” which now requires transportational assistance. Frye’s explication is rhetorically learned (and especially so these days, when the Bible is no longer known by heart), and if the audience at large was in possession of such “allusive agility,” even in an age of Biblical commonplaces, this agility must have been possessed in a vague and incoherent state among the majority of viewers. We are not talking about analysis, then, are we? And this gives us a first answer to the question, “analysis as opposed to what?” But what is this other thing? At the most basic level my caveat does not detract from Frye’s point, since his concern is with felt response rather than rhetorical exegesis, at least among the “audience.” The more pressing question is rather: is Frye’s exegesis, and the concomitant “lost art of reading poetry” to which it aspires, something that can or should be understood in exclusively rhetorical terms? This, I suggest, is like asking about the relationship of semiotics to topology in Lacan—which is where we’re headed. And the answer, in both cases, is: The Great Work must be Topological. Topological: as opposed to analytic? Lacan takes these concerns further than either Frye or, most relevantly, Lacan himself if we restrict him to his complex rhetorical punning. He does so when he identifies the notion of a locus, and in the past I’ve associated the transition from the rhetorical to the locative in terms of a transition from the poetics of figure/genre to what I call a distinctively locative poetics (rhetorical topos → locative globus). Crucial to this recognition

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was Angus Fletcher’s insistence in conversation that we must distinguish between verbal figure and what he called system. Although this latter may also be presented in verbal terms it is intrinsically topological or, in a broad sense of the term, geometric. In another register, closer to Blumenberg, we might call it transcendental (Blumenberg 1983, 495). In correspondence, Oleg Gelikman (honorary horsem of the quintessence) has put essentially the same point a different way: a structure is more than an analogy. This formulation is especially apt to train us onto what is most vital in Lacan’s discussions of structuralism, especially in Seminar XVI. For Lacan’s identification of the locative, I take the critical point of attachment to be found in Seminar VII.  Lacan is talking about “das Ding,” and, as I read it, the transition from Kant’s Ding an sich to the Thing of Freud’s third Copernican revolution. He says, For there is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire, whether it be perverse or sublimated. (Lacan 2008, 109–10)

Lacan rightly identifies desire locatively, in its place. From a rhetorical perspective, we can of course ask, isn’t this just a metaphor? There’s no refuting the rhetorician; what I seek instead is to make the case for the locative. The case is not that the appeal to the locative is literal here, but rather that the literal/metaphorical distinction is insufficient, or that even more strongly the distinction begs the question, since it presupposes the locative itself. This is in fact the core of the issue which cropped up earlier in terms of “natural metaphor,” which seeks to preserve a commitment to the literality of the real while anchoring metaphor in it. It may help, for starters, to recognize that linguistically the locative is a case. But neither is this definitive, for the existence of a vocative case doesn’t preempt historical stress on the rhetorical status of prosopopeia (which in fact Paul de Man identifies as the lyrical trope par excellence). And everything is further complicated, at least linguistically, by the fact that rhetorical units are identified both as figures and as tropes. If we could resolve the problem in an exclusively linguistic way, there would be no problem in the first place. That’s a first way to get a handle on the problem of “das Ding.”

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We are in pursuit of Das Ding as the place (locus) of desire, and the next step is to notice that in Kant’s case the Ding an sich is nowhere. This commits Kant to a form of what I’ve called indefinite externalism. The reason for failing to take what Kant says seriously is pretty obvious: if we can prove that the thing exists, but we can say (and therefore know) nothing about it as such, then what good could it be or do? What positive role could it play in the Kantian system? Well, of course, it can serve as the atrophied metaphysical appendage to which the good will is attached; such, I think, is the thought of the “average Kantian” when the question comes up. But I’ve insisted (Bassler 2018, 118) that this indefinite externalism accomplishes much more. For, in particular, this is the metaphysical version of the Kantian relative parafinite: the parafinite as indefinite. So, in particular, we must begin by recognizing that this indefinite externalism is the slender thread by which the theoretical/practical distinction is maintained in Kant’s philosophy. We therefore have two options: radicalize the primacy of practical reason, or derive a proto-paraphysical philosophy out of Kant’s metaphysical indefinite. Previously I’ve tried to show how Peirce, in particular, takes the first route, and I have tried to develop the second. (Ultimately the two may be taken to interweave, but then the plot thickens.) Let’s compare Lacan’s “place of desire” (or, for short, just place) with Kant’s Ding. Lacan’s place is not entirely indefinite: this is where the construction of the absolutely parafinite comes into this world. It is not entirely definite either: for the locus is itself a gap which separates the cause of desire from its effect. In any case, it is sufficiently definite that we can distinguish between perverse and sublimated ways of inhabiting this place: unlike the case of the Kantian Ding, here we can certainly say something. One could ask: might there be something similar in the way the moral will attaches to the Kantian Ding in various ways? But the answer is: no, because in this regard Kant remains metaphysically traditional: evil is a form of privation. The Kantian Ding is therefore not an other form of attachment, but the form of inattachment. This insistence does generate a tension, which is what makes the Kantian discussion of radical evil so interesting, and Kant does approach a theoretical conception of a non-­ privative negative in the idea of a negative magnitude.5

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In any case, Lacan’s place is squarely in this world, while Kant’s Ding can only refer to an otherworldly kingdom of ends, no matter how well it finds itself represented in this one. (And, for Kant, is this to be understood in a purely metaphorical way? Of course not!) How can Lacan’s place of desire be in this world? What is in this place? Desire, of course, but let’s not be too literal. It could be the place of a book, say, or a collection of matchboxes (Lacan 2008, 114). The question is not so much where is this place, but: what object is in this place? And the answer, of course, is the object of desire (a Martin Handcraft Troubadour Trumpet, say, with a five-digit serial number of earliest vintage, in original, aged dark gold lacquer). But what does this entail? Lacan’s primary answer is: it is the object of absolute choice. And there is nothing supernatural in this choice. This is first to say that the object is not the object of any good, but an object which is unconditioned by any good, no matter what it may be good for (how much fun it is to play, for example, or, for that matter, how impossible). Desire is subject only to what Lacan calls an “absolute condition.” This has a close connection with (but is not the same as) the Kantian indefinite, for whenever I attempt to determine the desire according to some relative condition, the determination of a specific need or the valuation of a particular good, the desire “always under- or over-­ shoots itself ” (Lacan 2008, 294). So, if we attempt to figure desire rhetorically, it will be natural to enlist the apocalyptic register of ends, just as Kant speaks—literally or figuratively?—of a kingdom of ends. Let’s say: speaks figuratively, means literally, and therein lies the rub. The rhetorical presentation of the place of desire is naturally in terms of the Last Judgment. In fact, in these terms, Lacan will formulate an analogue to the universal formulations of Kantian ethics. Lacan says that “the realization of desire is necessarily formulated from the point of view of a Last Judgment” (Lacan 2008, 294; emphasis mine). The paragraph to which this is the end begins with the question: What is desire? And Lacan answers this question in terms of the realization of a desire, which, he says, “is necessarily always raised from the point of view of an absolute condition” (Lacan 2008, 294). It is this absoluteness which opens the link to a Last Judgment. The object of a desire cannot be “hit” like a bulls-eye, as in the case of a demand seeking the satisfaction of a

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relative condition: a desire always “under- or [/and? OBB] overshoots itself ” (Lacan 2008, 294). This is because the desire is incapable of compensating for the action of the signifier which it enlists to articulate itself: the signifier must always demand something else. And so it is only indirectly, through the articulation of a demand, that a signifier can signify desire through its displacement.6 On the one hand, this is through the displacement of the signifier: desire is always registered in terms of what is omitted from signification, and Lacan figures this in terms of the displacement of the signifier (below the line of signification) itself. On the other hand, desire is only signified through the displacement of desire itself: its (re)moval, its displacement from the place of demand. Desire’s place is displacement, its location dislocation. Therefore, in the phrase ‘through its displacement’ the index is plurivocal, not ambiguous: it refers both to the displacement of the signifier and to the desire which exists only as displaced, and which is created in the displacement of the signifier. Lacan calls the consideration of things from the viewpoint of a Last Judgment a “thought experiment” in the Galilean sense (Lacan 2008, 313). This leads to the question: “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?” (Lacan 2008, 314). The formulation puts Lacan’s question in close analogy to Kant’s various formulations of the categorical imperative and so provides a vantage point for understanding Lacan’s third Freudian Copernican revolution in relation to Kant’s second. The Kantian formulation which Lacan favors is: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal maxim” (cited, Lacan 2008, 76). Lacan emphasizes the roots of the Kantian revolution in the “disorienting effect of Newtonian physics,” but he fails to recall that Kant identified Rousseau as the “Newton of the moral sciences” in the 1764 essay, “Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime” (Bassler 2018, 24–5, 166–70). Lacan’s re-orientation of ethics is manifestly psychoanalytical, and from this point of view he proposes that “the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan 2008, 319). He goes on to note that this ground-giving is “always accompanied in the destiny of the subject by some betrayal” (Lacan 2008, 321). In this light he makes four key claims supporting the idea that “psychoanalysis is capable of supplying a useful compass in the field of ethical guidance.”

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The first of these is the one just mentioned: “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire.” The second is that a hero is defined to be “someone who may be betrayed with impunity.” The third is that this betrayal with impunity “is something that not everyone can achieve.” Finally, Lacan asserts that “there is no other good than that which may serve to pay the price for access to desire—given that desire is understood here, as we have defined it elsewhere, as the metonymy of our being” (Lacan 2008, 321). This metonymy is exemplified in a remark about Oedipus that brings us back to the register of last things: “Oedipus’s desire is the desire to know the last word on desire” (Lacan 2008, 309). Considering these passages in relative isolation from Lacan’s development of them, what sort of ethics is this which is described here? I will attempt to answer this question on my own terms. First, it is a transcendental ethics, for it is an ethics which specifies the conditions of goods in general. A good is only a route of access to a desire. So while traditionally ethics has asked about the nature of goods, the good, and the relation of action to them, Lacan is telling us that he is identifying something that antecedes any such discussion. To put it bluntly: we cannot know what a good is until we know what a desire is. And to know what a desire is turns out to be a serious challenge indeed. It is this latter challenge which classical ethics underestimated. It formulated the distinction between uti and frui, but it either defaulted on the challenges posed by the latter (as in Aristotle, where the goal of ethics is to lead the good life) or it faced them in religious rather than philosophical terms (as in Augustine). So, in the same Kantian vein in which I have referred to Lacan’s ethics as a transcendental ethics, we might go a step further and say that it’s not an ethics at all, but a critique of philosophical ethics. For any such ethics, it seems, must adopt some attitude toward what constitutes a good and/or the good (and we could go on to argue that this was a point already appreciated by Augustine). Moving beyond the Kantian phraseology, let’s go ahead and refer to Lacan’s paraethics, with all the potential implications we may seek to identify in relation to the enterprise of paraphysics (as visionary critique or otherwise) and paraphilosophical praxis (including psychoanalytic praxis). Unlike a traditional philosophical ethics, which finds its ideal in the good, Lacan’s paraethics finds its ideal in the beautiful.

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Secondly, I will remark, but only in passing, that Lacan’s Freudian paraethics stands in some fairly obvious relations to what is sometimes called “moral perfectionism” and which is usually understood (rather blandly) as the cultivation of the moral individual as locus of the good. Here there are potentially interesting points of attachment to the work of Stanley Cavell, for in both cases I hear their investigations not just in terms of their proximity to the concerns of moral perfectionism but also and more significantly in terms of the ways more traditional expressions of moral perfectionism may be philosophically incoherent. So I suggest that we could think of Lacan’s paraethics as a “replacement” of or for moral perfectionism in all its varieties, but it is a replacement which inverts traditional forms of moral perfectionism in fundamental regards. To begin with, there is no reason to think that Lacan’s Freudian paraethics is driven toward a single goal of individual self-perfection, and much to think otherwise. Lacan’s paraethics must reject self-perfection as the highest moral good, for with this commitment we are once again back in the traditional ethical domain. All of this may help us to gain a bead on why Lacan is preoccupied with the status of the hero, in particular (and above all: Oedipus, Antigone, Hamlet). In Seminar VI, Lacan is more overt in his insistence that Hamlet is not a person but rather the discursive presentation of a certain crux, one especially important for psychoanalysis to confront (Lacan 2019, 233–354). I take it this is true of Oedipus for Lacan as well, and Hamlet is often figured, as I would describe it, as an exponentiation of Oedipus (behind this lie large problems of myth and story-telling). So when Lacan says that the hero achieves the capacity to be betrayed with impunity, we should distinguish between what we might call the hero as a literary unit (Oedipus, Hamlet) and the hero as an actually living entity. Lacan’s concern seems much more with the former than the latter, and the way the complex of concerns it represents stands in relation to psychic agency (though there was no doubt either that Lacan was speaking through a tremendous experience of personal betrayal, the sense of which I find falsified by Clément’s talk of Lacan’s prophetism). In this regard, to say that the hero can be betrayed with impunity means that we stand in a particular relation to the story of the hero which puts the complex the hero stands for in an unconditional light, and this explains both the

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power and the ambivalent reception of such stories. Clément does not so much give an account as she acts out her own personal version of Lacan’s drama (“The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan,” a drama in prose by Catherine Clément). Stories about heroes do not fundamentally meet any particular demand, though they will do that incidentally (the need to be entertained, the need to be consoled, frightened, instructed, dominated, liberated—we could go on listing goods forever). They are stories which exemplify the structure of desire and, in particular, what makes that structure unconditional. What Lacan is telling us is that this unconditionality is revealed by the unlimited capacity for betrayal. From the perspective of traditional ethics a dilemma arises here; for Lacan’s paraethics this dilemma becomes instead a paradox. The dilemma, traditionally posed, is this: the greater the good at stake, the greater the capacity for betrayal. Life is a great good, with a great capacity to be betrayed. Murder is a great betrayal. From a traditional perspective, to provide a moral protection for this good, we must limit the capacity for betrayal: there is a tension between the free expression of goodness and its protection. For Lacan this limitation necessarily compromises the good we seek to protect. For Lacan, to the extent that the good is protected from betrayal, it becomes undesirable and so less good. This is the central paradox of Lacan’s paraethics. One will of course say: perhaps this is true in certain extreme, limiting cases; but to take the highest Kantian concern, how could it possibly compromise the good of respect to ensure that this respect not be betrayed? From Lacan’s perspective the question itself is already ill-posed in two different, mutually reinforcing ways. For either respect is unconditional as Kant insists, and then it is not a moral feeling, as Kant declares it to be, but is in fact desire itself. But we have seen there is no “desire itself ” (for either Kant or Lacan, albeit for different reasons). For Lacan, there cannot be an absolute good or, indeed, since there is not, any feeling for it. But if respect is conditional, then we must ask to what end we respect. In this case to ensure respect is simply a means to ensuring the end it seeks, and we could say that ensuring respect is itself part of respect (in the same way that enforcing laws is itself part of the law, broadly construed).

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In fact, I think the question is already ill-posed from the Kantian perspective as well. For as a pure moral feeling, respect is a feeling of the freedom embodied in the moral law. And if we attempt to ensure respect in any sense which involves legislation, no matter how broadly construed, we compromise the feeling of freedom embodied in the moral law, and so respect itself. The difference between Kant’s perspective and Lacan’s, and what makes the Freudian Copernican revolution generally an advance on Kant’s, is that the Freudian revolution demands a less narrow and less rigid conception of rationality. That is, it demands precisely a legitimation of poetic reason, understood as the rationality of poiesis, of creation and discovery. We may now, finally, answer: analysis as opposed to poiesis. The more one looks at it, the claim that protection limits the moral value of goods, so far from being remote from Kantian concerns, seems central to Kant’s philosophical orientation. Ultimately what we are concerned with is the conflict between the moral and the political, one that Kant recognizes but that the whole reception history of Kantian ethics seeks to wish away, all the way into its neo-Rawlsian endgame. For Kant, or for the Kantian, this is a dilemma to be resolved; for Lacan it is a paradox to be articulated. How does Lacan formulate the paradox? In fact, this is the topic of Lacan’s final meeting in Seminar VII, “The paradoxes of ethics, or Have you acted in conformity with your desire?” We have been there all along. The formulation, “Have you acted in conformity with your desire?” is intrinsically paradoxical. For once we conform our action to our desire, we have not acted in terms of it. The terms have changed while we acted, though this is only “paradoxical” in the same sense as the Liar “paradox.” How could it be otherwise if speaking is itself the highest form of action? And if it is so, how could anything other than speaking be the highest form of action? Speaking is the action which puts desire in place of its being par excellence, for it is the action not of the speaker, but of the signifier. Like the signifier and like desire, the speaker is also displaced. If we like, we may call this displacement, which is the condition of the speech act in particular, writing. Lacan does not so much resolve as face the ethical paradox, and in the same way we have seen him face the liar’s paradox above, by identifying the peculiar temporal displacement which makes the statement “I am lying” only paradoxical insofar as we inhabit a philosophical mode (even

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a “resolution” of the “paradox” remains philosophical). But facing either paradox in this way is only the beginning, for then the language, and the action, must be cultivated to face this paradox praxically in those cases where it impinges on the foundations of language and action, and specifically in those cases where language just is action: as in psychoanalysis, which Lacan focuses on, and in that poiesis, the composition of poetry, which is the focus in this book. Rilke has his own version of a categorical imperative, one exclusively for the poet, which we may appropriate for the logic of poetic reason, and which bears some resemblance to Lacan and his recourse to the hero. “No one can advise or help you—no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself … confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?” (Rilke 1986, 6). As speaking is the ultimate form of action, so writing (narrowly or broadly construed) is the ultimate form of poiesis. The prize we can take away from our investigation of Lacanian ethics is: its fundamental, transcendental condition is a legitimation of poetic reason. The highest beauty—not ethical, but a condition of its assent—is the beauty of poetry—narrowly or broadly construed.

5.4 Envoi: Lessons of the Ghost Trumpet As Rabelais would insist, the following is a most veritable and true story, but readers who are understandably skeptical of such claims may read it as a parable or skip over it altogether. Patrick Fadely is a long-time friend, fellow-poet and music collaborator. He was my improvisation partner when I returned to music after a long hiatus, and he played a key role in motivating and spurring on work on my long poem, The Invention of Atlantis. When Patrick and I began working on music together we began by listening to simple tones and developing a style of improvisation. The masterpiece of this early period in our collaboration was a solo-improvisation Patrick made called Koi, which I still count one of the most successful musical improvisational works I’ve ever encountered.

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With the recent imposition of social-distancing, Patrick and I were motivated to re-initiate our musical collaboration, which had been in abeyance since he moved from Athens around a decade ago now. In the case at issue I was adding a track to something Patrick prepared for me called the missing bell, so that I first called my addition, overlaid onto an extended, multiple version of his track, the missing bells with trumpet, and now for short ghost/trumpet. During the second take, a sound entered into the recording, and if we follow Lacan’s insistence that even The Great Work occurs in this world, then it seems best to say that this sound must be something that I produced. It sounds like a voice not my own, and I readily identify the voice (for myself ) with the voice of Sainkho Namchylak, the Tuvan singer. I also have no reason or desire to locate this voice as something in any way supernatural. There are passages from Lacan which provide what I believe to be a very rigorous description of the way in which such a voice is produced. Motivated by a poem in which Patrick speaks of the impossible transition from syllable to blood, I have thought of it on analogy with the transition from dreaming to waking. Lacan, unbeknownst to me at the time of that writing, describes essentially the same thing. In Seminar XI (as he himself enters the gap constituted by his excommunication), Lacan speaks of “the gap itself that constitutes awakening” (Lacan 1978, 57). This occurs in the context of Lacan’s insistence on a strict separation of perception and consciousness (Lacan 1978, 46), and of a “space” (what I have called a locus) between them, so that this space in fact is the between of perception and consciousness. (Again we could ask, is this literal or metaphorical? Again, we must reply, the question begs the question.) More focally, Lacan is discussing the critical dream that appears in Chap. 7 of Freud’s Traumdeutung, in which a father dreams that his son comes to him from an adjoining room and says to him, “Father, can’t you see that I’m burning?” In an adjacent room the (dead) son has in fact caught fire. Wittgenstein, in what is essentially his last written testament, resists the challenge of this sort of dream by insisting that there cannot be any bridge from (sleeping) perception to (dreaming) consciousness, that there is no between:

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Wer träumend sagt »Ich träume«, auch wenn er dabei hörbar redete, hat sowenig recht, wie wenn er im Traum sagt »Es regnet«, während es tatsächlich regnet. Auch wenn sein Traum wirklich mit dem Geräusch des Regens zusammenhängt. (Über Gewißheit, 676) Whoever, dreaming, says “I dream,” even if he speaks out audibly, is as little correct, as if in a dream he said “It’s raining,” while in fact it is raining. Even if his dream actually hangs together with the noise of the rain. (Wittgenstein 1972, §676, translation mine)

Wittgenstein sees the problem indeed, but he refuses Lacan’s solution, that there is an interzone between perception and consciousness where something might be spoken (or written). It’s the same old positivist denial of the rationality of creation. And Lacan, too, insists that the Freudian account is deeply indebted to the tradition of creation ex nihilo, so there certainly cannot be any rational accounting for creation in the standard, traditional sense of rationality. A new account of poetic reason, and a new legitimation of it, must therefore be given. I’ve translated ‘Geräusch’ here by ‘noise’, though it might also be translated as ‘sound’, for in Lacan it is clearly a matter of the sound making a noise. Indeed, as Lacan puts it quite dramatically, the dream Freud considers is made up entirely of noise (Lacan 1978, 57). And so, we must understand, it contravenes Freud’s general desire to see the dream as a wish-fulfillment and instead heads toward the dream navel of Freud’s own enterprise: this particular dream, it seems, can at most but prolong the desire for sleep. Even that is finally countermanded, for the father wakes and discovers his son burning in the adjacent room, just as someone might awaken to the noise of the rain. (I often fall asleep to a recording of a thunderstorm. My dog, who is terrified by thunderstorms, is not tricked by this, however. The recording of a thunderstorm is already fully symbolic.) We are converging on Freud’s desire. Here is where we are necessarily headed: the ghost voice is more real than my own. It emerges in the locus between perception and consciousness. Borrowing Kant’s language against him, we may say: it is the real as such, in my world but not of it. This is not supernatural, it is paraphysical. The incursion of the real into the work of psychoanalysis is often not so dramatic, but it is fundamentally no different.

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In the dream, there is a voice, the voice of the son, who asks: Father, can’t you see that I am burning? Lacan asks, “Is there not more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door” (Lacan 1978, 58; no question mark: Il y a plus de réalité, n’est-ce pas, … There is more reality, isn’t there, …). But, of course, Wittgenstein would tell us: it is not the voice of the son, it is the voice of the son in the dream (it is not a brain-in-a-vat, it is the brain-in-a-vat-in-the-image, yes of course of course). Yes, of course. But the voice of the son-in-the-dream is more real than the voice of the father, in his (life)world but not of it. It is not supernatural, but it is paraphysical, and indeed what I would call absolutely parafinite. How can we fail to see that awakening works in two directions—and that the awakening that re-situates us in a constituted and represented reality carries out two tasks? The real has to be sought beyond the dream—in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative. This is the real that governs our activities more than any other and it is psychoanalysis that designates it for us. (Lacan 1978, 60)

The analyst is not the producer of the real, only the master of ceremonies, the stalker, the one, in fact, who goes below the line and assumes the role of the object a. And to expect that the shaman is or was any more is to be taken in by shadows, to which dreams are most often reduced. Clément, not Lacan, reduces Lacan to the prophet. But in this reduction the active power of dreaming, or the shaman, is then compromised and must be re-convoked. For “it is because of dreams and in the field of dreams that we first prove to be stronger than the shadow” (Lacan 2015, 377). We have already seen Calasso articulate this in his response to Kafka. The ghost entered at the first pause after I began vocalizing through my trumpet. It is surely no doubt that vocal production and instrumental production were both involved. Aesthetically, I don’t judge the improvisation successful. But praxically I gained from it something that helps me hear my way into some of the greatest musical successes I’ve encountered, such as those of the Miles Davis Quintet in their two-night residency at

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the Plugged Nickel in Chicago. Listening to these great recordings was an important preparation for this work, but not consciously on my mind as I made it. Ghosts are most likely to be found at the praxical intersection between improvisation and the Great Work. Whatever the ghosts tell you, and however far you fall from the Great Work, you will know that your effort has not been in vain, just from their absented-presence alone. For you have heard the many-voice of the subject-(dis)-continuum. Now: write it down.

Notes 1. Points for comparison: (Zukofsky 1987; Schmidt 2016). 2. (Eliade 1972); more recently, (Clottes 2016) has provided an extended argument, based on antecedent work by David Lewis-Williams, for shamanism as the creative source of Paleolithic cave-paintings. 3. The reference to Blumenberg is to an analogous but distinct simplification he introduces concerning the horizons of reality, visibility and possibility. Later in the same work, Blumenberg argues that Kant’s invocation of a Copernican turn in his own work is on analogy to Copernicus’ “first thoughts,” which Blumenberg takes to refer to the diurnal rotation of the earth and not its orbiting around the Sun (Blumenberg 1983, 595–614). The way I have presented the analogy above reflects this, albeit in a limited way: the decentering of the astronomical subject may already be identified with the assertion of a diurnal motion which accounts for the perceived rotation of the stars if we understand this decentering to be an unfixing of the central position of the observer, who now moves with the diurnal rotation about the fixed center of the Earth. In a passage exemplary of his distinctive form of wit, Blumenberg goes on to speculate on how Kant could have extended his analogy to the twofold motion of the planets— their motion around the Sun and the projection of the Earth’s diurnal motion—but “unfortunately, all that one can say is that Kant should have thought of that. But he did not” (Blumenberg 1983, 614). 4. It is sometimes popular to see Darwin as enacting a later “Copernican” revolution. This would constitute a decentering of the biological subject. Although Lacan does not respond to this suggestion directly, I take his

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running insistence on the human as creationist as a provocation to Darwin’s legacy: not in the sense that Lacan would displace Darwinian evolution by a form of biological creationism, but that so far as the human subject is concerned, creationism is in fact ineliminable. See, e.g., Seminar VII, “You cannot think, no one can think, except in creationist terms” (Lacan 2008, 126); “A strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of ‘creationism’” (Lacan 2008, 261; see also 124, 212). The entire line of thought is predicated on Lacan’s understanding of the thought of creation ex nihilo as a cultural precondition for modern subjectivity, which is closely related to what Blumenberg has to say about Christianity being a “necessary precondition” for modernity (at the same time that modernity cannot be seen as a secularization of Christianity). For Lacan, the idea of creation ex nihilo lies behind the Freudian concept of the drive. In particular, “… the Trieb [drive] can in no way be limited to a psychological notion. It is an absolutely fundamental ontological notion, which is a response to a crisis of consciousness that we are not necessarily obliged to identify, since we are living it” (Lacan 2008, 127). 5. I am indebted to an unpublished essay by Virgil Lualhati McCorgray (McCorgray unpublished) for insight into this issue. 6. décalage, which may here be translated as swerve, as in a solution to the Master Problem (Vuillemin 1996, esp. 169–87). In paraphysics, this corresponds to the logic of adjunction (Bassler 2018, 163–80).

Bibliography Bassler, O.  Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave, 2018). Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prahran: re.press, 2012). Bassler, O. Bradley. Diagnosing Contemporary Philosophy with the Matrix Movies (Cham: Palgrave, 2017). Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). Clément, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia, 1983). Clottes, Jean. What Is Paleolithic Art? Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, trans. Oliver Y. Martin and Robert D. Martin (Chicago: Chicago: 2016).

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Cohen, G. A. Marx’s Theory of History (Princeton: Princeton, 2000). Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Bollingen, 1972). Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton, 1958). Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Lacan, Jacques. Desire and Its Interpretation, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge, Polity, 2019). Lacan, Jacques. D’un Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006). Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 2008). Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). Lacan, Jacques. Transference, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge, Polity, 2015). McCorgray, Virgil Lualhati. “The Seed and Flowers of Radical Evil,” unpublished essay. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1986). Schmidt, Arno. Bottom’s Dream, trans. John E. Woods (Funks Grove: Dalkey Archive, 2016). Vuillemin, Jules. Necessity or Contingency: The Master Argument (Stanford: CSLI, 1996). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty, trans. G.  E. M.  Anscombe (New York; Harper, 1972). Zukofsky, Louis. Bottom: On Shakespeare (Berkeley: California, 1987).

6 Between Psychoanalysis and Structuralism

In Chap. 1 we were transported, along with Stanley Cavell and somewhat incidentally, from sunny Santa Cruz to wintry Chicago. In the first section of this chapter, we follow the same trajectory again, this time in a more concerted fashion, but with a quick jaunt to Paris into the bargain. This trip will combine business with pleasure.

6.1 Exit from the Modern Norman Brown’s late book, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, written at the end of his long tenure at UC Santa Cruz, itself stages a kind of dialectic of Chicago and Santa Cruz. His key discovery, he tells us, the source at the center of his volume, is Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam. Of Hodgson, he says simply: “our Copernicus (University of Chicago!)” (Brown 1991, 46). This comes at the beginning of an essay on “The Prophetic Tradition” dedicated to the Blake scholar David Erdman, which Brown published in 1982; previously he had given a series of lectures, first at Santa Cruz (1980) and then Tufts (1981), on “The Prophetic

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Tradition: The Challenge of Islam.” Brown is devoted to the prophetic, and “Our Copernicus” is showing Brown the way out of Hans Blumenberg’s modernity. Brown’s interest is not in the rigid orthodoxy of contemporary Islam but rather in Islam’s revolutionary and mystical potential, which he takes to lie at the prophetic source of this tradition. Brown’s thesis is that in so conceiving of Islam, William Blake turns out to be an Islamic revolutionary. Well, no, he doesn’t quite say that, but what he does say, is: “the Gnostic Gospel is pure Blake. It is also pure Sufism” (Brown 1991, 57). So we’re dealing with a “Gnostic thesis” to set over against Blumenberg’s claim that modernity is the second, and first successful, overcoming of Gnosticism. Brown in turn proposes a Gnostic overcoming of modernity and claims that we find the purest cultivation of this Gnosticism in Islamic lines. The key paragraph is: Islam is first of all a reduction of the prophetic tradition to its pure essence as revelation, discarding the element of sacramental magic common to both conciliar Christianity and the mystery religions of late classical antiquity. By discarding sacramental and sacerdotal magic Islam prepares the way for Dante and Blake: the only miracle is the book: and the book authenticates itself as miracle. At the same time it is a return to that emphasis on cognition, visionary cognition, which orthodox Christianity condemned and condemns as Gnosticism. (Brown 1991, 52)

Given, on the one hand, my core commitment to the poetic reason of visionary design and, on the other, my commitment to Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age, Brown challenges my project in most pointed terms.1 Brown may not be interested in Islamic orthodoxy per se, but he is interested in the founding of Islam as a religion of the book in a special and radical sense. The Koran takes on a status different, and more extreme, than the Tanakh or the Bible, for it is the one and only miraculous production bestowed upon us by Allah, who otherwise remains at a punishingly infinite distance from the human condition. Unlike the distant deus absconditus of late medieval nominalism, who induces a cultural anxiety it is precisely the function of the transition to modernity to overcome, the

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infinitely distant Allah, represented only by and thanks to his book, requires no analogous overcoming. Furthermore, the distance is itself manifest in the nature of the Koran as book: it is “altogether apocalyptic” (Brown 1991, 86), and the immediate effect of its style is “its idjaz, literally ‘the rendering incapable, powerless’; the overwhelming experience of manifest transcendence, compelling surrender to a new world vision” (Brown 1991, 91). The analogies with Blumenberg’s reading of late medieval nominalism (with some of its roots, of course, in Averroism) as an intensification of God’s transcendence are obvious; in terms of the lines Blumenberg lays out for medieval Christianity, what distinguishes Islam for Brown is that Islam manages to forge this hyper-transcendence into a stable religious tradition. In fact, Dante and Blake express but one side of what Islam manages to combine: “there is in Islamic tradition an attempt to unify the opposites which in the West gives us Dante on the one hand and Machiavelli on the other.” This is, at root, because as prophet Muhammad is “Prophet against empire: but Prophet armed” (Brown 1991, 51), echoing (Erdman 1954). What is lacking from Dante and Blake is the revolutionary political tendency that in the “West” can (only?) find separate expression in a figure such as Machiavelli. In short, there is a dissociation of literature and politics which Islam rejects in the name of the Koran as “total apocalypse,” at once a prophetic book and a manual for revolution: in these terms Brown asserts that “the origins of modern radical politics lie in the transformation of prophetic radicalism into a political movement prepared to seize power (‘The Revolution of the Saints’); and that Islam pioneered this modern development, in the seventh century C.E.” (Brown 1991, 52). For radical politics’ ultimate enemy, it seems, is not Christianity but the corporate state: Democracy, Inc., as Sheldon Wolin has named it (Wolin 2008). Surely Brown was not surprised either by the rise of Islamic terrorism or the war thereupon. To transpose Brown into Blumenbergian terms, the claim would become that, rather than Islam being a Gnosticism counter to modernity (though it would be so in Blumenberg’s reading), it is in fact the origin of the specifically modern form of Gnosticism, which Brown calls revolutionary politics, and which assumes the status, as I would put it, of a paraphilosophical praxis. So far from this Gnosticism’s specifically modern status

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disqualifying it from staging an overcoming of modernity, this status in fact locates it as precisely that position from which modernity can be leveraged. Once again, we bump up against the limitations of Blumenberg’s restriction of his project to providing a legitimation of philosophical modernity in a way which would presume that it can dissociate itself from a legitimation of political modernity, something which, whatever the limitations of her actual account, is not a problem to which Arendt leaves herself open in the same structural way. For if Blumenberg legitimates modernity as the successful overcoming of (philosophical) Gnosticism, and yet fails to recognize, as Brown would have it, that political Gnosticism is a founding (pre)condition for modernity, then the legitimation, if not rendered totally vacuous, has at least sprung a gigantic leak. Brown’s position illuminates an exposed shank in Blumenberg’s legitimation of modernity. Regardless of whether Brown’s account is persuasive, it opens up the question of the extent to which modern revolutionary politics can or must be understood as a form of political Gnosticism. There are some indications that Blumenberg would himself be sympathetic to this claim (Blumenberg 1985, 293–4). This opens the question of what would count as a modern revolutionary politics which was not Gnostic in form. For Brown, the literary conditions for reading the Koran are only met in the “West” (a totally inadequate name, since it is prejudicial not to see Islam itself as part of the Western tradition) in the current generation: among its many other virtues, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has taught us how to read the Koran for the first time! What is involved in both cases is a “systematic violation of the classic rules of unity, propriety and harmony; bewildering changes of subject; abrupt juxtaposition of incongruities” (Brown 1991, 89, my emphasis). The effect, beyond Romantic fragmentation, is to pulverize our experience of reading (Char 1948), and this is in line with the smithereening of the continuum that lies at the root of Islamic theology: “in fully developed Islamic theology only the moment is real” (Brown 1991, 86), leading to the “glue theorists” of the Mutakallimun. “The text of the Quran reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word” (Nasr, cited in Brown 1991, 90). From Brown’s perspective, Blumenberg’s legitimation of modernity fails on two parallel counts: it fails to recognize that modernity is predicated on a

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form of Gnosticism which has migrated from Islam to the Christian West, and concomitantly it fails to prevent the continuum from being blown to bits, dissolved down into a heap of points. This is after all the way the mathematical continuum is effectively understood in the wake of Georg Cantor, which in fact lends additional credence to Brown’s overall picture. Yet how is Muhammed’s status as final prophet compatible with the ongoing spirit of prophecy reflected in a figure such as Blake? Brown again cites from Nasr, who invokes the distinction between revelation (wahy) and inspiration (ilham): the former is closed with the cycle of prophecy, but the latter is preserved in the continuing cycle of initiation (wilayat) (Brown 1991, 62). And the result of this closure is a radical democratization and, we might say, lowering of inspiration: its source is identified in the mass of common people: “Islam stays with the dream-­ life of the masses, the eschatological imagination of the lowly and oppressed” (Brown 1991, 92). Here we see how Finnegans Wake could open us, in the “West,” to the “genius” of the Koran: it is the dream of Here Comes Everybody. This is an essentially communist ideal, and so Brown brilliantly resurrects his former Marxist self in the spirit of communist prophecy—he may be a post-Marxist, but as I read him he is an unrepentant communist. How is this more than, or different from, the spirit of democratic populism? And is it more than an American intellectual pipedream? One thinks of Foucault’s support for the Iranian Revolution, which at least had the merit of being overt and political, and so exposing its fault on its sleeve. Should we thank the Iranian Revolution for giving us the greatest film of recent vintage, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up? (Close-up 2010) And perhaps complain that Kiarostami’s films went down when he emigrated to the “West”?—which would include Japan! Brown identifies the resurgence of such communist ideals (my term) in the then recent French attempts to recuperate Spinoza for (post-) Marxism. In their own way, Brown’s two especially brilliant chapters on Spinoza are unparalleled as a philosophical argument for communism. Tellingly, the argument is rooted in the distinction between reason and imagination, a distinction whose traditional forms are by implication contested in the legitimation of poetic reason I provide below. Prophecy,

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for Spinoza, is an endowment associated not with greater perfection of mind, but with “more vivid imagination” (cited, Brown 1991, 102), and the toleration (religious and political) that Spinoza argues for “is based not on rational uniformity but on sentimental concord, located in the heart, the heart that has its reasons that reason does not know” (Brown 1991, 107). The latter phrase is borrowed from, and so indicates a link to, Pascal, and here Brown has rather surreptitiously migrated from the distinction between reason and imagination to two different forms of reason, admittedly in a paradoxical (and rhetorical) way. Now Brown’s argument becomes a bit twisty. The heart, which “has its reasons,” is the locus for God’s inscription of “the idea of himself and the very image of his Godhead.” So what is transmitted prophetically is another writing of the philosophical: this leads to what Brown calls an assertion of the “equivalence or equivocation between the voice of reason and the voice of imagination” (Brown 1991, 107). Equivalence or equivocation? In fact, it seems it must be both: the former in order to link philosophy and prophetic religion, and the latter to distinguish them. For what is inscribed on the human heart is not just the tablet of the law, but in fact the natural light of reason itself, “common to all human beings, by virtue of which all are equal” (Brown 1991, 111). It is only at this point that Spinoza’s communism (as Brown reads him) becomes fully apparent. Yet Spinoza’s communism remains committed to a common model of rationality which Brown himself finds untenable. For the rationality of Spinoza is a teleological rationality of self-preservation: “Men, I say, can wish for nothing more excellent for the preservation of their being than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body” (cited, Brown 1991, 198). For Brown, Spinoza is right to promote the “concrete development of the polymorphous intercommunication between all bodies,” but he lacks the capacity to see this energetic transaction “as self-­ destructive self-expenditure,” which “was beyond the scientific imagination of the seventeenth century” (Brown 1991, 198–9). For the latter, Brown enlists Bataille and his notion of a general economy without reserve: this is the focus of a final chapter on “Dionysus in 1990” (Brown 1991, 179–200). And so the book ends, yet the description given so far does not begin to invoke its full richness: in a chapter on Sor Juana’s auto

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of the Divine Narcissus, the third in a series of chapters charting the unrealized project of a reception history of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; in a brilliant reading of the scope of post-Whitmanian poetry, ending in a subtle appreciation of the successes and limitations of Louis Zukofsky, and in its invocation of the apocalyptic throughout. What are we to make of it all? In particular, is Brown’s ending invocation of Dionysus yet another Chicago/California call to irrationalism? So long as we retain the traditional distinction between reason and imagination, at a minimum Brown leaves himself exposed. Spinoza’s model of communism may be limited, but it is also rationally grounded. As Brown himself acknowledges, “materialists must come to understand what Spinoza called the intellectual love of God” (Brown 1991, 198); but what place does this find in Brown’s own general economy of communism? It is hard to see how this question can be answered until we have a robust conception of “Reason since Freud” (Lacan 2006, 412–41), one which encompasses both the philosophical and the political, and Lacan’s post-May 68 seminars may, and should, be read in such a light. Brown himself manifestly advocates a Freudian path to the future, but he asserts: “That Copernican revolution which Freud thought he was inaugurating, by showing that the human ego is not even master in its own house, is not complete until the human ego is forced to admit another master, the Dionysian principle of excess …” The function of this extension is to challenge the “homeostatic pleasure-principle in terms of another definition of pleasure and another definition of life.” To take the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle seriously is to admit that there is no such homeostasis, and so any commitment to such a homeostasis is a refusal to acknowledge that “there is a built-in need for toomuchness, for flamboyance (flaming), for exaggeration,” which is why, “in the last resort, there is only poetry” (Brown 1991, 183); compare (Mailer 1994, 77). Brown’s comments lead us to the conviction that the legitimation of reason had better include a legitimation of poetic reason. Brown’s commitment to a “built in principle of toomuchness” is, in my vocabulary, a recognition of the parafinitary condition of humanity (I say humanity rather than the human to accommodate the communist demand Brown signals). Lacan’s appeal to jouissance serves some of the same functions, though it seems clear that Lacan would never take it as a

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principle any more than I would take the parafinite to be one. But I question the efficacy (and logic) of replacing one principle of pleasure by any other principle, as Brown does and as Lacan does not. It is Brown, not Lacan, who sides with Freud on this point, and to the extent that Freud subsumes the Pleasure Principle under the Thanatos Principle his position becomes inherently unstable. Unlike Brown, Freud is far from celebratory in this adoption, and I take it that his emphasis on “dualism” in his late writing constitutes a recognition of the problem. Even more fundamentally, Lacan patiently shows how the entertainment of thanatos as a second principle consistently undermines Freud’s own insight, and his own cultivation of an account of desire seems more prospective than any such replacement. In this way Lacan steers a narrow course between the Scylla of Brown’s monism and Freud’s dualism. Brown also frames his commitments in terms of the adoption of a “Heraclitean, Dionysian” perspective over against an “Empedoclean” one. In his terms, the Empedoclean tack represents a dialectical approach, whereas presumably the Heraclitean, Dionysian one is an approach of “total apocalypse.” The latter smashes the continuum to smithereens: where is the glue? And what is communism without glue? It is the worst form of deracinated populism (where the deracination, the lack of root, is an entire lack of human rootedness). “Allah will provide.” “Only a god can save us now.” But, Blumenberg would reasonably ask, why on earth should He save us, given that He has gone so unreasonably far away? (Blumenberg 1985, 306, 635; 1997, 536–7; Brown 1990, 216)

6.2 Symbolism, Structure and the Esoteric With Norman O. Brown’s late work we reach ground zero for the challenge which a legitimation of poetic reason must face. Brown argues for an account of the nature of poetry that is the natural default in the absence of a legitimation of poetic reason, where the burden of poetry is carried along by imagination into the river of apocalypse. We have therefore reached a kind of midpoint for this work at which the nature of the challenge has become most explicit. In beginning to reconstruct poiesis in terms of an account of its rationality, I turn to the work of James Boon,

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who begins to assemble the tools appropriate to the challenge Brown poses: how can we rescue Freud’s revolution for an account of poiesis as rationally grounded? James A. Boon and his book, From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-­ Strauss in a Literary Tradition, may seem an unlikely vantage from which to begin to face Brown’s challenge. Yet the book is a kind of New World Manual which I find provides a privileged route into the challenges a legitimation of poetic reason faces. Boon shows you how to take a walk through structuralism by showing you how he takes a walk through structuralism: it’s a guided tour. What makes it work is that he sees that to take the walk you can’t just talk the walk, you have to walk the talk. So in the course of talking us through structuralism he does some structural analysis himself, by offering a comparative structural presentation of structuralism and poetic symbolism. This maneuver flips structuralism on itself, but it also offers an external source of comparison. Yet the thesis is that that external source (the tradition of symbolist poetry) is itself part of the pre-history of structuralism, so it opens out the synchronic presentation of structuralism onto its own diachronic lineage. The diachronic thesis will be (structurally) compelling if and only if the higher-level structural comparison of structuralism and poetic symbolism is found to be so. So the tour allows (but also demands) not only that you learn “what structuralism is” but also that you experience how it feels to have your level ratcheted up by structural analysis: not altogether pleasant, but heady perhaps. Boon is the antithesis of Brown, who is the great leveler. In returning to an insistence on levels we can begin to reconstruct the continuum that Brown has blown to shreds, and so pave a constructive path to the poietic subject-(dis)-continuum as solution to the labyrinthus de compositione continui. In reading Boon I’m aspiring to do the same thing as Boon himself: level three, so to speak. For now I’ll provisionally assume that Boon’s exercise succeeds, for I want to assess some of the implications of the comparison between symbolism and structuralism. The positive analogy is really nothing new, and wasn’t even in 1972, except perhaps for an American audience. But by virtue of the way that Boon follows it along a structural path, he is able to open things up that would be difficult otherwise. In particular, Boon’s text is a privileged context for thinking about the way Lacan uses

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structuralist currents to fortify psychoanalysis against just the sort of reading Brown proposes. To begin with, there is the famed analysis of Baudelaire’s poem “Les Chats” co-authored by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, which Boon himself uses as part of his own introduction to structuralism. Hence symbolist poetry is already a privileged subject for structuralism. It is at this juncture that Boon chooses to begin, right after the introduction, in a chapter called “Surface Affinities,” whose first section is on “Contents and Interests Shared by Lévi-Strauss and Symbolists.” Boon is already simultaneously dealing with two levels: one on which the structuralists take Baudelaire’s poem as their focus, and another on which this analysis opens up affinities between structuralism and symbolism. Boon’s enacting of structuralism exemplifies how it can never work exclusively on one level: it is inherently typed. This means also that the notion of a distinction between levels is an intrinsic component of every structural analysis, and it implies that structuralism is intrinsically committed to some intrinsic version of scaling. The relevant notion of scale need not necessarily be quantitative—one might begin by thinking about figure and ground, or text and context. In line with this commitment to typing, Boon notes that structures cannot be equally identified “everywhere” in experience. In fact, the privileged locus for identifying structures is in “definite privileged areas of human thought and deed which display more endurance through time and therefore more ready access to the structural foundations of experience.” To speak of “the physical structure of solid bodies” is not to speak of structure in Boon’s sense. And Lévi-Strauss contends that “these areas most likely exist in activities that are just on the verge of consciousness, being thereby relatively protected from self-conscious change” (Boon 1972, 31). A canonical example would be the structural features of the way humans assign names to animals, as Lévi-Strauss presents it in The Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 204–8). If we identify consciousness in terms of general features of mental control (Donald 1991), then what we want are activities on the threshold of control. But this, of course, is where poem-work occurs—presumably most or all poem work, which is precisely why a super-subjective or sub-subjective account of poiesis will not do. I suggest that what distinguishes symbolism as a poetic movement is

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that an effort is made to remain at this threshold while importing as much of the critical function as possible while remaining on the threshold: hence the focus in the Jena Romantics, precursors of the Symbolists in so many ways, on a convergence of criticism and poetry. This is my way of putting it; Boon puts it, or something closely related, this way: In sum, the Symbolist poem on the page is in one sense a standard ‘hunting ground’ for those logical structures of fundamental essence. But, in another sense [i.e. at another level, OBB] it is a set of program notes which reflect on a near-surface level the types of logical processes which maintain any interrelated body of semantic fields. (Boon 1972, 59)

The Symbolist poem is not a structural analysis, because the structural analysis is not “fully explicit” in the poem. But it is a road map to a structural analysis (of itself ) in a way that not all (indeed, not most) poems are. Poems which provide clear road maps (the Vedic hymns are identified as another example by a tradition originating with Saussure) expose in a privileged way the logic of poetic reason. This explains both what makes these poems such a favorable object for structural analysis—the structural analysis can be read “right off the top” of the poem (but surface appearances can also be deceiving)—and also why it bears an affinity to structural analysis—for it is already a “proto”-structural analysis itself (but caution is required, since it is sometimes in the form of a shaggy dog story). Furthermore, this explains why the structure of explicit structural analyses will not be so readily discernible insofar as they have themselves crossed over the threshold into a domain of more reflective self-­ consciousness and higher control. But the capacity for structural analysis will be recovered when we set such explicit structural analyses into comparison with Symbolist poetry, for now the level has changed and we return once again to a context where structures can be identified. What is this level? Boon tells us it is the level at which the goal is “the resolution of the opposition between science and art or myth, which resolution is in certain ways precisely the aim of Lévi-Strauss” (Boon 1972, 60). Here Boon anticipates the “level three” I’ve already mentioned, where the

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legitimation of poetic reason must be pitched. Lévi-Strauss becomes the herald of the reunion of the “two cultures,” revolutionizing the cultural consequences of “reason since Freud.”2 What Boon is telling us is that the structural conditions of such a resolution are not overt in either Symbolism or Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, but are available in terms of the structural analysis Boon is conducting. In its own way, Boon’s book is even more ambitious than Brown’s. Here, however, the plot thickens, and the devil is in the details—and details at different levels. First Boon will suggest that Lévi-Strauss’s predilection for Baudelaire’s poem lies in how they (Baudelaire’s poem, Lévi-­ Strauss’s structuralist predilection) stand in inverse relation, and then he insists that “the explanation will not do” (Boon 1972, 61). Among other things, we are close to the issue of adjointness in foundations (Lawvere 1966). In the present context it plays out in the interaction of metaphor and metonymy. The way Jakobson contrasts the vertical function of metaphor and the horizontal function of metonymy and their interplay is still severely limited, and it should be recognized that these functions are really being called metaphoric and metonymic by association. That is, these functions are not to be understood directly as the powers of two rhetorical tropes, but rather as the underlying linguistic functions which find dominant expression in these tropes. Even so, the scheme constitutes a drastic simplification. The power of Jakobson’s account lies in its relative tractability: it is a manifestly reductive presentation designed to facilitate investigation, and I will be making considerable use of its schematic nature below. Boon’s proposed structural inversion of Baudelaire in relation to Lévi-­ Strauss and Jakobson’s reading involves, on the one hand, an identification of a movement from inside to outside, from the house-cat to the cosmic-cat, in Baudelaire’s poem; and, on the other hand, the proposal that we think of Lévi-Strauss’s work in terms of a movement from “universal cosmic statements of art and myth to the closed units of analytic statements” (Boon 1972, 61), thus moving from “outside” to “inside.” This proposed inversion can also be framed in terms of the figures of metaphor and metonymy: in the poem, as Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss read it, the opposition between art and science is transferred to “the very heart of metonymy” by “metaphoric means” (Boon 1972, 60). The

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proposal is then that in Lévi-Strauss’s work cosmic metaphor (art/myth) is transferred to metonymic analysis (science). But this is precisely what Boon says “will not do.” For he rightly insists that both myth and structural analysis involve both metaphor and metonymy.3 This is Boon’s analogue of my insistence that we recognize the poiesis of visionary design as lying at the common root of art and science. When Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss say that the opposition of art and science is transferred to the very heart of metonymy by metaphoric means, I take it that they mean that the metaphoric force of the poem reduces the juxtaposition of art and science to juxtaposition “as such”: the brute metonymic apposition of one term to another. Lévi-Strauss has deemed science ‘metonymic’ in its replacement of one term by another (effect by cause, for example), and art as metaphoric. To the extent that the goal of the poem is to resolve the metonymic and metaphoric functions, it may thus be said to resolve science and art. But to say that a poem is the “metaphorization of metonymy” whereas structural analysis is the “metonymization of metaphor” will not do, for as Boon puts it, “it’s all a matter of sensory logic” (Boon 1972, 61). Boon’s ultimate insistence is that the goal of (in this case, symbolist) poetry and structural analysis is a cultivation of a logic of sense, and so, specifically, a logic that moves beyond the formal logic of traditional philosophical analysis. (Here ‘formal logic’ need not mean mathematical logic, though it would include it: it is any logic in which validity is exclusively a function of the form of the propositions involved. We need not be distracted by the distinction between soundness and validity made within formal analysis, but it’s no wonder the beginner is confused!) And yet, on the face of it, it seems Boon is the one being reductive here, since the metaphorization of metonymy and the metonymization of metaphor need neither be understood in reductive terms (though they could be, and it seems Boon does), but rather as indicating inverse vectors in the combined operation of metaphor and metonymy. It seems clear, as a matter of fact, that both Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are committed to the “principle” that there is no action of metonymy without a residual action of metaphor and vice versa, so in fact this non-reductive understanding is the only contextually appropriate one. Why is Boon committed to a reduction to the logic of

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sense? And is Deleuze, who wrote a book with this title (Deleuze 1990), committed to an analogous reduction? Surface affinities can be deceiving! Where do we stand at the end of Chap. 2? Baudelaire, represented here by his poem “Les Chats,” is an Everyman, since he’s as good as any other representative of human thinking. But he is also a straw man, for he and Lévi-Strauss, “the analyzer,” “share similar ‘reality worlds’” (Boon 1972, 59). Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss have not chosen Baudelaire at random. So Baudelaire is a “straw Everyman”: I take this to mean he serves as an everyman by way of his straw man function, but also that he serves as a straw man by way of his everyman function—else why take his poem as an object for structural analysis? But in saying he is a straw Everyman we are crossing levels, for he is a straw man at the level of formal analogy and an everyman at the level of content-object for analysis. (What about HCE? Does he have a Boonian as well as a Brownian version?) Boon’s next two chapters will divide and conquer: we begin, in Chapter III, with Poetic Everyman, and move on, in Chapter IV, to Poetic Straw Man (the whole book, in its own way, is about Baudelaire). The titles tell all. The subtitle of Chapter III is: “By Way of the Modern Poem (and Language) to Regain a Sense of Myth” (Boon 1972, 62). The idea seems pretty clear: Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of myth poses two distinct, though ultimately related, problems. The first is that we are unaccustomed to structural analysis, the second that we are unaccustomed to myth. Modern poetry can bring us to a sense of myth appropriate to considering Lévi-Strauss’s work. In particular, the “Romantic” conception of poetry “makes of a poem a rite of purgation, a tension valve through which the poet therapeutically objectifies some dilemma, derived from a conflict, and invites the public, insofar as they share the dilemma, to do the same.” In this way the Romantic poem becomes analogous to “a functionalist conception of ritualized performance of myth, in which society vents steam.” In fact, this shares some but not all features of Blumenberg’s distinction between fundamental myth and art myth in Work on Myth. But just as Lévi-Strauss moves beyond a functional to a structural analysis of myth, so too the Symbolist poem ratchets up the Romantic conception: here we have “a passage from opposition to resolution, all taking place within the context of the work itself—as opposed to within society by means of the work” (Boon 1972, 98). Boon turns back

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once again to “Les Chats,” honing in on the “middle couplet” (lines 7–8) which ties the first to the final sestet. This is the threshold across which the poem moves from the exteriorization of the first sestet to the “mythological resonance” of the second (Boon 1972, 49). It is this progression that might incline one to read the poem as a progressive movement (or a self-instancing allegory thereof?) from metonymy to a metaphor. What singles out Baudelaire’s poem as special is that, like the analysis of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, it moves neither dominantly from metonymy to metaphor nor vice versa, but instead, starts and ends with both, also stretching out in both directions simultaneously. In this regard Baudelaire’s poem is special, though maybe not even so special as what we can find in Mallarmé (Boon 1972, 105), and so is a “straw man” precisely because not an everyman! But there is another straw man here, which is the scheme of moving from metonymy to metaphor or metaphor to metonymy, since both functions are always, even if only residually, involved. And Baudelaire’s poem, like Lévi-Srauss’s structuralism, helps us to overcome this straw man. So I suggest we can read Boon non-­ reductively, when he declares that it’s all a matter of sensory logic, by understanding this to constitute a rejection of this second straw man. Next, in Chapter IV, “Self-Aware Syntheses of Pensée Sauvage” (Boon 1972, 108), Boon moves on to Poetic Straw Man. What makes Symbolism special (and also problematic) is that it violates the customary rule that poetic metaphor be understood as a process of “symbolic induction,” which “as a rule does not transcend the unconscious level” (Lévi-Strauss, cited Boon 1972, 109). But this then also vitiates symbolist poetry, in particular, as an object for structural analysis! In particular, we may wonder whether, in such an “introduction to structural analysis” as provided by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, we have been entirely set up: for insofar as the symbolist poem is a poetic analogue of structural analysis, it seems we are reading out of the poem just what the structuralist analysis is putting in: we are looking in a dark, poetic (black) mirror and finding the “structure of structure.” In short, a symbolist poem is just “too good” for structural analysis. But is the structure of structure something self-confirming, or rather something that only sends us on into ever-higher levels of analysis? Perhaps for now the observation is enough that even if it is this latter, it seems an inappropriate way to introduce structuralism, for the

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structural self-replication is likely to be even harder to handle on first acquaintance than a “first-order” structural analysis would be. So the likelihood is that we’ll mistake it for a first-order analysis—with all the threat of vacuity that runs—and miss whatever is non-vacuous about it. And yet, we might ask, aren’t toy models always, in one way or another, vacuous? But that’s precisely what makes them toy models. We have to do our best to keep walking the talk. This concern about Symbolist poetry cuts both ways, too: as it brings symbolist poetry closer to structural analysis, so it brings structural analysis closer to symbolist poetry. What implications does the rapprochement have for each? In Chapter IV, Boon is primarily concerned with the implications for Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: he takes the Baudelairean straw man and promotes him to the level of Lévi-Strauss. The principle of extension is that what Baudelaire and the symbolists did for poetic language Lévi-Strauss does for language as such, something “the Symbolists were only to muse about” (Boon 1972, 109). The rather interesting consequence of this extension is that Mallarmé’s insistence that the subject of all poems is poetry is promoted to the view that all myths are about myth, and Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis becomes a meta-myth, but with the proviso that all myth is already meta—(Boon 1972, 112). Lévi-Strauss declares himself on board with this general attitude in his introduction to the science of myth, Mythologiques (Lévi-Strauss 1964–1971, 1969, 1973, 1978, 1981). Another consequence of the promotion from the domain of Symbolist poetry to structural analysis of myth is that the ambition for a “universal hierarchy of symbols” is relinquished (Boon 1972, 118). Lévi-Strauss is “interested solely in the horizontal relationships among analogous elements … [and so] he views all symbols as keys to the universal logical process of analogizing between analytically separate orders of experience” (Boon 1972, 118). In so doing, he universalizes the totalizing poetic ambition which is specific to (or at least intensive in?) Symbolism: “Symbolist works, native myths, and studies of both are all characterized by the same logical end point. They are ‘totalizing thoughts, which exhaust reality by means of a finite number of given classes’” (Boon 1972, 133, with internal quotation from Lévi-Strauss). Boon does not explicitly notice that this not only makes myth itself a kind of straw man, in that it

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shares its most basic structural features with structural analysis itself, but also that it implies that structural analysis is only (or most?) appropriate to objects which share its own most basic features. We can encapsulate this challenge pointedly by saying that structuralism can only analyze straw men! And this makes it clear that what is problematic about enlisting Baudelaire’s poem as object for analysis is not the basic features it shares with structural analysis, but rather the specific feature of being relatively self-conscious. Structuralism now starts to look more and more like the more-conscious side of a totalizing impulse analyzing the less-­ conscious side of a totalizing impulse, and this begins to bring the strong analogy with psychoanalysis into view. This is what Symbolist poetry cultivates, too. As such, both serve as challenges and precedents for a legitimation of poetic reason: how is such a legitimation to be provided in a way that doesn’t beg the question? Among the “Critical Ramifications” which Boon considers in Chapter V, the one that concerns me most involves his question, “Can anthropology elucidate esoterism?” (Boon 1972, 164). This points both in the direction of what is esoteric in Symbolist poetry and the question that seems to concern Boon more directly, which is the extent to which we can capture in structural analysis of myth what is gained in the performance of myth: this has obvious implications for music as well, and so Lévi-­ Strauss’s invocation of musical parallels in Mythologiques is also at issue. At this point my reading of Boon connects back with the reading of Brown at the most fundamental level: whereas Brown is committed, as I would put it, to modernity as the exfoliation of esoteric traditionalism in a convergence of prophecy, poetry and politics, Boon points the way to an esoteric modernism that would distinguish it from all traditional stances. Call this the distinction between traditional and modern esotericism, understood in the context of the legitimacy of the modern age, conceived at a minimum as both political and philosophical. Mallarmé says: “To evoke, in a precise obscurity, the object hushed, by allusive, never direct, words, reducing themselves to uniform silence, tentative behavior near creating [comporte tentative proche de créer].” Boon’s question is whether Lévi-Strauss, and particularly his Mythologiques can help to illuminate this, and what is its result? His effort bootstraps on Lévi-Strauss’s: the structuralist mythographer leaves behind the myth’s

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“initial charm so that the fuller effort will be made” (Boon 1972, 165). Both Mallarmé’s Grand Œuvre and Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques are committed to the “potential for universal truth” (Boon 1978, 165). Mallarmé tries universal affirmation “for himself ”; Lévi-Strauss, with “the help of others first—different points of departure, but analogous points of view” (Boon 1972, 219). In both cases, Boon finds this effort in the crossings of levels: the “fond inconnu becomes manifest in the effortful synthesis of disparate orders of experience,” and “the locus of this effort is the subject of both Symbolism and structuralism” (Boon 1972, 219). But it is rather ironic to speak of a locus here, for the crossing is between distinct levels: what is this paradoxical place between distinct levels which we call a threshold? (Fletcher 1982) In fact, in an indirect sense at least, Boon recognizes this, since he quotes Merleau-Ponty saying, “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at … It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (cited, Boon 1972, 205). The field of the subject-(dis)-continuum is locative, but it would be a mistake to conclude that it is located in (another) space. It is, rather, orienting for space. Indeed, even this way of situating it is insufficiently radical and must be abandoned in favor of a characterization in terms of desire. The locative is what is figured by music in Mythologiques, and Boon is sensitive to this figuration. “Music is there to remind us that experience is a synchronized symphony of contrastive sensory features—all ours for the playing” (Boon 1972, 177). Music is an allegory of the logic of sense, written in the “language of sense” itself. (Is structuralism, as meta-myth, an allegory of myth written in the language of myth? Yes, it seems, with the implication that all myth is proto-allegorical.) Boon invokes the distinction between horizontal homophony (musical line) and vertical polyphony (harmony) and sees Lévi-Strauss as “advocate of the polyphonic mind” of which musically Bach is the “crowning point” (Boon 1972, 173–4). In both Bach and Lévi-Strauss, Boon sees polyphony as ultimately horizontal and vertical, and in Lévi-Strauss “multiple lines of conceptual counterpoint [are] running simultaneously, with no single line predominating (no story-line ‘melody’), just as we have found in Mallarmé’s poems and in Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats’” (174, see also 167).4 What distinguishes Mythologiques is that it relinquishes the sensitivity to

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textual performance which Boon attributes to the “ideal native,” but which we may attribute also to the performing musician. Lévi-Strauss remains “outside,” yet Boon thinks a “feeble echo” may be found, much in the way, I would suggest, in which a translation may provide a feeble echo of the esoteric content of the original (Jakobson 1985, 81–2).5 In fact Lévi-Strauss’s myth analysis is predicated on the intertranslatability of myth as a feature which precisely distinguishes it from poetry! So we have the paradoxical effect that whatever is “echoed” in myth analysis is a function of intertranslatability, but that insofar as what is esoteric in myth is poetic as opposed to what is intertranslatable about myth, it will be inaccessible. Boon thinks a remnant remains, but this suggests that, in the other direction, poetry is not utterly untranslatable even in its most esoteric dimension. It seems we are staking out nothing less than another version of the paradox which Mallarmé himself faces, already quoted above, and which led directly on to Boon posing the question, “can anthropology elucidate esoterism?” (In the nineteenth century, there was an epidemic fear of being buried alive. People put bells on coffins, with bell pulls placed into the hands of corpses.) Brown and Boon establish the dual starting points from which we now begin to converge on the legitimation of poetic reason. Brown identifies in its most radical form the threat which Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age continues to face, and Boon identifies the first hints of a poetic reason to be legitimated. In particular, the prophetic poetry Brown values seems on the face of it virtually orthogonal to the proto-structural poetry of symbolism. Yet the two converge in the notion of visionary design. The goal of the rest of this book will be to respond to the challenge, first formulated in its most radical and barest form by Brown, by teasing out a more advanced version of the proto-structural identified by Boon. A first argument will be given for the legitimation of poetic reason which relies on Jakobson’s broadly structural construal of language, yet this argument does not yet meet the challenge Brown poses. The two lines represented by Brown and Boon will converge on a second argument for the legitimation of poetic reason in which Blumenberg’s argument for the legitimation of modernity is stabilized against the sort of attack Brown poses. This argument does not presuppose Jakobson’s account of language function and it does make clear

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how the legitimation of poetic reason stabilizes the commitment to modernity Blumenberg advocates. On both these fronts, the second argument is preferable, but it is also more involved, both since it requires the explicit deduction of a subject adequate to poetic reason and because it requires a historical deduction comparable to the one Blumenberg gives in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. There are thus three deductions provided: a first deduction of the legitimacy of poetic reason along Jakobsonian-structuralist lines; a transcendental deduction of the Lacanian subject, understood as a prototype for the fuller account of the poetic subject-(dis)-continuum; and finally a second argument in sketch for the legitimacy of poetic reason taking Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age as a starting point.

Notes 1. I am in no position to evaluate how convincing Brown’s picture of Islam should be taken to be. My concern is with the structure of Brown’s argument, and so I hope that for current purposes such an independent evaluation may be safely neglected. This conforms to the distinction between narrow and broad reading I’ve indicated at the beginning of this project. 2. Anteceding Lévi-Strauss, we find in Marcel Mauss: “‘Participation’ thus implies not only a confusion of categories, but it is, from the beginning, as it is for us, an effort to identify ourselves with things and to identify things among themselves. The reason has the same deliberate and collective origin in the most ancient societies and in the most incisive forms of philosophy and science” (cited, Calasso 2010, 272). 3. However, one may also simply choose not to take Jakobson and Lévi-­ Strauss strictly at their word, recognizing that the functions are metonymic and metaphoric “by association.” This matter should be clarified by the first argument for the legitimation of poetic reason on the basis of Jakobson’s schematic diagram, given below in Chapter Eight. 4. Lévi-Strauss’s critique of serial composition dovetails with Boon’s characterization. Lévi-Strauss’s friend René Leibowitz already provides an argument (however questionable in strictly historical terms) for the legitimation of serial composition in his 1946 volume, translated and published in

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English as Schoenberg & His School (Leibowitz 1947). Neither is serial aesthetics restricted to the musical domain, as is discussed in (Grant 2001). (Conte 1993) has attempted a broadly serialist reading of mainly American experimental poetry. 5. It is critical that evidence for such a claim is intrinsically anecdotal, as in the lesson of the ghost trumpet, and so cannot be subject to usual procedures of verification or falsification.

Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997). Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985). Brown, Norman O. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: California, 1991). Boon, James A. From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (New York: Harper, 1972). Brown, Norman O. Love’s Body (Berkeley: California, 1990). Calasso, Roberto. Ardor, trans. Richard Dixon (New York: FSG, 2010). Close-up, dir. Abbas Kiarostami (Criterion Collection 7380096, 2010). Char, René. Le poème pulvérisé (Paris: Fontaine, 1948). Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of Post-Modern Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell, 1993). Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia, 1990). Donald, Merlin. On the Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1991). Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton, 1954). Fletcher, Angus. “Basic Definitions of Threshold for a Theory of Labyrinths,” in Beauty and Critique, ed. Richard Milazzo (New York: Mussmann Bruce Publishers, 1982), 142–52. Grant, M. J. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory and Practice in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001). Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1985). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006).

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Lawvere, F.  William. “Adjointness in Foundations,” Dialectica 23 3/4 (1966), 281–96. Leibowitz, René. Schoenberg & His School, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library 1947). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper, 1973). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques (Paris: Plon, 1964–1971). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Naked Man, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper, 1981). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper, 1978). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper, 1969). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago, 1966). Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994). Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managing Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton, 2008).

Part III The Logic of Lyric and Poetic Legitimation

7 The Logic of Lyric (Part One)

In this chapter and the next, I conduct a differential, proto-structuralist reading of selected lyric poetry, which will allow me to disclose a preliminary logic of lyric in which the esoteric function plays a central role. In terms of this esoteric function, I obtain a provisional positive answer to a question analogous to Boon’s: can poetry elucidate the esoteric? The answer is more specifically that it does so in exemplifying the role the esoteric function plays in poetry itself. In Chap. 10 I present Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age as a transcendental deduction which promotes what I will call the modern function to the legitimating feature for the modern age, and I argue that a second deduction is required to stabilize the first, in which what I will call the esoteric function is analogously promoted from function to legitimating feature. We have already met this esoteric function in the previous chapter and seen its centrality for symbolist poetry, and what I excavate here will help to identify a sense of modern esotericism compatible with Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age. This logic of lyric then drives toward a crux in the praxis of the lyric poet, which argues that the poetic rationality of lyric poetry cannot be understood exclusively in structural terms. This will help to indicate why the first proto-structuralist legitimation of poetic reason © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_7

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provided below in Chap. 8 remains limited. This praxical crux, which goes under the name of lyric esotericism or lyric withdrawal, and which is understood as an application of what I identify as the esoteric function, throws us back onto a reading of Vedic poetic culture, as figured in the work of Kuiper, Toporov and Calasso, where this esoteric function is especially perspicuous in a way that was identified in a modern European line that dates back at least to Saussure. In considering the reception of Vedic poetry, my ambition is not a historical reconstruction of its poetic praxis, but rather to identify some ways that recent readings of Vedic poetry culture identify it as a sort of limit practice for lyric poetry in the Western tradition. In retrospect, we will see that this was the same role Symbolist poetry played in Boon’s analysis of structuralism. Vedic culture is, on the one hand, manifestly agonistic, and yet thematically conceived the ultimate agonistic triumph leaves ahead of it no prospect but the esoteric choice to withdraw “into the forest.” This dynamic lies at the heart of the logic of lyric I cultivate in this section. Louis Dumont has argued for this “forest asceticism” as the ultimate root of Western individuality (Dumont 1981, 126, cited Calasso 2014, 379 n. 270.16). I do not rely on the success or failure of Dumont’s assertion, but it exemplifies the way in which an esoteric function may have manifestly exoteric consequences. Such will be the case, too, for the esoteric lyric function as I identify it. The counterpoint between agon and esotericism is central to Harold Bloom’s theory and reading of poetry, and it coalesces in an explicit form in his mid-career work Agon (Bloom 1982), where the agonistic nature of poetry is played off against a manifestly kabbalistic and Gnostic approach to its reading. In its own way, Bloom’s work provides a challenge for the legitimation of poetic reason that is analogous to the challenge Norman O. Brown provides for the legitimation of the modern age. For Bloom the making and the reading of poetry are such coeval acts that “strong reading” of poetry can only be understood in terms of the poetic agon itself, and Bloom will insist, self-deprecatingly, that the only strong reading of a poem can be another poem (one cannot help but wonder whether Bloom is making an esoteric move of his own). Like Brown as well, Bloom’s orientation is deeply grounded in Freud’s psychoanalytic

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approach, but he argues that in fact Freud’s approach is only an epiphenomenon of a deeper poetic conflict, a conflict of which we can say that it is poetry itself. Thus, as for Brown, poetry is all. Bloom’s criticism will therefore be helpful, in particular, in the attempt to move from the psychoanalytic act, especially as it is understood by Lacan, to the poetic act. His agonistic appropriation of Freud also stands in an agonistic relation with Lacan’s reading of Freud, and by crossing the two, we will first be able to arrive at a manifest account of poetic reason, necessarily keeping in mind the Gnostic consequences of Bloom’s agonism as we proceed. As preparation for the further consideration of these issues, I turn to an immanent reading across a trajectory of poems chosen to aid us in this quest.

7.1 Stopping By the Woods / Because I Could Not Stop What are we to make of Robert Frost and his poem, “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening”? (Frost 1969, 224–5) Indeed, what are we to make of Robert Frost at all? I’m a strong supporter, but I don’t have an answer to the question. Oleg Gelikman has suggested reading the poem as an expression of Frost’s Gnosticism, and I will embrace this suggestion and extend it speculatively by proceeding differentially, juxtaposing as a point of comparison Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” (Dickinson 1999, 219–20). Both poems are readily available electronically, and I encourage the reader to follow along in the poems themselves while reading my commentary. In the Frost poem, the poem’s speaker stops. In the Dickinson poem, the speaker does not stop but is carried along. Conversely, in the Frost poem, death does not stop for the speaker: the speaker must move on, the encounter with death is deferred. And in Dickinson’s poem the speaker does not stop: her carriage moves on, with death taking a little ride-along. In Frost’s poem, the speaker drives; in Dickinson’s poem, death drives. (Dickinson gives us to believe that she writes from a posthumous perspective.)

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Then, Dickinson’s poem throws a wrench in the works, because the frame of motion is utterly reversed: instead of passing the Sun, the Sun passes us. This anti-Copernican retrograde makes everything that was previously mobile immobile and vice versa. It makes Dickinson’s poem more radical than Frost’s: the only thing that introduces any comparable structural complication in Frost’s poem would be the reduplication of the last line, with its miles to go before I sleep. If we “exponentiate” Frost’s poem to the level of Dickinson’s, the reduplication becomes an insistence on repetition as an inverting device. But I don’t suggest that we should read this in Frost’s poem: it’s an imposition from outside. Next, there’s the matter of the houses: Frost’s is remote, in the distant village. Dickinson’s is sunken, an altogether more violent displacement. It generally takes a long time for a building to sink: centuries. Both poems are “passings by,” though Frost’s is located at a moment of arrest (snapshot); Dickinson’s is a description (perhaps even an enactment) of the “Vorbeigang” thematized mostly powerfully by Hölderlin as the Vorbeigang des letzten Gottes, the passing-by of the last god. And then there are the horses. I am indebted to Gelikman’s suggestion that in Frost’s poem the shaking bells are the mechanical exfoliation of the horse-mechanism, and that this constitutes a kind of laughter. But also a death knell? A clang? A cackling of bells, perhaps. Dickinson’s horses are altogether more apocalyptic: pointed toward eternity. (They are horsems.) Harold Bloom’s chief provocation is to insist that there just is no other vital form of American religion than Gnosticism (Bloom 1992). But its dominant mode is a misprision of Protestantism (already, it seems, a misprision of Christianity, masquerading à la Bultmann as a return to the “primitive”). Here, the plain fact, in any case, is made apparent by the complete alignment of Dickinson and Frost on the central point: the church is sunk, back in the village, owned by someone I only think I know—in other words, I don’t know in the requisite sense. I have about as much chance of knowing as a horse’s chance in bells. Wherefore then gnosis? (Only at the sharp point of the infinite.) Dickinson’s poem ends with dimensional shifting in the scale of time and violently so. At day’s end, Dickinson may be the most violent poet in

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the English language. Camille Paglia is the only person I’ve seen who comes close to recognizing this, when she reads Dickinson’s poetry as an extended fantasy of multiple amputation (Paglia 1991, 669).1 The Dickinson Dash: in both senses. Dash as gash.

7.2 Our Journey Had Advanced The Dickinson poem which really opens Frost up, because, as a kind of poetic Archon, it opens everything up, is “Our journey had advanced” (Dickinson 1999, 209), which I read in The Pace of Modernity, following on Bloom in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate (Bloom 1977). It is brilliant of Bloom to invoke this poem in the place he does, and what he does by framing his book on Stevens with the Dickinson poem is a huge version of what I’ve barely sketched above for the much simpler context of Dickinson’s simpler, but by no means simple, poem and Frost’s. Because the ground opened up by “Our journey had advanced” is the entire Land of the Dead, we’re now at full tilt. Of course Frost’s snowy woods are also the Land of the Dead, but in an ostensibly more gentle, pastoral sense, and one which breaks in on the speaker only for a moment (Augenblick), after which he will pass on. Is sleep only a rather hackneyed poeticism here? I find that only the repetition saves it, by doubling the ante. In other words, if you plaster the line above a corpse in a funeral home (and then there’s no need for repetition, but then again why not?), you’ve just doubled the hackney, rented the coach for another hour, coaxed another drink from the bartender, staved off closing time. But if the repetition sinks in (and as Freud teaches, how can it not, at some level, albeit occluded, it’s all a matter of scale), well, then you have to deal with the fact that while strong poetry may be somehow enjoyable, it is not pleasant, that its power is something altogether different, as different as death is from life. So: not unrelated, but related by no known relation. The logic of lyric is a logic of jouissance beyond the pleasure principle. Gnosticism is a challenge because it gives us a handle on this. But which handle? The handle of the hackney door? The door to the Land of the Dead? The keys (back) to the village? Which latter would be to say: Gnosticism is a story we tell ourselves, a bedtime story that can either

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keep us up or put us to sleep. And, of course, stories can always do both (and do). In his summa, Audubon: A Vision, Robert Penn Warren concludes by asking for a story of deep delight (Warren 1969). Is Gnosticism, after all, such a story, not even despite but because of its grim surface? My earlier reading of Dickinson’s poem took the form of an antithetical completion to Harold Bloom’s reading, with my ontological reading in contrast to Bloom’s reading emphasizing the transition from being to consciousness. I now want to complete this antithetical completion in turn by offering a reading in terms of the achievement of consciousness in the poem, which I believe Bloom rightly identifies. Previously I found that Bloom’s reading fails only in that it does not sufficiently attend to the suddenness of this transition to consciousness, what Roberto Calasso finds throughout Kafka in the form of a forced awakening (Calasso 2005, esp. 196–9), and it was this that led me to a reading in terms of the tradition of the sudden taking up into the moment which stretches from Plato’s Symposium through Paul’s Letter to Corinthians and on eventually to include Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s Augenblickliche Philosophie. In Plato, important examples of exaiphnes occur in the Seventh Letter, 341c, Republic, 515c, 621b, Symposium, 210e–211a, and liberally within the Parmenides dialogue. In Paul the crucial passage is I Corinthians 15:52, in the King James Version: In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. Contritely, I must give Bloom’s reading more credit than I did previously. It is indeed a reading in terms of the transition from being to consciousness, where he locates the “odd fork” in being itself, a “road which is no road,” and so rightly recognizes a moment of election. But as the road is no road, so this moment of election is not elected: Dickinson stands on its threshold, for even (or especially) a poet as strong as Dickinson cannot, for Bloom, escape the swerve away from election. Such are Bloom’s Gnostic (and Mosaic?) commitments; but are they also Dickinson’s? I think not. In what follows I suggest that by placing Dickinson’s poem in a Vedic context, we can see that her allegiance is to an esoteric poetic consciousness which in fact antecedes the distinction between knowledge (gnosis) and being.2 This claim will depend on accepting a distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric which I indicate below. Failing this

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distinction, Bloom turns to a home-grown, pragmatic and “American” version of Gnosticism to identify a spark of the alien within the ordinary, among strong poets never entirely extinguished. Yet Emily Dickinson, strongest of American poets, cannot be included into this line. I am unqualified to argue for or against specific readings of Vedic poetry, and so fortunately that is not requisite for my purposes. I am not at all interested in any “foundation” of the Western poetic tradition in Vedic poetry,3 but rather in the way the attribution of certain features to Vedic poetry establishes a context for the logic of lyric I am cultivating. To be sure, the more historically responsible one is able to be, the more interesting the reconstruction becomes, and so I rely on readings provided by two quite different figures much more competent than myself. Specifically, I look at Chapter VIII of Roberto Calasso’s Ka (Calasso 1999, 155–204), relying as well on F. B. J. Kuiper’s article, “The Ancient Aryan Verbal Contest” (Kuiper 1960). Here the methodological distinction between narrow and wide reading made in Chap. 1 above is especially apposite, indeed requisite.

7.3 Calasso’s Vedic Context In Chapter VIII of Ka, Roberto Calasso sketches a notion of esoteric consciousness in the Vedic tradition. I will identify an instance of this consciousness in Dickinson, which she discovers through her radical pursuit of the logic of lyric, and then go on to compare her discovery at “the fork” to poems by Robert Frost and John Ashbery. Calasso’s Chapter VIII begins with a description of the sabhā or “initiation place,” site of “meetings, royal audiences, games.” The essential elements of a sabhā are doors and columns: “everything else is optional.” The Vedic sabhā as site of initiation will be compared to the Eleusinian telesterion. First to speak in the chapter is Varuna, who declares the end of the agonistic brahmodyas, “the time of the cruel dispute about enigmas” (Calasso 1999, 157). These verbal disputes occurred in the sabhā. To what use will it be put in our new, belated time? (Perhaps an aeon is coming to an end.) Let’s host some travelers from the far west ­(Hercules/ Hesperides/Hebrides/Hybrid). Among them comes a fellow traveler named Roberto Calasso.

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The enigmas may have passed, but vertigo lives on: it is the inevitable effect of this forest of doors and columns. The vertigo is intensified by … wandering cows. In Eleusis, there was a long wait, ritual starvation and perhaps the ingestion of psychoactive compounds on an empty stomach. Loud noises, strobing shocks of light: shades of the modern rock concert (Stein 2006, 52–83). “A geometric forest, or an alcove with mirrors” (Calasso 1999, 158). It’s the forest inside the forest, a pure syntax of trees (Ashbery 1972, 55; Friedrich 1970). What is the geometry of an alphabet? Spare / me / spare me. Square me. Cows mill around at random (cow = variable: (Calasso 1999, 169)). Vedic Quine: to be is to the value of a cow. Vedic Stein: A wife has a cow a love story. Varuna grants Vasistha a vision, “born of the seed he had spurted in the air: the vision that brings clairvoyance, that made Vasistha a(n) rsi” (Calasso 1999, 158, trans. mod.). Vasistha is the honorific author of the Yogavasistha, about which Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty writes in her Dream Book (O’Flaherty 1984). Above all, Vasistha’s vision is the focal Vedic design we track here. The Vedas are themselves the visionary designs of the rsis: “the rsis didn’t write the Vedas, they saw them” (Calasso 1999, 160), “[s]itting, immersed in tapas” (Calasso 1999, 162). Immersed in tapas, they vibrated, throbbed, trembled (Calasso 1999, 161). Tapas, it is said, “came before the word, the number, reasoning, deduction” (Calasso 1999, 197). It is a thermodynamic version of Rilke’s primal sound, vibrating itself. Perhaps Descartes found it in his stove-chamber. And then “it was time for the vision to split away from the seer” (Calasso 1999, 162). The visionary design is what is transmissible of the seer who sees it. It is the inscription, the track, of a vibration. Though they bore a distant resemblance to Plato’s Guardians (were these guardians a devolution of the rsis?), they looked over (surveyed, care-took, curated) not the Republic, but the many worlds, pearls strung along, “like vertebrae in a spine” (Calasso 1999, 163). They were, above all, wakeful: they were the higher wakefulness within the world of waking, hyperwakeful, and so mistakable for a form of dreaming, like the world of the movie theater (Ashbery 1972, 105–6) that Geoffrey O’Brien has called the phantom empire (O’Brien 1993). The rsis were seers, but the vratyas, having disappeared into the forest, “lived on as ghosts” (Calasso 1999, 203). For “the esoteric is the forest,” the home of the kecin muni,

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long-haired and silent, covered in dirt, clothed in wind, into whom the gods enter (Eliade 1960, 113). These bore no resemblance to Plato’s guardians whatsoever. The rsis, Calasso says, “were dazzled by one revelation: the elementary fact of being conscious. There was no need to drink soma or develop techniques or be inspired. The bare fact of being conscious was enough in itself ” (Calasso 1999, 164–5). The continuation requires that we accept the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric: “Everything else was a supplementary hallucination superimposed over the primary hallucination: that of living inside a mind” (Calasso 1999, 165). The fact of consciousness is exoteric, even pedestrian. But the recognition of consciousness as the primary hallucination, inceptive for a state of hyperwakefulness: that is the threshold to the esoteric, the one probed by Freud and Lacan. A division must be drawn. This is regularly thematized in terms of the illusoriness of reality. But that is a figurative, exoteric conversion of the esoteric recognition. Better is the idea of consciousness as wakefulness, or even the hyper-­ wakefulness of a wakeful dreaming: the Matrix as the one and only world in which we are living. Once we admit the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric, we may formulate the matter in this way: mind, the “first substance,” emerges from tapas, “a subtle heat, a hidden simmering, a burning beneath the surface, which sometimes flares up, with images, words, and emotions clutching at its seething crest, but above all: an incandescent point. All this we call tapas, heat” (Calasso 1999, 177). Einstein said that of all the physical sciences generated during the nineteenth century, thermodynamics, the physics of heat, was the one that would never be overthrown. It would rest in place while sparking the quantum revolution (Kuhn 1978). Traditionally, Vasistha is said to be the author of the seventh mandala of the Rg Veda, and Calasso’s chapter orbits around the themes of its second hymn. SEND TO THE GODS THE OBLATION, LORD OF FORESTS, AND LET THE IMMOLATOR, AGNI, DRESS IT (Rg Veda 7.2.10). The hymn is addressed not to Agni but to the Apris, manifestations of Agni. “Atri said: ‘What’s the first thing we notice, when we bend our gaze down upon the plains of earth? Fires. We recognize them as people. They are the toughest of living beings’” (Calasso 1999, 194).

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BLACK BODY RADIATION: “Jamadagni said: ‘Where does fire come from? From the mouth. From the vagina. From a smooth, moist cavity. From the burning lake” (Calasso 1999, 195). Mare’s head: fire beneath the waters (like sodium metal). “Then Indra said: I AM PRANA, BREATH. YOU ARE BREATH. ALL BEINGS ARE BREATH. BREATH IS WHAT BURNS BELOW. THUS DO I PENETRATE ALL SPACES” (Calasso 1999, 199). Indra sat next to Visvamitra at the mahavrata, the celebration of the great vow.4 It was ancient, “like all the ceremonies founded by the vratyas.” Who were these ancient vratyas, of whom one no longer speaks, but who are “the shadow that accompanies our every gesture”? (Calasso 1999, 200) They are the ones who “lived on as ghosts” (Calasso 1999, 203). Do they live on as the long shadow of the parafinite? Yes, one band of its many shadows. “It is because of dreams and in the field of dreams that we first prove to be stronger than the shadow” (Lacan 2015, 377). A band (vrata) bound by a vow (vrata) dictating a way of life (vrata). They were nomads, “the eternal ambush.” Deleuze and Guattari hallucinate them in the guise of paratroopers among the French legionnaires, from the historical novels of Jean Lartéguy. They slaughter ruthlessly in the morning and in the afternoon reconvene to build an aid camp for children. But in fact they were nothing like that. The exoteric is what allows for a community. The Brahmans wanted to be guardians of the esoteric and also of the community, but this was unstable. The Brahmans supervised the rituals, and certified the actions of the executor; but who supervises the Brahmans and thereby ensures that the distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric remains in place? It seems the vratyas were born from this imperfection, like the discrepancy which invades any system of harmony. “Often they were announced by a great din. Harps, drums, rattles, flutes. To their minds, even the earth was first and foremost a sound … that an other life was always open, always flitting outside and beyond; that the community was not everything. Thus, for a long time the vratyas were the sensible presence of the esoteric. But what is the esoteric? The esoteric is the forest” (Calasso 1999, 201), a terrible woods (Bray 2008). We are circulating among the realm of the newly—and not so newly—dead. The FOREST of the dead.

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The breaths: the breaths were first revealed to the vratyas, “who arranged the right gestures, through the revelation Indra gave to me, that day I am remembering” (Calasso 1999, 204). This is because in the forest of the dead they were closest to the world thinking itself. As we will see, this is also a radical image of the way lyric poetry sees itself. Poetic reason is the reflective medium in which the world thinks itself (Wheeler 1978, 23). If the hymns emanated from a person, the primal Purusa, they emanated from him like exhaled breath (Calasso 1999, 161). “To a flute-­ player the gods gave not intelligence (νους); while he blows, his intelligence also flies out” (cited, Onians 1988, 38; see also 56). But critically, Calasso insists that he describes the time after the ancient Aryan verbal competitions in the sabhā. It is Varuna who declares the end of the disputes (Calasso 1999, 157–8), and in the Rg Veda Kuiper identifies the presence of Varuna, ancient god of the Waters, in terms of his role as guardian of cosmic law (rta), hidden in the netherworld of undifferentiated Chaos (Kuiper 1960, 219; Hymn V.62.1). Is Varuna’s declaration a manifesto for the return of the repressed? Are the vratyas remnants of some sort? Ghosts of departed quantities? Kuipers finds analogues of the ancient Aryan verbal competitions in cultures across the world, so they can’t be used to explain what makes Vedic culture distinct. While he insists on the deep roots of Vedic culture in prehistory, it is still this distinctness that interests Calasso, and what primes his work for an identification of a specific logic of lyric. The distinctness is that Vedic lyric finds a specific way to carry these prehistoric roots beyond the verbal contest, one that is capable of absorbing and transmitting the deep prehistoric roots in full force.

7.4 Return to Dickinson It is time to return to Dickinson, reading in minute detail. This reading is not an account of what the poem says: what the poem says is the poem itself. (“What the world thinks is the world.”) Once again the reader is encouraged to read the poem itself alongside, line by line. LINE ONE : The age of the verbal dispute was over. We had advanced to a new place (locus), and this new place was itself an advance. We came

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to it together. (Who are we?) Whatever this place is, it is our poetic locus. Advanced: taken forward; not elementary. LINE TWO: Bloom reads ‘feet’ as ‘Being’; in a more pedestrian mode, our feet are the transport for our journey: they are our “traversers.” Our feet carry us along. What carries us along in the poem? It is what in the Vedas are called the meters. A foot is itself an element of a poetic journey and what carries it along. It is a unit of measure and what transports us through this unit (Calasso 2001, 143–66). Don’t forget those cattle roaming around in the sabhā: if meter = cow and cow = variable, then, assuming transitivity, meter = variable. The tense: were come. This is a more radical version of the pluperfect than we usually see, banking off the verb to be rather than to have. Dickinson locates our locus here. almost: the plu- is not yet pluperfect, it is pre-pluperfect. We are approaching what Bloom calls a threshold (Angus Fletcher, too); we are not crossing it (yet). Can we reach the threshold, or is it a limit, always out of reach? Can the past be perfected? LINE THREE: ‘to’ points toward the limit, at which stands a divergence. Being’s road: the divergence is (being) a divergence in Being. How can a road have a fork? By cleaving in two. So the fork is odd: a fork in a road is odd indeed. It makes the one road not two, but three. It is a Y, not an X. (Dickinson did not read widely, but she read quality. Alongside the Bible, she was an avid and alert reader of Shakespeare. In King Lear, there are two important instances of ‘fork’. At 1.1.145–6 it means barbed arrow-head. Lear cautions Kent to forbear, to come no further, remarking, ‘The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft’, to which Kent responds, ‘Let it fall rather, though the fork invade / The region of my heart’. At 4.6.116–9, in the plural it means legs. Here Lear declaims, ‘Behold yon simp’ring dame, / Whose face between her forks presages snow, / That minces virtue and does shake the head / To hear of pleasure’s name–’ (cited, Onions 1986, 110). Legs are forks in a torso; they begin at the pelvis.) LINE FOUR: this is the end of the first stanza, and it is registered by the slant-rhyme come / Term. Now the poem becomes oblique. I choose one particular path to follow. We have already seen that the fork itself is not achieved, much less crossed (yet). It is approached, term by term. Here, both the sense of term as unit of time and as unit of language

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pertain. They coincide in the notion of poetic meter, not in the narrow literal sense, but in the cosmic sense intended in the Vedas, which is Calasso’s concern. As ‘Eternity’ stands in apposition to ‘that odd fork in Being’s Road’, we may extend the apposition grammatically: we were almost come to Eternity. Almost? And yet, term by term, can we even approach it? Are we to take this at “face value?” It is at this point that the poem accelerates. It accelerates “speech-pragmatically,” by telling us so. LINE FIVE: WE HAVE CROSSED INTO ETERNITY IN THE MOMENT. (Compare Norman Mailer’s description of breaking the cordon in Armies of the Night (Mailer 1994, 130)). The Gnostic correlate is: he came upon the place without knowing it. Given the way Bloom reads Browning’s poem, he calls Dickinson’s poem her “Child Harolde to the Dark Tower Came.” Grammatically, the line is parallel to line two. So let’s compare them: in the first we have feet, in the second pace. In the first we have being (were), in the second seizing (took). ‘Almost’ is anticipatory, proleptic (to take beforehand); ‘sudden’ is overtaken (from sub-ire, to steal up-on). From the one to the other, there is a crossing, a capture, and an arrest. (Mailer arrests the MPs, and not vice versa; it is only later that they arrest him, and then only in a legal sense, which means the opposite: they carry him away.) Bloom does not identify any of the three poetic crossings at this point in the poem. Yet the sense of crossing is manifest not only at the semantic level (sudden capture), but at the syntactic level as well: the grammar has moved from pluperfect (had advanced, were come) to past (took), and also at the level of poetic construction: we have crossed into the second stanza. The acceleration is best described at once as drastic, terminal even in its sweeping up into Eternity, and as negative, for in fact the acceleration is, in the domain of the progression term by term, an arrest, a deceleration to standstill. We are taken up. The diction of the line is baroque, but a pedestrian paraphrase would be: we were startled. A curious word, this last: it comes from to kick, to struggle. It is the violent motion of a foot unable to pace (and so, unable to keep pace). What is it like here? Is it like anything at all? LINE SIX: The voice of the verb is indefinite: our feet led us, or our feet were led? Looking ahead to the next lines doesn’t help. That our feet

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are reluctant argues for the latter interpretation in which the main verb (were) is elided. Broadly, both ‘almost’, in line two, and ‘reluctant’, here, are concessive. The overall sense is indefinite, but generally a picture builds that our feet have given out (as have perhaps also our knees, or nearly). This all argues that ‘pace’ should be taken to indicate specifically the step of the foot, so that the ‘awe taken’ comes in the form of arrest. At this moment (in timespace, Zeitraum) the forces are reversed, or more accurately arrest and pass over from a positive (pace) to a negative (led) form. We are being pulled down, sucked even, into the rabbit hole, not so much against our will as against the normal function of our feet. LINE SEVEN: Before here means ‘before us’, i.e. in front of us.5 We may overcome our ‘almost come’ and have arrived in sudden awe, but now a new trajectory lies ahead, in wait: one replaces the other (two paths, one the precondition of the other). Before also means ‘over against us’. The new trajectory may not be traversable, even almost, for between lies: the forest. LINE EIGHT: This is where the vratyas live, ghostly and ghastly. What would it even mean to cross this forest? LINE NINE: There is no going back; but is there any going forward? (After Mailer arrests the MPs, they arrest him. Do they move him forward? They do carry him along.) The remainder of the poem builds a cumulative sense of surround, in which directionality is replaced by omni-­ directionality. In fact, the path we have traversed, behind us, is closed, as if a Gate had been shut. De facto, we are moving into the forest. LINE TEN: When a route is sealed off, it is no longer a route. It is a past route; it is past being a route. There is no way out but through. But is there a way through? LINE ELEVEN: The poem’s chief repetitions are ‘feet’—uncapitalized both times—and Eternity—capitalized both. A white flag is a flag of (pure) surrender. Is Eternity surrendering to us? But how are we to get there? How do we traverse the forest? The only thing for certain is we cannot go back. Are we stuck, arrested? But then how has our pace taken sudden awe? Is the awe an arrest? Where has it taken us? For it has taken us. LINE TWELVE: The forest is a sabhā. The trees are the columns. The spaces between the trees are gates. Gates to where? No: Gates through

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where? Through the trees, of course. Hesse’s novel, The Glassbeadgame, ends with a story drawn from the Yogavasistha. The story ends, and so the novel ends: he never again left the forest (Hesse 1963, 616). I suggest: Emily Dickinson has turned into a vratya, and she endeavors to carry us along, too. She is a permanent ghost, an esoteric function of her own lyric poetry. I find this a stronger reading than Cameron’s that the poem is the revision of its own diagram (Cameron 1979, 110). The poet will not be taken up into the city; in Bloom’s or the Bible’s sense, she is not elected. God stands at every gate, like the gatekeeper in Kafka’s Before The Law. Dickinson’s poem is the testimony of and to the esoteric. This esoteric is not Gnostic, but then what is it? It is the zero-element of the poetic function and as such the completion of the modern function. This poem is more radical than either of the “poems of two paths” I will go on to compare it to, and it is more radical than Browning’s “Childe Roland” in being a condensation of it to its ultimate essentials. Paring down is the ultimate treason in an age where nothing flows. Emily Dickinson is not a Gnostic, nor is her poem: it neither entails nor withholds a hidden knowledge. But then how does it testify of and to the esoteric? It is also not—perhaps counter to appearances—apocalyptic. In particular, nothing is ending here, and Eternity stands at bay, an untraversable distance. Neither is it mystic: the forest of the dead is, for all that, a forest. And if it is Romantic, it is in the limiting sense that the poem is structured as a quest-romance. Yet it is esoteric: it is the space we enter into when the exoteric is sealed off behind us. How does this relate to the recognition of the fact of consciousness? In fact, in Dickinson’s poem, we have moved beyond this fact of recognition, primal as it may seem. Vasistha speaks: This is the decisive step: thought. Something that adds a new quality to thought: to enter into brahman. The gods entered there, the rsis likewise, and finally [wo]men too. (Calasso 1999, 175, interpolation mine)

This allows us to reverse the terms in which we have read the central part of the poem above: our step steps along, until our pace takes sudden awe in the decisive step: the step (not) beyond (le pas au-delà) into the esoteric realm. Then our feet lead, albeit reluctantly. Why then, on this reading,

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reluctantly? Because in a forest, especially the forest of the dead, one must step carefully. And because as Vasistha goes on to mark, the gods have a vested interest in our not taking the step, in guarding each gate vigilantly. For in taking this decisive step, the human seals behind it the condition of being the cattle of the gods, and the gods have a vested interest in retaining their cattle (their meters, their rhythms, their variables, their love stories). But where are we once we take the decisive step, this step which is not the step of election? One could be in the city of God, one could be guarding the temple, but we are not. We are in the forest. This indicates that our condition is esoteric. We—whoever and howsoever the ‘we’ of this poem may and must be—stand here with route sealed behind. The gods come and go; the rsis, like Plato’s guardians, pass in and out of the community, the polis, like the women in Eliot’s museum. We are forest dwellers. In the language of the Vedas, we are vratyas, a band bound by a bond. What bond? Occasionally some of the young people in the community, particularly the younger sons, would disappear, and it was rumored that they had joined the vratyas. Everybody knew there was another community in the forest, a parallel, tighter community, whose contrasting gestures, behavior, language, and dress formed a counterpoint to the life of the grama [village], sometimes invading it, with brash ferocity, striking as suddenly and unexpectedly as Rudra’s arrow. Thus they thought of them as of Rudra’s wandering bands. They were the esoteric itself, precipitous, rapacious, self-contained. They congratulated themselves on being indistinguishable from each other, like two-legged [forked] wolves. They referred to themselves as ‘dogs’. (Calasso 1999, 201, emphasis and interpolations mine)

The consciousness of the vratyas can only be expressed in language metaphorically: they thought with a thinking that was close to the world thinking itself. For “the first substance the world was made of must have been none other than that element from which the mind emerged” (Calasso 1999, 177). Tapas: black body physics as the radiance of thought.

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After he is victorious in the brahmodya, Yajnavalkya leaves for the forest (Calasso 1999, 188). For what else is left? “And the life of the vratyas was nothing but a rite, throughout their ceaseless wanderings.” (Calasso 1999, 200). “What is the esoteric? The thought closest to the vision things have of themselves” (Calasso 1999, 202). The vratyas came after the brahmodyas. What came before? Of course it matters, but how could we know? What business do I have writing about the vratyas? See you later. Much later.

7.5 Frost, Again In the previous comparison of Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods” and “Because I could not stop for death”—inspired by Oleg Gelikman’s reading of the former poem as Gnostic sally—I suggested that Dickinson’s poem was more radical than Frost’s nonetheless sly venture. Given Gelikman’s reading of Frost’s poem as Gnostic, I intended the comparison to establish an analogy: Dickinson : Frost :: Esotericism : Gnosticism. Above, I’ve given a reading of “Our journey had advanced” that aimed to flesh out the sense of the Dickinsonian esoteric along Vedic lines. Bolstered by Dickinson, I now enter into contrast (contest) with Frost again, by juxtaposing this time his poem, “The Road Not Taken” (Frost 1969, 105). I remembered this poem as “The Road Less Traveled,” and if internet indications are any evidence, I am not alone in this. So the first thing to note is that it’s one of the most famous American poems, and, alongside the poem by Frost previously considered above, the most famous in Frost’s canon of poetry, no doubt. In fact “The Road Less Traveled” (which in fact never appears verbatim) is not its title, and to substitute the one—the road less traveled—for the other—the road not taken— inverts the sense, since the road less traveled is in this case the road taken. Dickinson’s poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” is as canonical as “The Road Not Taken,” but “Our journey had advanced–” most surely

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is not. The latter escapes what Harold Bloom calls the Strong Light of the Canonical. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, a way of saving or recuperating a poem that is not quite up to the par of the three others. But that would be to confound the esoteric with the exoteric: the esoteric is not canonical. We may establish another analogy: “Because I could not stop for death” : “Our journey had advanced–” :: brahman: vratya. My compliment to “Our journey had advanced” is anything but backhanded. For me, it is a poem to live and learn with unlike any other I know. If I had to say what kind of Gnostic Frost is, I’d say a sly one. But isn’t Gnosticism inherently sly? What I mean is that Frost is an unassuming one, and among Gnostics that’s not always the case. Frost’s Gnosticism, if Gnosticism it is, steals up on you, startles, kicks you, struggles. The poem gets into your bloodstream well before you realize what’s going on. Maybe you never realize what’s going on; it just hits you. Could there be a more innocuous poem than “The Road Not Taken”? Yes, there could, by a long, long shot. But I’m not sure this is how it first seems, so I want to mine into the subtle treachery this poem has on file. I’ll proceed in much the same fashion as with the Dickinson poem above, but stanza by stanza rather than line by line. First Stanza: Yellow wood: the leaves are changing, autumnal. This is an autumn poem as much as the former by Frost was a winter poem. Everything about this poem is autumnal. But it is also, more generally, a forest poem, as was also the other. What is Frost doing in the woods this time? He is standing, which means: brought to a standstill, arrested. Looking down a road into the distance, as far as one can, it goes off the map of perception. But this one (fork) bends explicitly into the undergrowth. It gets lost in the bramble. Is it a road into the underworld, the Land of the Dead? Is the Land of the Dead a forest within the forest? When a road forks, diverging is just what it does. Yes, but converging too: it’s all a matter of emphasis (not perspective). As the way up and the way down (hodos: threshold, road, path, way, journey, trip, expedition) are the same, so the ways converging and diverging. There are two forks, one traveler: that’s the nature of a fork in the road. Even if there are two travelers, if they go down different forks, they can’t go together. But more fundamentally, one traveler can’t go down two forks and still “be one

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traveler.” (Well what about quantum travelers? What about the garden of forking paths? What about time travel?) The stanza ends midline: the whole, although grammatically freestanding, is a comparative clause. The second stanza gives us the weight on the other side of the balance. Second Stanza: Curious retraction: the roads are different, but they are not really different. The second is less worn, but it is really worn about the same. Is there any ground (!) for choice here? Let’s be speculative: if the first path is the path of the death drive, and the second is the path of the pleasure principle, how different are they really? Is there really any need to introduce the death drive? Is there any pleasure which is “merely” pleasure? Is the reality principle “merely” an extension of the pleasure principle? Basically, how different are life and death? Well, all the difference in the world, and yet not so easy to differentiate, for there is death in life, second death, and perhaps there is even life in death, who knows? Conversations continue. Now the balance has been set, but the sentence is not yet complete. Third Stanza: Let’s not forget we are in the woods: here all paths are seldom traveled. In particular, recently fallen autumn leaves have not been disturbed (they are about to be, selectively, along one path). Now, I suggest, the movement of the poem goes beyond retraction into a kind of hyper-vacillation.6 To help see this, I’ll read the poem more definitely than it demands or deserves. Suppose the first route really is the road to the Land of the Dead. Then damn straight, that path is kept for another day. But what follows belies any sense that the first, rejected path is understood in such terms. For how could one doubt that one will ultimately return to the path that leads to the Land of the Dead—unless there are many, of course. But perhaps this is just what Frost is after: in each forking, is the ultimate stake not that we have missed the proper path to the proper death? And yet, the “impropriety” of traveling otherwise is that death is deferred, which is simply to say that living on is an impropriety, an “achievement of death by other means.” This is more or less where Freud lands in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” when he says that the detour by way of the pleasure principle is the way to one’s proper death.

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None of what I’ve suggested is thematically necessary, but it exposes a structure of vacillation which I think is the necessary poetic power of this stanza, what hits you when you’re not looking. The gambit (the road I’ve taken) is a way to try to identify it. Fourth Stanza: Let’s start in a pedestrian way, since after all this is a poem about walking. Why telling with a sigh? Well, as an expression of nostalgia for all the opportunities missed along the way. My revered mentor Salomon Bochner led a very, very busy life as a mathematician at the time when the Princeton Mathematics Department plus the Institute for Advanced Study had jointly taken over that supremacy in the mathematical world that was previously held by Göttingen— in fact, some of the key players had moved from the latter to the former, Hermann Weyl in particular. (Bochner came to Princeton from Munich.) There was a mandatory retirement age at Princeton, and at his retirement celebration, Bochner made a speech in which he remarked that there was a small rail line going from Princeton to the adjoining town, and he’d never taken a trip on this train. One of the things he planned to do in his retirement was to ride on this train. Which is the road less traveled? Less traveled by whom? Onward: the poem is itself a telling, perhaps not ages and ages hence, but after the fact. In fact, the poem tells us there will be (another) telling ages and ages hence, but this telling of the future telling is already a telling. Is the speaker planning to repeat himself, as older folk are wont to do? Is he already repeating himself? Is he retiring? What will he be telling with a sigh? That he took the road less traveled. But did he really? How does he know? Does he know? And doesn’t the sigh suggest that maybe he didn’t after all, or is that pushing it? How different would it have been? Is the telling ages and ages hence itself a form of approach to the other path, if the other path leads down a bramble into the Land of the Dead? Is a telling the relaxation of a deferral? Is it perhaps even a way to go back and, in a sense, take the road not taken? What will you do with your retirement, when it comes? Yet the road not taken is (ostensibly) the road more taken, and that the speaker has not taken it has made all the difference. What likelihood is there, though, really, that any of us is so special, so discerning, as to have been able to take the road less taken? (Unless, perhaps, that’s just what life

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is: taking the road less taken, the one not taken by rocks, falling leaves and other forms of sudden death.) And aren’t the ones most likely to think they’ve taken the road less taken the ones who have most likely done no such thing? The levels of vacillation are exponential, unending, infernal. The title tells us: this is a poem about the road not taken. Not taken by whom? By the poet? But then why does the poem end with a declaration that the road taken by the poet, the road less traveled (or judged, or chosen to be such) has made “all the difference”? One way to make sense of this would be to take the poem to be insisting that, in fact, it doesn’t matter which road you do take, what matters is the road you don’t take. But if, as is the case in the poem, there are only two roads, is this any more than a difference in emphasis? And is such a difference enough to make all the difference? Come on, you say: the road not taken means the road not taken by the majority, and is the road the poet has taken. Isn’t this clear enough? But then the title of the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is about the road the poem tells us was taken, by the poet. And then the vacillation is already reflected, indeed inflected, in the title. In this case we’re exponentiating right from the get-go. One way of putting the slyness of Frost’s Gnosticism is to say: there doesn’t seem to be anything to know here. Once you start looking at it, everything seems up in the air. But wouldn’t that be just how you feel once you start realizing that what you’ve taken to be home was actually a prison-house all along? (Not to bank too much off words, but: is this an esoteric reading of Frost’s poem? Or is it, on consideration, just what we must be feeling at some level when we read the poem, when it hits us, even if we can’t identify what it is we are feeling? Or could it be that it is the one as the rendering explicit of the other?) We have yet to compare these two poems by Dickinson and Frost. What makes all the difference between them? I’ve already suggested an answer to this question: Frost’s may be read as a Gnostic poem; Dickinson’s may not. (You might counter: but you’ve only offered one reading of Dickinson’s poem, there are others, and maybe some of them are Gnostic. Not only do I grant that there are indeed other possible readings of Dickinson’s poem (as, for example, Sharon Cameron’s), it’s fundamental

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to the whole praxis of reading I’m promoting that there should be. But although there is, in general, no final reading of a poem, certain readings counting as readings rule out whole possible classes of others. The claim is that Dickinson’s poem cannot be read as Gnostic. Frost’s can.) The suggestion is only the beginning of the matter and cannot replace the work of comparison.

7.6 Three Poems I don’t think there are any poems in Ashbery’s corpus of writing that are canonical in the sense of the three poems by Frost (two) and Dickinson (one) mentioned earlier. Perhaps the closest approximation to a canonical poem is Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Ashbery 1975). Harold Bloom may still want to speak of the Strong Light of the Canonical in Ashbery (even from the forest of the dead, the land beyond the grave). But I insist we are somewhere essentially different. We haven’t been in Kansas for quite a while. On repeated reading, it’s clear that Ashbery’s Three Poems (Ashbery 1972) constitutes a poetic journal: one can in fact imagine Ashbery having kept up such a journal for long periods of his life, and that Three Poems would represent an especially successful patch drawn out of (and revised from) a much larger body of writing. We know that Flow Chart (Ashbery 1991) was written in the wake of the death of the poet’s mother, and so it, too, is a journal in its way. Angus Fletcher told me that when Ashbery read Fletcher’s treatment of his poetry in A New Theory for American Poetry, his response was simply: “I like that you say I’m meditating.” And yet nothing should be taken as simple in Ashbery, either in his poetry or his public persona. As I’ve read Dickinson’s poem against the background of Calasso’s treatment of Vedic sources, so I want to read Ashbery against the backdrop of Lacan’s reception of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, especially in his Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–1955) (Lacan 1991). Lacan’s second seminar can be seen as a consideration of the historical development of Freud’s metapsychology, which Lacan divides into four major phases:

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1. The early Entwurf einer Psychologie (1895, Project for a [scientific] psychology) 2. Chapter 7of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) 3. The development of a concept of narcissism in “Introduction to Narcissism” (1914) 4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).7 In Freud’s positing of the death instinct, Lacan identifies not so much an overturning of his previous metapsychology as his driving it to an altogether deeper level: We are beginning to see why it is necessary that beyond the pleasure principle, which Freud introduces as being what governs the measure of the ego and installs consciousness in its relation with a world in which it finds itself, that beyond, exists the death instinct. Beyond the homeostases of the ego, there exists a dimension, another current, another necessity, whose plane must be differentiated. This compulsion to return to something which has been excluded by the subject, or which never entered into it, the Verdrängt, the repressed, we cannot bring it back within the pleasure principle. If the ego as such rediscovers and recognises itself, it is because there is a beyond to the ego, an unconscious, a subject which speaks, unknown to the subject. We must therefore posit another principle. Why did Freud call it the death instinct? That’s what we will try to get hold of in the encounters to come. (Lacan 1991, 171)

On this view, life just is the longer path, and the road not taken just is the road to the Land of the Dead—until it is taken, of course. Is waking the longer path to sleeping? What are those “miles to go”? When he was quite young, one of my cousins had a pathological fear of people dressed up as animals. When he encountered one, at a zoo, for example, he would immediately lie down and go to sleep. This may itself seem pathological, but on reflection, it is in fact much more rational than running away: running away is what you need to do when you see an actual scary animal. Running away from a person dressed up as an animal is either a category mistake or, at best, a form of symbolic response. But then, we might also say a person dressed up as an animal is a category

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mistake or a form of symbolic response. What’s at stake is something more like taking on the power of a totem than the cognitive psychology of fight or flight.8 With the idea that life just is the longer path as frame, I turn to a reading of Ashbery’s Three Poems, and specifically a passage in the middle of the three, “The System,” that hooks up directly with the topoi considered above. As always with Ashbery anyway, we begin in medias res. Like Frost, Ashbery also considers a fork in the road, and a hope that, it seems, can only refer to the promise the more tangled way offered for a time. This is, then, the declared hope of Frost’s poem, what has “made all the difference.” In “The System,” the two roads are also not so different, but in a different sense than in Frost’s poem: these lead to the same place. And this can only be ascertained because, unlike the case of “The Road Not Taken,” both of these roads are taken. And the taking of them both proves deflationary. Nothing is left for another time, there is no pleasure-­ rail to the town over from Princeton, and we have to learn to live with a new, diminished hope. Have we all become so sly? After all, Bochner’s quip about the train line was a bit of a joke. But still, it was a joke with a point to it. (The pleasure-line, in fact, led not to the next town over, but to Houston, and a second career in the history of ideas. Is that living with a diminished hope, after a world-class career in mathematics? I’m sure Bochner didn’t think so: his second-career in intellectual history was of the most vital, pressing importance to him. And for me, it made all the difference.) Ashbery refers to one of the two paths as both less promising and more obvious: could a better deflation of the ostensive tenor of “The Road Not Taken” be given? Somehow, the Road Not Taken is less promising because more “obvious”—slightly less tread, yet only slightly, and yet that “slightly” “makes all the difference.” Ashbery’s concessive construction deflates by suggesting that we have no firm grip on its promise at all, only a presumptive attitude that what is less obvious is more promising. And yet all the obvious path really is (at least obviously!) is more obvious. Then the other, tangled path looks better. It is more complex and therefore more practical—what?! In fact, this carries along the same idea as the previous evaluation, where “more obvious” (simpler) means (or is taken to mean, pre-concessively) less promising. Why did you take the less

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promising path first? Because, at any rate, it was more obvious. I’m working on a math problem, say, and the first thing I try is the more obvious thing. I know it probably won’t work, so it’s less promising, but if it does work, then I’m done, easy as pie. Of course this can be a justification for, and a path of, lassitude. I see far enough along to determine that, in fact, it really isn’t so promising, but I feel the brunt of it only after taking it (another vacant movie, another two hours of my life down the drain); what’s left is the more tangled way. But what we’re talking about here can’t be like a math problem, for in that case if you go along the more tangled way, either you find a solution or you don’t. For the ways to join back together, this path would have to peter out, too, and then we would only be back where we started, and moreover, in what sense, then, would we have a puzzle that fit together perfectly, a perfect ghost story ending with a rational explanation? In this case the paths don’t go to the same place, they return to it. So the problem we’re facing has to be of some other sort. Well, consider standing at a fork in the road. Which way should I go? That’s a problem. And does it even matter? That’s another problem. The longer way, as I’ll call it, begins to hook back up with the shorter way once it becomes surveyable in detail. Here the longer way is described as if it were a geometrical object, and its thorough scrutiny depends on seeing the many ways you can hold it (this way!) in your hand. It has been untangled, and at this point it joins back up to the shorter, straight(forward) er way. It’s all a matter of finding principles of surveyability, and the difference in the paths is only that the first one presents itself as more readily surveyable. But once the second, longer way becomes surveyable, it is “in principle” no different than the first, shorter one: they come back together again. We can, that is, now survey them both together. Everything becomes perfectly rational, the puzzle assembled, the ghost (story) demystified, and now the hope is gone. Now we have to live with it. Generally, that’s the more difficult part. The story is over, and in the real world things are harder, you’re on your own. This suggests a way to understand the sigh in Frost’s poem. It is the sigh of deflation: as we tell ourselves it has made all the difference, we sigh, which indicates that the only difference that is left, the only one that allows us to live on, is the mere fact of declaring the difference that made

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all the difference. But in fact it didn’t make any difference at all, and saying that it did is just our way of living on: with a sigh. (Deleuze & Co.: difference makes all the difference. Right.) This is one way of living with it. What’s important to recognize is that not only is it not Ashbery’s, it’s not Frost’s either. It is the speaker in the poem’s way of living with it, but Frost is sly (not as sly as Ashbery, though, who in slyness is not just Frost’s successor but his overlord). Frost is not the speaker, he is the poet who has deployed a tissue of differential vacillations that adds up to nothing, and so is much closer to the absence of difference that is identified in Ashbery’s poem. But that absence of difference in turn is not Ashbery’s, but the speaker of Ashbery’s poem, for Ashbery is super-sly. Well, let’s leave Ashbery out of it for now: he’s bought that much with his super-slyness. At the end of this first half of the paragraph, Ashbery’s speaker tells us we need a new hope, a hope that doesn’t take itself seriously. What kind of absurd hope is that? Instead of telling us directly, the second half of the paragraph poses a choice. But that comes at the end, and we must see how we get there. This second half begins with a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and I take it to be the first explicit citation of a literary work—but not the first literary reference—in “The System.” Now, it appears, the two paths we previously considered have been repackaged as salvages of a self-conflicting reality. What we’ve found out in the meantime is that these cross-purposes resolve into a perfect rationality, but one which deprives us of our hope. There are not really any paths to go down, but, still, how do we manage to stay in place? For staying in place has two aspects: the place in which we stay, and all that flies past us threatening to draw us inertially downstream, and downstream is no past at all. This is why to remain where we are we must move very fast, and if we do manage to become dislodged we are dragged not just into any past, but into a galling sentimental past drenched in nostalgia. Should I stay or should I go (backwards into the schmaltz)? At the end of Frost’s poem, speaking to grandkids, is the speaker staying put or getting dragged back? The more I consider the poem, the more I think the speaker has refused to make the choice. If this is right, it turns the poem into one of the darkest in the English language. By comparison, Ashbery’s poem of “hope not taking itself seriously” is a neon sign for

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living on. And yet, Ashbery’s poem does not make it easy to see how we can choose either of the two horns, or why they should be any more “practicable” than the two ways we consider previously, or why we could rule out that they, too, will end up coming back together, at the point where we started out. My goal here is not to provide an analysis of the poem, but to elucidate some of its connections to the Dickinson and Frost poems previously considered. These connections are now on view, so I’ll move along. But before we go, I want to remark that how we go about making our decision is something, Ashbery or his speaker suggests, that has to do with a variation on the gnomic utterance: whatever was, is, and must be. This phrase appears twice: first, when we are told we must seize the truth of it (Ashbery 1972, 85), and once more, when we are told the phrase occurs again, now with a change from a major to a minor tonality. This modal variation is in fact (the speaker tells us) a change in you, not in the gnomon itself, one not yet determining its generic mode as comedy or tragedy, only as chock full of action and life (Ashbery 1972, 93). Major or minor? Comedy or melodrama? Your choice, but how much musical or dramatic sense does that make? Well, we are after all dealing with some pretty advanced art. And yet it seems that Ashbery, in so many ways in the advance guard, remains wedded, at least here, to a poetics of genre and its modulations. I’ve said a lot about how Ashbery’s poem reflects back on Frost, but not yet Dickinson. Could our choice of modal variation be a new form of being “taken up in the moment”? A new way of doing justice to what was, is and must be? Not into Dickinson’s Forest of the Dead, to be sure, but somewhere close enough to Geoffrey O’Brien’s phantom empire? The sabhā has been replaced by the movie theater (an architectural through-­ line in Three Poems) and Ashbery’s reclusiveness, poetically and personally, as portrayed by Larry Rivers (Rivers 1979), is a step beyond, but only a step beyond, Emily Dickinson’s. A step forward? I think not. In Ashbery’s instance, at least, Harold Bloom’s insistence that poetic influence constitutes a decline is quite right. Reclusive and hermetic as he and his poetry may respectively be, Ashbery declines Dickinson by publicizing her. It’s not just that dear Emily sits on the chair, hiding her bodily presence from the visitors to her house, though as a biographical

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anecdote that is undeniably powerful, and the fact is imported into the poems, too. It is rather that Ashbery trivializes the esoteric and deliberately so. This is Ashbery as super-slick, super-sly, and powerful as it is, the irony Ashbery achieves in doing so is nevertheless weak compared to the original esoteric force of Dickinson’s poetry. First, there is no initiation: the moments we have that are most singular are those moments upon awakening (Ashbery 1972, 84–5). The emphasis is on their threshold character, but they lead only into the same old waking world (for which the movie theater constitutes at once an escape and an intensification). Bookending our paragraph on the other side, we are told there is no moment approaching (Ashbery 1972, 94). There is no moment in Dickinson’s sense at all. The only spark of self is the slippage of a singular isolated moment into the indefinite past. Ashbery, we might say, is a temporal as opposed to a spatial Gnostic, and his poetry is a retreat from Dickinson’s esotericism back into a more typical poetic Gnosticism. We can argue, on all sorts of psychological grounds, that this is the “healthy” thing to do, but we’re talking about poems, not self-help. Among recent critics, Harold Bloom is the one who has most consistently insisted on the demands of the poetic life: it’s not for the health nut. There are two immediate concerns that a reader might raise about the trajectory as I’ve sketched it. First, one might ask: don’t you first insist on distinguishing the speaker of Ashbery’s poem from Ashbery as author and then go right on to conflate the two? But the Gnosticism I’m identifying is depicted in Ashbery’s poem, not identified with its speaker, and so belongs to Ashbery if it belongs to anyone at all. That is to say that it belongs to the poem, just as asserting that Emily Dickinson is an esoteric poet is to say that it is her poems which are esoteric. Second, the reader asks: why do you identify Gnosticism as the typical poetic condition? The answer is that I take Bloom’s analysis of influence seriously, along with its Gnostic implications. It seems to me that most Romantic and postRomantic poets—including Ashbery—do in fact fit this model. And while this default Gnosticism may in fact be taken, proximately, as an inheritance from Romanticism, its roots are much farther back. This tendency does not automatically make these, or any, poets Gnostic (i.e., in the sense that their poetry is), but it indicates an inertial pull in this

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direction. We might even say: Plato was right to banish the Gnostic poets from his republic, but to banish them all forecloses on a legitimation of poetic reason. The latter is much more threatening to Plato’s enterprise and he has no arguments against it. We have but to look for clues to find the Gnostic strain, and they are to be found in Ashbery, as for example the spark I’ve identified above. Dickinson, as I read her, does not fit Bloom’s model, and this is a precondition for her retrieving in full force the esotericism I’ve identified pre-eminently in the Vedic tradition, following Roberto Calasso. Finally, to return the water to its natural, muddy state: in fact, Ashbery and his speaker stand in close connection. We are in fact encouraged, in all sorts of ways, to identify them. We shouldn’t, because Ashbery (like Frost) is sly, super-sly, even. Where, exactly, are the Gnostic implications of Bloom’s analysis of influence? I’ve pointed out before that in mapping out a proportional criticism, Bloom follows the anomalous ratio critics of antiquity (Bassler 2012, 163). In fact, the picture of poetry Bloom’s criticism implies is traditional in a much more fundamental respect, for the stress is in fact on verbal competition, agon, as in the ancient Aryan verbal contest. This verbal competition differs from the traditional verbal contest only in two regards, albeit important ones. It is ultimately, for Bloom, a contest between poems, not poets, and so it is a contest that is staged diachronically rather than as spoken exchange. These qualifications are important, but they do not alter the basic picture: poetry understood as the vocation of the poet is a praxis of verbal competition in which the stake is poetic life or death. Will the poet be subsumed by the precursor, and so die into the precursor’s fold (the ephebe’s prison-house), or will the poet misprision the precursor in a way which opens a domain of relative poetic success? Since the misprision of the precursor results, at best, in an achievement which is nonetheless a poetic diminution, the best the poet can hope for is to ventriloquize the precursor so that, as Bloom frequently puts it, the precursor is made to sound as if s/he were speaking in the voice of the later poet. Ghostlier demarcations, indeed. This description is implicitly Gnostic for it is a picture of the precursor as demiurge and of the poet as the cultivator of the spark within, which would break through the precursor’s influence into a relative poetic freedom. That this freedom is drastically curtailed only makes Bloom’s

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picture a pessimistic version of Gnosticism, along something like what are usually taken (and are taken by Bloom) to be Freudian lines. But then there are, of course, the rare, anomalous cases when a poet dwarfs his precursor, of which, for Bloom, Shakespeare’s triumph over the influence of Marlowe is the prime instance. Though he speaks of Shakespeare and his relation to Marlowe, so as far as I can see Bloom simply takes such triumph to be ultimately unaccountable, standing outside the explanatory bounds of his criticism. In fact, it seems that it is unaccountable, first and foremost, in accounting for the function of the precursor in such an instance. What we can see that Shakespeare would have found in Marlowe does not in any way indicate to us why Shakespeare, as we come to know him, should have had such an investment, even immaturely, antecedently. Yet this begs the question of how Shakespeare manages to capitalize on a proximate poetic resource. For the only other alternative, given Bloom’s Gnosticism, would be that every so often there is a poet who manages to break out of the prison house with sails full and flags flying. In this anomalous case victory is registered by the fact that there is nothing for the criticism of influence to contribute. One can see Bloom’s retraction onto character analysis in his large Shakespeare volume as motivated by this condition. Another sort of survival by displacement, one which Bloom would also identify as a decline, comes when the power of a “high” genre is displaced by that of another “low” one.9 Oleg Gelikman identifies this at work in John Ashbery’s poem, “Syringa” (Ashbery 1985, 245–7), in which the poetic lyric is displaced by what he calls the documentary. Reading “Syringa” as an ars poetica, Gelikman finds that in it Ashbery accomplishes not just the generic displacement but in fact a description of the displacement itself. Key here for Gelikman’s reading is what Bloom has called the line of “anxieties of Epicurean influence,” running from Dryden through Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman and Swinburne to Stevens (Bloom 2011, 133–161). Gelikman’s reading of “Syringa” allows us to annex Ashbery, in this poem at least, to this Epicurean line, in particular by virtue of the emphasis Ashbery places, both dramatically and descriptively, on what we may call its Lucretian trajectory. The poem’s drama begins, in Act One, with nature, understood as “a matter of collisions and bumps. It is composed of events rather than things” (Gelikman), starting

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with Orpheus’ quest bumping into Euridyce’s change of mind—she won’t be the angel of history, after all. So the beginning of the dramatic trajectory is the Lucretian trajectory itself. What happens to it over the course of the poem? In Act Two, as Gelikman identifies it, there is the dismemberment of Orpheus and another collision, this time between two orders of reason, reflected negatively in the two ways the song abandons Orpheus, in which destructiveness is followed by insufficiency. Here we might characterize the collision in terms of the strength of poetic reason—its power to rend–colliding with its weakness—that, as grounded in desire, it is never enough. So we move from a trajectory of colliding events (Act One) to a trajectory of colliding reasons (Act Two). The drama concludes in Act Three. Orpheus has abandoned the realm of events (Act One) and of song (Act Two) and now achieves the domain of generic displacement, embodied in a new ars poetica. This puts the poem squarely into the genre of what Gelikman calls documentary. This new genre is the documentation, inherently, of a trajectory, and not just any trajectory, but the trajectory which the documentation itself is. The documentary poem is self-documenting, and this documentation thus documents a third collision in Ashbery’s poem, between poem and history. In so doing, the poem recapitulates the trajectory of Orpheus, or equally we may see Orpheus as the perfect allegorization of the poem’s trajectory. The poem becomes “a strange, involuted, inanimate body,” a “bad comet” in the words of the poem itself. Its eccentric path screams its apocalyptic hatred so inwardly that the cry folds in upon itself. Across the sky … The profound consequence of this vision, which Gelikman identifies explicitly, is that the poem, so understood, is no longer a verbal contest: No more contests or dialogues with various café residents, cultural critics purveyors of nostalgia and prophets of restoration and return. Eurydice is not coming back even if you find her. She has her own views, and the Bacchantes have their own tastes. The poet of the documentary poem must know how to record, how to build, when to turn away from the construction, and, most important, when to pass out of sight … (Gelikman, unpublished correspondence)

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The conception of poetic work on offer here is a maker’s knowledge conception, going back to medieval roots and finding full flower in the work of Francis Bacon and other early modernists (Pérez-Ramos 1989). As such, it anticipates the concerns of any account of poetic reason, and its radically empiricist consequences. Could it be that there has never been such a thing as the modern lyric? That the preoccupation with Orpheus in the creation of opera as the quintessentially modern musical genre was a farewell to the classical song, and to the siren-song of classicism? We know that Ashbery wrote his poem while listening to Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (Schiff 1998, 179). For Bloom, such a reading of Ashbery would take him too much at the word of his poem, which seeks to emancipate itself through a self-instancing declaration of independence, seeking to recuperate out of its belated condition an earliness which it can in nowise literally have. How could we possibly arbitrate such a dispute? In fact, I have no desire to arbitrate, yet I find a comparison worthwhile, and it can be moved forward by juxtaposing key passages of “Syringa” to obvious precursors in Steven’s peacock poems. And since we are working in the service of comparison, with one of the two terms being Bloom’s criticism of influence, I will rely in particular on Bloom’s commentary on Stevens’ poems, and in particular “Domination in Black.”

7.7 Domination in Black I view Bloom’s book, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate (Bloom 1977), as the culmination of Bloom’s practical criticism in something like I.A. Richards’ sense. But at the same time it represents an extreme outcropping, perhaps even the quintessence, of Bloom’s series of programmatic works, the tetralogy (as Bloom himself presents it) spanning from The Anxiety of Influence through A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism to Poetry and Repression. The programmatic value of Bloom’s collective reading of Stevens’ poetry in his volume is made explicit in the culminating “Coda: Poetic Crossing,” and as such it points forward to Bloom’s proximate book, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, in which Bloom extends his analysis of crossings.

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It is at the beginning of Bloom’s coda that he offers his reading of Stevens’ early “Domination In Black.” This reading “closes the circle” of Bloom’s book by returning to an early, formative lyric from Stevens’ Harmonium, but it closes the book, as well, by bookending the reading of Stevens that began with Dickinson’s “Our journey had advanced.” Hence we, too, finally come full circle. In his coda to the Stevens volume, Bloom takes the step, for the first time so far as I’m aware, of offering a genealogy of his six-fold map of misreading initiated in The Anxiety of Influence and developed throughout the tetralogy. He does so by identifying, behind its six-fold rhetorical figuration, a grounding in what are classically referred to (by Cicero and others) as topoi or commonplaces. These topoi offer oratorical schemata which can then be filled out through rhetorical figuration. What is crucial is that the derivation proceeds from topoi to figures. Bloom sees the topological schemata as being simplified under the reductive pressure of British associationist psychology, where faculties go proxy for topoi and the emphasis is on, in particular, contrariety, contiguity, and cause and effect (Bloom 1977, 402). This aligns the topoi, now faculties, with ethos as opposed to pathos, and the “temperature” of composition is correspondingly reduced. Bloom sees Wordsworth as reacting against this emphasis by emphasizing the category which he calls “passion” or “excitement.” In fact, we are dealing with another internecine skirmish around the issue of “transported styles” (Toliver 1989), or what Kant on the continent would famously stricture in a more philosophical context as the “elevated tone” of Platonic enthusiasm. This is key for our consideration, since the transition from lyric to the genre of documentary which Gelikman pinpoints in Ashbery’s “Syringa” is a cooling and annealing of the poetic process. Tone, once elevated, now becomes flat, as anyone who has ever heard or listened to Ashbery reading his poetry will know. Elliptical as his presentation is, Bloom provides not so much a transcendental deduction as what we might call a visionary derivation of the map of misreading, yet nonetheless on analogy to Kant’s provision of a deduction of the table of categories from the logical functions of judgment. We may hazard the following scheme:

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Associationist topos

Corresponding ethical figure

Figure of pathos

Crossing

Contrariety

Irony

Synecdoche

Election

Contiguity

Metonymy

Hyperbole

Solipsism

Cause and effect

Metaphor

Metalepsis

Identification

Each crossing is a crossing from ethos to pathos, thus into transported style, as represented by the corresponding figure, and each crossing is (typically) marked by a transition from sight to hearing (or else an intensification of sight), an oscillation between mimesis and expression, and a heightened internalization of self (Bloom 1977, 402–4). Overall, the oscillation is one from ethos to pathos, three times over, and we should compare it to the rhythm of the fading and resuscitation of the subject in a psychoanalytic context. Such, for Bloom, is the reaction of the Romantic crisis-lyric to the underlying topoi it rhetorically figures and then intensifies. Although Bloom recognizes that not every relevant poem of strength will follow this pattern, he offers a reading of “Domination in Black” in these terms, thereby anchoring it, belated as it is, to the Romantic tradition. Bloom begins with the long Romantic foreground which motivates this late anchoring. Stevens’ leaves trope against Shelley’s, and more to the point for current purposes, “as in Yeats, the cry of Juno’s birds presages the end of an era” (Bloom 1977, 376). What is at issue in the peacock’s screams is an apocalyptic tone (as Kant’s “elevated tone” is translated into French and received, among others, by Derrida). Bloom’s reading of Stevens’ “Domination in Black” is itself a masterpiece of concision, in two parts, bookending the material of his coda. His insistence on the poem’s dizzying figuration is as extreme as Lacan’s emphasis on the instance of the letter in the Freudian unconscious, so the reading may well require a preliminary suspension of disbelief. But Bloom’s reading is a supreme example of what he calls strong misreading,

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and altogether more successful than his reading of Dickinson at the beginning of the book. Here Bloom is on home turf, marshaling his forces to ultimate control at the end of a long and densely argued book. My first task will be to schematize Bloom’s reading for current purposes. The poem describes a room by a fire, and the multicolored variation in the flames is troped by the colors of the outside world, bushes and fallen leaves, “repeating themselves.” The variation is described as itself a turning, which as Bloom points out is the root sense of troping, so that figuration doubles back upon itself. Bloom takes this redoubling as an indication that the poem begins with an irony intent upon counteracting, in this case, too strong a presence with the image of an absence. The presence which is too strong is the influence of Shelley’s leaves, and the poem describes a scene in which the leaves are only present as absence: they are the absent external world only figured within the inner one, as they are also the absent Shelley’s presence as only figured (and so defended against) in the poem by Stevens. This repetition of the leaves is “qualified,” Bloom tells us, by the closing lines of the first stanza, which counterbalance, against the absent leaves, both in image and in grammar, the “striding” color of heavy hemlocks, the domination of black. This is followed by the recollection of the peacocks’ cry. “Colors,” Bloom points out, are themselves a synonym for “tropes,” and so we have trope against countertrope: “When Stevens turns against his lyric’s opening figurations, he must give us a synecdoche for death in the domination of the black” (Bloom 1977, 377). We have moved from the irony (ethos) of the opening figuration to a synecdoche (pathos) for death. The next stanza begins with a “metonymic reduction as an obsessive undoing of ” the synecdoche: the colors of the peacocks’ tails substitute for the leaves themselves, and in so doing militate against the absence of color (trope, turn) as the colors descend in the flight of the peacocks down from the boughs of the hemlock. Now we have introjected two absences into the inner room, for neither the peacocks nor the leaves are there in actu. These colors (tropes, turns, visions) yield to “the high dominant” of the peacocks’ cry, “wonderfully caught up in the synesthesia of ‘the loud fire’” (Bloom 1977, 377). Here Stevens catches himself up into sublime ascent, as the sound of the peacocks’ cry tropes (now: resounds) against the hemlock’s “color of mortality.”

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The best is yet to come, for the sharp contrast of tropes in the final stanza moves “the entire poem into a very different mode” (Bloom 1977, 378). The speaker looks out the window and sees the planets turning as like the leaves turning into the wind: “this giant perspectivizing shrinks the cosmos to one autumnal metaphor” (Bloom 1977, 379), but to this Stevens opposes a final metalepsis, troping upon trope and bringing us to dizzying heights of word-consciousness turning fold upon fold. For the striding of the night tropes upon the previous striding of the hemlock, raising it to an apocalyptic pitch of blackness, rounded out once again aurally in the recollection of the cry of the peacocks. At the end of the coda, Bloom maps out the poem once again, this time in terms of the crossings which are effected by the three pairs of figures. The first crossing, of election, moves from Stevens’ reaction formation against Shelley’s strength to Stevens’ turning against himself, which is figured in the synecdoche for death. The second crossing, of solipsism, “struggles with the death of love,” with the metonymy (ethos) functioning regressively and as isolation, while the counterbalancing hyperbole (pathos) effects “the massive repression of instinct that sublimely augments one’s unconscious or inwardness at the expense of all the gregarious affects” (Bloom 1977, 403). What is perhaps most vital to this gloss is Bloom’s insistence that the sublime is achieved at the cost of the poet’s self-intensification, which takes place precisely in that inner room Stevens’ poem describes. The third crossing, of identification, passes from a labor substituting for instinct (in particular, the death drive) to the achievement of an earliness outside the self in which “time seems to stand still or to roll back and forward” (Bloom 1977, 403). The crossing in the first stanza is where Stevens “meets the fear that he may not be able to become a poet or maintain his own poethood” with the ‘Yes’ that “becomes an affirmation of strength, an evidence of poetic election” (Bloom 1977, 404). In the second stanza, the second crossing is effected in a transition from sight to sound and mimesis to expressiveness (ethos to pathos), but the internalizing movement of the first crossing is reversed “as the shadow of the external world comes near again” (Bloom 1977, 405). The third crossing is the most ambivalent, for it tropes both against and toward Death, and is captured in the distinctive character of the fear at issue. It is, as Bloom puts it, the fear of “a seeing that hears,

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because it hears a remembered cry, and so is disjunctive with the seeing of ‘I saw how the planets gathered’” (Bloom 1977, 405). How do Stevens’ apocalyptic peacocks, on Bloom’s reading, compare to Ashbery’s bad comets? In “Syringa,” the bad comet is the poem itself, and screams like Stevens’ peacocks, before passing out of sight—into the archive. (If we follow Bloom, in Stevens’ poem the scream of the peacocks just is a passing out—in both senses—of sight, since it is an eclipse of sight by sound.) The poem as bad comet is so self-enfolded that its meaning is unknowable. Bad comets follow an eccentric path, indicating Ashbery’s link to Hölderlin (Ashbery 2000, 5), and are dis-asters, quintessentially objects ripped out of place, entstellt, dis-located (dis-figured, distorted, de-­ formed). The poem has troped itself out of the domain of sense altogether, like Shelley’s skylark ascending to an invisible height. All that remains is, predictably, the blackness of dark, which engulfs the poem on its way to flooding the entire continent. The poem and its Atlantis have gone forever, and all that remains is the archive of documentary evidence and the possibility of academic construction. Here Ashbery’s talk of stellification must surely be taken in all its irony, for though stars may shine over a sunken continent they surely cannot shine for it. Ashbery has substituted death by drowning for Stevens’ loud fire, an act of rhetorical violence surpassing anything and everything in Stevens’ poem. The singer, having thought constructively, built a skyscraper, sees the song engulfed in darkness, and must then (also) pass out of sight, becoming as absent as the absented poem. And yet, this third stanza in “Syringa” can nonetheless be read to follow the model of Bloom’s last two tropes. This final act begins with a lament for belatedness, yet the stanza ends with a desperate attempt to open a new earliness. For the withering ironies of the library archive and its frozen microfilm which entomb the lives of singers await a new event, which resurrects the poet by an act of accidental homonymy. This launches the opening for a new poem, now appealing back to our engulfed poem as its unknown anxiety of influence and the reactivation of its hidden syllabus in some future, belated act of poetic misprision. Ashbery, having identified the documentary, falls back into the crisis lyric. If anything, Ashbery’s picture is even more Gnostic than Bloom’s in its

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emphasis on the randomness of connection. But if this is intended to be a Lucretian collision of poetic atoms, it has been extremalized, smithereened beyond all atomist identification. In opening the future to further Gnostic agonism it offers no quarter for a legitimation of poetic reason.

Notes 1. Paglia’s reading is brilliantly provocative, but her invocation of a distinction in antecedence between Puritanism and baroque sensationalism (Paglia 1991, 667) is specious and unnecessary. 2. In a brief correspondence following my essay review of (Bloom 2004), (Bassler 2012, 139–61), Bloom insisted that his Gnosticism was much more ontological than I credited. I have puzzled over this remark ever since, and I wonder if it marks a step in the direction to which I commit here. As Paul de Man once said, we will all eventually recognize that Bloom was out ahead of us all along. 3. Roberto Calasso in particular stresses the remoteness of Vedic culture and attributes this to the depth of its roots in prehistory. “The distance between Indian and Western cultures today, though obviously great, becomes negligible when compared with the astral distance of both from the Vedic world” (Calasso 2014, 337). 4. Kuiper’s thesis is that the verbal contests were associated with the ritual of transition to the new year, and he finds positive analogies with the mahavrata (Kuiper 1960, 221). Compare (Calasso 2014, 239–40). 5. Sharon Cameron reads ‘before’ here to mean ‘in the past’, and then goes on to read the next appearance of ‘before’ as ‘in front of us’, thereby juxtaposing the two usages. I think her reading of the first occurrence renders the usage of ‘between’ that follows incomprehensible: between what and what? On my reading, the forest lies between the sealed off route and the cities in advance, where Eternity’s White Flag is flying. Cameron herself cites another example from Dickinson where the conjoined usage of ‘before’ and ‘between’ works in this way (Cameron 1979, 75, 111). She rightly insists on the ultimately irresolvable ambiguity of Dickinson’s poems, and alternate readings are certainly welcome. As I take it, the governing feature of Cameron’s reading, steering and perhaps steered by the way she construes the first instance of ‘before’, is that the poem “almost asks to be read as a diagram subject to its own revision” (Cameron 1979, 110).

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6. Compare Nohrnberg: “Further, Frost implies that all roads diverge from themselves, and so the speaker, far from following truth wherever it may lead, might never really leave his latter-day wood of error” (Nohrnberg 1976, 149). I have previously suggested a reading of Goethe’s Faust (Part One) in which Faust never leaves his study (Bassler 2012, 86). 7. I read Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety (Seminar X) (Lacan 2014) as identifying Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety as marking a distinct fifth phase in this metapsychological development. This is not yet reflected in Seminar II. 8. Zach Peck has pointed me to the work of E. Hoel, who has suggested that dreaming is a way to avoid overfitting on the training data of perception (Hoel 2017). Is this problem of overfitting so different from the inadequacy Freud recognized in the system of the Entwürf? In short, memory is here conceived of as a succession of engrams, as the sum of a series of facilitations, and this conception proves to be completely inadequate if we don’t introduce the notion of image into it. (Hoel 2017, 108) The problem of image recognition is predicated on the presence of images. These images will then be reproduced on the occurrence of the same succession of memories, and this generates a discrepancy between the hallucination of images and the perception of reality. To correct for this, the “memorial hallucination” must be compared with the perception of reality. However, given that the former is a function of need, it carries energy on an altogether higher scale than the perception of reality, so a buffer is needed between them. These are the three essential components of Freud’s system in the Entwürf. But the memorial hallucination is still prey to the problem of overfitting, and this is altogether connected with the distinctness of dreams as they are presented in Chapter Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams. 9. From Bloom’s perspective, Angus Fletcher’s identification of the “environment poem” in A New Theory for American Poetry must inevitably look like such a venture. Indeed, Fletcher encourages this by calling what he promotes the “low romantic” tradition.

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Bibliography Ashbery, John. Flow Chart (New York: Knopf, 1991). Ashbery, John. Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000). Ashbery, John. Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985). Ashbery, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems (New York: Viking, 1975). Ashbery, John. Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972). Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prahran: re.press, 2012). Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford, 1982). Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale, 2011). Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977). Bloom, Harold. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead, 2004). Bray, Paul. Terrible Woods: Poems 1965–2008 (Loveland: Dos Madres, 2008). Calasso, Roberto. Ardor, trans. Richard Dixon (New York: FSG, 2014). Calasso, Roberto. K., trans. Geoffrey Brock (New York: Knopf, 2005). Calasso, Roberto. Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1999). Calasso, Roberto. Literature and the Gods, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 2001). Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979). Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999). Dumont, Louis. “La Genèse chrétienne de l’individualisme moderne,” Le Débat, September–October 1981. Eliade, Mircea. Le Yoga: Immortalité et Liberté (Paris: Payot, 1960). Friedrich, Paul. Proto-Indo-European Trees: The Arboreal System of a Prehistoric People (Chicago: Chicago, 1970). Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: HRW, 1969). Gelikman, Oleg. Unpublished correspondence with the author. Hesse, Hermann. Das Glasperlenspiel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1963). Hoel, E. “Dreams evolve to assist generalization,” arXiv.org > q-bio > arXiv:2007.09560, 2017.

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Kuhn, Thomas S. Black-body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (New York: Oxford, 1978). Kuiper, F. B. J. “The Ancient Aryan Verbal Contest,” Indo-Iranian Journal 4 4 (1960), 217–281. Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Lacan, Jacques. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (Book II) (New York: Norton, 1991). Lacan, Jacques. Transference, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York: Plume, 1994). Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, Princeton, 1976). O’Brien, Geoffrey. The Phantom Empire (New York: Norton, 1993). O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (Chicago: Chicago, 1984). Onians, R. B. The Origins of European Thought About the Body, Mind, Soul, The World, Time and Fate: A New Interpretation of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence Also of some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1988). Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised throughout by Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage, 1991). Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (New York: Oxford, 1989). Rivers, Larry, with Brightman, Carol. Drawing and Digressions, with a forward by John Ashbery (New York: C. N. Potter, 1979). Schiff, David. The Music of Elliott Carter, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998). Stein, Charles. Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess & Freeing Your Soul (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2006). Toliver, Harold. Transported Styles in Shakespeare and Milton (University Park: Pennsylvania State, 1989). Warren, Robert Penn. Audubon: A Vision (New York: Random House, 1969). Wheeler, John Archibald. Frontiers of Time (Austin: Center for Theoretical Physics, 1978).

8 The Logic of Lyric (Part Two)

A Primal Scene for the Logic of Lyric: Indra slays with his vájra the power of resistance (vrtrá-) of the inert Chaos, which power is conceived as residing on the primordial hill that floats on the surface of the cosmic Waters. Indra, while slaying this vrtrá-, at the same time splits the hill which is now riveted to the bottom of the Waters, and Fire and Water are forced to leave the undifferentiated world of inertia and to join the ranks of the heavenly Gods. This well-bottom of sundered hill is identified with the nocturnal sky (Witzel 1984), and both become the domain of Varuna: “To Varuna, the ancient god of waters of Chaos, a new function is now assigned as the guardian of the cosmic law (rtá-), which remains hidden in the nether world” (Kuiper 1960, 218–9, italics mine). This mystical act, which recurs cyclically, opens an aperture through which the inertia of the primordial hill is overcome. It is associated with the ancient Rg Vedic potlatch festivals of the winter solstice, which Kuiper identifies as the most archaic stratum of culture in the Vedas, a stratum which also describes the function of the ancient Aryan verbal contest. These verbal contests are accompanied by chariot races and ritual gambling and conducted by a priestly cast displaying their prowess as sabhéya, which Kuiper finds best translated by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_8

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Zimmer’s German rendering, “schlagfertig,” roughly “quick-witted” (Kuiper 1960, 265). Agonic contests were probably not transacted in the composition of Vedic hymns, Kuiper thinks, which emerged along the line of priestly disputations, with the boundary a loose and permeable one. What is clear is that the verbal contest was “no holds barred,” and abusive language and contention were essential ingredients. “Bragging and mockery are the two requisites of the verbal contest all over the world” (Kuiper 1960, 258). At one point Kuiper likens these contests to litigious dispute. Like the potlatch which it accompanies, the verbal contest is a “game with no fixed rules.” On analogy with Blumenberg’s anthropological characterization of man as the animal who quintessentially sees and is seen, in this chapter I explore the possibility of characterizing the logic of lyric in terms of an essential transformation in this early practice of the verbal contest. My suggestion will be that the transition from the earlier stratum of the ritual contest to the composition of Vedic hymns plays an analogous role for understanding the logic of lyric to the transition Blumenberg identifies from hominid cave-dwelling to the exit onto open savannahs, with the consequent acceleration in what might be called “visibility demands.” In this type of epochal transition, the earlier stratum is “re-inscribed” in the latter in terms of a consequent series of myths: in the case Blumenberg considers, specifically the mythology of exits from the cave (Blumenberg 1989). In the analogous case for the logic of lyric, a critical function is exemplified by the “hymn to the word” in Rg Veda X.71. This hymn presents a myth of the origin of language, and I argue that Derrida’s work on “reinscriptions” of the origin(s) of language may be read to serve a critical function similar to that supplied by Blumenberg’s secularization critique in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. In each case, the reinscription occurs in terms of the promotion of what I call the “modern function” to the level of a systematic platform for this function’s pursuit. This promotion is at the heart of the move associated with all the transcendental deductions we will consider. All these steps pave the way for a fuller consideration in the second argument for the legitimation of poetic reason in Chap. 10. Kuiper’s picture of the ancient Aryan verbal contest is of a verbal agon at the threshold of its transformation into something altogether different.

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The antinomian approach to poetry is consonant with Harold Bloom’s agonism. The strength and limitation of Bloom’s Gnostic orientation are well represented by this agonistic presentation of the poetic act, and the transition from the litigious to the hymnal stratum of the Rg Veda constitutes, to invoke Blumenberg’s terminology analogically, a first but not definitive overcoming of agonic Gnosticism. I conjecture that there will be a resurgence of this agonistic attitude in all historical cases of epochal shift: in the classical Greek case we find the cultivation of a heightened sense of polemos which perhaps reaches its theoretical pinnacle in the thought of Heraclitus, but it goes on to become a model of political exchange in classical Greece and Rome. Only with the synthesis of the Church Fathers is there a concerted attempt to stabilize this fundamentally unstable “agonism” (Blumenberg 1983, Wolfson 1964). As associated with New Year’s festivals, the Ancient Aryan verbal contests were associated with the rising sun: “Agni’s arising from the realm of darkness, if connected with the beginning of the new year, must have implied his victory over death” (Kuiper 1960, 233). The verbal agon occurs in a hidden dwelling, the sabhā or “cow-shed,” and following Held, Kuiper conjectures that “the place where the social contests were fought was a sacred one” (Kuiper 1960, 265). Sabhā and Samiti are the two daughters of Prajāpati. The function of the former is more obscure than that of the latter, but both are invoked by the poet in petition for harmonious speech (Kuiper 1960, 277). “It would seem a reasonable conjecture, therefore, that the sabhā was conceived as the deity that presided over the contest … and as such was endowed with, and personified, the narístā, ‘manifestation of one’s social prestige’.” Narístā was a special, perhaps, Kuiper says, even a secret, name of the sabhā: “whoever knew this (secret?) name of the sabhā could be sure that the goddess would grant him victory” (Kuiper 1960, 278). I suggest that we compare the translation of sabhā as cow-shed with our term ‘woodshed’, especially in the usages ‘woodshedding’ and ‘being taken behind the woodshed’. “All these feasts bear the character of secret or open warfare … The weapon is the gift …” (Kuiper 1960, 279). But it is in the transformation from the verbal contest that the Vedic Hymn emerges. Vedic poetry is what displaces the feast. In this displacement, we move from a physical site to a verbal locus.

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8.1 Toporov’s Vedic Poetics In this section I present Vladimir Toporov’s account of Vedic poetics as a first step in accounting for the locative logic of lyric. It is of course important whether Toporov provides an account of actual Vedic poetics or merely a modern poetics in Vedic dress; however, here this is only of secondary concern. In the long run, the project of a locative poetics will want to determine with as much philological rigor as is possible how it stands in relation to Vedic (or any other) poetics, and there is much reason to think that Toporov’s presentation is an extension of Saussurean speculations, about which Saussure himself already had doubts. On the other hand, Saussure’s conjectures on Vedic poetry have been underestimated, even in the well-balanced presentation of Jean Starobinski in Les mots sous les mots. As is the case with all thinkers of the first order—which is where I locate Saussure—the assessment of their thought is a matter not for decades but for centuries. My goals are fortunately otherwise: to present and assess the poetics Toporov ascribes to the Vedas independently of assessing the historical credibility of his ascription. Here, in terms of the distinction I have made above between narrow and wide reading, it is exclusively narrow reading which is at issue. Such will be enough to support the use I make of it in what follows. As for historical evaluation, I will restrict myself to some remarks about the significance of this poetics as part of the legacy of Saussure and what it contributes to the larger reflections on psychoanalysis and structuralism I pursue.

8.1.1 Linguistic Bifurcation and the Anagram Very much in line with Saussure’s speculation on anagrams in the Vedic hymns and elsewhere, but also drawing heavily on Calvert Watkins’ essay on “Language of Gods and Language of Men” (Watkins 1970), Toporov identifies a linguistic bifurcation in the Vedas and a concomitant mapping of terms between the two languages. Cognate terms in the two languages will typically stand in some relation by way of phonetic transformation, though this transformation need not act exclusively and directly upon the two terms themselves. For example, there may be two

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complementary terms associated with the languages of god and men which reflect the distinction between the two languages themselves. Toporov gives as an example the “derivation” of Σκάμανδρον from Ξάνθον, reflecting the transformation (αν)θ → ανδρ, which moves us from θεοί (Gods) to ἄνδρες (men). In tandem, the example reflects transformation at the phonemic level, for we have the inversion sk (Σκ) → ks (Ξ) (Toporov 1981, 203). This Greek example reflects the sort of phenomenon which Toporov, following Saussure, finds pervasive and systematic in the Vedic context. Indeed, Toporov will go so far as to assert that “the singers and audience for Vedic hymns were attuned to a barely noticeable and quite complicated transformational relation between the sounding elements of this text and their linking to the yielded meanings in a way which nothing in the West equals until well into the 20th century” (Toporov, 246, all translations mine). Toporov’s commitment, whatever its historical accuracy or inaccuracy, is one which I share: it is to a poetic function which is at once modern and esoteric, in whatever historical epoch it appears, and the one because the other. On occasion I have in fact witnessed the sort of attunement between poetic reciter and audience which Toporov describes. How pervasive this phenomenon is I cannot and need not say: not in the contemporary context, and certainly not in the Vedic.1 Toporov also helpfully indicates that Vedic poetics stands in relation to the Iranian poetics of the Avestan tradition roughly on analogy to the relation of the esoteric to the Gnostic I have tracked above in the context of American poetry. Beyond remarking that it appears the relation between a modern function and its devolution into a form of dualism is already well established in this cultural context, I will not consider this in any more detail (Toporov 1981, 210). Toporov gives a much more extensive example of anagrammatization in his reading of Rg Veda X, 125, to which I return below.

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8.1.2 From Combinatorial Transformation to Deformation Theory What is most radical and thus helpful in Toporov’s essay is his generalization of the notion of anagrammatic manipulation, beyond combinatorial transformation, to deformation. While it may at first appear that anagrammatization complicates a text (perhaps unnecessarily), in fact its deeper function is to stabilize it. Anagrammatization is a device for ensuring the long-term transmission of a poetic text. A preliminary comparison with the stabilizing function of myth is useful here. Blumenberg has defined a mythical story as a template which is subject to manifold productive variation. While in principle the criterion of productive variation should be specified, there is a certain sense in which retrospectively the productivity is reflected in the perdurance of the mythical template itself.2 One of the fruits of Blumenberg’s study is to show the way in which the psychologically stabilizing value of myth can assume a culturally stabilizing value by way of historical transmission that adapts itself to the ongoing “story-needs” of the members of the culture. More controversially, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have argued for a Neolithic science which was stably transmitted down succeeding generations through its embodiment in mythical form (de Santillana and von Dechend 1969). However, so far as the issue of stable transmission is concerned, the structure of the two accounts is essentially the same. Once the full impact is registered of, e.g., Lévi-Strauss or Griaule’s insistence that “traditional” cultures are in possession of a systematic and sophisticated tradition of cultural knowledge, there is every reason to believe that the practitioners of this tradition thought carefully about what would be required to guarantee the long-term transmission of this knowledge— whether we take this “thought” to be “reflectively conscious” in our modern sense or not. Toporov sees an analogous capacity for stable transmission in the Vedas. This stability can be used to account for the transmission of this body of text down from a culture for which very little remains in the way of archeologically identified artifacts. Saussure’s or Toporov’s individual attempts to identify an anagrammatic interpretation of the Vedas may be

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judged far-fetched, since they rely on extended conjecture about poetic intentions, but if we view the anagrammatic stratum of the Vedic hymns as part of a deformation poetics whose structure is designed to secure its transmission, the thesis becomes one in which the correct “identification” and “interpretation” of individual anagrams becomes secondary. What is required, instead, is to provide a convincing demonstration that the structural transformations of anagrammatization are present in the text and to demonstrate their potential to stabilize the text not in terms of one privileged meaning but as a poetic template in a way analogous to the way Blumenberg identifies the template-function of myth. The transmission capacity is graded by the poetry’s tensile strength in yielding an adaptable template subject to variant reception, where both template and reception may and indeed must be identified simultaneously at various different levels. Toporov follows Calvert Watkins, who appeals to a passage in old Indo-European poetry (in this case old Irish) where the strategy is explicitly acknowledged. The details need not concern us here, but the general principle is straightforward: if you want someone to carry a message without interfering with it, make sure they carry it in such a way that they don’t know what message they are carrying (which prevents intentional interference) and so that however they do vary it the coded message remains sufficiently intact. At this level of generality, there is little controversial about the point being made: the controversy surrounds the extent to which specifically anagrammatic techniques are at work. But the success or failure of individual identifications of anagrammatism, like the variations of the templates themselves, are only relevant as a reception-­ tradition, and not individually as “decodings.” The role of the poet as guarantor of tradition is thereby reinforced both thematically and functionally. The poet “as bearer of the idolized memories is the preserver of the tradition of the entire collective.” This role must be guaranteed functionally by the transmission of the poetry itself. In this regard, Saussure identifies the success of Indo-European poetry in terms of the stress it places on the phonetic level. Toporov focuses on an aspect of the phonetic stratum which guarantees it a relative independence, namely, rhythm, quoting Saussure, who asserts that alliteration functions not at all by requiring the analysis of the words involved, but

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rather by an analysis of the phonetic level (Toporov 1981, 216 fn. 69). As we will see below, alliteration can even serve as a signal that a particular region of anagrammatism is being opened or closed: in this case it serves as the primitive (phatic) anagrammatic signal. A next level of sophistication, which is required for the higher-order stabilization of deformation itself, involves the knitting together of the phonetic and semantic levels. “The operations of analysis and synthesis are presupposed in all these poetic procedures, which have to do with various arts of parsing (“division”) of the textual deformation and the fitting together of the text out of elements of different origin” (Toporov 1981, 217). Retaining both flexibility and strength, the text becomes tightly woven. Toporov gives another illustrative example, this time from Troubadour poetics. The phrase entrebrescar los motz has, as its meaning in the esoteric language (trobar clus): to bind words together, to set them one after another, to plait them together. But this sense has the opposite valence to that in the exoteric language (trobar prim): to turn words round, to weave them round, to mold them round, all of which express some form of negating deformation, as when we speak of twisting someone’s words. What seems a distortion at the exoteric level is esoterically essential. Yet both exoteric and esoteric sets contribute to poetic effect as goal. Freud’s point about the status of antithetical words is related, yet here we have the added complication that the antithetical statuses do not coexist at the same level, and Toporov will refer to an “ambivalence of metalinguistic terms” (Toporov 1981, 217). This phenomenon is to be found in all poetry, but in the Vedic context it becomes foundational and systematic, and so perspicuous. Poetic functionality is ultimately as multi-tiered as the poem itself. The two antithetical registers identified in the trobar clus and the trobar prim may be understood as moments in tension in the production of the poem: first a positive compounding which, however, creates not a poem but a poem template, and second a negative deformation which varies or modulates the stencil to fashion a distinct poetic artifact. This runs in parallel to the way that myth must serve as template and yet, in any given narrative instance, variation of the template. The stabilization of the poem-­ artifact cannot be understood exclusively in terms of the status of the template or of the variation: it must be understood dynamically, in terms

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of the transmission of the poem-content, where ‘content’ is understood to refer to the multiple registers at which the poem is constructed and not to semantic content alone. Respecting the esoteric dimension of the poem-artifact, the notion of a univocal semantic content makes no sense whatsoever. The poem-artifact ultimately possesses a stability quite distinct from myth, for here the template and the variation are integrated in the artifact itself. Toporov draws on Valéry to articulate this sense: “A work is solid when it resists the substitutions to which an active and rebellious reader always attempts to subject its parts…. The living arbitrariness of the reader attacks the dead arbitrariness of the work. But this energetic reader is the only one who matters—being the only one who can draw us to what we don’t know and don’t possess” (cited, Toporov (1981), 222). It is not just in this passage that Valéry anticipates Harold Bloom’s theory of strong misreading, yet Toporov’s crucial point is that misreading is itself a second-order function of the functional stabilization of the poem itself. As in Benjamin’s reflections on Schlegel, with which we began, in his working notes Saussure recognizes that Vedic poetics yields the possibility of a poetic reason which is non-theological: In the religious idea, the reason could have been that an invocation, a prayer, a hymn has no effect unless the syllables of the divine name are mixed into the text. (And on this hypothesis the funerary hymn itself from the point of view of its anagrams is already an extension of what has entered into poetry from religion.) The reason could have been non-religious, and purely poetic: of the same order as what presides moreover (ailleurs) in rhymes, assonances, etc.” (cited, Toporov 1981, 230)

Saussure’s note suggests not only the possibility for an autonomous poetic reason, but also why it would be possible and even likely that this poetic reason would be bound up with its religious application. This suggests in turn that Benjamin’s need to save Schlegel from his own tendency to theologize the poetic responds to an intrinsic temptation generated from within poetic reason itself, much as a Gnostic transformation of the esoteric function remains a temptation as well.

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8.1.3 The Poetic Locus: Hymn to the Word Toporov exemplifies his approach to Vedic poetics in an extended reading of Hymn X, 125 from the Rg Veda, the so-called “Hymn to the Living Word.” I supply my own translation of it here, cobbled together from the Sanskrit transliteration, the German version given in the translation of Toporov’s text (Toporov 1981, 232–3) and from the English translation of Ralph T. H. Griffith (Sacred Writings 1992, 631–2). I TRAVEL with the Rudras and the Vasus with the Adityas and Allgods I wander I hold aloft both Varuna and Mitra Indra and Agni and the pair of Asvins I sustain highswelling Soma and Tsvastar I support Pusan and Bhaga I load with wealth the right reasoned sacrificer who presses Soma and offers oblation I am the Queen the treasure collector most knowing first of those meriting worship thus Gods have established me in many places with many homes to enter and abide through me alone all eat through me who sees breathes hears the outspoken they think not of it yet they dwell beside me hear one and all the truth as I declare it I announce myself truly and utter the word that Gods and men alike shall welcome I make the man I love mighty in exceeding make him a sage an Rsi a Brahman I bend Rudra’s bow that his arrow may strike and slay the hater of holy words I rouse and order battle for the people and I penetrate Earth and Heaven I on the world’s summit bring forth the Father my origin is in the waters in the ocean

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I thence extend over all existing creatures and touch even yonder heaven with my forehead I breathe like the wind and tempest a strong breath the while I hold together existence beyond this wide earth and beyond the heavens such have I become in my greatness Voice (X, 125) In the translation I have tried, within reason, to reflect the features of the original Sanskrit hymn emphasized by Toporov. On the one hand, by virtue of his emphasis on the phonetic dimension of the poem, a translation cannot hope to preserve the majority of the features associated with the esoteric level. On the other hand, like structural approaches to poetry generally, there is no assumption that an indigenous knowledge and experience of the original language is necessary, and there is much that argues against such an assumption. The esoteric level is largely transacted in terms of combinatoric transformations and deformations, and these can be understood from a linguistic point of view without the need to assume a first-order relation to the language. Such matters should be largely if not entirely separate from an indigenous “feel” for the language. The transmission of these features, on the other hand, does require that they be transmitted indigenously: if they become completely explicit, as they do in a structural analysis, they are no longer in a position to promote transmission. This observation also suggests that there would be a distinct advantage in the original poetic practitioners only being at the threshold of conscious of these esoterica, and it is for precisely this reason that a structuralist account of poetry, at least of this sort, requires a revised conception of the poetic subject at odds with most of the philosophical tradition. For neither an imaginative subject, nor a narrowly rational subject, nor a combination of the two, would be naturally capable of forging the artifacts in line with the compositional features structuralism identifies. I take this to be the primary reason that the “human sciences,” chief among them linguistics and psychoanalysis, have been taken to pose challenges to the still hegemonic philosophical orthodoxy. It is therefore clear that the fundamental issue in Toporov’s reading of Rg Veda X, 125 is not whether he provides a “convincing interpretation,” but whether his reading is convincing in identifying those combinatorial and deforming features which he attributes to Vedic poetry. There is the

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additional challenge that no single exemplification is likely (or perhaps even capable) of making such an argument: the combinatorial and deforming features do not lend themselves to “definitive” identification. Here we face many of the most aggravated problems associated as well with music criticism, yet we must in addition attend to the knitting of phonetic, grammatical and semantic dimensions. My ultimate concern is therefore not so much with the question whether Toporov’s reading is convincing in this structural sense, but rather how we are to evaluate the reading he provides. I will argue that there is an inevitable circle here, but that it is not vicious. By virtue of the work he seeks to accomplish, Toporov cannot find an external lever by which to hoist the poetic world, but he is able to provide a reading which, itself adopting the assumptions it seeks to identify, knits itself together with the poem it partially unknits. This is similar to Harold Bloom’s notion of strong misreading in that any reading will inevitably succeed only to the extent that it usurps the status of that which it reads, but it is distinct in viewing analysis as a form of usurpation complementary to poiesis. Similar issues have also been rehearsed in James Boon’s work and the discussion of it above. In this way we establish a relation between analysis and poiesis in which neither is simply derived from the other. Consequently, in reading Toporov, much in the same way Boon reads structuralism, I seek to exemplify this dynamic complementarity. What I am characterizing as a dynamic complementarity between analysis and poiesis in Toporov’s own reading is thematized in terms of a distinction between exoteric (public) and esoteric (sacred) levels. Thus I will want to see the analysis/poiesis distinction as subsuming the exoteric/ esoteric distinction (at another level). After providing a transliteration and translation of the hymn, Toporov begins: “A concluding position befits this hymn insofar as it contains open and latent indications of a second level essential for the understanding of Vedic hymns, on which a properly sacral sense unfolds” (Toporov 1981, 233). Just as we will see that an alliterative signal indicates the onset or conclusion of anagrammatization, so the position of this hymn signals the transition to a second, sacral level, one associated with the “language of gods.” The hymn exhibits other, reinforcing features which distinguish it among the body of hymns: it is the only hymn in the Rg Veda to the Word (Vāc) as “personified speech and the truly cosmic” (Toporov 1981, 234). This feature

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prepares the poet for the task of assuming not just the role of (poietic) creator of all but more focally as creator of a text about all. Such a cosmological orientation already prepares the text to assume a locative status, in which “Vāc as ‘Prototext” and as ‘Protopoet’ is distributed among various places (Orte)” (Toporov, 1981, 234). We may say that the poem is not only a descriptive solution to the continuum problem as the distribution of places but equally a praxical, self-exemplifying one. This coincidence opens the esoteric dimension of depth as a view into not just the world but the action of the gods. Further still, it motivates the idea that the poem-work is a portrait of the poietic subject in its field of reflection. At the heart-center of the poem (end of fourth couplet) we find the call to listen (“hear one and all the truth as I declare it”) sound “like an oath” which is signaled alliteratively: śrudhí śruta śraddhivám, followed by an overlapping phrase which offers the hearer a security for the value of what is spoken: śraddhivám te vadāmi. Although Toporov does not stress it, clearly the latter phrase contains a reflective anagrammatization across its span, and Toporov reads the overall phrase as the “iconic image” of the “secret treasure” buried in the “deepest deeps, the secret matrix” at the heart of the poem. The absence of the god’s name (Vāc) and the pervasiveness of ahám3 (conjugated “I”) in the hymn—fifteen times of which ten occur at the beginning of a line—is taken to indicate the anonymity which characterizes the surface level of the poem and so as a hermetic cover protecting the appearance of Vāc at the esoteric level of the poem. This is witnessed both in terms of the saying of saying (“I declare it / I announce myself ”) at the center of the poem, and also in terms of anagrammatic displacements of the name Vāc itself: vá (subhiś) c(arāmi) ⊃ Vāc and vá (sūnām) c(ikitúsī) ⊃ Vāc. While it is tempting to see the greater problem in identifying whether these anagrammatic identifications are “really there or not,” it is worth facing the complementary problem as well: whether they are inevitably there. Toporov identifies the stance opposite to both alternatives: “Only when one has found Vāc, the word, the ‘spoken’ (uktá-), can one ground the highest sacral sense and avoid the stain of the ‘unspoken’ or ‘falsely spoken’” (Toporov 1981, 237). Because the reading of the poem requires this praxical enactment of the poem itself, Toporov accords the Hymn to the Word not just the status of a poetic text but also of a

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“metapoetic description” for which the analysis of the text serves as a guideline (Toporov 1981, 238). In the penultimate section of his essay, Toporov assembles the pieces he has laid out along the course of the essay. Saussure introduces the division of the Vedic text into two levels: from this follows the concretization, appropriated from Watkins, between language of gods and language of men from which Toporov set out. Anagrammatization is a principle of double encoding and as such reinforces the text through strategic redundancy. In sophisticated cases like the Hymn to Vāc the redundancy may even take the paradoxical form that an absence at one level evokes a presence at another. The “alert investigator” of the Vedic text will pierce through to the fundamental principle of analysis and leave behind all doubts about the real grounds of the image which presents itself. And even if one does not follow Toporov’s lead into certain conviction of one’s own, it is considerably more difficult to contest that the overcoding carries one along unawares, and perhaps even better so. Lest this assertion itself seem entirely esoteric, one should consider the significance of the fact that a rhymed poem in English is almost always easier to remember than an unrhymed one. What Toporov is claiming is wider in its purport but has the same basic tenor. Once convinced, the investigator will recognize “the places where a phenomenon sought for or a thing that attests to its existence can appear” (Toporov 1981, 240). Here we are able to forge the continuity between the reflectively attentive investigator and the less conscious experience of the same text. For in both cases the places of appearance are witnessed, and the only difference is that in the former case the witnessing is itself witnessed at the second order. This does not constitute a violation of the text precisely because the text itself functions metapoetically, and the consequence of investigative attention is simply to elicit this metapoetic experience consciously. To forge a slogan which will be helpful below, we could say that poetic reason differs from analytic reason only by virtue of the association of the metalinguistic function with the latter. Below, Jakobson will help us see how to make this observation more precise. As the hymns themselves become places within the collection of hymns as a whole, the text becomes a superhymn articulating a metapoetic structure at the global level. The first hymn is devoted to Agni, beginning

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Agním īle puróhitam, “I laud Agni, the chosen Priest” (Sacred Writings 1992, 1), where ‘Priest’ translates Puróhita, which can mean house-priest of the King, but also “the one placed at the pinnacle” (Toporov 1981, 240). This latter gloss introduces a metapoetic element, as it singles out the beginning as the highest point. After many hymns lauding individual gods, the Rg Veda ends with a hymn to unity, which has, like the first hymn, a “summarizing character,” running through in its gathered up form once again the entire content of the Rg Veda. It returns as well to the motifs of laud and healing with which the first hymn begins. Phonetically there is a pervasive emphasis on sam, “together, common.” Toporov describes the entire construction of the Rg Veda as “hypersemantic” in orientation, and the analyses he presents lead him to conjecture that other names of gods can naturally be identified in other hymns. Whether this can be verified or not, it exemplifies the way in which the Vedas cultivate, both for the pre-reflective and for the reflective, an energy field for the language of gods. The experience combines a horizontal reading of the textual surface with a vertical reading of its depth and “actualizes the category of the place,” where the elements in question occur. As Lacan has given us a first model of the poetic subject in his psychoanalytic investigations, so Toporov’s investigation of the Vedas has yielded a first model of locative poetics. Jakobson’s work on the poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry will carry us a step further on.

8.2 Jakobson, and a First Deduction of Poetic Reason There are certain aspects of Jakobson’s treatment of poetry that stand in conflict with poetic reason as I attempt to legitimate it. However, these differences are largely verbal, and when they are not, they can be met. Jakobson insists on opposing the poetic function to (narrowly) cognitive ones, and so there is an appearance, and somewhat more, that Jakobson himself remains implicated in a traditional and quite narrow conception of reason. I have no wish to legitimate poetic reason in opposition to functions that have been previously associated with cognition in the

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narrow sense. The legitimation of poetic reason will require us to re-­ evaluate these, and in particular what Jakobson calls the metalinguistic function. Consequently, so long as such a revaluation occurs there is no fatal obstruction in Jakobson identifying only those functions as cognitive which he does. What points Jakobson’s account in the direction of poetic reason is the way he identifies the poetic function with the “message itself ”: “The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language” (Jakobson 1990, 69).4 In the same essay, Jakobson gives another, closely related characterization in terms of the distinction between selection and combination, which he will go on to understand as two linguistic “axes” associated with metaphor and metonymy respectively. In forming a sentence like ‘The child sleeps’, I select the terms ‘child’ and ‘sleep’ from collections and then combine the two terms. Selection is among terms grouped on the basis of “equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy,” while the combination of terms is based on their contiguous juxtaposition. In his second formulation, “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson 1990, 71). The two characterizations are linked by identifying the axis of combination as that of the message. Jakobson understands the poetic function to be present in all language but dominant in what we explicitly identify as poetic. His emphasizing of the poetic focus on the “message itself ” should not be understood on analogy with “art for art’s sake,”5 but rather in terms of the way the stability specific to poetic language comes from heightening the distinction between the message itself and its communicative value. The fundamental stabilizing feature of the poetic function is that “by promoting the palpability of signs, [it] deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” Ironically, it does so by insisting that these palpable signs are themselves objects in the world, but ones set off in their function from the referential function played by objects. Effectively, the world has been “cut in two.” Equally, the fact that the poetic function serves a crucial stabilizing function requires that we should understand (predominantly) non-poetic language as a deformation of dominantly poetic language (Jakobson 1990, 41–6). Such deformation will be possible to the extent

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that usage does not push too far in the direction of conflating the sign and the object. At a time when there is a rapid inflation in the production of signs, Jakobson sees the need to stabilize the distinction between sign and object as especially pressing. Such was the case during the nineteenth century, and we might even conjecture that this inflation along with concomitant attempts to shore up the credit of words and breed confidence in their value are as responsible as any other single current for the massive cultural transformation we find during this time. Jakobson mentions “positivism, naive realism in philosophy, liberalism in politics, the neogrammarian school in linguistics, an assuasive illusionism in literature and on the stage (with illusions of both the naive naturalist and the solipsistic decadent varieties, the atomization of method in literary theory (and in scholarship and science as a whole)” (Jakobson 1990, 377). To this we could add the axiomatic drive toward the uniformization of mathematics. Jakobson identifies a crucial instance in which the literature of the time thematizes this very crisis in confidence, though we could think of many others, for example Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. In The Stone Guest, Puškin draws attention to the statue which “represents” the commander like a giant when in fact the commander was short and puny. Jakobson comments: “It is hardly possible to express more drastically the simultaneous distinctness and identity of the representation and the object represented” (Jakobson 1990, 359), and we might go on to see in the overshadowing of the object by its representation the potential for the domain of signs to inflate (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 23). Here the topical figure in the text reinforces the underlying semiotic stabilization while broadcasting the potential for destabilization the poetic function seeks to correct. Later, we will consider an argument given by Paul de Man for Kant’s “materialism” and see that in effect it amounts to no more than the identification of that locus in Kant’s Third Critique where the stony palpability of the sign becomes paramount. In playing a structural role heightening the distinction between sign and object, which Jakobson takes to be fundamental for all linguistic communication, it follows that “when dealing with the poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry” (Jakobson 1990, 70). That the field of ordinary language cannot be sectored off from poetry is

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due to the ubiquity of the poetic function, yet it is also true that the poetic function is only one among (equally ubiquitous) others. Jakobson supplies two schemes, one of “factors” and one of “functions,” which I combine together in the following table. The functions are given above the factors, and parenthetical glosses correspond to terms given directly above them: REFERENTIAL/ CONTEXT; (spoken of; 3rd person)

EMOTIVE/ ADDRESSER; (1st person)

POETIC/ MESSAGE PHATIC/ CONTACT

CONATIVE/ ADDRESSEE (orientation toward; 2nd person;vocative/ imperative)

METALINGUAL/ CODE (glossing; confirmation)

(Jakobson 1990, 66, 71).6 In the above diagram, the poetic function should be understood to lie on the vertical axis at the point where it intersects the horizontal axis, and the phatic function should be understood to lie on the horizontal axis where it intersects the vertical. The fact that these two functions both lie at the intersection of the two axes does not at all imply that they coincide functionally, and I suggest below a way in which they may be viewed as inverses of each other. It is already suggestive that the poetic function, along with the phatic, occupies a central, intersectional place in Jakobson’s diagram. But the question remains: is it possible to understand Jakobson’s poetic function as itself a function of poetic reason? In particular, how does it pertain to poiesis understood as making, even in the narrow context of poetry traditionally conceived? Only once we have provided a minimal context for this question can we proceed to the analysis and transcendental deduction associated with the above table. In “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” Jakobson reports anecdotally that Xlebnikov discovered “after the fact” an anagram hidden in one

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of his poems which led him to identify the “key word” of the poem to which the anagram was connected. On this basis, Xlebnikov went on to conjecture retrospectively that “Krylyškúja [winging], the key word of the poem, must have spontaneously, “in pure folly”, inspired and directed its whole composition” (Jakobson 1990, 253). Here we meet the compositional analogue of the esoteric dimension in the form of an original germ or cell identified as that from which the work springs forth. This may be a happy picture of some fortuitous poetic circumstances, but to adopt it as a model for all compositional production would be the equivalent of committing to the “Augenblickliche Philosophie” discussed above. Jakobson moves in another direction: he infers that “the poet’s metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic language” (Jakobson 1990, 253), and he also points out the extent to which the poet fails to identify the subliminal patterning of the poem on the basis of an identified germ cell. The anagram, when it is identified explicitly, is identified metalinguistically, not poetically. In this regard the linguistic analysis is not more rational but simply more metalinguistically (descriptively) explicit. Indeed, in such a gloss poetic adequacy is replaced by descriptive adequacy, and poetic reason is replaced by analytic reason. Even more generally, the metalinguistic function of linguistic discourse is to reintegrate the verbal message back into the axis of selection, and it does so on the basis of the phatic function. The phatic is exemplified in those parts of a message intended to establish contact: “Hello,” or “Bassler’s, Bradley speaking.” (What’s in a name?) Although Jakobson does not say so explicitly, I suggest we understand the phatic function as the projection of the horizontal onto the vertical axis, for in establishing contact we select out a particular code/context for the communication itself.7 We could therefore say that the phatic is about the communication as communication and, as such, selects a specific communicative context. It is only in such communicative context (not to be confused with the referential context that appears in the diagram above) that the metalinguistic function can operate on a message. This operation is sometimes referred to as interpretation, and I will use that term here. In the case of poetry, where the poetic function predominates, there is a dominant projection from the vertical to the horizontal axis, and so what distinguishes the interpretation of a poem is that in this case we are

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dealing focally with an inversive reprojection. The interpretation (analysis) of the poem consists in a projection back from the horizontal to the vertical axis which the interpretation renders more explicit. Analysis, as interpretation, is always involved in such explicitation, but in the case of poetry what underlies interpretation is the inverse relation between the poetic and phatic functions. In moving from the poem to the interpretation we move from a continuum of equivalences (similarities projected onto the horizontal axis of the poetic message) to a discontinuum of disequivalent distinctions, or what we may call di-glosses, understood as the glossing of distinctions (differences). The model therefore provides a method for identifying linguistic poiesis and analysis as inverses, roughly what I have previously called “adjoints.” Note that it is not the case that the application of one projection followed by the other leaves us where we started. It also follows that analytic rationality cannot be identified as theoretical rather than practical and, like poetic rationality, antecedes the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. We are beginning to be in a position to answer the question: what is poetic reason as opposed to analytic reason? What is most striking in the response to which Jakobson leads us is that, on their own terms, poetic and analytic reason are structurally identical in being projections, and if we consider them intrinsically (i.e. abstracting from what they project to what) they can only be internally differentiated by the specific way they stand in inverse relation to one another. We are not altogether removed from the classical Greek mathematical understanding, which deeply influenced Platonic dialectics, that analysis and synthesis stand in inverse relation, yet this distinction (which remains operative in Hegel’s Logic) is between two methods associated with one rational source rather than a distinction between two forms of reason. Despite the fact that Jakobson identifies “narrowly” cognitive functions and contrasts them with the application of the poetic function, it is also clear that the system of functions attributed to language has a structural logic of its own. In particular, given that the poetic function is ubiquitous in language it is clear that the “know-how” associated with linguistic competence in general is inclusive of the know-how associated more specifically with the poetic function. This is reflected not only in terms of the fact that if we know how to select among similar terms we

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will also be able to identify the way these selections play a role in their projection onto the message by the poetic function. Even more fundamentally, in certain special cases these projected selections will serve as a zero-point, and so a condition of possibility, for the meaningfulness of the message itself. This zero point is precisely the specialization of the poetic function to the esoteric function. In poetry generally, this specialization is cloaked beneath a dualistic surface. In some limit cases, such as Vedic poetry and the poetry of Dickinson, it stands in an essentially exposed position at one or more levels. It is in such cases that the exoteric value of the esoteric function is most readily identified, as I have attempted to do above. Boon’s analysis of symbolist poetry could largely be rewritten in analogous terms. If our goal is to identify a specifically poetic rationality, this may all seem reassuring, but what has just been said about the poetic function holds true for all six of the linguistic functions Jakobson identifies, and among these we find also the emotive function. It therefore holds that the know-how associated with the emotive function is equally associated with linguistic competence. Furthermore, Jakobson explicitly asserts that the structural character of this function is subject to linguistic analysis along with all the others. Speaking of the case in which an actor conveys different messages by emotionally inflecting the same phrase (Segodnja večerom, this evening) in accordance with corresponding situations, Jakobson and his colleagues found that “all such emotive cues easily undergo linguistic analysis” (Jakobson 1990, 67). If there is a specific reason associated with the poetic function, we must either explain why this function in particular is associated with a form of reason, or else we must concede that all the linguistic functions correspond to forms of reason. It is essentially the former horn to which I will commit, and specifically because the poetic function, unlike the emotive, referential, conative and metalinguistic functions, involves projection from one axis to another. There will therefore be exactly two forms of reason: poetic reason, associated with the poetic function, and analytic reason, associated with the phatic. It is a slightly different question to ask whether all six of the functions are associated with cognition. Sufficiently broadly understood, I do not think Jakobson would find this problematic, nor do I. But the question about poetic reason is another one, since, on the one

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hand, in linguistic context it corresponds specifically to the poetic function and, on the other, in its most general sense it is not confined to the domain of linguistic production (making). Arguably, this distinguishes the poetic function from the other linguistic functions: although it can operate on non-linguistic codes, if we commit to the Jakobsonian scheme its operation is exclusively linguistic.8 The way in which Jakobson associates factors and functions bears a striking resemblance to the way Kant associates the table of the logical functions of judgment with the table of the categories and derives the latter from the former. This analogy will motivate the first legitimation of poetic reason given below, which takes the form of a transcendental deduction based on Jakobson’s table of linguistic factors/functions. Jakobson himself sketches informal “genetic” derivations of each function from each factor. What distinguishes these genetic motivations from Kant’s deduction is primarily that Kant derives the entire second table from the first, whereas Jakobson proceeds case by case. This is not at all to cast doubt on the possibility of an analogous uniform deduction of Jakobson’s table of functions from the table of factors, and indeed there is much to suggest it given that the factors can be identified as formal specifications of communication conditions for the associated linguistic functions. In Kant’s case, it is the former table that identifies “functions,” whereas in Jakobson’s case it is the latter. If this indicates a relevant difference it is that in Jakobson’s case we are operating at a different level (from communicative conditions to expressive functions) according to a different manner of proceeding. Although this requires us to keep straight the distinction between the two sets of functions, I do not see that this obstructs the analogy I will go on to draw. In order to provide a transcendental deduction of poetic reason in association with Jakobson’s derivation of linguistic functions from communication factors, we first need to identify and then to legitimate the rationality associated with the application of the poetic function. To see how this might be accomplished, I begin by considering Jakobson’s diagram in somewhat more detail, starting with the poetic function and working outward. Since Jakobson characterizes the poetic function as the projection of the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, we must begin by

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understanding these two axes, which Jakobson identifies explicitly in the case of the functions, but which pertains to the specification of factors as well. Let us return to the sentence, ‘The child sleeps’. Ignoring for now the definite article, Jakobson identifies the choice of noun ‘child’ and verb ‘sleep’ from among cognate groups: this is the operation of the “principle of selection.” To form a sentence, the terms must be properly juxtaposed: in our highly schematized example we place ‘child’ and ‘sleep’ next to each other in the appropriate way. This is the operation of the “principle of combination.” The sentence connects the sender of the message (ADDRESSER) to the receiver of the message (ADDRESSEE) by way of connecting the former to the latter (CONTACT). Jakobson places this connection along the horizontal axis, which we may therefore call, alongside the axis of combination, the axis of the message. Notice, therefore, that the horizontal dimension is doing double work: on the one hand it identifies the relevant factors for the message; on the other hand it indicates that the message is laid out by the juxtaposition of (selected) linguistic units. What connects these two functions is they are both concerned with the status of the “message as message.” It describes not what, but how the message communicates. The vertical axis, in contrast, is concerned with the status of what the messages communicates. In terms of factors, the message employs a code to communicate about a context. The linguistic function associated with the code is meta-lingual (fixing of code), whereas the linguistic function associated with the context is referential (fixing of context). A code is used to specify a context: both must be fixed. In this case, the vertical axis does double work as well: it indicates the axis of the code and it also indicates the axis of selection. What connects these two roles is that both concern the status of the communication as communication: the code indicates the means whereby communication about the context is possible, and selection indicates the means whereby such communication can be specified to a particular context. In considering the poetic function as the projection of the vertical onto the horizontal axis, it is helpful to begin by noting that the poetic function occupies the position along the vertical axis occupied by the phatic on the horizontal axis. Above I have suggested that, inverse to the poetic function, the phatic function should be seen as projecting the horizontal

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axis onto the vertical axis. It is rather odd, and worth considering, that Jakobson does not identify this characterization of the phatic function, for it is arguably more concrete and identifiable in such projective terms than the poetic function is. But, of course, Jakobson was especially concerned with the poetic function, and the essay from which this presentation is drawn is called “Linguistics and Poetics.” In any case, if the phatic function projects the message functions into the communication, the poetic function projects the communication conditions into the message. For this reason, the poetic function communicates especially, though not exclusively, the conditions of the message as such, and this indicates the sense in which it serves as a condition of possibility for meaningful communication. But how does Jakobson identify these conditions, and why does he identify them in the way that he does? Jakobson focuses especially on the case of poetry in the traditional sense, and his thesis is that in this case the poetic function in the poem acquires a “verse shape” which remains “completely independent of its variable delivery.” Furthermore, “no doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent ‘figure of sound’” (Jakobson 1990, 81). Unpacking these claims will help us to understand Jakobson’s commitment to the poetic function and its communication of message conditions. To illustrate his claim that verse shape remains independent of delivery, Jakobson presents various cases where some structural aspect of a poem is anomalous. In a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the placement of the word ‘absurd’ upsets the natural way of stressing the second syllable. Various solutions are possible: placing the stress on the first syllable, the second syllable, or finessing the stress in some intermediate way. But no matter what is chosen, some solution is required, and this feature is part of the poem’s verse shape. The task of a linguistically informed poetics is to identify this shape. That a solution is required fronts the conditions of the message as the sort of message it is: in this case, poetic in the narrow sense. But since any of the available solutions fronts the conditions of the message, the poetic function is constitutive not just for the message generally, but for the communication of its conditions as message. Is there a circle here, and if so, is it vicious? It seems we have appealed to poetry in the narrow sense to exemplify the poetic function, but we have identified the poetic function by the pressure placed on the “poetic

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conventions” which are, in the narrow sense of poetry, at play. Jakobson finesses this problem by insisting, on the one hand, that the distinction between poetry narrowly conceived, where the poetic function predominates, and the presence of the poetic function in other contexts, where it does not, is a gradual one. On the other hand, he will quote Osip Brik, “perhaps the keenest of the Russian Formalists, who used to say that political conspirators are tried and condemned only for unsuccessful attempts at a forcible upheaval, because in the case of a successful coup it is the conspirators who assume the role of judges and prosecutors. If the violences against the meter take root, they themselves become metrical rules” (Jakobson 1990, 78). Nothing succeeds like success, not despite but because of its contingency, no matter how disturbing this recognition may be. Jakobson will qualify his claim that verse is primarily a recurrent figure of sound in an analogous way. The phonetic material of poetry is critical but not exclusive: verse shape “yields to no isolating phonetic treatment” (Jakobson 1990, 79), and “Valéry’s view of poetry as ‘hesitation between the sound and the sense’ is much more realistic and scientific than any bias of phonetic isolationism” (Jakobson 1990, 81). We get even closer to the heart of the matter when Jakobson asserts several pages along that “equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as its constitutive principle, inevitably involves semantic equivalence,” and he goes on to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins to indicate that equivalence must be sufficiently broad to include experience of both likeness and unlikeness. We may take this one step further and say that the poetic is not only the condition for glossing but is itself always incipiently glossive, including both the potential for glossing and equally what I have called above di-­ glossing. Yet this should not at all coerce us into any understanding of the poetic function, and by implication poetic reason, as merely proto-­ metalinguistic/analytic. Indeed, without the existence of a separate if not entirely autonomous poetic reason, analytic reason itself becomes incoherent. To focus on either exclusively is to extremalize to a limiting rational condition. If we successfully avert the essentially romantic tendency in the direction of a genetic relation between a proto-analytic “poetic reason” and a full-blown “analytic reason” deriving from it, we may begin to prepare for

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a transcendental deduction of poetic reason on its own terms. I begin with an argument which corresponds to Kant’s metaphysical, “regressive” deduction of the categories, which precedes and motivates his transcendental deduction. Let us assume provisionally as unproblematic that there is a legitimate conception of analytic reason associated with the phatic function, and which is the condition of possibility for metalinguistic glosses (including di-glosses). Traditionally, the referential function standing at the opposite pole from the metalinguistic function is associated with intuition, and only in God’s case is intuition rational. So we may equally assume for our provisional purposes that there is no legitimation in our human context of a reason associated with the phatic function supporting a reasoning directly in terms of the referential function. Instead, any such deduction must connect the phatic function to the metalinguistic function. In Jakobson’s table, the only possible connection between the context and code is by way of the message. If the message has any rational status whatsoever, it must be associated with the corresponding function, which is precisely the poetic function. But the condition of the message as such is that it allows us to use the code to communicate about the context. Since there is no intuitive (referential) rationality, the only possible recourse is to appeal to the poetic function. If the status of the message is to be rational, the poetic function must be associated with a rationality appropriate to its connecting function. This rationality is precisely poetic reason. The analogy (in various registers) to Kant’s metaphysical deduction should be sufficiently apparent to those who know it that I will not belabor the point here (Kant 1996, 197, B159–60). The more pressing question is: how does the regressive argument I have given prepare for the provision of a progressive, transcendental deduction of poetic reason? The short answer is: when we use the poetic function we bring the axis of selection to the axis of combination; this is analogous to Kant’s insight that the transcendental deduction is anchored in bringing the table of the logical functions of judgment to the manifold (Bassler 2018, 174). But the striking bonus Jakobson’s presentation provides is that we may now acknowledge that we equally require, but are also capable of providing, a transcendental deduction of analytic reason: this is accomplished in terms

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of the dual focus on the phatic function bringing the axis of combination to the axis of selection. This partially overcomes the objection often associated with Kant’s lifting of the table of the logical function of judgments to the table of categories: why are we in a position to presuppose the legitimacy of the former table? The (negative) answer in brief is that in doing so we have indeed presupposed the legitimacy of analytic reason. So our deduction of poetic reason in the context of Jakobson’s table has the added bonus that it eliminates what was question-begging in Kant’s transcendental deduction by making a transcendental deduction of analytic reason equally possible (and structurally homologous, carried out “inversely”). It does, of course, remain dependent on Jakobson’s table mapping out the linguistic factors and functions, so there is no claim that the deduction is presuppositionless. However, it does not immediately commit us to a particular logical orientation, as Kant’s table of the logical functions of judgment certainly does. We may see the core of each of these deductions by comparing them to the syllogism which is the core of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. That syllogism goes: 1. “The manifold given in a sensible intuition is subject necessarily to the original synthetic unity of apperception.” 2. “The act of understanding whereby the manifold of given presentations (whether intuitions or concepts) are brought under one apperception as such is the logical function of judgments.” 3. “Therefore everything manifold, insofar as it is given in one empirical intuition, is determined in regard to one of the logical functions of judging, inasmuch as through this function it is brought to one consciousness as such.” (Kant 1996, 185) This determination in regard to one of the logical functions is what the analogous category achieves, and so the syllogism amounts to a transcendental deduction of the table of categories. In our case we seek a transcendental deduction not of categories determining the manifold in regard to the logical functions, but rather of poetic reason itself. The deduction is analogous, however, in that it seeks to demonstrate that poetic reason is a necessary (and therefore legitimate)

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determination of the poetic function, which latter plays the role analogous to that of the logical functions of judgment in Kant’s deduction. Our syllogism therefore proceeds as follows: 1. A message requires contact between an addresser and an addressee. 2. The act whereby the principle of selection is projected onto (applied to) the axis of combination is the (application of the) poetic function. 3. Therefore, every message, insofar as it constitutes a unity of sense, is determined by the poetic function, insofar as it is through this function that sense is projected onto combination. Let us compare the analogous syllogism for analytic reason: 1. A sense requires the specification of a context with respect to a code. 2. The act whereby the principle of combination is projected onto the axis of sense is the phatic function. 3. Therefore, every sense, insofar as it constitutes a unified message, is determined by the phatic function, insofar as it is through this function that combination is projected onto sense. Note that comparable arguments do not follow for the other linguistic functions Jakobson identifies, because these other functions are not projective in the way the poetic and phatic functions are, and so result in no analogous determination. These arguments may appear inadequate on first encounter, and I will defend them in such a way that at the same time I hope it becomes clear why they may seem so. Jakobson himself will take us halfway there, but by virtue of Jakobson’s residual commitment to a narrow construal of the “cognitive,” we must take one final step beyond Jakobson himself. Because the defense is more pertinent to this project in the case of poetic reason, I proceed in the same order as above. In the deduction of poetic reason, the premises of the argument are unproblematic, at least assuming Jakobson’s description: they follow immediately from definitions of the contact factor and the poetic function respectively. We are therefore left with two problems: how the conclusion follows from the premises, and how the conclusion amounts to a

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deduction of poetic reason. As to the former, it will be helpful to unpack the conclusion itself in syllogistic form: 3′. A message constitutes a unity of sense. 4′.  It is through the poetic function that sense is projected onto combination. 5′.  Therefore a message is determined as a unity of sense by the poetic function. Here I will assume that 3’ is unproblematic. Though this does in fact commit us to an idealization concerning the status of a message, it is one Jakobson endorses. 4’ constitutes merely a rephrasing of 2 in this new context of the message considered as a unity of sense. 5’ therefore follows if we view the status of the message as a sense unity to result from the projection from the axis of sense onto the axis of combination. In fact, there are some grounds for thinking that Jakobson is not thinking of the situation quite this way. This is where we need to make a final step, which I will argue follows if we replace Jakobson’s narrower talk of cognition by one which opens the possibility for poetic alongside analytic reason. In line with his narrow cognitivism, Jakobson speaks of the poetic dimension of language as revaluing language. However, I think there are reasons to think that this picture of revaluation is misleading at best and mistaken at worst. To see it as misleading, we would need to understand it as an awkward way of speaking, metaphorically if you will, of the “transformation” which is required to pass from the “mundane” message to the “poetic,” and this latter typically in the narrower sense of poetry as a literary artifact identified as such by various literary conventions. This would at least allow us to make sense of this “revaluation” in a way which is consonant with Jakobson’s persistent recognition that all language involves the poetic function, and what distinguishes poetry in the narrow sense is the predominance of this function. Otherwise, if we understand the notion of “revaluation” in such a way as to commit us to the idea that the poetic is something super-added to the “mundane” in the way that spice is added to a cooked dish, then the claim fails to cohere with the assertion of the pervasiveness of the poetic function in all language.

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However, even if we do construe Jakobson’s poetic revaluation charitably, it does not in itself lend any direct support for the idea that the poetic function bestows unity of sense. Indeed, there are many places where the particular sense Jakobson identifies as supported by the poetic function is described in a way that makes it seem this sense “rides on top of ” the sense of the message understood more mundanely. “It was an ordinary evening in New Haven” would have one sense seemingly independent of the poetic function and another “poetic sense” only in the context of Wallace Steven’s poem. But this again does not cohere with Jakobson’s identification of the poetic function being at work in language at large, and not merely in “poetic language” more narrowly construed. If we look at Jakobson’s discussions of the general role of the poetic function, on the one hand, and his discussions of the “poetry of grammar” on the other, what becomes clear is that there is in fact no grammar without the application of the poetic function. More pointedly still, it is not just that there is no grammar in its absence but that the poetic function is constitutive for grammar as such. In fact, just this is the specific way it serves as a condition of possibility for the meaningfulness of a message. For if the unity of sense of a linguistic message depends on its grammatical constitution for the provision of this unity, then the poetic function is indeed constitutive for the unity of sense of the linguistic message. It seems clear that for Jakobson, grammar satisfies just this desideratum. Drawing on an essay where poetry is not the focus, we find Jakobson referring to Franz Boas with approval: “the grammatical pattern of a language (as opposed to its lexical stock) determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed in the given language” (Jakobson 1990, 432, my emphasis). But the poetic function is not just active at the grammatical level (as we must assume in some very broad sense all six of the functions are), it in fact plays a special limiting role, which I have referred to above as the esoteric function. Because the poetic function projects from the lexical stocks to their encoded combination in the message, it secures the determination of the message as a unified sense, where we speak of determination in just the way Kant did in his own deduction. Unlike the other functions, the poetic function serves as the condition of possibility for grammar as structural foundation for the meaningfulness of a message. If we accept the Kantian transcendental deduction, there is

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no reason not to accept the deduction I’ve provided in the Jakobsonian context as well. Indeed, I think we must, which is to say: if there is some problem in the latter argument, we should be able to find an analogous problem in the Kantian argument as well. There is certainly nothing to indicate that Jakobson explicitly draws the conclusion that his scheme implies the legitimacy of poetic reason, but this should be chalked up to his narrow cognitivist prejudices. What we have done here is to follow out the implications for the nature of cognition which Jakobson’s account of the linguistic message implies. Jakobson was not a philosopher as such, so it was not requisite for him to draw these conclusions explicitly, and he should therefore not be faulted for failing to do so. On the other hand, I do think that the conclusions rendered explicit here do better justice to the overall orientation of Jakobson’s investigations than the rather outmoded frame he sometimes uses to present them. In this sense, I believe an account, if not an explicit legitimation, of poetic reason is already very much present in Jakobson’s work, and what I have done is to render it explicit. Since I have gone through the argument relating to poetic reason in some detail, the argument regarding analytic reason can be handled more briefly. However, the implications of accepting this argument are even more radical, since they require a massive revision of what analytic reasoning is typically thought to be. In this case, the second premise of the argument is somewhat controversial, since Jakobson does not characterize the application of the phatic function explicitly in projective terms. This follows, instead, from the observation I’ve argued for above, that the poetic and phatic functions work in dual ways. This construal is therefore one of the assumptions behind the argument. In fact, insofar as we can identify something as analytic reason in Jakobson’s own account, it will be associated with the metalinguistic function, which I have argued above depends in the case of a message on the projection supplied by the phatic function. What analysis does—on the traditional construal—is to discriminate between conceptual cases, and this discrimination finds its roots in the parsing of the code (“bachelor means unmarried man”). On the construal which follows from the given argument, however, this will constitute only one part of analytic reasoning and a relatively superficial one.

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Assuming we accept the two premises, there remains the problem as in the previous case of evaluating what the conclusion should be taken to mean and whether it follows from the premise. We may begin by offering a crude gloss of the second premise. Two “signs” cannot count as combined until we recognize them as parts of the same message. But there is the more fundamental sense of combination as well: Jakobson understands the message as involving (whether tacitly or explicitly) an addresser and an addressee, who must stand in contact for us to speak of a message at all. If we construe the phatic function as the projection of the axis of combination onto the axis of selection, then any such contact already involves a basic sense which we may speak of as the zero-grammar of contact, much as I’ve spoken of the esoteric function as the zero-grammar of meaning above. This “zero-grammar,” along with the zero-grammar of the poetic function, may be identified as the (doubled) grammatical trace, in which case we may speak of the present orientation as “grammarological.” The nature of reason is grammarological in this sense, and the present work could take as alternative title, Of Grammarology. Elsewhere, Jakobson compares the role of grammar in poetry and geometry in painting (Jakobson 1990, 486). This just means that to establish contact the addresser and addressee must be competent in selecting out such zero-degree grammatical terms (hello, etc.). The implication is that this competence is the condition of the possibility for the combination of terms within a message generally (with single term messages—Drink!—understood as cases of combination as well, albeit limiting ones where the combination is not of terms but of addresser and addressee alone). “Syntax,” as it is usually understood, is indeed a prerequisite for “semantics” in the usual sense, but it must now also be understood as the zero-degree of semantics, co-involving the zero-degrees of the poetic and phatic functions. The capacity to investigate semantics formally is secured by virtue of the fact that this zero-degree semantics is not just included within semantics overall but in fact constitutive for it. It follows that to speak of “semantic content” is misleading at best, much in the same way it was misleading at best to think of the poetic as something super-added to language. In fact, this casts grave doubt on whether we have any coherent understanding of semantic content whatsoever, since it seems it

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would at once be required and forbidden to include some equally incoherent notion of semantic “form.” Finally, as I have already advertised, because poetic and analytic reason stand in dual relation to each other, they are structurally adjunct, and are to be intrinsically distinguished only in terms of how they stand in positional relation to each other. With a legacy that stretches up to the present, much of early twentieth century philosophy (Anglo-American, Austrian, and elsewhere) was devoted to distinguishing between “true” reasoning (analytic) and “nonsense” (everything else). In fact, what are misguidedly identified in this tradition as truth (analytic) and nonsense (poetic) are structurally adjoined. And as if that weren’t bad enough: what have traditionally been taken to be “truth” and “nonsense” are only to be distinguished in terms of how they stand in structural relation to each other! Many aspects of the deductions presented above have not been filled out, and in Chap. 10 I offer another, independent transcendental deduction. Though this latter deduction depends on Blumenberg’s argument for the legitimacy of the modern age, it corrects and extends Blumenberg’s argument rather than working on analogy to it. As such, it presents a fuller transcendental deduction than the one given here, albeit one I only sketch. The two taken together will reveal more about the legitimacy of poetic reason than either one standing alone.

8.3 A Return to the American Scene At the end of this chapter I return once again to the history of (largely) American poetry, for if the account of poetic reason I cultivate cannot open and sustain poetic history, it remains pragmatically null. I turn, in particular, to the meditations of one of the finest recent critics of American poetry, David Bromwich. In a particularly insightful essay on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, David Bromwich uses Nietzsche and William James as foils to identify two strains in the poetry of Stevens’ Parts of a World and the agonistic struggle between them. While there is no definitive winner, the contest leads Stevens to an ultimate difference with Nietzsche. Bromwich begins by citing Nietzsche’s remark that “It is thus pride, and the customary manner in which pride is gratified, which stands in the

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way of a new understanding of morality. What force, therefore, will have to be employed if this brake is to be removed? More pride? A new pride?,” to which Bromwich responds, ending his essay on “Stevens and the Idea of the Hero”: Nietzsche for his part chose to build more pride, with more humiliations as well, for the sake of the more than human. Stevens, in the poems I have been concerned with, was building a new pride. (Bromwich 2001, 89)

Nietzsche’s conception of “more pride,” whatever the details, is traditionally agonistic. Stevens’ “new pride” rings a decisive American modulation on this traditional model of the poetic agon, and one related to the poetic excavation I have conducted in the last chapter. With the martial overtones of the poetry contest in mind, it is most relevant that it does so by turning to the hero in time of war. Stevens’ turn requires us to distinguish between the warrior as hero and the (priestly) poet as heroic “warrior of words.” The second usage of ‘warrior’ is analogically predicated on the first. In the background to the warrior and the priest stands the equivocal role of the king. In the winter solstice festivals Kuiper describes, the king figure retains the function of patron and “delegates” to the poet as his representative in battle: “while impersonating Indra as maghávā [distributor of the goods of life, OBB] by his munificence, he obliges the poets by his gifts to assist him in return by defending his party in the word duels in the sabhā” (Kuiper 1960, 280; Perse 1949, 86). In time of war, Stevens’ hero elevates the man on the dump. Through the mental internalization of war—“that war is part of [the mind] itself ”—Stevens indicates a possibility for identifying the poet and the common (every)man, and in “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” misery and mastery converge. This convergence, however, can only occur in the emergency condition that “the whole life of a community was in question” (Bromwich 2001, 83), and so the elevation is premised on an exceptional social fact. Stevens “did not in fact want to consider the war as an aesthetic spectacle, or as a subject for the imagination. ‘The immense poetry of war,’ which he speaks of in a prose note written at this time, is not assimilable by poetry itself: it belongs to a different kind of making” (Bromwich 2001, 85). Stevens asserts that in this

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violent condition, “consciousness can take the place of imagination” (cited, Bromwich 2001, 85), and this could perhaps even serve as a model for poetic reason but for the fact of its anomalous social position, which promotes pre-conscious to conscious processes. Yet we have seen above that even at the most basic level it is when poetry frustrates us, by presenting us with an anomaly forcing us to choose a solution, that the poem as autonomous linguistic artifact presents itself to us most explicitly. For Bromwich, the altogether winning trait shared by Eliot and Ashbery is something else again: “ one realizes how far perfection of the work, as Ashbery reads it, must always be from any conflict with perfection of life. But that is because the two have no relation to each other at all. The poet’s individual disasters or windfalls, if he has either in a notable degree, will be taken as they are dealt out, free of any connection with the energy that his words carry past him. Ashbery’s understanding of these matters has enabled him to appear at once the most confident and the least arrogant of poets” (Bromwich 2001, 19). For Ashbery, whatever art is, it is always happening elsewhere. The self is a spark protected beyond experience. By way of contrast (and put a bit euphemistically, perhaps), Geoffrey Hill’s “distinct negative appeal—a charmless personal integrity—is a source of Hill’s endurance thus far” (Bromwich 2001, 152). Hill “continues to write a poetry of strife, with a wish to end in conciliatory prayer and … he stands out now as the British poet who can be read beside the masters of the high style” (Bromwich 2001, 151). One envisions the transition from strife to prayer as a right adjoint to the modulation from tramp to hero (Lawvere 1966): where the one promotes from verbal agon to hymn, the other moves from the ordinary to the exceptional struggle. “What Stevens was most struck by during the war, and what he wrote the “Examination” to celebrate, was the wager the soldiers took in joining a task which, whether it succeeded or failed, would change the meaning of everything it touched” (Bromwich 2001, 87). In contrast, Ashbery “appears to speak from the wisdom of ordinary action and suffering; but he does so by describing the pathology of art as the pathology of life” (Bromwich 2001, 196). In part this registers a change of generations, but mainly it aligns (early) Eliot with Ashbery more closely than either is aligned with anything in Stevens. (By now, the reader has no doubt noticed my willingness to weigh in on Ashbery as Gnostic and my

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unwillingness on Stevens.) And yet for all the Jamesian convergence in Stevens’ poetry of the 40’s, he “never gave up his interest in the “accelerations that seem inhuman,” the shifting sum of all the effects that belong to the Nietzschean hero” (Bromwich 2001, 88). There are many issues to fit into place, but pacing remains the central reality of the American condition. For Bromwich “the aesthetic that seems to me compelling in modernism was mostly improvised from a rhetoric of understatement” (Bromwich 2001, 3). This “quiet modernism” makes room for the Auden tradition in Bromwich’s canon of American modernism, extending through Elizabeth Bishop (with a crucial antecedence in Marianne Moore), Adrienne Rich, and with Ashbery a fully paid up member. It seems exclusive of Eliot, Crane, Hill and even Stevens. Yet Bromwich is able to lean (heavily) on Stevens’ insistence that he intended nothing (Bromwich 2001, 17); is this Stevens on the super-sly, outfoxing foxy Robert Frost? Perhaps it is not so much understatement as slyness that is the fitter characterization: this would allow in Eliot and Ashbery if not perhaps Crane and Hill. Elizabeth Bishop’s remark is on the main line of this impulse: “what one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” (cited, Bromwich 2001, 23). Once again we brush up against the poet’s own proto-Gnostic resistance to poetic reason. This desideratum expresses the intersection between a conception of “the meaninglessness of ritual” such as that proposed by J. Frits Staal and Richard Rorty’s central remark, that the United States can count itself lucky to possess several thousand individual whose business it is to analyze philosophical concepts for no particular reason. We are very close to the transformation of the verbal poetry contest into a fully litigious analytic culture divested of all intrinsic content, the culture of bureaucracy and litigation, where a relapse into full blown verbal contest promotes unbridled technocratism. Such self-representation as that given by Bishop verges on disavowal of the distinctive modulation in the early twentieth century poetry Bromwich considers, and as such his own opting for a characterization in terms of “quiet modernism” verges on self-betrayal. Bromwich compares this, wrongly I think, to a passage in which one of Thomas Hardy’s heroes, about to plummet to his death off a cliff, hangs on long enough to contemplate a trilobite fossil. “Here

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if anywhere is an instance of perfectly useless concentration” (Bromwich 2001, 30). We need to take account of the ironic registration inherent in such a comment, whether intentional or not, and puzzling out the appeal to Hardy would show just how close an aesthetic or cultural awareness can lie to its own self-cannibalizing undoing. American poetry after Ashbery fails in ambition, and to return to an era in which poetic ambition was culturally confirmed we must go back to the age of Eliot, Crane and Stevens. I end with some comments on a short lyric by an unsung hero of this generation, the astonishing Howard Blake, who published “Lyric: On Other Terms” in 1936, a metapoetic masterpiece fit to conclude this second chapter on the logic of lyric. I transact on the style of my previous dissections of Dickinson and Frost, but with an eye especially to the discussion of Jakobson above. Zenocrates is the name of the wife in Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine. ‘Zenocrate’ does not appear as such in the OED, but there is an instance for ‘Zenocratically’ and a derivation which gives Ζεύς + κράτος, power, rule. Zeus is the Greek analogue of Indra. “What one hopes to obtain in the sabhā is power” (Kuiper 1960, 278). I do not know that Blake was looking at Vedic sources, but Austin Warren reports that he was talking to a graduate student in the Harvard Philosophy Department with interests in Leibniz, Santayana and Whitehead—a spread similar to Eliot’s, which extended onto Indian sources as well. Blake was most certainly reading Eliot and Crane intensely, and so would have pondered Eliot’s reference to Indian sources and Crane’s “Sanskrit charge.” Leaves: a probable point of comparison are those of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Blake’s leaves cannot be engaged in verbal contest, and so avoid “saccharine repulse” as well as girder erected to the sun. They are disengaged from battle, will cross no Rubicon. Hesperides is the Isle of the Blessed, at the far Western extremity of the world: interesting points of forward comparison are Saint-John Perse’s Vents and Oppen’s “Disasters.” This disowning of any knowledge of “split ditches” should be compared with the myth of Indra splitting the primordial hill (but also to the splitting open of earthly graves), which is juxtaposed to an oceanic lassitude. Blake proposes, if he proposes at all, instead of a logic of lyric conceived as verbal agon, a dialogue of the dead.

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Is Blake’s a logic of lyric’s endgame, much as I’ve considered endgames of German Idealism above? To put the point in linguistic terms: what on earth is happening to the first-person? In this world of espionage can there be a personality profile of amiable lassitude? Beyond Tom’s boom …

Notes 1. Toporov cites a passage from Valéry which strongly suggests that Valéry identified something intrinsically modern in the sort of poetic connections Toporov considers: “The poet’s operation is exercised by means of the complex value of words, that is, in composing at once sound and sense … like algebra operating on complex numbers” (cited, Toporov 1981, 194). The comparison to operating on complex numbers suggests that the poetic use of language “torques” it (Bassler 2012, 174 ff). This twisting is obviously related to Lacan’s fascination with the topology of the Möbius strip and related figures. 2. This leaves outstanding the question how we are to identify exactly what counts as the template, as opposed to the variations. 3. Apologies: underperiods have not been supplied. 4. ‘Set’ is being used to translate the Russian ustanovka, “a calque for German Einstellung, a philosophical term designating apperception, the viewpoint or mental set crucial in the perceiver’s constituting an object” (Jakobson 1990, 506, n. 2 to Chap. 2). 5. Jakobson insists that the formalist orientation he shares with Tynjanov, Mukařovský and Šklovskij is erroneously identified with an “art for art’s sake approach”: “What we stand for is not the autonomy of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function” (Jakobson 1990, 378). What I am insisting is that the autonomy of the aesthetic function” should also not be understood on analogy with art for art’s sake: the function is autonomous in the sense that it cannot be reduced to other functions. The same holds true for the poetic function conceived of as a basic linguistic function. 6. In terms of the diagram given above, Jakobson also identifies first (emotive), second (conative) and third (referential) persons with the genres of lyric, exhortation, and epic respectively (Jakobson 1990, 70). Gerard Génette notes that while epic and drama are clearly represented as genres in Aristotle’s poetics, lyric, which is usually taken as the third classical

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genre, is not present. Rather, Aristotle establishes a correlation between three styles of address and three genres: heroic verse (epic), iambic verse (tragedy and comedy) and the dithyramb. It is in the eighteenth century that the dithyramb is identified with the lyric (Génette 1977, 391). In fact, Génette argues that to attribute a system of genres to Aristotle at all is an anachronism. 7. This observation has implications for those semioticians who would seek to divest Jakobson’s scheme from its connection to a full code associated with the metalinguistic function. While I am sympathetic to the idea that an explicit code is not structurally inherent to Jakobson’s scheme but is rather extrinsically assumed, the phatic function always implies the establishment of some context, and the identification of this context is the first step in the process of “decoding” a given message. Although in many actual cases, the phatic function will be inclusive of establishing the code in terms of which the message is given (“Hello” indicates, for example, that the code is English), this is not necessary. These points are especially important in the appropriation, modification or rejection of Jakobson’s scheme for musical semiotics (Nattiez 1990, esp. 16–19, Grant 2001, 155–8). For related reasons, Jakobson introduces the distinction between introversive and extroversive semiosis in his essay, “Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems,” (Jakobson 1971, 697–708); also (Nattiez 1990, 111–17) and (Agawu 1991, 132–3). 8. Here again musical composition presents itself as a crucial test-case.

Bibliography Agawu, V. Kofi. Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton, 1991). Bassler, O. Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prahran: re.press, 2012). Blumenberg, Hans. Höhlenausgänge (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989). Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). Bromwich, David. Sceptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (Chicago: Chicago, 2001).

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De Santillana, Giorgio, and von Dechend, Hertha. Hamlet’s Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Gambit, 1969). Genette, Gérard. “Genres, «types», modes,” Poétique 32 (1977), 389–421. Grant, M. J. Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001). Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature (Cambridge: Belknap, 1990). Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings 2 (Hague: Mouton, 1971). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). Kuiper, F. B. J. “The Ancient Aryan Verbal Contest,” Indo-Iranian Journal 4 4 (1960), 217–281. Lawvere, F. William. “Adjointness in Foundations,” Dialectica 23 3/4 (1966), 281–96. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago, 1966). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton, 1990). Perse, St.-John. Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse, trans. T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1949). Sacred Writings. Hinduism: The Rig Veda, trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith (New York: Quality Paperback, 1992). (Original editions of translation: 1889/1896). Toporov, Vladimir N. “Die Ursprünge der indoeuropaischen Poetik,” trans. Peter L. W. Koch Poetica 13 3–4 (1981), 189–251. Watkins, Calvert. “Language of Gods and Language of Men. Remarks on Some Indo-European Metalinguistics Traditions,” in J. Puhvel, ed. Myth and Law Among the Indo-Euorpeans (Berkeley: Studies in Indo-European Comparative Mythology, 1970), 1–17. Witzel, Michael. “Sur le chemin du ciel,” Bulletin des Études indiennes 2 (1984): 213–279. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Vol. 1: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1964).

Part IV The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason

9 Priming the Deduction: The Medium of Reflection and The Poetic Subject

In this chapter I provide an account of the poetic subject which is adequate to the legitimation of poetic reason to be provided in Chap. 10. I begin descriptively, by appropriating Hegel’s discussion of the medium of reflection for an account of the poetic subject as medium of reflection, and then I make explicit the transcendental deduction underlying Lacan’s derivation of the object a as cause of desire. Lacan’s psychoanalytic subject is in fact adequate to both the conceptions of poetic and analytic reason derived from Jakobson’s table of linguistic functions and factors in the previous chapter, and whether we identify the subject as poetic or analytic will depend on whether we stress the articulation of the subject according to the levels associated with the various forms of object a (analytic subject) or whether we stress the object a as cause of desire (poetic subject). In providing a transcendental deduction of the object a as cause from the formal description of the typography of the object a according to levels, I establish a link between analytic and poetic reason that helps us see not just what the poetic subject entails but also how the traditional conception of the analytic subject is radically revised in being subject by Lacan to the demands of Freud’s Copernican revolution.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_9

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9.1 Reflection in Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence Already in Chap. 1, we encountered Benjamin’s reading of Schlegel’s promotion of a novel conception of the poetic work which, however, remains unprotected in Schlegel’s work itself. This unshielded condition goes some way to explaining the inertial pull of Schlegel’s thought, and those of many others in his generation, toward a culturally reactionary position, ideologically if not coherently anti-modern. This is indeed the larger fate of the romantic movement itself. To what extent may we, then, find a legitimation of this new concept of the poetic work (as reconstructed by Benjamin) in the work of Schlegel and his contemporaries, and specifically as something which can be legitimated in terms of a modern conception of rationality along Blumenberg’s lines? In previous chapters, I have followed out numerous efforts to recuperate the romantic impulse for philosophical modernism, and specifically insofar as they might contribute to a legitimation of poetic reason consonant with a commitment to modernity in Blumenberg’s sense. In general these efforts are ultimately unsuccessful, largely because the revision to the account of the nature of reason they propose is insufficiently radical. However, in inspecting these attempts, not only have the challenges faced by a legitimation of poetic reason become much clearer, but vectors along which such a legitimation might be provided have become clearer, too. This is especially the case in the extent to which these various prospects stake out some version of “reason after Freud,” and this makes Lacan’s work paradigmatic, especially in its self-constitution as a response to the Hegelian sense of negation as developed by Kojève and Hyppolite. Thus, in this volume I have focused on some late examples drawn from the reception history of German Idealism; a fuller reconstruction of the trajectory of German Idealism itself is a project for another time. For such a reconstruction, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre would prove central. Not only is this work (in its various editions) of great intrinsic merit so far as German Idealist philosophy is concerned, it was also a chief philosophical impulse for the development of the Jena Romanticism surrounding the Schlegels and for the work of the “Tübinger Stifters” (Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling). Ultimately, the innovation Benjamin identifies in Friedrich Schlegel occurs in this context and must be seen both as

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response and reaction to Fichte. Following on a consideration of the Wissenschaftslehre, one naturally comes to Schelling’s System of Absolute Idealism. Schelling was himself a peripheral member of the Jena Circle, contributing to the seminal Athenaeum journal, and his System could be read as an eccentric illumination of it. Hegel’s Differenzschrift systematizes his response to both Fichte and Schelling, and this work could serve, finally, as a transition to the consideration of Hegel’s doctrine of essence in the Science of Logic. Hegel’s doctrine of essence, I suggest, is the closest approximation we find to a legitimation of poetic reason along “German Idealist” lines. And so, although I will forgo the trajectory outlined above, I include a preliminary discussion of Hegel’s doctrine of essence here. My claim for the doctrine of essence is itself somewhat anachronistic, since it was not Hegel’s goal to offer a legitimation of poetic reason in the sense I propose, and indeed, as I read it, no commitment to poetic reason is on offer in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Yet, what I intend by the claim should become clear in due course, and framing matters in these terms will also help to illuminate precisely why this was not Hegel’s self-assigned task. This treatment I give relies extensively on Béatrice Longuenesse’s Hegel et la critique de la métaphysique: Étude de la doctrine de l’essence (Longuenesse 1981).

9.1.1 Reason and Negation The extent to which Hegel’s reason differs from the poetic reason to be legitimated can be measured most conveniently in terms of the location of negation with respect to each. Interposing Lacan as middle term, we can measure, first, the distance from Hegelian to Freudian/Lacanian negation, and from there the distance along to the negation identified with poetic reason. This is not the only measure, nor perhaps even the best one, but it is the most expedient for the moment. In the Science of Logic, Hegel conveniently specifies the central role of negation in his conception of logic near the very beginning of the enterprise, in the context of distinguishing between understanding and reason:

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The understanding determines, and holds the determinations fixed; reason is negative and dialectical, because it resolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive because it generates the universal and comprehends the particular therein. Just as the understanding is usually taken to be something separate from reason as such, so too dialectical reason is usually taken to be something distinct from positive reason. But reason in its truth is spirit which is higher than either merely positive reason, or merely intuitive understanding. It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality alike of dialectical reason and of understanding; it negates what is simple, thus positing the specific difference of the understanding; it equally resolves it and is thus dialectical. But it does not stay in the nothing of this result but in the result is no less positive, and in this way it has restored what was at first simple, but as a universal which is within itself concrete; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but in this determining, this positing of a difference, and the resolving of it, the particular has at the same time already determined itself. This spiritual movement which, in its simple undifferentiatedness, gives itself its own determinateness and in its determinateness its equality with itself, which therefore is the immanent development of the Notion, this movement is the absolute method of knowing and at the same time is the immanent soul of the content itself. I maintain that it is this self-construing method alone which enables philosophy to be an objective, demonstrated science. (Hegel 1976, 28)

Hegel goes on to specify the way in which the Phenomenology of Spirit, where the immanent development of the notion is laid out, constitutes the “foreground” of the Science of Logic.

9.1.2 The Attainment of Notion and the Position of Essence Essence supplies the location within the Science of Logic which identifies the way in which the program of the Phenomenology is distinct from the Logic. For in the doctrine of essence, the Notion, though presented in the becoming of its inwardness, still remains attached to the external medium which Hegel calls immediate being, and so is therefore included in the division of objective logic. As such, “the doctrine of essence … stands

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midway between the doctrine of being and that of the Notion” (Hegel 1976, 61). On analogy with Benjamin’s reconstruction of Schlegel, we may see the place occupied here as the external place (locus) of the artwork.

9.1.3 The Three Forms of Reflection Béatrice Longuenesse defines Hegelian reflection as “the endlessly repeated movement by which thought as a ‘function of unity’—to adapt a Kantian term—returns to itself by way of the multiple determinations that it finds in itself, (only) then to carry itself, beyond the unity thus rediscovered, towards other determinations” (Longuenesse 1981, 63; all translations mine). On analogy with Benjamin’s reconstruction of Schlegel, the term corresponding to reflection will be poiesis. Hegel characterizes the reflective movement as “an absolute recoil [absoluter Gegenstoß] upon itself ” (Hegel 1976, 402; Žižek 2014). This movement comprises three distinct forms of reflection: 1. Positing reflection: “this reflection is positing in that it suppresses immediacy so as to make it a posited being (Gesetztsein), that is to say, a thought determination” (Longuenesse 1981, 64). 2. External reflection: “this second movement is that of the recognition of the relative autonomy of the ‘presupposed’” (Longuenesse 1981, 64). 3. Determining reflection: “unity of positing reflection and external reflection. It is external reflection in that, as with this latter, it confronts another, it takes the risk of losing itself in the given, unforeseeable determinations. But it is positing reflection in that this other is nothing but itself ” (Longuenesse 1981, 65). In my characterization of poetic reason, this threefold movement corresponds to the fading and retrieving of the subject in poiesis.

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9.1.4 Essence In the overview for the section on the doctrine of essence, Hegel maps out the three chapters which will be our focus. Essence, Hegel tells us, is “being that has been sublated in and for itself ” (Hegel 1976, 393). But it is not yet notion: “in the whole of logic, essence occupies the same place as quantity does in the sphere of being; absolute indifference to limit.” But whereas quantity is this indifference as immediate, “in essence, on the other hand, the determinateness is not a simple immediacy but is present only as posited by essence itself.” This movement of positing involves negation, and “the negativity of essence is reflection; and the determinations are reflected, posited by essence itself and remaining in essence as sublated” (Hegel 1976, 391). This indicates the fundamental role of negation, and therefore reason, in reflection: it is specifically the negation identified in essence itself. Essence is itself first given as reflection: that is, it is given within negation as already involved. “Reflection determines itself and its determinations are a positedness which is at the same time reflection-into-self.” What is first posited is illusory being as that against which reflection stands over. But it is equally this being which reflection takes up into itself and determines as essence. This will result in determinate reflection. On the way from positing reflection to determining reflection we must pass through external reflection in which the difference (which in another way is no difference) between illusory being and reflection is “heightened.” It is this middle stage which is most precarious but also most interesting. Analogously, Peirce’s chief innovations lie the category of secondness, which corresponds to the status of indexical signs. Lacan’s philosophy is driven by the comparable innovations cultivated in the account of the mirror stage, which corresponds to the category of the imaginary. In all three cases, the third category, which we may uniformly call the symbolic, remains relatively deficient in its cultivation, and it would be a central part of the task of an account of poetic reason to redress this gap. Let us map out more systematically the three stages in this Hegelian determination:

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• Stage 1: positing reflection. This is the reflection that posits illusory being as that which it sublates: “The immediacy that reflection, as a process of sublating, presupposes for itself is purely and simply a positedness, an immediacy that is in itself sublated, that is not distinct from the return-into-self and is itself only this movement of return” (Hegel 1976, 402). Hegel also characterizes this stage as presupposing reflection and also as absolute reflection: “reflection, as absolute reflection, is essence that reflects its illusory being within itself and presupposes for itself only an illusory being, only positedness; as presupposing reflection, it is immediately only positing reflection” (Hegel 1976, 402). • Stage 2: external reflection. Hegel tells us that external reflection in the realm of being was the infinite: “the finite ranked as the first, as the real; as the foundation, the abiding foundation, it forms the starting point and the infinite is the reflection-into-self over against it” (Hegel 1976, 403). Earlier in the Logic, Hegel tells us that external reflection is involved when attention is payed to a fact which is, however, not itself expressed in a proposition (Hegel 1976, 90), and he characterizes the dialectic of Plato in Parmenides as a dialectic of external reflection (Hegel 1976, 100). Plato proceeds, according to Hegel, by comparing two different determinations of a proposition and “demonstrating from their difference” (Hegel 1976, 100–1). Again he reiterates that external reflection involves comparison (Hegel 1976, 118). From these passages we can see that external reflection is that reflection which proceeds by comparison, but comparison of what, exactly? Hegel gives us an answer in the context of the syllogism: This external reflection is the syllogism in which are the two extremes, the immediate and reflection-into-self; the middle term of the syllogism is the connection of the two, the determinate immediate…

External reflection “achieves” this determinate immediate by a comparison of the immediate, i.e. illusory being as reflection’s immediate presupposition (Hegel 1976, 403), with reflection-into-self. Although I defer discussion, I note that Hegel goes on to describe the transition to determining reflection by way of the reflection (!) that external reflection is itself not external.

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Stage 3: Determining reflection: this is “the unity of positing and external reflection.” It is achieved (in the paragraph previously mentioned) by recognizing that external reflection is positing reflection. We are now in a position to contrast stages one and two: Positing reflection

External reflection

starts from nothing

starts from immediate being posits an other (essence) in place of being

In determining reflection we achieve determinateness as negation in general. This is to be distinguished from determinate being  =  “simple immediacy.” The transition from positing reflection through external reflection to determining reflection is just this transition from simple immediacy to determinateness as negation, and yet following the indication Hegel gives us of the limit of the doctrine of essence, it is clear that this determinate negation is still attached to the immediacy of being. We achieve determinateness as negation in general because we do not start from being but from nothing (determining reflection is the reprise of positing reflection). This is not yet, however, a determination of reflection (Hegel 1976, 406). We might call negation in general also “universal negation” or “negation as such.” This is only one side of the determination of reflection: “In the determination of reflection, therefore, there are two sides which at first are distinguished from one another. First, the determination is positedness, negation as such; secondly, it is reflection-­ into-­self ” (Hegel 1976, 407). These two sides must be “thought together.” Hegel explains how this must happen a bit further on: “This its reflection and the above positedness are distinct; its positedness is rather its sublatedness; but its reflectedness-into-self is its subsistence. In so far, therefore, as it is the positedness that is at the same time reflection-into-self, the determinateness of reflection is the relation to its otherness within itself” (Hegel 1976, 408). Unlike quality in the realm of being, this determinateness is not “a ‘beingly’ quiescent determinateness”1 but rather “the determination of reflection is in its own self the determinate side and the

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relation of this determinate side as determinate, that is, (as) to its negation.” Putting this up front, the determination of reflection involves the bringing together of the determination and its negation, which will ultimately lead us, via identity and difference, to contradiction.

9.1.5 The Determinations of Reflection The determinations of reflection are best first approached through the remarks in which Hegel highlights their relation to the traditional logical laws of essence: the law of identity, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (“law of diversity”), the law of excluded middle, the law of contradiction. The Law of Identity: A  =  A is universally true and has no content. “Identity and difference are different”: this means “identity is different.” Already here we see that contradiction is involved in identity (Hegel 1976, 413). “The law of identity itself contains the movement of reflection, identity as a vanishing of otherness.” The law of diversity: Here Hegel again highlights the “movement of reflection.” This can be best brought out by the paragraph at (Hegel 1976, 423) beginning “This involves the dissolution …” He then moves on to opposition. The law of excluded middle and the law of contradiction: “Difference,” Hegel tells us, “as such is already implicitly contradiction; for it is the unity of sides which are, only in so far as they are not one—and it is the separation of sides which are, only as separated in the same relation” (Hegel 1976, 431). Through contradiction, opposition “withdraws into ground” (zu Grunde geht, literally “goes to the ground.”) The law of excluded middle is: something is either A or not-A. Hegel interprets this in the form: something is either +A or −A (positive or negative in an opposition). But ‘A’ is neither +A nor −A. The law of contradiction: in opposition to the standard formulation, Hegel says the truth of contradiction could be grasped through the law, “everything is inherently contradictory.” This, of course, is the opposite of the standard formulation: “there is nothing that is contradictory” (Hegel 1976, 439).

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9.1.6 Ground As Longuenesse asserts, “It is with ground that one truly passes from the simple critique of the illusory autonomy of the determinations of being to the exposition of the proper productivity of essence” (Longuenesse 1981, 107). The remarks at the end of the chapter on the determinations of reflection concerning contradiction are a culmination of sorts of the project which is initiated in the chapter on illusory being, in which Hegel showed that the movement of essence is to establish itself through the positing of a (sublated) being. Longuenesse gives a nice summary of this positing movement of essence: “Essence is from the beginning defined as unified movement of thought which posits being; that thought posits being signifies that it constitutes being at the same time it suppresses it, that it gives itself a representation of being’s objectivity at the same time that it denies the autonomy of this objectivity with respect to its own determinations” (Longuenesse 1981, 108). As Longuenesse also says, this positing is always ultimately a presupposing since it is with respect to the being posited that essence is itself “constituted” (Longuenesse 1981, 117). But by virtue of the fact that essence establishes itself over against this positedness, the determinations of reflection are “self-divisive.” In order to expose the “proper productivity of essence,” essence must begin to overcome this division. It is the three stages of ground that witness this progression. The resolution of this divisiveness is only encountered when essence collapses into its self-division (what Longuenesse, among many others, calls its “alterity”); when, that is, it “goes to the ground.” Once again Hegel relies on the antithetical nature of language to evince the “solution amidst the ruins,” which relies on precisely the “absolute recoil” which reflection itself is. This particular pivot occupies a very special position: it is not only “self-instancing” but also instances its own self-­characterization. These two “moments,” however, do not coincide, which distinguishes this pivot of reflection as ground from the final completion (of reflection) as concept.

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To begin to comprehend this progression, I start with a brief characterization, drawn from Longuenesse, of the three stages of determination of absolute ground. The absolute ground is “the exposition of the different categorial pairs in which is thought the immanence of the ground to that which it ‘founds’—to all determination” (Longuenesse 1981, 117). The determined ground breaks into three stages: 1. formal ground, 2. real ground, and 3. complete ground. 1. Formal ground: “This negative mediation of the ground and the grounded is the characteristic mediation of the form as such, formal mediation.” The determinateness is simple, in the sense of not being yet divided up into “two sides”: “Now since in the determinate ground, the ground and the grounded are each the whole form, and their content, though determinate, is one and the same, it follows that there is as yet no real determination of the sides of the ground, they have no distinct content; the determinate is as yet only simple, it has not yet passed over into the sides; what is present is the determinate ground at first in its pure form, the formal ground” (Hegel 1976, 457–8). 2. Real ground: “is the exposition of this mediation of the ground and of a content [in which a content is presupposed by the ground in the same way that essence presupposed a being] in which it exposes itself, in which it is achieved [est à l’œuvre]” (Longuenesse 1981, 117). “The definition of the real ground thus consists, instead of immediately transposing a phenomenal unity (in the “given” object) into an essential hypostasis, in seeking in this unity which one of its multiple determinations is its support.” As Longuenesse goes on to say: “That is, which is the ‘essential’ determination which unifies all the others in order to make [faire] the unity of the thing. The principle is no longer tautological [as in the case of the absolute or formal ground] since there is a real difference between the ground and its result. Further, it [the principle] is not realized in a hypothetical heaven of ideas, but in the effective confrontation of the ground with the empirical multiplicity” (Longuenesse 1981, 123). 3. Complete ground is the synthesis of these previous two stages. Although Longuenesse’s characterization will not make complete sense until the first two movements are considered in more detail, she describes complete ground in the following terms:

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The complete ground is thus a ground unifying in itself formal ground and real ground. It is real in the measure to which a connection [rapport] between real determinations is thought, the predominance of the “essential” real determinations over those which are “inessential” for grounding a whole including within itself these two types of determinations. But it is also “formal” in that this connection between “essential” and “inessential” determinations is in turn ‘grounded … by its own reflection. The reflection of unity “grounds” unity. The reflected connection “grounds” the real connection’. (Longuenesse 1981, 127)

Here we see that what is critical to the complete ground is that it is a “connection of connections” [rapports des rapports] (Longuenesse 1981, 125). This movement is the analogue of the reversal of the principle of non-contradiction at the end of the chapter on the determinations of reflection. The ground is precisely that which signifies the unity of thought by bringing the determinations of reflection into the reflection itself rather than allowing them to remain “divisive” (Longuenesse 1981, 133). This issue will be taken further in the confrontation of ground and condition. Longuenesse also correlates these three stages with helpful “examples” to keep in mind (Longuenesse 1981, 115): formal ground: law and force real ground: causality complete ground: reciprocal action As we can see, these three examples can also be thought together as separate stages through which one overarching exemplar passes. The other “example” which Longuenesse proposes to follow through this movement is Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception. At first, we “recognize” the synthetic unity of apperception only in terms of our ability to let the “I think” accompany all our presentations. That is, we recognize the synthetic unity of apperception only as the formal ground of the analytic unity of apperception. Then we move on to the attribution of an active unification to the synthetic unity of apperception. This is the stage at which we split into two “moments,” which are associated with concepts and intuitions respectively (Longuenesse 1981, 134). Here Longuenesse

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is discussing the section on ground and condition, but the two moments are the analogues of those first rendered explicit for ground in the section on real ground. Finally, the notion of complete ground would at least be “anticipated” in Kant’s doctrine of “self-affection” and perhaps even as “developed” in the Selbstsetzungslehre in the Opus Postumum (Kant 1993). But we can say that by and large the First Critique remains at the level of real ground.

9.1.7 Ground and Condition Ground and condition stand in the same relation as did previously essence and illusory being. The latter is posited by the former and (ultimately) recognized as presupposed. Each is “relatively independent” of the other, but only in the sense that the two moments which they “represent” stand apart. In terms of the dichotomy ground/condition and its resolution in terms of the “absolute unconditioned,” Hegel provides a rereading of the Kantian thing-in-itself. Longuenesse points out that we must be careful to recognize that for Hegel at each stage we are dealing with a connection between two different levels of being, whereas in Kant we are, at one stage, dealing with the distinction between concept and intuition, and, at another, with the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal (Longuenesse 1981, 134). Longuenesse’s reading is specifically with respect to Kant’s fourth antinomy, but the point can be made in general terms. In each of Kant’s antinomies, two arguments are presented which are equally persuasive once speculative appeal is made to an idea of reason. Kant takes this consequence as an indication that no such speculative appeal can be made. As Longuenesse points out, Hegel’s point, on the contrary, is that both “sides” of the antinomy are the “same argument,” since they are only two difference ways to define the same thing, the ‘series of all the conditions’. Even more, these two different ways have the same ground, which is the unconditioned exigency of reason. This exigency is expressed, on the one side by the a priori affirmation of the achievement of the series of conditions: the totality of this series is posited as condition of the series itself. On the other, the exigency of the unconditioned is expressed in the rule which commands not to complete arbitrarily the empirical

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search for conditions: the empirical series is posited as condition of its proper totalization. (Longuenesse 1981, 135–6)

As I would put it, Hegel identifies the two arguments as the same because they are equal as expressions of the problem of the parafinite. Hegel takes both sides of the Fourth Antinomy to express what he calls “the exigency of reason,” and this shows that Hegel’s commitment to reason is itself a function of the problem of the parafinite. In the next section, I exemplify this state of affairs in the development of the Peirce’s thought.

9.1.8 Coda on Peirce Peirce’s early work in philosophy was, by his own report, dominated by Kant’s two tables: the table of the logical functions of judgment and the table of categories. He was consistently drawn to the relation between the two tables, which he took to be established by the metaphysical deduction, but rejected the transcendental deduction and the superstructure of transcendental idealism which it supported because of the conception of the transcendental object which it implied (Murphey 1993, 33). I have suggested elsewhere that we view Peirce’s argument for the pragmatic maxim as a replacement for Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories of understanding (Bassler 2018, 117–33). For present purposes it is enough to say that Peirce felt there was a tension within Kant’s system between the fundamentally realistic impulse of Kant’s Copernican revolution and the residual idealism of Kant’s discussion of the transcendental object. That is, Peirce felt that Kant’s Copernican revolution should result in a realism of the phenomenal realm. In order to refashion the Kantian enterprise along these lines, it was incumbent upon Peirce to re-interpret Kant’s thing-in-itself in such a way that it left the picture: to interpret it away, as it were. We have seen how Hegel attempts to provide such an interpretation: we take the contradiction embodied in the thing-in-itself, namely that it is an unthought thought, as an indication of what Longuenesse has referred to as the “exigency of reason” and argue that Kant’s revolution requires a completion in terms of the metaphysics of “thought being.” In this way, as I would put

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it, the notion of thought being goes proxy for an explicit cultivation of the parafinite. Peirce’s program is similar insofar as real being for Peirce just is phenomenal being (the one and only matrix, that reality in which we live and breathe): there is a sense in which Peirce’s position expresses a doctrine of immediate perception, a tempered form of direct realism. But whereas Hegel suggests that the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal must be replaced with an account of “thought being” in which this division is overcome (aufgehoben), Peirce insists that Kant’s phenomenalism be purged of its residual noumenalism. Consequently, instead of giving an account of thought being, Peirce must give an account of “the unthought thought,” as in fact he does in an early essay: Proposition. All unthought is thought-of. Proof. We can sometimes think of the unthinkable as thought; we have, for instance, a conception of the conception Infinity, though we cannot attain that conception. To think of a thing is to think in such a way that our conception has a relation to that thing … any unthought which is not thought of as thought, is by the relation of complete negation, negatively thought of as unthought. Cor. I. Only the phenomena can be thought of as thought, the things in themselves are thought of as unthought. Cor. II. All neumena (things-in-themselves) are unconditioned because they cannot even be thought of as thought. Cor. III. All thought is thereby thought of, for it would not be in our consciousness unless we were conscious of it. Hence, all things in heaven and earth are thought of, however small our experience may be. Cor. IV. Whatever is unthought is apprehended, for as I showed before all falsehood is partial truth. Whatever is thought-of can be normally thought of. Normal thought is true. Therefore all the unconditioned is apprehended and may be so without error. To formulate it: Whatever is unintelligible is true. (cited, Murphey 1993, 27–8)

Peirce’s position changes somewhat, and it will be helpful to point out how he stood around 1868 with regard to the same issues. He defines

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“cognizable” as “experienceable” and argues that we cannot speak of “incognizable” as being a concept, with this being understood in one of two senses. Either in ‘not-cognizable’ we take the ‘not’ syncategorematically, in which case we have no concept of ‘not’, or else, as Peirce puts it, ‘incognizable’ is a (self-contradictory) concept of the cognizable: “Not, then, or what is other than, if a concept, is a concept of the cognizable. Hence, not-cognizable, if a concept … is, at least, self-contradictory.” As Murphey concludes: “Thus cognizability and being are synonymous and the denial of cognizability is either meaningless or impossible” (Murphey 1993, 112). These two positions differ, but both express Peirce’s general stance that the uncognizable, if a concept, can only be a concept of the cognizable. The latter expression of this view moves away from the previous expression of this subsumption in terms of partiality (falsehood is a partial truth, the unintelligible is true) to the stronger formulation in terms of contradiction (the incognizable is a self-contradictory concept at best). These declarations are both expressions of Peirce’s commitment to the reality of the experienceable, on the one hand, and the cognizability of the experienceable on the other. As did Kant, Peirce came to the conclusion that the unconditioned would be uncognizeable. But because of his commitment to phenomenalism, Peirce drew conclusions of which Kant stopped short. In particular, Peirce denied the existence of intuitions, that is, of direct presentations. For Peirce, if there were to be any such things, these would lie on the side of the unconditioned, not the conditioned (this was a consequence of Peirce’s pursuit of the Kantian point that, as he would put it, all perception implies inference because perception is structured according to the logical structure of judgment.) That is, there is no first, or most direct presentation. What we are seeing here is Peirce’s application within the realm of the phenomenal of just those strictures which Kant established in the realm of the noumenal. We may say that Peirce has imported the parafinite (though he would conceive of it as a form of the infinite) into the phenomenal realm. (As I read him, Kant also brought the parafinite into the phenomenal realm when he identified the manifold as the pure form of intuition. But this is a wholly different tack than the one Peirce takes.)

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As a result, Peirce brought the continuity of the phenomenal to the fore. Each cognition implied previous cognitions; although all cognitions are to be temporally extended (none are instantaneous), there is no lower bound on how short a temporal duration may be through which a cognition extends. If there were, cognitions would bottom out, and we would have most direct cognitions, i.e. unmediated intuitions. Peirce’s project gives an indication of why Hegel would take the extension of the form of intuition, and then the productive imagination to be incipient forms of Reason. What Peirce discovered was that the unconditioned enters in a “roundabout” way already at precisely those loci which Hegel also identified. From this we may draw two conclusions of major relevance for the project at hand. First, Hegel already identifies why an appeal to the imagination cannot be made to repair a conception of reason which is too narrow: any such imagination must itself already commit us to the germ of a broader reason whose consequences must be drawn out. This is precisely what Hegel, by his lights, is doing, and what makes his philosophy a precursor of the legitimation of poetic reason. At the same time, Peirce can help attune us to the way that the very limitations of Kant’s appeal to the thing-in-itself which Hegel identifies are themselves indications of the complexity of a problem which the doctrine of essence cannot face,2 and these are reflected precisely in the way the logic of essence remains attached to the immediacy of being. Peirce’s commitments suggest an alternative at once to the radical indefiniteness of Kant’s externalism and Hegel’s overcoming of it in the Subjective Logic. This alternative is to identify a form of externalism within the phenomenal domain itself. In the remainder of this book I will argue that this externalism is precisely the locus of poiesis; this is the sense in which Peirce’s philosophy stands as precursor to the legitimation of poetic reason. While this is certainly not the locus of reflection in the doctrine of essence, it retains a structural analogy to it. This allows us to identify what is trenchant in the identification of the poetic work as privileged medium of reflection and also what must be jettisoned in the German Idealist and Romantic account of it. Hegel was also correct to view negation and in particular the status of contradiction as key issues in his response to Kant’s philosophy. Once we call into question the Kantian treatment of the thing-in-itself, and so

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Kant’s indefinite externalism, the conceptual status of negation is the first issue to address. But Peirce’s project also shows that there are two ways to respond to the feeling that Kant’s advance is “not enough.” One is to “overcome” the distinctions which Kant made, that is: to elevate those distinctions to a more appropriate metaphysical level. This is, in some sense, what Hegel proposes. The other is to reject the distinctions as conceptually incoherent, with this conceptual coherence spurring not an ‘overcoming’ of this incoherence but rather a radicalization of one side of the Kantian distinction. This is what Peirce proposes. Peirce’s proposal remains metaphysical, but in an altogether different sense than Hegel’s. We might say that in Hegel’s case we attempt to progress by aggravating, and so deepening, the conflict which Kant indicated. Hegel exemplifies this when he describes the relation between finite, contradictory being and the progression to the absolute. Hegel says at the end of the chapter on the essentialities or determinations of reflection: Finite things, therefore, in their indifferent multiplicity are simply this, to be contradictory and disrupted within themselves and to return into their ground. As will be demonstrated later, the true inference from a finite and contingent being to an absolutely necessary being does not consist in inferring the latter from the former as from a being that is and remains the ground; on the contrary, the inference is from a being that, as is also directly implied in contingency, is only in a state of collapse and is inherently self-­ contradictory; or rather, the true inference consists in showing that contingent being in its own self withdraws into its ground in which it is sublated, and further, that by this withdrawal it posits the ground only in such a manner that it rather makes itself into a positedness. In ordinary inference, the being of the finite appears as ground of the absolute; because the finite is, therefore the absolute is. But the truth is that the absolute is, because the finite is the inherently self-contradictory opposition, because it is not. In the former meaning, the inference runs thus: the being of the finite is the being of the absolute; but in the latter, thus: the non-being of the finite is the being of the absolute. (Hegel 1976, 443)

Following Longuenesse, I would argue that the appeal of these sections of Hegel’s Logic has to do with the way in which Hegel articulates the “divisiveness” of finite-being. But at least on the usual interpretations it is just

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this specificity which Hegel’s enterprise “overcomes.” In shorthand: concept over ground. On the other hand, the Peircean enterprise, by virtue of the way it proceeds, fortifies precisely those junctures within the Kantian enterprise that Hegel has identified as crucial and remains with them. Shorthand: Hegel tarries with the negative, Peirce tarries with the Kantian. The result is that instead of a metaphysics of thought-being, Peirce provides us with a metaphysics of continuity. The limits of Peircean metaphysics are, above all, more perspicuous for the current project, for they point us directly to the question: what is the role of discontinuity in poiesis, and how does it stand in relation to poetic reason? Lacan provides a bridge, for he begins with a response to Hegel on negation and ends with an account of the subject-(dis)-continuum. The next order of business will therefore be to extract an account of the paraphysical poietic subject from Lacan’s subject-(dis)-continuum.

9.2 Lacanian Extraction: Deduction and the Poetic Subject Among investigations of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories in the First Critique, there has been considerable debate about where the transcendental deduction begins and ends. I find that in this debate there is an anxiety which is generated by finding that the transcendental deduction is much too short for it possibly to do the heavy lifting Kant ascribes to it. That this anxiety goes largely unstated is itself telling: it gets played out instead in arguing about the boundaries of the deduction, distinguishing a “longer” version and a “shorter” contained within it (as I myself have also done). In contrast with views of anxiety as indefinite because lacking an object, Lacan tells us anxiety is not without an object, and I think Kant’s transcendental deduction furnishes us with an especially perspicuous example of this state of affairs. We know there is transcendental deduction, because Kant tells us there is, but almost everything else seems up for grabs (in this regard, presenting an uncanny counterpart to the thing-in-itself ). The more we look for it, the more it slips away, becoming itself a slip, a dechet as Lacan identifies the waste status of the object a as remainder, residue. The transcendental deduction is “slip’s

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dream,” to play off the title of Arno Schmidt’s Zettels Traum (Schmidt 1970, 2016). One of Wittgenstein’s collections is called Zettel, “Slips,” because it consists of small pieces of paper on which Wittgenstein wrote brief passages collected together in a box (Wittgenstein 1967). There is also an approach to Kant’s philosophy called the “patchwork interpretation,” which takes as its orienting premise that Kant’s work consists of the ex post facto assemblage of manuscript passages, “slips.” It is therefore delightful that the passage in Lacan’s work I find most helpful for extracting an account of the poietic subject from his investigation of the psychoanalytic subject is to be found in the seminar on anxiety, and that in this particular seminar we find Lacan’s most extended attempt to provide his program with something resembling a transcendental deduction.3 My remarks about this can be relatively brief because most of the antecedent preparation is supplied by the extensive characterization of the Lacanian subject-(dis)-continuum above. Kant’s work toward the transcendental deduction in the First Critique is laid out analogously, and so I will take its presentation as a model. I hope the concision of the presentation in this section will help to highlight the structural morals to be extracted from the long foreground investigation of Lacan’s work to this point. Given this preparation, I now take leave of the sort of text-immanent presentation to which I’ve devoted myself above. In extracting the paraphysical poetic subject, much of the work involves the translation of Kant’s insights into my own vocabulary, which has been developed to this end. Already in Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1991), which orbits around a near-obsessive focus on the revolution that is Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” and which for Lacan inaugurates the second major phase in Freud’s bipartite career, the realm “beyond the pleasure principle” is explored as a new and heretofore uncharted domain. This domain is what I call the parafinite. The realm governed by the pleasure principle and its associated energetic models, in terms of which pleasure involves the satisfaction of a variational principle bringing energy to a minimum, is predicated on the assumption that this domain is bounded not only above (by states of over-excitation) but below as well. This latter bounding is the one which is most obviously problematic: if the pleasure principle seeks to minimize

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tension and therefore energy, why does it not simply drop to zero and result in the immediate death of the organism?4 From an energetic perspective, this is the key problem Freud confronts in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The domain of pleasure is bounded both above and below and is therefore strongly finite, where these finite limits are understood to be conditioned by the nature of our organism (biologically and psychoanalytically) and the principles which govern it. The hypothesis Freud explores in this work, and which later writings confirm he retains, is that there is another realm besides this strongly finite realm. Since Freud’s psychoanalytic account of the subject must take this “beyond” into account, Freud’s psychoanalytic subject is inherently parafinite. What Lacan initiates around the time of Seminar II is an investigation of this beyond as a distinct realm: one related to the domain of pleasure, but autonomous and so requiring an account of its own. By the time of Lacan’s Seminar X, on anxiety (Lacan 2014), this investigation is quite robust and is reflected, in particular, in the locative terms which Lacan uses to couch his investigation. In a key passage he enlists these terms in the demarcation of the relations between desire, jouissance, anxiety and the object a. Lacan begins by insisting that jouissance must be conceived of as “profoundly independent of the articulation of desire,” and he then goes on to remark: Indeed, desire is constituted upstream of the zone which separates out jouissance and desire, and which is the fault-line where anxiety is produced. This does not mean that desire doesn’t concern the Other involved in jouissance, which is the real Other. I will say that it is normative for desire, for the law that constitutes desire as desire, not to manage to concern this Other in its centre. It only concerns it elliptically and off to one side— small a, substitute for big A. (Lacan 2014, 182)

Many points are made in this passage. 1. Desire is constituted before desire and jouissance are separated. This means that the constituted of desire is squarely in the parafinite domain, not in the strongly finite domain, which can extend at most to the point where desire and jouissance are separated since, in par-

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ticular, jouissance is not (except in reduced forms) regulated by the pleasure principle. 2. Anxiety is produced in the threshold region where desire and jouissance are separated out. It is liminal with respect to the distinction between the strongly finite and the parafinite domain. Since there cannot be a definite demarcation of these two domains, it is natural enough to think that anxiety is without an object. To say that anxiety is not without an object is a better characterization because this indefinite transition is in fact marked by the production of an object, albeit one which from the perspective of the pleasure principle as regulative for the strongly finite domain can only be viewed as paradoxical. 3. Lacan goes on to use the same double-negation construction to characterize the relation of desire to the real Other: desire is not without the Other involved in jouissance. We may in fact view this as the explanation for anxiety being not without an object, as will become clearer shortly. This passage also makes it clear that the real Other, as involved in jouissance, cannot be located within the strictly finite domain. The Other is parafinite, located outside the strongly finite domain of the pleasure principle. 4. The “law” of desire cannot concern this Other “centrally.” I take this to mean that insofar as desire is constituted in the strongly finite domain by a legal demarcation of desire, the Other, though certainly contributory for this law, cannot be subsumed under it. As I would put it, the Other is transcendental for the law of desire, and so we can understand the transcendental constitution of the law of desire only in terms of reference to the Other, specifically insofar as the Other is involved in jouissance. This prepares for the notion of transcendental deduction which is to follow. 5. The law of desire only concerns the Other indirectly, insofar as the object a is substituted for it. We can formulate this in two associated ways: the object a is the representative of the Other in the strongly finite domain, and its location is a second focus which elliptically displaces the focus of the Other (which is located in the parafinite domain). More speculatively, I suggest that the separating off of desire from jouissance is the dynamical process in terms of which jouissance and desire are produced as dual foci in the dynamic bifurcation of the

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subject. This prepares for the transition to a catastrophic account of the paraphysical subject, which identifies the sense in which continuity and discontinuity are related in its formation and constitution. 6. As is exemplified in the creation of the object a, the finite domain is “off to one side” of the parafinite domain. This “being alongside” justifies the distinction of the two domains as finite and parafinite and also prepares the way for using the creation of the object a as a first model for poetic creation. Lacan’s associated transcendental deduction is the deduction of the object a as the cause of desire. Just as Kant’s deduction, in deriving the categories from the logical functions of judgment, legitimates the categories as of the understanding, so Lacan’s deduction of the object a legitimates its role as cause of desire. Here there is only one category in the Kantian sense (cause), but there is nonetheless an associated table, which Lacan calls “the (−ϕ) chart,” for the deduction of the object a according to its various forms. Already in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 2008), Lacan speaks of a “transcendental ethics” whose regulative orientation is provided by the question, “Have you given grounds relative to your desire?” This immediately suggests that a transcendental deduction is required to legitimate the role played by the object a in its role as cause of desire. This deduction will legitimate an altogether new orientation for ethics commensurate with the “Freudian revolutionary turn.” Much of Seminar VII is taken up with tracing the history of philosophical ethics from Aristotle to Kant as an enterprise in which the ethical good is consistently understood to be grounded in an account of happiness ruled by some form of the pleasure principle.5 As such, these ethical projects fail to account for the founding role of desire in any ethics which would take the Freudian revolution into account. Although finding the deduction in Lacan’s Anxiety seminar certainly takes some work, I do not view this as an anachronistic description of what Lacan seeks to accomplish. Although Lacan characterizes his approach as a dialectical “half-speaking,” this need not prejudice Lacan’s methodological commitment to a transcendental orientation in any way which would preclude him from providing a transcendental legitimation

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for his project. I seek such a reconstructed legitimation here, which will also prepare the way for the legitimation of poetic reason to follow. Lacan’s “table of category [sic],” the (−ϕ) chart, organizes the five levels of the object a’s emergence across a quasi-developmental scheme. At the lowest level, the oral stage, we find the object a in its most primitive form; this is followed in turn by the anal, genital, imaginary (mirror-) and symbolic stages. Much of Lacan’s work in the decade(s) preceding this seminar was devoted to an extensive account of the imaginary/mirror stage, and the presentation in Seminar X incorporates this innovation.6 In Kant’s deduction, the table of categories is “lifted” from the table of the logical functions of judgment. In the Lacanian context the closest analogue to the table of the logical functions of judgements is the arc which Lacan describes from the first to the fifth stages of erotogenic development. This arc is presented as a parabola, beginning at bottom left with Stage One (oral), passing in ascent through Stage Two (anal) and reaching its peak at Stage Three (genital), then to pass in descent through Stage Four (imaginary/mirror) on its way down, finally, to Stage Five (symbolic) at bottom right. What this diagram adds to the mere ordering of the five stages is the explicit correlation of stages according to levels: Stages One and Five correspond (as “ascending” and “descending”) at the lowest level, Stages Two and Four likewise correspond above them, and Stage Three marks the critical apex at which ascent is converted into descent. The reversal at Stage Three motivates the idea that at this level the object a will be identified with a reversal of value. This negative value corresponds not to a change from positive (ascending) to negative (descending), but to a lack of vectorial orientation, something positively possessed by all the other stages whether they be “ascending” or “descending” ones. I give Lacan’s table in a form modified and ornamented to facilitate the derivation (for purposes of comparison, the reader may consult the original table at Lacan 2014, 303). To indicate additions, I have bracketed those parts which are my own contribution to Lacan’s diagram.

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[IDENTIFIER]

[OBJECT]

[OTHER]

[STAGE]

[5]

voice

object a

desire of the Other

[superego]

[4]

image

the Other’s might

[XXX]

[scopic]

[3]

desire

anxiety ([as] -ϕ)

the Other’s jouissance

[phallic]

[2]

trace

the Other’s demand

[XXX]

[anal]

[1]

anxiety

object a

desire x of the Other

[oral]

As with Kant’s transcendental deduction in the First Critique, much of the work lies in preparation for Lacan’s deduction. In the absence of an “antecedent” table like the table of the logical functions of judgment, the work must consist in a kind of “preparation” of the above table by remarking on its entries in detail. This preparation begins with the identification of the way the “parabola of stages” is reflected in the table: here the stages are organized vertically, reading from top to bottom, but if we view Stages One/Five and Two/Four as corresponding, we can see this reflected in the table itself. At 1/5, the OBJECT column is occupied by the object a itself, and the OTHER column is occupied in both cases by desire of the Other. The only difference we can note in these two columns is that in the OTHER column the desire of the Other is characterized as “desire x of the Other” at Stage One. I take this to mean that at this lowest level, desire of the Other remains indeterminate, as is reflected in the indeterminate status of the variable x. Taking this as a clue, we may hazard that a similar difference is reflected in the status of the object a as well; I will therefore refer to the object a at Stage One as the “x object” and at Stage Five as the “named object.” Anxiety appears twice in the table as well: first at Stage One as the “identifier” and then at Stage Three as the “object.” It will be some time before we are ready to unpack (−ϕ) as anxiety, but on the basis of the observations above, it makes sense to identify the anxiety that appears at Stage One as IDENTIFIER as bare (or x) anxiety. I will in fact call this bare anxiety signal anxiety, taking my cue from a passage in which Lacan relates anxiety, desire and the indefinite x. In what Lacan calls the Third Table of Division, the subject of desire $ (the subject “in its lack”) is

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represented as the fraction a/S (Lacan 2014, 160). Here, the object a substitutes for the Other A because A is incommensurable with the subject S.7 In the juxtaposition of A and S we are not yet in a position to assign a name, hence we begin with the indefinite (variable) x; as we pass to the level of the object a we substitute for A and the Other is thereby lacking (struck-A, which I indicate as /A/). This is the level of signal anxiety: anxiety is registered, but not in terms of any object that can (yet) be named. Lacan refers explicitly to signal anxiety at (Lacan 2014, 103, 119). In the latter of these two passages he connects it to the passage across a rim as we have considered it previously. Finally, in identifying a/S with $, the subject of desire, we move to the level of desire. (Recall that anxiety is identified by Lacan as that “point” at which desire begins to be separated off from jouissance.) Since I am providing a kind of analytic/conceptual motivation (comparable to Kant’s metaphysical deduction) for the transcendental deduction, we will follow this development “backwards,” analyzing as needed to prepare the deduction: the Second Table of Division occurs at (Lacan 2014, 114) and the First Table at (Lacan 2014, 26). The mere distribution of these tables in the overall seminar strongly suggests that the preparation of the transcendental deduction governs the architectonic organization of the entire seminar. The three tables of division correspond to the “meta-table” given at (Lacan 2014, 174), which groups them together, and they correspond also, albeit in a rather complicated way, to the four Venn diagrams given at (Lacan 2014, 291–2). Here again, I will introduce details “analytically” on an as needed basis. We now have a fairly complete description of Stage One (the simplest of the levels). Signal anxiety registers the bifurcation of desire and jouissance as just that point where the object a substitutes for the Other A, which as displaced takes on the form /A/. At this point, in the absence of a definite name, desire remains simply desire x of the Other. Stage Two is structurally more complex, but given the forgoing description of Stage One it can be handled economically. At this level the IDENTIFIER is precisely the waste product which constitutes a trace of the economy of desire at this stage, the dechet or slip which the infant paradigmatically presents to the parent as gift. This trace is, as extracted

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from the infant, a trace of the subject themself. Because the identifier is properly (albeit synecdochally) the subject themself, here the category of the object is taken over by the category of the other: to appropriate Oleg Gelikman’s felicitous characterization, the Other captates the position of the object. Gelikman’s gloss is manifestly supported by a passage concerning the corresponding Stage Four, the other stage at which the Other captates the object. As Lacan declares, in this case, “my presence in the Other has no remainder.” At Stage Four, the scopic level, I specifically “cannot see what I lose there. This is the meaning of the mirror stage” (Lacan 2014, 253). As Stage Four is totally dominated by the Other’s might (this is the level at which Lacan will couch the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave), so Stage Two is totally dominated by the Other’s demand: this is the famous Scene of Instruction. Indeed, as Lacan notes, it is in terms of the exhaustion of demand to its full term, “to the bottom of the barrel, up to and including the D0 of demand” (Lacan 2014, 53), that we will see the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three. We also note that might (Stage Four) is the reflection of demand (Stage Two), and that this relation pivots about the Other’s jouissance at Stage Three. This is focal for linking Lacan’s deduction to the German Idealist conception of reflection in an external medium, as in Hegel’s doctrine of essence. In the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three the difficulty ratchets up an order of magnitude. It is therefore all the more welcome that Lacan supplies us with a clue linking Stage One with Stage Three. With respect to the object a, Lacan tells us that “in anxiety, we are dealing with it at a moment that logically precedes the moment at which we deal with it in desire” (Lacan 2014, 161). This passages links the identifiers at Stage One (anxiety) and Stage Three (desire), and indicates that as we move progressively through the stages we are moving “downstream.” If Stage One is the stage located at that “fault-line” where anxiety is produced, where desire, not yet separated out from jouissance, “begins” the process of its constitution, then at Stage Three we are now in a position to identify desire—for now desire is our identifier, and so must itself be capable of being identified. Taking advantage of the ambiguity of the subjective and objective genitive, I will speak at Stage Three of the identification of desire: no longer are we in a position of being able to mark desire only as

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of the Other in terms of an indeterminate x. To what extent can desire, at Stage Three, be named? The fact that anxiety here appears no longer as mere identifying signal, but rather as object a, is key. At this stage the object a is a full-fledged signifier: the phallus is specifically not to be identified as a physical object, and it is this change in the status of identification which is most fundamentally characteristic of Stage Three. This is the step which is required to ascend from Stage Two to Stage Three, for “it is precisely this waste product [produced at Stage Two, OBB], this scrap, which resists signifierization, that comes to find itself constituting the foundation of the desiring subject as such … ” (Lacan 2014, 174). The foundation for the desiring subject is given at Stage Two; its construction requires the ascent to the level of the signifier. This point is overwhelmingly difficult to maintain, since there is a strong psychological tendency to identify Stage Three in terms of the genital object biologically construed. Lacan rightly insists that there has been great misunderstanding on just this point; I think he would agree that the misunderstanding is comprehensible in terms of its own psychoanalytic near-inevitability. If Stage Three is as Lacan describes it, then part and parcel of the formation of this stage is our strenuous desire to misconstrue it. This misconstrual lies at the heart of psychopathology. The biological ground of the negative valence associated with the phallus lies in the fact of detumescence and the coincidence of sexual jouissance with it. As Lacan acknowledges, this is an empirical state of affairs at a “certain level of an animal realm” and as such an empirical fact “without there being any necessity to it nor anything that would be linked to the organism’s Wesenheit in Goldstein’s sense” (Lacan 2014, 176). This passage prepares us for what I take to be the central formulation of this negative valence as Lacan presents it in the Seminar: At the level of genital desire, the function of the a is symbolized analogically, analogically to its predominance, its ascendancy, in the economy of desire, by the (−ϕ) which appears as a subjective residue at the level of copulation. The copula is everywhere, but it only unites precisely by being missing right where it would be specifically copulatory. This central hole gives its privileged value to castration anxiety, the only level at which anxiety is produced at the very locus of the lack of the object. (Lacan 2014, 320)

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What is most extraordinary about this passage can only be recognized by taking it very strictly at its word. 1. The (−ϕ) must be understood as a symbol: as such we already introduce the “degree zero” of Stage Five at Stage Three, much in the same way that the degree zero of anxiety is introduced at Stage One. In fact this analogy (between analogies) is not at all coincidental: it takes us across the main diagonal running from bottom left through center to top right in the (−ϕ) chart: from signal anxiety to castration anxiety to (fully symbolized, i.e. named) desire of the Other. Signal anxiety is the zero degree of, and as such condition for, castration anxiety in exactly the way the latter is the zero degree and therefore condition for desire of the Other. It is only at Stage Three that the object a is a signifier standing for an object rather than an object serving as a proto-­signifier, and this just is the reversal of valence specified earlier. It is also the inception of that “lifting” which constitutes Lacan’s transcendental deduction. Let us call this transition to the level of the full signifier the principle of lifting. 2. It is at this point that the object a exchanges its objective status for a subjective one. From here on, to speak of an object a must be understood in a new, paradoxical sense: this object is subjective. A subjective object is (already proto-)symbolic. We might say: it is (at this first point) a signal of the symbolic. 3. As the function of the object a ascends in the economy of desire, its valence changes from positive to negative. We have reached a catastrophe point in the evolution of the object a. This catastrophe point corresponds to the attainment of the maximum in the parabolic diagram of the evolution of the object a. 4. As proto-symbolic, the copula is delocalized. The change in valence (from objective to subjective) is reflected in the fact that where it is ostensibly (objectively) copulative it is in fact manifestly (subjectively) lacking in copulative potential. It has the status of a singularity (topological defect) which generates a positive homology group (as on a torus, where a path traverses a loop which cannot be collapsed to a point.) The positive homology is the “privileged value” inherited from the “hole” it cuts in the local fabric of copulation. Lacan will come to

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express this point in the koan: there is no sexual relation. The phallus, as signifier, absents itself locally (is cut out) to manifest itself globally (negatively) as support for the system of signifiers. A local cut creates a global anxiety through a reversal of valence.8 This reversal is the privileged sense of the phallus as negative. It is not quantitative but dynamic. As such, it is the analogue of the dynamic, not the mathematical, sublime in the Kantian system. 5. This privileged, negative value just is castration anxiety, and this is now anxiety formed in its full sense as the “subjective object.” Another way to put the same point is to say: it is as castration anxiety that the object a is fully subjectively internalized. What we will see in the progression from Stage Three through Stage Four to Stage Five is that, paradoxically, this full subjective internalization is not in the subject themself, but rather in the Other. The provides the key for understanding the way the German Idealist notion of reflective medium is transposed in the Lacanian context. 6. The critical sense of the locative enters at precisely this moment: the locus is that lack in which anxiety is produced specifically as the lack of an object. This will provide us with the proto-structure for the locative which is at issue in that locative poetics for which a legitimation of poetic reason is first possible. Lacan makes it clear elsewhere that he speaks of a moment not in the Platonic-Kiekegaardian-Heideggerian sense of a suddenness, the Augenblick which is a twinkling of the eye, but rather in the sense in which the moment of a system is taken in physics, and which we may understand roughly as an encapsulating record or “germ” of its dynamic condition (Lacan 2014, 329). We may summarize in the koan: the locative is dynamically constituted through de-localization. Here again, to speak in Kantian terms, the alignment is with the dynamical, not the mathematical. Because the principle of lifting is already analytically secured at Stage Three in the way I’ve indicated above, and since this is the central aspect of the (−ϕ) chart which allows it to be deduced and so legitimated, I will describe Stages Four and Five in less detail, though we will also return to all of the stages in the transcendental deduction given below. Not only are the last two stages considerably more complicated, the description of

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Stage Five remains anomalous: it is carried through neither to the same extent nor in the same terms as the description of previous stages. Lacan maps out the transition from Stage Three to Stage Four in some detail in the Seminar given on 15 May 1963, beginning with a rehearsal of points pertaining to previous levels. Already at Stage One (oral), we find passage across a rim (here the lips, enveloping the breast in the action of sucking). Lacan cultivates at some length the various ways this structure of the cut at Stage One already anticipates what we will find at Stage Three, and we may recall the way Stages One and Three are linked by Lacan in terms of the encapsulating moment. At Stage One, the object a is identified as the breast, and the breast is presented as what Lacan calls an amboceptor: much like the mouthpiece of a trumpet, it plugs the lips of the infant into the mother. Lacan insists that in this dynamic the anxiety point lies neither in the infant’s lips nor in the breast as amboceptor, but in the mother herself: “in the child, the anxiety of the mother’s lack is the anxiety of the breast drying up” (Lacan 2014, 234). But at this primitive stage, the Other is just what the infant cannot yet recognize as such. That the phallus would serve as an amboceptor in the (so-called) act of copulation is what we might call the retrospective dialectical illusion at Stage Three. The object at this level is therefore in fact precisely the lack of an amboceptor. At Stage One, the dialectical illusion is that the breast belongs to the mother. In fact, the breast belongs as much to the infant as to the mother: its function is genuinely amboceptive, and Lacan even insists it bears a vestigial affinity to the placenta which is the genuine amboceptor at “Stage Zero,” the uterine stage. At Stage Two, we might say, the waste scrap belonged to the child and then belongs to the mother: there is an exchange rather than an amboception, but the exchange is real. At Stage Three there is neither amboception nor exchange. One might ask: if the relation of infant to mother is one of nurture and the breast is the amboceptor which joins them in this relation, why is the relation of male to female not that of reproduction and the phallus that which joins them in this relation? The answer must be that this latter picture takes the male organ for the phallus, and this is precisely what Lacan is at pains to distinguish: it is not the male organ which is the object a, on analogy to the mother’s breast, but the phallus as signifier.

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And this signifier is neither an exchange between the two partners nor an organ they share. It is, rather, a fully subjectivized object that Lacan identifies as orgasm, thus effecting the transition from desire to jouissance, which makes its first explicit appearance at this level, as the jouissance of the Other. This state of affairs follows from the identification of the cut in this instance with the detumescence of the male organ: the cut therefore lies not in the identification of the organ itself (breast) nor in the exchange of the waste scrap, but rather in the dynamic transition in the state of the organ. This transition is marked by a specifically negative valence (not descending as opposed to ascending, though Lacan sometimes speaks this way, but as the transition from ascending to descending, hence momentarily to a lack in fixed orientation), which equally registers the fact which Lacan observes, that orgasm is the only case in which anxiety is actually concluded. “Likewise, this is why orgasm is not all that commonly reached …” (Lacan 2014, 239). The clear implication, as well, despite the metonymic relation between male detumescence and orgasm, is that the phallus is not to be identified exclusively with the male. The comparison of the object a at these three stages should help clarify, differentially as it were, the sense in which the object a as anxiety is understood to be the cause of desire. We are reminded once again of the remark from which I started, that the locus of the constitution of desire is the fault-line where anxiety is produced, and which lies upstream from the division of desire and jouissance. Only at this stage are we in a position to divide our desire as identifier from jouissance as located in the Other. Thus at Stage Three we have reached the point where desire and jouissance can be subjectively distinguished, although the picture of “genital desire as the desire for orgasm” only presents the most rudimentary portrait. But of the first three stages, it is also here that we can most clearly see that the constitution of the object a cannot be understood exclusively in terms of desire (desire to be nurtured, desire to satisfy the Other’s demand), for the constitution of the object a at Stage Three is manifestly in terms of desire and jouissance. This is not to affirm that jouissance is entirely absent from earlier stages, only that its role there is not yet typologically explicit. Lacan not only admits but insists on the persistence of the dialectical illusion as it is transacted in analysis: the analysand demands the phallus

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from the analysis. But “no permanent phallus, no almighty phallus, is ever likely to seal off in any conciliatory fashion the dialectic of the subject’s relation to the Other, and to the real” (Lacan 2014, 240). The goal of psychoanalysis cannot be to secure a “happy marriage.” This is rather the “dream of phallocentrism” which stands as a permanent dialectical illusion, but which also forecasts precisely the transition to Stage Four. For it is the status of the dialectical illusion as lure that next becomes constitutive for the object, which Lacan identifies at Stage Four as the eye, or its “objective correlative,” the stain. This is the scopic level. We have already seen above how Lacan understands the constitution of the object a at this level as the Other’s captation of the position of the object, this time as the Other’s might. Here we enter into the labyrinthine dynamics of the Mirror Stage, which is worthy of a book all its own. Failing that, what is most curious and interesting to note about the dialectical presentation Lacan provides in the Seminar is its trajectory in terms of the various stages. Roughly: he starts with a discussion of Stage Five, then retreats to Stages One through Four, and more or less ends on this note. We have reached that point at which, on analogy to Kant, the analytic deduction, presented above as a conceptual unpacking, must pass over into the transcendental deduction. A mathematical theorem may have many proofs, and the path which Lacan chooses in order to follow out the transcendental deduction determines the nature of the specific proof he gives. He chooses to move along the path of the obsessional, and specifically that of the male obsessional. Freud’s royal route to psychoanalysis was along the path of the female hysteric, and the path Lacan chooses here is not only complementary but also one which faces Freud with serious challenges. From a Freudian perspective it may sometimes look as if obsessional neurosis is the only psychopathology which bests psychoanalysis; Lacan’s choice of it indicates not just a fundamental departure from Freud but also a way in which the deduction can serve as an orientation for rebalancing the psychoanalytic venture. Although it is commonly acknowledged that Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis begins with his early investigations of psychosis, the reconsideration of obsessional neurosis is no less crucial for Lacan’s work. Taken together, the two redress Freud’s concentration on hysteria from opposite sides, as it were.

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Above, I have mentioned the problem of identifying the textual limits of Kant’s transcendental deduction; for current purposes I will identify Lacan’s as beginning at the end of the Seminar XXI (“Piaget’s Tap”) on 12 June 1963 (Lacan 2014, 291–3) and running to the end of Seminar XXII, “From Anal to Ideal,” on 19 June 1963 (Lacan 2014, 294–309). This is a more coherent unit than it may at first appear, for in Section III of the 12 June seminar Lacan advertises a line of reasoning that he follows up on 19 June. He starts with the obsessional, and then introduces four Venn diagrams that correspond to Stages One through Four in the parabola introduced at the beginning of Seminar XXII. (Please note the Seminars XXI and XXII referred to here are the twenty-first and twenty-­ second meetings of the overall Seminar X.) We will see that these Venn diagrams stand in close correlation with the Tables of Division given earlier in the text as well. The diagrams codify the way these stages stand in relation to subject, object a and Other, and it will be the task of the transcendental deduction to lift this information in such a way that it legitimates the category of object a as cause. I will call the presentation of these diagrams Lacan’s “preparation” for the transcendental deduction in the narrow sense. In this preparation the presentation of the trajectory of stages (analogous to Kant’s table of the logical functions of judgment) is primed for the deduction itself. Rather than present these codifications as Venn diagrams I give them as intersection formulas, understanding that it does matter that we read from left to right. Thus, for example, in the first Venn diagram we have S in the left circle, /A/ in the right circle and a in the intersection of the two circles, which I write as: S ∩ /A/ = a. As a representation of Stage One, this indicates that the subject and the Other share the object a (breast), and the Other appears as /A/ to indicate that the subject does not yet reach the Other (Lacan 2014, 27). This corresponds to the fact that, as Lacan puts it, there is not yet need of the Other but only need in the Other (Lacan 2014, 291). He goes on to insist that the “true scope” of the division between subject and object a at this level can be glimpsed “if you see that the breast is part of the subject’s inner world and not part of the mother’s body” (Lacan 2014, 291). This corresponds to the state of affairs given in the First Table of Division (Lacan 2014, 26), where there is

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already division between $ and a on the side of A (Other) and no division of A (in the form /A/) on the side of the subject: A

S

$

/A/

a

At Stage Two, there is division both on the side of the Other and on the side of the subject: the division on the former side is as before, but now the subject is divided between /A/ and 0, the basic level of demand. This demand is demand in the Other, on analogy with the way Lacan has described need in the Other at Stage One. Here the diagram is given in the form: a ∩ /A/ = $. We note the reversal of the roles of subject and object relative to Stage One, and that the subject S has been replaced by its “negative” counterpart $. Each of these displacements must be understood in terms of the introduction of demand into the Second Table of Division (Lacan 2014, 114): A

S

$

/A/

a

0

We can best see the relation at Stage Two if we think of $ as being “promoted” to the role of a and a to the role of S: →

→

↓

↑

A

S

↑

$

/A/

↑

↓

0

↑

a

↑

→

←

↓

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where the arrow below a is identified with the arrow above S, as indicated by the added circuit of arrows. Stage Two reflects the Scene of Instruction, “the educative demand par excellence,” and should no doubt be identified with the Discourse of the University, leaving us for the moment to ponder how the other discourses should be aligned with the stages along this trajectory. This stage will also prove critical for the specification of Lacan’s proof to the case of the obsessional, as will become clear below. Although it may not appear promising at first, the Third Table of Division does indeed provide the leading clue for the formulation of the Venn diagram for Stage Three once we understand that the specific “version” of the diagram being given is “male-vectored.” Precisely by virtue of the fact that we ascend to the genital at Stage Three, the vectorization of the diagram is unavoidable, and we enter into the perilous waters of conducting an analysis which bifurcates for masculine and feminine sexuality. Since Lacan focuses on the male obsessional, the male-vectored form of the diagram is the appropriate one here, and in any case it will be some considerable time before Lacan reaches anything like a full clarification of the status of feminine sexuality (for which year Seminar XX is especially important). The bifurcation into female/male is addressed in the successive seminars, “Woman, Truer and More Real” (XIV) and “Men’s Business” (XV). (Here again references are to specific meetings within the overall Seminar X.) I begin, therefore, with the Third Table of Division (Lacan 2014, 160): A

S

a

/A/

$

The positions of $ and a have been inverted from the Second Table of Division, and the S returns to an undivided state, so that in this latter regard the Third Table of Division resembles the first. Identifying, for the masculine vectorization of the diagram, S  =  M (Man), a  =  −ϕ, and /A/ = W (Woman), and imitating the transcription of the First Table of Division in the formation of Stage One, we have: M  ∩  W  =  −ϕ. The

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minus sign attached to ϕ, the genital object a (phallus), reflects the inversion of the division $/a → a/$. Lacan interprets the negative valence as indicating a lack, and associates it with jouissance in the Other: Stage One:

need in the Other

Stage Two:

demand in the Other

Stage Three: jouissance in the Other.

Although the process of division is complete at this point and so there is no Fourth Table of Division, there is an alternative form of the Third Table which motivates the transition to Stage Four: A

S

x

a

/A/

anxiety

$

desire

Lacan gives this alternative form the title, “Anxiety between x and desire” (Lacan 2014, 161). He tells us that this new form represents the drawing of the operation of division to a close: the “raising” of a is reflected in the equation $ = a/S, which is a fractional “rationalization” of the incommensurability (parafinitude) of the Other. This completes the process of division conventionally through the substitution of $ for A: … indeed, A has no common denominator, it lies outside the common denominator between the a and the S. If we want to bring the operation to a close nevertheless, in a conventional way, what do we do? We put the remainder in the place of the numerator and divisor in the place of the denominator. The $ is equivalent to a over S. (Lacan 2014, 161)

In fact, we may take this new “form” of the Third Table of Division as a new diagrammatic object since it introduces a new column, which I will call the “x column.” It is the introduction of this third column which allows us to “regularize” equationally the inverted relation of a and $ in the Third Table of Division, and, in doing so, draw the distinction between anxiety and desire. Desire and anxiety are, respectively, the

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IDENTIFIER and OBJECT at Stage Three, and jouissance in the Other is the status of OTHER. The “regularization” of them promotes us from Stage Three to Stage Four, where the fact that “x stands between anxiety and desire” is captured in the equation: S ∩ +ϕ = x. At this level, the regularization has “returned” us to the bare subject S, the Other has been replaced (by the same regularization) as the dialectical illusion of a positive phallus, and the intersecting object a has been rendered completely indeterminate. What we must do to complete our trajectory is to understand how Stages Four and Five serve as descending correlates of Stages One and Two. The first clue is that the trajectory from Stage Three to Stage Four is a descent precisely because at this point there is no further division (cut) to be performed. The transition from −ϕ to +ϕ reflects the centrality of the dialectical illusion at Stage Four, where it takes hold as fantasy. In the transition from Stage Four to Stage Five, the might of the Other takes the form of incorporating a voice, the voice of the Other (Lacan 2014, 277). These extremely rudimentary indications must suffice to complete our trajectory for the purposes at hand. In proceeding now to the deduction itself, rather than continuing in the reconstructive mode I’ve pursued above, I provide on my own terms as explicit a formulation of the deduction as possible. Given the antecedent preparation, at this point the argument can be formulated quite concisely. In the presentation of Stages One through Five, the object a has been presented in what I will call syntactic terms: we are given the logical function of the object a at each of these levels. This logical function can be read off of the diagrams or the associated intersection-equations, since they both indicate how the object a serves as the syntactic cut which marks the intersective boundary between the form of the Subject and the Other at each level. All that remains is to see how the object a, which marks the cut syntactically, takes on the semantic function of cause of desire: to show this is both necessary and sufficient for the deduction required. The required lifting is a lifting of syntax into semantics, and to understand semantics to be defined by this lifting would be a better definition than those usually given: semantics only has a transcendental sense.

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Lacan specifies to the case of the male obsessional, and for this case Stage Two takes on a privileged significance. In fact, the details of the male obsessional as a “character profile” are much less important for the purposes of the particular deduction Lacan provides than the focal role of Stage Two for the male obsessional. At this stage, the object a has in fact been captated by the Other’s demand. The desire at this level is precisely to satisfy the Other’s demand. Yet how can the object a function semantically as the cause of the desire to satisfy this demand when in fact the object is replaced by this demand itself? The answer must be that it is the demand itself which causes the desire for the demand to be satisfied. It remains to show that the nature of the Other’s demand is such that it can itself cause the desire for its satisfaction. Here is where the structure of the (male) obsessional comes into play: it makes perspicuous the structure of the demand which makes this “circularity” possible and, as possible, real. Like all other psychopathologies, obsession must be understood against the full (−ϕ) chart. What creates the special link between obsessional neurosis and Stage Two is that obsessional neurosis replaces the desire of the Other by demand in the Other (Lacan 2014, 293), thereby substituting Stage Two for Stage Five. The consequence is that the obsessional expects to be begged: this is the manner in which desire takes the form of a demand. But the demand could not be substituted for the desire of the Other unless the demand is itself the cause of desire in the obsessional himself. Therefore, demand, as the captation of the position of object a at Stage Two, is the cause of desire. Here, as in Kant, the deduction itself is quite short if not entirely simple. Its form also indicates that while there is only one category to be deduced in Lacan’s case, there should in principle be as many deductions as there are psychopathologies, and each would proceed in terms of and thereby also explicate what is specific to the psychopathology at issue. The (−ϕ) chart thereby becomes a “master chart” for the mapping of psychopathologies: not in the sense that they are all represented in the chart, but rather in that the structure of each one should correspond to a deduction specific to that pathology. I conjecture that Lacan chooses this deduction not because it is most illuminating but because it is most readily accessible. Any deduction will

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illuminate some aspects of the (−ϕ) chart and not others, but the gravest limitation of the deduction through obsessional neurosis is that it does not illuminate the specific way in which anxiety lies at the heart-center of the (−ϕ) chart. Lacan’s last seminars of the year are designed to counterbalance, and the reformulation of the anxiety chart at (Lacan 2014, 319) is central to this rebalancing. This chart should be viewed as a “blow-up” of the central position in the (−ϕ) chart, which is precisely the place where −ϕ occurs as object a. In terms of this reformulation Lacan is in a better position to exfoliate the logic of castration associated with this central square, and in fact for much of the latter part of his career this logic of castration will go proxy, as a simplification, for the much greater and more detailed logic we could associate with the (−ϕ) chart were we to follow out all the various deductive routes to the specification of its structure as the transcendental determination of the category of cause. To appropriate logical language, we could say that the semantics of castration goes proxy for the more involved proof theory of the (−ϕ) chart. We can now see that most fundamentally the “trajectory” from Stages One through Five is not developmental in nature, but in fact logical, and establishes the vertical axis for the (−ϕ) chart. The layout of the (−ϕ) chart, which takes the Stages as its logical, vertical scaffolding, can then be seen as the demarcation of the normative function of object a, syntactically the cut between subject and Other, as cause which is foundational for the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Notes 1. Miller translates ‘seiende’ as ‘affirmative’; but this presupposes that there is a constant alignment between being and positivity in Hegel, which is misleading at best. 2. I leave open the question whether these problems are faced by later developments in the Science of Logic. 3. I am profoundly indebted to Oleg Gelikman and Virgil Lualhati McCorgray for extended conversations about this seminar. 4. There is a complementary problem with aesthetic accounts which seek to explain the experience of aesthetic intensity in terms of a maximization of

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energy: the jouissance of the aesthetic experience cannot be accounted for on such terms any more than pleasure can be accounted for in terms of the extinction of energy. An interesting example is provided by the two major statements of Ekkehard Jost on Cecil Taylor, first in his book Free Jazz, where Jost attempts to explain Taylor’s goals in energetic terms (Jost 1994, 66–83, originally published 1974), and in his later essay “Instant Composing as Body Language,” in which, while still recognizing Taylor’s work as “energy music,” he also modifies and tacitly acknowledges the limitations of this energetic model (Jost n.d., liner notes accompanying recordings by Taylor from July 1988). Freud’s metapsychological investigations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and beyond are opened up by a recognition of the inadequacy of energetics. 5. Lacan’s account is schematic and omits any consideration of moral perfectionism or religious-philosophical ethics. I’ve spoken of the former already above; as for the latter, there are significant similarities with Lacan’s ethics, but the obvious and decisive difference is that for Lacan ethics will not be grounded in any appeal to a revealed source for ethical conduct. 6. It becomes increasingly clear as one follows out Lacan’s seminars that a full account of the final, symbolic stage remains outstanding. I read the challenges of accounting for the symbolic level, in particular, out of Lacan’s performative act in withdrawing the subsequent seminar on the Name of the Father. This will lead, eventually, to the intense preoccupation with the linkage of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, and ultimately in Seminar XXIII, to the Sinthome. 7. fractional “rationalization” = reduction to scale as a is raised into cross-cap (see (Lacan 2014, 138)). 8. It is the reversal of valence which is critical; the local cut occurs already at previous levels (see, e.g., Lacan 2014, 232). Mathematically, the reversal reflects a critical point, which, dynamically, functions as a catastrophe point.

Bibliography Bassler, O.  Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave, 2018). Hegel, G.  W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.  V. Miller (New York: Humanities, 1976).

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Jost, Ekkehard. Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1994). Jost, Ekkkehard. “Instant Composing als Körpersprache,” available at http:// www.fmp-­label.de/freemusicproduction/labelsspecialeditions/ct88_jost_d. html (n.d.) Kant, Immanuel. Opus Postumum, trans. Eckhart Förster and Michael Rosen (New York: Cambridge, 1993). Lacan, Jacques. Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Lacan, Jacques. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (Book II) (New York: Norton, 1991). Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 2008). Longuenesse, Béatrice. Hegel et la critique de la métaphysique: Étude de la doctrine de l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1981). Murphey, Murray. The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). Schmidt, Arno. Bottom’s Dream, trans. John E. Woods (Funks Grove: Dalkey Archive, 2016). Schmidt, Arno. Zettels Traum (Stuttgart: Stahlberg, 1970). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel, trans. G.  E. M.  Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). Žižek, Slovoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014).

10 Modernity and the Transcendental Deduction of Poetic Reason

In this chapter I lay the ground for and then sketch the second argument for the legitimacy of poetic reason. Blumenberg’s argument for the legitimacy of the modern age is understood as the positive “deduction” of modernity’s legitimacy associated with his critique of any reading of modernity according to a secularization hypothesis, in which the core terms of modernity would be understood as substance-preserving “translations” of concepts antecedently available. This argument proceeds in terms of the consolidation effected by the “emergency positing” of a minimal rationality requisite to assure the systematic promotion of human self-assertion. I argue that this rational commitment not only can but in fact must be extended to the notion of poetic reason. Blumenberg’s minimal rationality guarantees the structural/functional stabilization of systematic conditions for human self-assertion but does not take adequately into account the nature of human self-assertion as a making (poiesis). This recognition is requisite for the dynamical stabilization of Blumenberg’s legitimation argument. Without it, the pacing of human self-assertion can neither be articulated nor confronted. On this basis, I supply an alternative argument which secures not only the conditions Blumenberg specifies for a legitimation of modernity but, in the process, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_10

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conditions for a legitimation of poetic reason as well. Though only a sketch is given of this argument, I believe it is enough to reconstruct the full argument should anyone care to devote themselves to this historical-­ philosophical task. I conclude by arguing that the latter legitimation is in fact a condition of the former, and that, so far as legitimating the modern condition is concerned, poetic reason is the most fundamental conception of reason, from which any conception of reason as critical or analytic must derive its legitimation conditions. I begin the chapter by considering potential objections to the very formulation of the problem in these terms, stemming from the tradition of endgames of German Idealism itself, as exemplified by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and having to do in both cases with whether there is any coherent sense of “modernity” to be legitimated in the first place.

10.1 Sublime, Locative and a Poetics To Be Legitimated The transition from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime stands as a flashpoint in Kant’s work: it leads to questions about the relative status of philosophy and literature and so bears directly on the status of poetic reason. We have seen, as well, how Lacan’s exit from German Idealism constitutes a commitment to the dynamic/causal as over and against the mathematical/structural. The legitimation of poetic reason will require us to confront the way philosophy and literature have been taken to stand in relation during the modern age generally and the Romantic era in particular. The romantic “reunification” of philosophy and literature potentially calls the notion of modernity itself into question, and in order to face problems with the normative status of an appeal to the modern, I turn to objections expressed by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. In this way we move to the question of how Blumenberg’s modernity could be drawn upon to legitimate a distinctively modern conception of poetic reason. The account of poetic reason provided is distinctively modern in that it builds out from Blumenberg’s notion of a minimal, emergency consolidation of rationality necessary for legitimating the modern, systematic promotion of

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human self-assertion. Beyond positing poetic reason to provide a dynamically stable legitimation of the modern age, so doing also accounts for why the forms of expression cultivated in German Idealism and Romanticism would be both requisite and (now in a new, extended sense) quintessentially modern. In so doing, we make a transition analogous to that Kant attempts from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime. The proof must have a transcendental status because it appeals to a visionary architectonic to legitimate the production of work having the status of such a visionary architectonic. Lacan’s work on the subject-(dis)-continuum and the transcendental deduction of the object a as cause are enlisted both in the process of constructing such a visionary architectonic and also in providing a description of poetic reason itself. It will be helpful to understand the way this visionary design is related to and yet ultimately departs from Kant’s visionary architectonic. Here Paul de Man proposes a signal challenge for this enterprise, located at just that point where Kant moves from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime. Whereas I have previously read Kant as an architectonic visionary (Bassler 2018), de Man reads him as a materialist, of a sort we might call grammatological, pinpointing this commitment in the breach that opens up in Kant’s system at the juncture between the mathematical and dynamical sublime. A considerable part of de Man’s motivation for reading Kant as a materialist is that de Man claims no sense can be made out of the Kantian architectonic at precisely this point. I will argue instead that there is no breakdown in Kant’s architectonic at this point in his venture. De Man begins with a beautiful synopsis of the context of Kant’s treatment of the mathematical sublime: The mathematical sublime starts out from the concept of number. Its burden is that of calculus, as one would expect in a philosopher whose master’s thesis dealt with Leibniz: it is the burden of realizing that finite and infinite entities are not susceptible of comparison and cannot both be inscribed within a common system of knowledge. (de Man 1996, 74)

In these terms, we may pose the problem of the sublime as: how can we represent the incommensurability of the finite and the infinite when they

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can be neither compared nor inscribed within a common system? The representation Kant identifies is that of the absolutely large, an instance of what I have called the absolute parafinite. The absolutely large must remain cognitively indeterminate and so, in particular, non-numerical, yet stand as a representation precisely in the context of quantity. As incomparably large, “it can never be accessible to the senses. But it is not pure number either, for there is no such thing as a “greatest” in the realm of number. It belongs to a different order of experience, closer to extension than to number” (de Man 1996, 75). I would call what de Man describes the “transition” from the numerical to the geometric parafinite, but is it a transition in any literal or, indeed, even coherent sense? For de Man, this “non-transition transition” might more readily be seen as a “transcension,” if there were such a word, for with it de Man identifies a transposition or elevation from “the natural to the level of the supernatural, perception to imagination, understanding to reason.” In so doing, de Man forces us to face a deconstructive crux: an articulation of the infinite given as a totality cannot occur,1 so the distinguishing characteristic of the sublime is a failure of articulation, a gap; yet this “transcension” cannot supersede the failure “by becoming, as in the dialectic, the knowledge of this failure” (de Man 1996, 75). For, we may fill in, such a knowledge would be a cognitive retrieval of that lack which motivated the transcension, and if such retrieval were possible there would have been no motivation, because no need, for the transcension in the first place. Thereby de Man re-inscribes the sublime in its gram-materiality: there is no locus of the sublime. Its place “is only formally, and not transcendentally, determined,” and so “the sublime cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as a linguistic principle. For de Man, this is the dilemma which opens onto the abyss of the dynamical sublime. De Man observes that in a classical context the progression from number to extension would be followed by motion, but that Kant turns instead to power. Yet we may note that this departure from classicism had already been effected by Leibniz in his discussion of force, and Kant only follows him here. This non-classical transition will assume a central role in de Man’s own agenda, as we see in the lecture on Kant and Schiller when he remarks that “one thinks of the dynamical sublime as a kind of

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residue after the tropological discourse has tried to saturate the field. One thinks of it as a passage from trope to performative, as a passage from cognition to power” (de Man 1996, 137, my emphasis). Most likely the trajectory from Kant to Nietzsche is also on de Man’s mind. However, de Man disputes that the transition to power can be accounted for “by purely historical reasons” as I have done above in referring back to Leibniz, and insists that the only way to account for it “is as an extension of the linguistic model beyond its definition as a system of tropes” (de Man 1996, 79). At this point the analysis of Kant’s appeal to power has become one of the power of rhetoric and its limits. But is a system of tropes itself tropological? This question, in fact, intersects de Man’s late work at multiple points: first, as here overtly, in his move from a more traditional conception of rhetoric to what he will call a performative rhetoric—but in what sense is such a performativity still rhetorical? Yet it is also reflected in his treatment of irony as the “figure of figures” and so, we might say, an internalization of the system of rhetoric within one privileged figure. Yet it intersects equally de Man’s discussion of prosopopeia as the “master trope of poetic discourse” in the essay “Hypogram and Inscription” and elsewhere (de Man 1986, 48). Most relevant of all, perhaps, is the passage several pages along in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” where de Man juxtaposes Wordsworth’s prosopopeia in Book Five of The Prelude, when he addresses the “speaking face” of Nature, to Kant’s “flat, third-person world,” where the “only word that comes to mind” for the Kantian correlative “is that of a material vision, but how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible.” De Man says Kant’s vision, flat and third-­ person as it is, can hardly be called literal, but it will be the materiality of the letter which de Man goes on to identify as Kant’s inscriptive vision. Kant is an inscriptive materialist: “The bottom line, in Kant as well as in Hegel, is the prosaic materiality of the letter and no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment” (de Man 1996, 90). Yet the prosaic “transcension” of the poetic is already at issue in Jena Romanticism. A second background, equally important for de Man’s consideration, is Lacan’s essay, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud,” where Lacan cultivates the subject-(dis)-continuum.

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De Man dismisses Kant’s architectonic presentation of the sublime, but I conjecture it can be read in a way which promotes Kant’s visionary design as I have previously identified it. This is not to deny the capacity to identify such visionary design as a form of materialism—that is a separate issue. In fact, the challenge de Man’s reading poses in terms of Kant rebounds on the side of Shelley’s “poetry of mind,” as is exemplified by the opposition de Man asserts between Wordsworth (which in this regard I read Shelley as radically extending) and the Kantian materialism. So far from being adjoints, for de Man the poetry of mind and Kant’s materialism are simply opposed! And yet, retaining the adjunction of Kant and Shelley as springboard, I indicate in this section how Derrida and Blumenberg, both skirting the boundary between philosophy and literature, may be adjoined as well. This will bring us to the proving ground of poetic reason. In fact, de Man’s opposition is already an adjunction of sorts, as is revealed in a telling passage in which he compares Wordsworth and Kant once again. The force of the contrast is that Wordsworth’s mind looks upon the earth and heavens’ face, whereas the impossible transcension to the dynamic of the sublime (which is read as the subreption of Kant’s entire architectonic) turns Kant’s gaze to stone. For de Man, Wordsworthian prosopopeia and Kantian inscription work, indeed, in opposed directions, but traverse the same road. Everything therefore hangs on de Man’s insistence on the decoherence of Kant’s architectonic vision.2 De Man begins to map this decoherence when he identifies two distinct senses of the architectonic in Kant. On the one hand, the architectonic envisions the nature of a building, and in this register Kant is “entirely material, emphatically not tropological, entirely distinct from the substitutions and exchanges between faculties or between mind and nature that make up the Wordsworthian or the romantic sublime.” On the other hand, the Kantian architectonic is sometimes “much closer to the allegory of the faculties and the tale of recovered tranquillity we have just been reading, much closer as well to the edle Einfalt and still Größe of Winckelmann’s neoclassicism.” Here, too, de Man appeals to the chapter on “The Architectonic of Pure Reason” toward the end of the First Critique, where Kant speaks of “the unity of miscellaneous cognitions brought together under one idea,” which de Man glosses as a conception

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of the architectonic in terms of “the organic unity of systems” (de Man 1996, 87). We are close, once again, to the idea of the superwork, and hence to the locative transcension of genre. De Man also refers to Derrida’s reading of the Kantian architectonic in “Le colossal” in La Verité en peinture (de Man 1996, 125). We may add to that, in de Man’s “The Concept of Irony,” a story about the way, in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, “there is first a performative, the act of positing, the original catachresis, which then moves to a system of tropes; a kind of anamorphosis of tropes takes place, in which all the tropological systems are engendered, as a result of this original act of positing” (de Man 1996, 176). The talk of “engendering” recalls Cavell’s proposal of a transcendental deduction, if not of the system of tropes, of the closely associated system of genres.3 The upshot is that de Man correctly identifies a crux in Kant, but it is a crux which only calls into question an inadequate understanding of the Kantian architectonic. There is no breach in Kant’s visionary design.

10.2 Romanticism and the Status of the Modern Before prosecuting the agenda drawn from the resources of German Idealism, I need first to discuss the standard of the secularization critique according to which they will be held, and the consequent notion of legitimation which will be required both of and for them. To do so, I consider Blumenberg’s project in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age against the background of German Idealism. The manifold ways in which Blumenberg’s project can be used to indict German Idealism (and its reception) of promoting various versions of the secularization thesis is clear, and I will not dwell upon it here. What is needed, instead, is some sense of the challenges the broadly German Idealist orientation may pose for Blumenberg’s project. Are there ways in which, independently of its commitment to secularization theses, German Idealism and/or its reception cast doubt on the legitimacy of Blumenberg’s own legitimation?

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Indeed, I believe there are. The most basic one is that Blumenberg’s legitimation of the “modern age” (Neuzeit) presupposes a periodization in which history can be divided into pre-modern and modern epochs. This is quite different from, for example, the notion of modernity one finds in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972), in which “modernism” as enlightenment is identified as an aspect or function already present, say, in the context of Homer’s work. I do not believe that appeal to such a “modern function” is incompatible with Blumenberg’s notion of modernity, but it is clear that at a minimum they are distinct commitments. Specifically, in Blumenberg’s legitimation of modernity we can see the modern function being assigned a definite and above all systematic role. It is to something like Blumenberg’s sense of modernism that we find resistance in some of the most sophisticated inheritors of German Idealism and Romanticism, among them Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. To begin to see where the problems lie, I begin with an observation Paul de Man makes in The Resistance to Theory (which should really be called The Resistance of Theory, for reasons de Man himself makes clear enough). Among the many things one finds there, the one important for current purposes occurs in the context of a development of Saussure’s theory of anagrams in the context of Michel Riffaterre’s poetics. Most immediately relevant are the remarks de Man makes about what he finds dubious in the ‘modernity’ concept. He develops these concerns out of remarks by Gadamer which manifestly conceive of modernity in secular terms, and yet de Man also complains that even more fundamentally modernity is a naive concept because it reads history in terms of a linear periodization. Though Blumenberg’s idea of modernity parts company with Gadamer’s modernity as secularization, it certainly is a periodizing concept. As it turns out, this will have much to do with how we deal with the fact that we read literature, in the most naive sense, from beginning to end, and de Man himself conceives allegory as a manifestly sequential narrative. Jacques Derrida has expressed a related doubt about the concept of modernity, which will furnish a more accessible point of departure at this point, and which I therefore pursue for strategic reasons. In Derrida’s case, the problem is intimately related to questions about the approaches

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to language taken by linguistics and philosophy respectively. In particular, given his concern for the way work in the tradition of philosophy has treated language, the question becomes one about philosophy’s self-­ demarcation, though we could also ask about demarcation from the other (linguistic) direction as well, which will become a concern when Derrida considers Saussure. An example of such self-demarcation, but not, for Derrida, merely one example among others, is Heidegger’s looking to the word ‘Being’ as an “originary word,” an Urwort. As such, Heidegger’s investment in the word ‘Being’ is already an investment in origins, by virtue of the status the word itself takes on. At a minimum, Derrida writes, the sense of Being Heidegger seeks is at least tied to “the possibility of the word in general. And of its irreducible simplicity” (Derrida 2016, 22). Will linguistics help? Derrida proposes a dichotomy he will take to be false, and which first introduces the checkered term ‘modernity’ for consideration: (1) Modern linguistics still has something to do with language, which “Heidegger would probably doubt”; or (2) Heidegger’s meditations on the meaning of Being are unwittingly implicated in an “old” linguistics. Why does Derrida take the dichotomy to be false? The alternatives, he asserts, “would not be so simple.” First of all, even if linguistics remains enclosed within a “classical conceptuality” and so would be dismissed by Heidegger, it nonetheless deconstructs Heidegger’s question of Being and so cannot be considered an ontic science or regional ontology along the lines of phenomenological investigation. In this regard, linguistics’ potential resembles that of psychoanalysis to break through the confines of ontic and regional circumscription. In short, the human “sciences,” as exemplified by linguistics and psychoanalysis, call the very meaning of ontological philosophy along Heidegger’s lines into question—ultimately, it seems, even beyond the self-criticisms Heidegger will himself level at the project of fundamental ontology as conceived in Being and Time. These “sciences” call into question the ontic-ontological difference and call for another conception of difference, which Derrida will develop as différance. Second, in posing the question of Being, Heidegger necessarily poses the question of truth, sense and logos as well. This leads not to the recuperation of metaphysics, but to the radicalization of these questions, a

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“dislodging” (or, as I would say, dis-locating) of them “to their proper depth” (which also entails the question of the depth of the proper). This questioning opens at once onto fundamental metaphors and the (metaphorical) gap which separates them from any ontological accounting, indicating the “ambiguity of the Heideggerian situation” (Derrida 2016, 23) which may be taken as part of the inspiration for the two-step of deconstructive praxis.4 How, in treating metaphor, does (or must) linguistics (or psychoanalysis) overstep the bounds of its own self-conceptualization? From another angle, we may ask the same question of philosophy. Developing the Saussurean distinction between the syntagmatic (speech chain) and the associative (mnemonic chain or system), Roman Jakobson distinguishes between metaphor (systemic) and metonymy (syntagmatic) and applies the distinction to what Roland Barthes calls “non-linguistic languages” (Barthes 1968, 60). In this context we see how our questions lead on to the question of a demarcation not just between linguistics and philosophy but between what we might call proper and improper languages, with the twist that the latter are, it seems, only metaphorically languages (in turn closely linked to Lacan’s declaration that there is no metalanguage). Following Jakobson, Barthes notes that there is a preponderance of semiological treatment of the metaphorical and little treatment of the metonymic. For the metalanguage (meta-langue) which the linguist or semiologist uses to speak (parole) of metaphor is itself metaphorical (systemic), and so continuous with its object, which (it seems: a challenge is here posed to Lacan) is not the case when speaking of the metonymic. This observation, in turn, would provide a fruitful Archimedean point for re-evaluating philosophical debates about the status of and need for a metalanguage. As praxis, deconstruction would seem to seek an exit from this (in both senses) metaphorical dilemma. So we might ask, in particular, if deconstruction so taken counts as an exit from the dilemma about the relation between philosophy of language and linguistics or, more generally, between philosophy and any of its cognate “sciences” (cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, literary criticism, history, sociology, anthropology, semiotics to name a few). But what, in each case, would a commitment to deconstruction entail?

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10.2.1 Derridean Homework I once saw a clip from a television interview in which Derrida complained that the interviewer, in asking a question about deconstruction, had not done her homework. What is the homework deconstruction requires? Let’s do some Derridean homework, here with respect to the question of the border, in particular, between philosophy and literary criticism: this will yield especial fruit as literary criticism is a contested attempt to develop a criticism of poiesis. In the first chapter of Of Grammatology, Derrida refers to “that great chapter” on the symbolism of the book in Ernst Robert Curtius’ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Curtius 1953). We might say that Curtius is a critic’s critic (Harold Bloom called Curtius’ book a desert island book) in the way that people sometimes speak of a poet’s poet. Curtius describes an evolution in the symbolism of the book which Derrida asserts conceals, nonetheless, an underlying “fundamental” continuity (Derrida 2016, 16). Here too, Derrida will identify a dichotomy which he takes to be ultimately false (are there any which aren’t?). In this case the dichotomy is of a historical nature, identifying a “decisive break” in the transition to modernity. Derrida does not (yet) use this latter term, and in another context he declared: As for me, I’m no fan of modernity. I have no simple belief in the irreducible specificity of “modernity.” I even wonder if I have ever used that word. In any case, I am very mistrustful whenever people identify historical breaks or when they say, “This begins there.” (Derrida 1988, 84)

A sufficient reason for Derrida’s mistrust would be his hypersensitivity to the philosophical status of origins. Yet he himself marks a turning when he says that the “most decisive cut” appears at the moment of the constitution of the science of nature in the seventeenth century, when “the determination of absolute presence is constituted as self-presence,” the moment of “the great rationalisms of the seventeenth century” (Derrida 2016, 17). From then on the condemnation of writing will take the form of a denunciation of its “non-self-presence.” Derrida focuses on the figure of Rousseau, the consideration of whom will dominate the latter and

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larger part of Of Grammatology. We should mistrust, in turn, Derrida’s mistrust of periodization, and see to what extent his reading of Rousseau can yield a more sophisticated notion of modernity, perhaps even one which dovetails with the critique of readings of the “modern turn” which Blumenberg targets in his secularization critique. For his part, Blumenberg makes it clear that his conception of an epochal threshold is not of the naïve sort Derrida attacks: “Chronological sequence does not provide an adequate criterion of the direction of relation to an epochal threshold” (Blumenberg 1983, 587). In a passage from Emile, Rousseau refers to the book of Nature and how “in this great and sublime book I learn to serve and adore its author” (cited, Derrida 2016, 19). Derrida comments that here, too, The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. (Derrida 2016, 19)

This passage allows us to identify what for Derrida can only be the underlying continuity Curtius’ treatment has concealed: it is the continuity of an underwriting (and so we encounter the concern for legitimation), in which the appeal to the preexistent signified guarantees the totality of the syntagmatic chain from afar. This holds for the Book of Self-Presence equally as it held for the earlier Book of Presence. The underlying dynamic remains unchanged, and is perhaps exposed most readily in the work of Saussure’s linguistics and its legacy. I remark in addition only that Derrida’s own presentation proceeds according to a classical acceptance of the distinction between the finite and the infinite, only to illuminate most perspicuously its irrelevance for the consideration of the problem he identifies. As I would put it, the here irrelevant distinction between the finite and the infinite needs to be displaced by an appeal to the parafinite. But in fact, at least with respect to Curtius, we may ask whether Derrida has not once again, yet this time without recognizing so, set up a false dichotomy in order to subvert it, and one to which Curtius’ work in no way commits him. Perhaps Derrida, who always agrees that any texts remains to be deconstructed, even his own, would not resist this. But

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what is at stake is the particular way in which Derrida’s text generates its own potential to be deconstructed in this particular case. To be sure, Curtius does cite Novalis, who writes, “Books are a modern species of historical entities, but a most significant one. They have perhaps taken the place of tradition” (cited, Curtius 1953, 326). But this is Novalis, not Curtius, and for his part Curtius is at pains to identify a rupture within the Middle Ages itself. He speaks, for example, of an “explosive irruption of subjectively experienced history into the culture world of the Middle Ages,” more evident in its epic, its mythology, philosophy and rhetoric than it is even in Dante’s Commedia, where it is, however, also evident (Curtius 1953, 369). Beatrice’s function in the Commedia is not intended for Dante alone but for all believers, and so introduces a disruption into church doctrine which is “either heresy—or myth” (Curtius 1953, 373). Beatrice is “the highest salvation in the form of a woman” and so she cannot appear “without blasphemy in a triumph in which Christ himself has a place” (Curtius 1953, 378). All of these passages identify a dis-locative transformation, but are they evidence that Curtius is committed to the notion of a “decisive break”? We cannot yet say. What Curtius does say is this: The founding hero (hero ktistes) of European literature is Homer. Its last universal author is Goethe…. European literature of the nineteenth and the twentieth century has not yet been sifted, what is dead has not yet been separated from what is alive. (Curtius 1953, 16, emphases mine)

And, correlatively: Man’s knowledge of nature has made greater advances since the nineteenth century than in all proceeding epochs. Indeed, compared with earlier advances, they may be called incommensurable. (Curtius 1953, 2)

Curtius’ first assertion should be taken prima facie as a historically located assertion about the then state-of-the-art, although this cannot discount the possibility of a decisive periodization of European literature. But should we restrict ourselves to this prima facie reading? For the second assertion is not easily read in this way, though it does also indicate the

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sense in which we still stand in a massive blind spot when it comes to evaluating the nineteenth century. All of this is in line with the epigraph Blumenberg chooses for The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (sadly, omitted from the English translation): C’est curieux comme le point de vue diffère, suivant qu’on est le fruit du crime ou de la legitimité (It is curious how the point of view differs depending on whether one is the fruit of crime or of legitimacy, André Gide, from The Counterfeiters) (Blumenberg 1988). The problem is not whether every text can be deconstructed, but first whether the act of deconstruction is a crime or legitimate, a bastardization or a scion of the text. Derrida would no doubt then go on to deconstruct this as a false dichotomy, but he can be read (deconstructively) against himself as offering a legitimation of deconstructive praxis based on a critique of origins. In my view, these should be counted as two distinct moments (dynamically related) in the praxis Derrida’s deconstruction opens up. Analogously, Blumenberg’s legitimation of the modern age is itself the (transcendental) praxis based on his secularization critique. Curtius’ case is interesting in its own way. Carefully read, it is nearly impossible to attribute any categorical stance to him, but what is most suggestive in the first passage quoted above for the project at hand is the way the paragraph ends. Of the sifting of nineteenth and twentieth century literature, it concludes: It can furnish subjects for dissertations. But the final word upon it belongs not to literary history but to literary criticism. For that in Germany we have Friedrich Schlegel—and beginnings. (Curtius 1953, 16)

For Curtius, the nineteenth century is not just the end of the universal possession of the European literary tradition, but also the beginning of something new. He says “our age” will be remembered in the future as the “Period of Technique” (Curtius 1953, 23), yet against this he sets the philological task of recuperating the European literary tradition in survey. This is the task of “literary history,” but the day belongs to “literary criticism.” I take this to indicate that Curtius is fully aware that philology has itself entered a new era in its own history, one in which it lays the ground for a new orientation toward literature and, by extension, culture. Curtius is a “humanist,” yet not obviously in the reactionary or recuperating ways

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to which his appropriation has led.5 For humanism is faced with a rupture in culture before which the rupture within medieval culture pales, and the fate of “humanism” lies in the beginnings of a new literary criticism in the work of none other than Friedrich Schlegel (to whom we could add Novalis). Of this, Curtius has little to say directly, yet it is worth noting that the irony that what he identifies as the end of the 26 centuries of European literature in the Age of Goethe is also the first time “Romania” has been “radiative” in Germany and not merely receptive (Curtius 1953, 34). “In him [Goethe] the entire European tradition was alive” (Curtius 1953, 63). Taken together, this suggests that perhaps a new era of European literature is, in the Age of Goethe, about to begin, and the reference to Schlegel could certainly be read in this way. On this view, Curtius’ work in literary history would contribute to this ongoing development. In any case, his carefully couched periodization alone is enough to indicate that it remains for him an open and urgent question. This is the question I seek to face in this book in more direct terms, and Curtius’ work provides a point of historical survey which is of inestimable value in its richness and subtlety. To accept Derrida’s deconstruction straightforwardly would neutralize Curtius’ potential to serve this function, just as De Man’s deconstruction of the Kantian sublime would neutralize the Kantian architectonic. We cannot, of course, expect it to be presented in the terms of the new criticism Curtius himself acknowledges remains outstanding, yet Curtius’ subtlety goes some considerable way in paving the way to this future nonetheless. In this regard, it is worth noting the first function assumed by the appeal to the book is in terms of a defense of philology. “The book is more real by far than the picture” (Curtius 1953, 14), since we can have it in our hands in a way the picture remains largely removed from us, absent a trip to the museum. And since books can be difficult, philology is required as a tool for the science of literature. Curtius traces the rise of philology as a part of the tradition of European literature, but it remains as requisite for literary history as it does within the active reception of a literary tradition, and in a way which is functionally distinct. There is no reason to think that Curtius views his literary history as anything other than the philological preparation for the work of literary criticism which will, he indicates, decide the future of literature in the European tradition

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or its absence. Curtius’ own primary investment in the book is not as symbol, but as historical artifact demanding philological methods for its transmission. Where literary history is concerned, in this sense, and in a way discounting the historical context for its consideration, il n’y pas de horstexte. “But a book, apart from everything else, is a ‘text’” (Curtius 1953, 15). Curtius’ point, like Kant’s, is functional, Derrida’s, like de Man’s, deconstructive. What I have been proposing in this section in a textimmanent way is the functional recuperation of deconstructive praxis, and this may serve as a model for the recuperation of Romantic poiesis more generally. It is in just this functionally recuperated form that I provide a legitimation of poetic reason. This functional appeal is strategic, extrapolating from the functional nature of Blumenberg’s argument, and will need to be revisited in the future. But that is a story for another time.

10.2.2 Derridean Arguments In mathematics, the term ‘argument’ is used in a systematically equivocal sense, and this equivocation has largely been taken over into the contemporary philosophical community. On the one hand, the argument of a theorem is the logic of its proof, its “proof structure.” This is already complicated by the fact that there are many different possible proofs for a theorem and no robust sense of a logical structure they possess globally or in common. The only obvious commonality is the logical relation between premises and conclusion(s), which leaves no trace of the way one gets from the one to the other (Shoesmith and Smiley 1978). Yet this movement from premises to conclusion(s) is what proofs are all about. On the other hand, the argument of a theorem is the specific presentation given for the proof of the theorem, and this inevitably leaves most of the formal, logical structure of the proof out. Usually, this omission is chalked up to “practical considerations,” and yet if mathematics itself functions as a calculus for accelerating a certain domain of thinking, in the process generating an opacity which Husserl criticized in his discussion of Galileo’s mathematical physics and identified as quintessentially modern, then the reduction of this sense of proof to a matter of practical convenience reduces the function of mathematics to the value of a shorthand notation.

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We must begin the search for Derridean arguments not with the foundational, logical sense of proof but rather with an analogue of the functional sense of proof we encounter in mathematical practice. In the process, however, we will find that Derrida’s arguments, in this sense, cast back retroactive light on the foundational sense of proof itself. For the foundational sense of proof is not at all foundational in the sense it has traditionally been taken to be by philosophers and mathematicians alike: it does not ground our mathematical practice in any way that would supply an independent legitimation of it. More accurately, if it accomplishes anything at all it would be to establish or, as Derrida might say, inscribe a notation in terms of which proof, in the latter, practical sense, will be conducted. Even this it does in no straightforward way, for as soon as the notation is inscribed, the process of weaning ourselves from it must immediately begin, for “practical” reasons alone! What, then, is the value of this preliminary inscription—and one which does not occur at the beginning of mathematical investigation, but inevitably only in retrospect? Derrida’s insistence on a writing preliminary to language is retrospective as well, which is not to imply it has no prospective value. My choice will be to take as a leading clue the fact that Derrida constitutes his argument as a revaluation of the Husserlian notion of bracketing, and so as a revaluation of the very notion of a philosophical practice given over to the identification of essential structures of phenomenological givenness. In part, Derrida takes over the reformation of the phenomenological reduction initiated by Heidegger, but my sense is that what is most valuable in Derrida’s revaluation comes directly from the confrontation with Husserl himself, and most especially in Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” (Derrida 1989).

10.2.3 From Modernity to the Cut In fact, Derrida does use the term ‘modern’ in Of Grammatology, but in a way which tends to discount it. To begin with, he speaks of the eighteenth century, and the extent to which it marked a “cutoff point” in attempting to deal with two exigencies, and how this extent is “too often ignored or underestimated” (Derrida 2016, 81). The two exigencies at

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issue are: that the scientific interest in writing should take the form of a history of writing, and that it “should guide the pure description of facts, assuming that this last expression makes sense” (Derrida 2016, 81). But this latter assumption is the assumption of the possibility of a phenomenological language of description (“language of presence”), which is under focal attack in grammatology: hence the need for Derrida’s proviso. Grammatologically, the expression is both incoherent and yet a declaration of commitment to what, in the title of the immediately following section, Derrida will call transparence (compare Starobinski 1988). It is the fault of the nineteenth century to have underestimated the extent and implications of this declaration, and Derrida draws on the work of Madeleine V.-David to redress this imbalance. When this veneer has been peeled back, a first decentering of the alphabetic priority can be discerned in the “Chinese” prejudice and the preoccupation with a universal script to be found in Descartes, Kircher, Wilkins and Leibniz, among others. Yet by wrenching the Chinese language out of the history of language (and so violating the first exigency) its functional appeal becomes philosophical rather than historical, and so leads to a redoubling of phonocentrism in the dual forms of rational calculation, on the one hand, and mysticism on the other.6 This division indicates the compatibility of mechanism with a theocentric framework which, according to Derrida, precludes Leibniz’s project for a universal characteristic from serving as a first instance of grammatology. Next, the notion of the eighteenth century as a cutoff point leads to an appeal to Bachelard’s notion of an epistemological cut, which in this case Derrida identifies as occurring in the work of Fréret and Warburton, who critically demolish the utopian appeals to Chinese (Fréret) and Egyptian (Warburton). Fréret’s cutting critique of attitudes towards Chinese is quoted by Derrida: Chinese is not an ideal philosophical language, something the Chinese have never had “anything like” (Derrida 2016, 87). The cut marks the rejection of a double, and doubled, initiative: of a history of writing as the privileged conduit for the reconstruction of an ideal language. Derrida will replace this dual venture by another: that of “writing differently” in a way which will require us also to “reread differently” (Derrida 2016, 94). I have already suggested how Derrida may be read from a Blumenbergian angle by identifying his critique of the appeal to

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origins as analogous to Blumenberg’s secularization critique; correspondingly, Blumenberg may be read as supplying this different writing and different reading in other, yet transposable, terms. So what is the difference? (So what is différance?) Instead of seeing the linearity of writing as something to reject outright—as if we were currently in any position to do so—we must rather accede to “pluridimensionality” and “delinearized temporality” not by regressing to the “mythogram,” but rather first by recognizing that the linear model of writing does its own sort of mythological work, appearing as “another form and another epoch of mythography” (Derrida 2016, 94). To state the rather obvious: neither the history of writing nor the displacement of a particular model of writing are being rejected, but the sense of these commitments has changed from what we can identify with those seventeenth century projects (Descartes, Kircher, Leibniz) which are definitively rousted by eighteenth century criticisms. In particular, the traditional concepts of “man, science, and the line” (anthropology, physics, geometry) must be left behind. And when Derrida goes on to remark that “[e]ven less can this meditation be contained within the limits of a regional science,” he discards not just the prospect for a regional phenomenology of language but by implication the Husserlian commitment to phenomenology as rigorous science as well. Yet the prospect of grammatology will not suffice for this departure, for it is implicated in the same morass as these traditional concepts, and most especially when we attempt to consider it as a positive science. Here we reach the difficult final page of Part One, where Derrida declares, significantly in the subjunctive tense, that “[g]rammatology, this thought, would still hold itself walled-in within presence” (Derrida 2016, 101). Would? On what terms? We must move back to the previous paragraph and its pivotal italicized assertion. Spivak’s revised translation gives: “[i]n a certain way, ‘thought’ wants to say nothing.” This seeks to capture the original French: “[d]’une certaine manière, «la pensée» ne veut rien dire” (Derrida 1967, 142). Yet we may equally say that Derrida’s vouloir-dire translates Husserl’s commitment to intentionality, so that the sentence may also be translated, in a certain way ‘thought’ intends nothing. And along this line we may say: ‘thought’ is an indeterminate blank. As a final step, translating this into the terms I have developed for my own use

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elsewhere, finally: for Derrida, ‘thought’ is the parafinite, and its blankness a registration of what I have called the paraphysical bracket. By this circuitous path, we establish a first point of return for considering Benjamin’s reformation of Schlegel’s medium of reflection. The assertion which begins the penultimate paragraph, that “[t]he constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a necessary and difficult task,” is immediately counterbalanced by the following assertion that “a thought of the trace, of différance or of reserve,” integral to the constitution Derrida seeks, “must also point beyond the field of the epistémè” (Derrida 2016, 101). What is this thought beyond the “field of thought”? Without referring specifically to the term Ereignis, Derrida draws a parallel to Heidegger’s thinking of it and its “transgression of all philosophemes.” Thought is to occupy the analogous place for Derrida: hence its neutrality, its blankness, echoing Blanchot’s response to Heidegger. The translation of this thought as the parafinite is certainly willful on my part, but the justification appeals to, yet goes beyond, blankness to Derrida’s concluding insistence in this paragraph that thought must be “measured to the size of writing” (Derrida 2016, 101). So we see the conjunction of the indeterminate and size which is critical to the thinking of the parafinite and its history, stretching back at least to Anaximander’s apeiron (Bassler 2015). We are now ready to look at the appearance of the term ‘modern’ in Derrida’s text. It concerns the inadequacy of the linear model and the recognition thereof. The inadequacy of the written line “is not modern, but it comes clean [se denonce, literally: denounces itself, OBB] today better than ever before” (Derrida 2016, 94). This self-denunciation is what the cuts Derrida identifies bring into relief (to translate backwards into French: relève, Derrida’s preferred term for translating the Hegelian Aufhebung). Yet there is an irony here that cuts more deeply still, to the distinction between continuity and the cut (with a nod to Richard Dedekind). Returning to the beginning of the chapter, we revisit Derrida’s insistence that the theory of the written sign developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suffered an eclipse at the hands of the nineteenth century. How is this eclipse to be explained? As this point Derrida cites in extenso from Madeleine V.-David in a footnote. David’s explanation is

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that language in the nineteenth century suffered from a “too exclusive apology for the facts of language” at the hands of Herder and his successors, and that this exclusion erased the way prepared in earlier ventures in the history of language, so that “a gap remains to be filled, a continuity to be reestablished” (cited, Derrida 2016, 388). Yet in the body of his text, Derrida accounts for the gap not in the nineteenth century demolition of the long preparation, but in the “epistemological cut” effected already in Fréret and Warburton. And yet Derrida does reestablish a continuity of sorts when he declares that the self-denunciation of linear writing is not modern; yet here the “cut” has now slid forward into the contemporary. This situation can be profitably compared first to the problem posed by understanding Curtius’ declaration of a “cut” in the history of European literature which he identifies with Goethe and, second, with Blumenberg’s epochal transition to the modern as the marking of a cut, not so much in the provision of a legitimation of the modern age as in an unmasking of the history of its delegitimizations (including Derrida’s). In particular, we may pose the question: if we allow for a plurality of cuts, do Derrida’s cuts differ in any fundamental way from Curtius’ and Blumenberg’s thresholds? It seems the matter may reduce to one of scale, which, however, is of course no trivial matter. The difference between providing a transcendental deduction for the table of categories, for literary genres, or for every word in the language is a critical difference, but all belong to one general current of thinking: one extending from Kant to the endgames of German Idealism.

10.2.4 From the Cut to Modernity With all our “homework” now in place, I turn back to de Man’s consideration of a dubious modernity and its relation to Curtius’ reading of the tradition of European literature. As it turns out, de Man does have reasons to suggest that Curtius’ potential “cut” is anything but provisional.7 He suggests it has, rather, to do with an essentially classical orientation in reading literature, and one that is shared by such strange bedfellows as Curtius and Lukács.

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De Man’s argument is intricate, and I only sketch it here. Part of the problem of arriving at his conclusions (to the extent he may even be able to think in terms of conclusions) is that (in this regard much like Blumenberg) his argument proceeds by way of indirect discourse: he looks at the positions of others to show up their limitations. The argument begins with Jauss, who identifies both Curtius and Lukács straightforwardly with a “classicist” tradition of reading. As de Man reports, Georg Lukács, an avowed Marxist, is criticized for reasons that differ little from those invoked with regard to the anything but Marxist Ernst Robert Curtius. For all their ideological differences, both adhere to the classical creed of the canonical work as the aesthetic incarnation of a universal essence. Curtius’s canon, which is that of the masterpieces of the Western neo-Latin tradition, differs entirely from Lukács’s, which is that of nineteenth-­century realism as it culminates in Balzac and dissolves with Flaubert. But the disagreements between various canons are less important to Jauss than the canonical conception itself, in which the work is assumed to transcend history because it encompasses the totality of its tensions within itself. Lukács and Curtius both remain faithful to such a conception. (de Man 1986, 57)

As my remarks above are meant to indicate, how faithful Curtius is to “such a conception” remains less clear to me than to de Man. De Man points out that even Jauss’ esteemed teacher Gadamer is reproached by Jauss for a commitment to canonization, “which in Germany often tends to coincide with the canonization of the Age of Goethe.” Jauss’ reaction is expressed in the Hegelian idea that “the end of classicism is also the end of art,” which leads Jauss to a concern with “modernity as the crux of literary history.” De Man asserts that “the question remains to be considered whether Jauss’s own historical procedure can indeed claim to free itself from the coercion of a model that is perhaps more powerful, and for less controllable reasons, than its assumed opponents believe” (de Man 1986, 57–8). This coercion is conveyed in considerable part through the idea of modernity itself, as we shall see, as expressed in particular by Gadamer. It is, I will suggest, just this sort of expression of modernity to which de Man and Derrida are both, and in

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my opinion rightly, opposed. I conjecture, further, that their reasons are related to, and maybe even derive to some extent, either directly or indirectly, from Lacan’s Freudian critique of (Kojève’s) Hegel. Such a stance is hugely more prospective than the Gadamerian suggestions to which de Man objects. In an essay, “The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century,” Gadamer asserts that the advance in philosophical thought in the twentieth century can be seen in terms of three regards in which twentieth century thought is less naive than its predecessors, specifically with respect to what Gadamer calls the naiveté of positing, the naiveté of reflection and the naiveté of the concept. One can easily imagine an analogous historical transformation being posited from with the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, which becomes less naive about the status of the logical, of self-reference, and of the requisite antipsychologism required for the treatment of concepts. De Man points to the end of Gadamer’s essay, where Gadamer identifies the modern period as “post-Hegelian” and asserts that this development consists in an improvement of the concept of spirit, which now “finds its true abode in the phenomenon of language, which stands more and more as the center of contemporary philosophy” (de Man 1986, 76). (Phenomenology of Spirit as a coherence theory of language: some improvement! Gadamer meets Donald Davidson.) As de Man puts it, “that is how modernity is here defined, as a Hegelianism which has concentrated more on linguistic dimensions” (de Man 1986, 76). If this indeed is how modernity is to be conceived, it’s no wonder that de Man and Derrida would have a problem with it. It is therefore important to stress that Gadamer’s characterization is far from anachronistic and that such naive glosses have exercised a huge influence in the academic community. It is essentially representative of all secularization accounts of modernity, whose power is largely a function of how easily they may be grasped and reproduced. What is central to the merit of de Man is that he (like Derrida) notes how ultimately un-Hegelian such a conception in fact is. In speaking of the way in which Benjamin’s stance on the political aspect of history derives from the poetical (sic) structure of language, de Man writes:

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To the extent that such a poetics, such a history, is nonmessianic, not a theocracy but a rhetoric, it has no room for certain historical notions such as the notion of modernity, which is always a dialectical, that is to say an essentially theological notion. You will remember that we started out from Gadamer’s claim to modernity, in terms of a dialectic which was explicitly associated with the word “Spirit,” with the spirituality in the text of Hegel. We have seen, and it is for me gratifying to find, that Hegel himself— when, in the section of the Aesthetics on the sublime, he roots the sublime in this same separation between sacred and profane—is actually much closer to Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” than he is to Gadamer. (de Man 1986, 93, 1996, 105–18)

Certainly, Blumenberg’s notion of modernity, so far from being dialectical in this sense, is so profoundly opposed to any account of modernity whose legitimation would require an antecedent appeal to pre-modern and/or theological legitimation conditions that his secularization critique becomes focal for his entire enterprise. This also indicates the focal sense in which Gadamer’s commitment to modernity falls prey to the secularization critique. His notion of modernity does “fail” in this regard insofar as it appeals to an antecedent conception of spirit which is progressively secularized not only in but as the criterion for the modern development which results in the sophistication (“non-naiveté”) of contemporary philosophy of language as a progressive secularization of the traditional conception of spirit. If we take this failure seriously, not only most of German Idealism but the vast majority of contemporary philosophy in both “analytic” and “continental” traditions is wiped off the board. This marks a first return, full circle, to the question with which we started, but with a first major recognition of what is required to exit from the endgames of German Idealism. So, in fact, we have evidence that the views of Blumenberg, on the one hand, and Derrida and de Man, on the other, dovetail in this regard while standing in profound opposition so far as the value of the term ‘modernity’ is concerned: it is precisely in this sense that I view them as adjoints. The plot thickens when we return to Benjamin’s investment in the early German Romantics, because one of the implications of his reading of the Jena Circle is that there is a fundamental (though unstabilized) level at

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which their commitment also fails to fall to a secularization critique. This does not invalidate Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization hypothesis, but it does blunt or at least complicate it as a weapon for opposing the development of romanticism as a modern cultural and intellectual current. In fact, Blumenberg’s nuanced treatment of romanticism in Work on Myth dovetails with such a suggestion (whatever Blumenberg’s personal prejudices may have been). This opens up a path to legitimating poetic reason as it also suggests we should pay particular attention to the roots of romanticism in its conception of language and its role.

10.2.5 Gram-materialism and the Logic of Lyric Having argued for a limited convergence of Derrida and Blumenberg, it is time to return to de Man’s gram-materialism and what it can tell us about the logic of lyric. The quickest route to what we need begins by asking the question: why does de Man call prosopopeia the master trope of poetic discourse? “Now it is certainly beyond question that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in its turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general). And that it therefore occurs, like all figures, in the guise of a cliché or a convention is equally certain” (de Man 1986, 47). There is a curious crossing of genres in de Man’s assertion, for he identifies the figure of address as recurrent in lyric poetry, yet prosopopeia, as the personification of an absent figure, is an inherently dramatic device. Perhaps there should be no great surprise here, as Angus Fletcher has identified the strategy of personification as lying at the heart of allegory, and it is allegory around which all de Man’s meditations circle. Personification is also a privileged locus for considering the location of agency within poetic discourse: “The agency is of two sorts: the agents are intended either to represent abstract ideas or represent actual, historical persons” (Fletcher 1964, 26). But we may also identify the appeal to agency as a requisite once we leave the literal battleground of the verbal contest: from actual sparring we move to the creation of various poetic genres, now locating the potential for confrontation within them. We might begin by saying that a genre is a platform for literary

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contestation. One of the questions which the legitimacy of poetic reason seeks to answer is: what happens to poetry when it moves from a vocative, through a generic, to a locative model of contest? In broad terms, the answer that I will defend is that we move from a poetry of voice to a poetry of the subject-(dis)-continuum, and that we thenceforth understand voice as a function of this (dis)-continuum rather than understanding the poetic subject as a function of voice. It is for this reason that I have laid the ground for this deduction by laying out the logic of lyric, since lyric is typically understood in the wake of romanticism as the quintessential poetry of voice, along the lines de Man indicates. In undermining the primacy of voice, playing out the endgame of German Idealism from within, de Man moves from the primacy of lyric to the preoccupation with allegory. Allegory as such is, course, nothing new, but its history is what is at issue here. Therefore it will be worthwhile to ask whether there are loci within antecedent allegory corresponding to the apotheosization of voice in the romantic (and post-romantic) approach to lyric. The answer is not far to find: it lies in the way that the epic dimensions of allegory are played against and so tempered by romance elements: unsurprisingly on all counts, the prehistory of romanticism is to be located in romance. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a most perspicuous example since it cuts romance such a wide berth. In this regard, matters peak in the final (extant) Book Six, where we find emphasis laid on those elements which correspond to the esoteric function we have identified above as highly developed already within a Vedic context and represented in nineteenth century literature by Dickinson. In Book Six, a number of the personae cultivate the esoteric in one way or another, but perhaps the most obvious (exoteric) of these esoteric figures is the Hermit. While counseling that secrecy be shunned, “nevertheless, he dwells apart, and his past history remains undisclosed” (Nohrnberg 1976, 662). At least figurally, the personification is simultaneously of the exoteric (free, not secret) and the esoteric (apart, undisclosed). The reader will recall the distinction made between the modernizing function, which may and in fact will be found in any culture or era, and modernity understood as a historical epoch, which will be associated with providing the modern function a particular legitimate and legitimating

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status. Book Six of The Faerie Queene helps us to see why the function of esoteric retreat is naturally identified as the modernizing function par excellence. At least as early as Quintilian, the locus amoenus is identified as the ideal retreat for purposes specifically of writing. Yet James Nohrnberg insists that this only reflects one side of Quintilian’s view, for writing is a combination of effort and leisure, and both sides of the paradoxical equation must be supported equally. This classical paradox is sufficient to require that from a classical viewpoint poetic reason be a rationality of paradox, and as such it already points to the crux of poetic reason itself. In the case of traditional allegory, this paradox stretches from the romantic genius who, enlisted allegorically, declines into an abstract genus, moving from allegorical “Selfe” to “other.” James Norhnberg quotes Owen Barfield’s gnomic encapsulation, “It is from the Gorgon’s head, petrifying life into the stone of abstraction, that Pegasus is born” (cited, Nohrnberg 1976, 770), yet he notes that if the process declines into a categorical self-consciousness, it is fatal to the creation of poetry itself. Here we see another argument that poetic reason must antecede the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, and that should we identify it with a traditional account of the subject and its self-­ reflective potential, the game would be thrown before it ever began. Nohrnberg also notes that generally Book Six does not “allegorize” to the extent of Books One through Five, and the example of the Hermit indicates just how allegory gives way to irony (Nohrnberg 1976, 668), which in fact stands as the master figure for de Man’s (post-)romantic reconfiguration of allegory as well. The non-negligible difference is that what can be identified as a strategy in Spenser becomes an explicit theme in de Man. This is not just a difference in quantity but a difference in kind, and it indicates a growing consciousness of the need to re-visit allegory shared by Fletcher and de Man in their different ways. Insightful as both analyses of allegory are, both ultimately go proxy for a locative poetics which I read both Fletcher and de Man as approaching in different ways in their late work. We can see the need for a locative poetics anticipated in different ways, but a passage from the end of Fletcher’s extended discussion of personification early in his book on allegory is particularly apt. Banking on Curtius, Fletcher points out that “for allegorical heroes life has a segmented character, as each event occurs a new discrete

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characteristic of the hero is revealed, almost as if it had no connection with prior events or with other tied-in characteristics” (Fletcher 1964, 35). Here is the narrative smithereened apart, indicating that the question of the subject-(dis)-continuum has not even been posed, much less faced. Yet the narrative is not trivialized for all that: Fletcher insists that the segmented character retains a credible notion of narrative agency. “One thing at a time’ does not imply that as an organization of agency the fable fails to have interest. The sum of all single steps may be extremely complex, as in a mosaic” (Fletcher 1964, 35). Fletcher then cites Curtius, who observes that though we may find Aeneas a lifeless character, the great theme of the Aeneid is not Aeneas but the destiny of Rome, and that embedded in this we even find a journey to the underworld which lays the ground for Dante’s Commedia. So far from implying a trivialization of agency, the handling of agency just is the standard-bearer for the construction of the European literary tradition from Homer and Virgil to Dante and beyond. Curtius’ tradition of European literature is a tradition of allegory, both in origin and goal. But this also suggests that when we move from a conception of agency which trivializes the continuum problem to one that stages it in terms of the subject-(dis)-continuum, the status of literature itself will also be subject to revaluation. Further, we may expect that this will be most readily traced in terms of the increasing introjection of romance elements into the allegorical presentation, so that Spenser’s allegory is a privileged example by virtue of its early modern location, with deep roots in the Italian renaissance romance epics. In fact, Norhnberg’s analysis of Book Six reinforces this conjecture in multiple ways. Equally, it is no coincidence that Nohrnberg’s advisor and mentor, Northrop Frye, should have written a book (in the same year of publication) on the status of romance called The Secular Scripture (Frye 1976). Weakly understood, such a title would point in the direction of the secularization hypothesis, but ironically, and more powerfully, it encapsulates the challenge Romanticism at once poses and faces for modernity. For present purposes I leave aside the question which would be the “correct” way to understand Frye, but Geoffrey Hartman leaves what is crucial open and exposed when he refers to Frye’s emphasis on the design of Romance as “a perpetual displacement of sacred patterns or

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archetypal myths” (Hartman 1981, 49). The key word is displacement, or as I have called it, dislocation (compare Monod 2002). Tracing from prosopopeia to the locative recapitulates the trajectory from romanticism to the legitimacy of poetic reason. One consequence of de Man’s discussion is that the rhetorical mastery of poetry harnessed through prosopopeia is hallucinatory: “As any reader of Hugo or, for that matter, anyone who ever wondered about the legs of tables or, like Wordsworth, about the faces or the backs or mountains, knows, prosopopeia is hallucinatory. To make the invisible visible is uncanny” (de Man 1986, 49). Riffaterre approaches this set of issues through the epithet and the elevation of the adjectival to representation as a permanent feature. Should the adjective enter into a predicative relationship, it loses its epithetic quality and “poeticity disappears” in the degradation of the trope. “We must therefore conclude that the agent of poeticity is a specific relationship between epithet and noun, which designates a quality of the noun’s referent, or a seme of that signifier, as characteristic or basic.” We are dealing once again with an origin narrative, and this time nothing less than an account of the birth of poetry: “So that the poetic is born where an adjective’s meaning, normally contingent, accessory, in any case context-­ determined, is represented a priori as a permanent feature” (Riffaterre 1978, 28). On Riffaterre’s account, the birth of poetry brings conditionality into visibility. The recourse to trope as “hyper-predication” should give us pause: first of all, because it commits us yet again to a kind of origin narrative, and second of all because it subscribes to a view of language which either is, or readily devolves into, a narrowly referential one. De Man will aggravate matters even further by appropriating irony to aggravate the paradoxes and outright contradictions inherent in a thorough goingly rhetorical approach to romantic poetics. In de Man’s own account, the two disjunctive sides of the story are each associated with a rhetorical origin narrative. On the side of poetry of mind (Wordsworth, Shelley) the birth of vision is in the emergence of rhetoric from a primary prosopopeia; on the side of ‘materialism” (Kant, Fichte) the birth of vision is in the emergence of architectonic from a primary catachresis, which de Man identifies with positing (or, as I’ve termed it, positioning). In this way, de Man envelops the locative within the rhetorical dimension itself. What I propose, instead, is the inverse

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strategy: to envelope the rhetorical within the locative dimension. This corresponds to the functional recuperation of the deconstructive as I’ve described it above. We may begin to find a way to integrate de Man’s identification of a “materialism” into a larger architectonic framework beginning with a passage from Lacan: “the analyst will find sufficient material upon which to base his practice by simply learning to correctly count to four, as the author of these lines is trying to teach people to do (this is, to integrate the function of death into the ternary Oedipal relationship)” (Lacan 2006, 299–300). In the fourfold of Vedic categories, this amount to reintegrating the third category, sacrifice (de Nicolás 1976).8 One might do worse than to ask how this counting to four would work in both Lacan and the Vedas. I’ve suggested that the Hegelian dialectic begins in the Phenomenology with quaternary “Hegel boxes” whose antecedent model is the traditional logical square of opposition. Quickly these are telegraphically collapsed into ternary dialectic progressions of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. But although Lacan will cultivate his own version of the logical square of opposition, the “fourfold” Lacan points to is not to be found in a relapse to the earlier logical quaternary, but in its re-visioning: and this re-visioning lies manifestly on the far side of the triadic dialectic. Counting to three is not enough. In Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, Lacan will show us how to count to four (Lacan 2016). The stony materialism de Man seeks to identify in Kant is manifestly associated with the function of death which Lacan identifies by its inorganicism. Is there a comparable progression on the side of poetry of mind? For Lacan, the response should be: no, there is not. And yet, in “Shelley Disfigured,” de Man does identify an undertow of the stone-­ faced death mask. On Lacanian lines, we should identify Shelley’s poetic strategy (and by backwards implication, Wordsworth’s) as an exercise in the imaginary rather than the symbolic. The preferred context for unfolding this distinction is Lacan’s essay, “Psychoanalysis and Teaching.” Wordsworth and Shelley remained trapped in a primary narcissism which Lacan identifies with the imaginary. This strategy goes by way of an introjection of death into the ternary structure of the Oedipal triangle: “This is how death comes to take on the semblance of the imaginary other and how the real

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Other is reduced to death: a borderline figure who answers the question about [one’s] existence” (Lacan 2006, 378; Derrida 1979). This is a strategy of signification, as in jokes, whose frivolity “stems from the fact that they make us share in the dominance of the signifier over the significations of our fate that are the hardest to bear” (Lacan 2006, 372). Yet this dominance can be achieved in two distinct ways: either through the narcissism of imaginary identifications, or through symbolic identification in truth, whereby the “lures” of the imaginary are replaced by questions. This latter identification opens the question, in particular, of psychoanalytic praxis as, I would put it, a paraphilosophical praxis, since we question its relation to truth. What would the equivalent be in the poetic domain? In contrast to rhetoric in its traditional sense, de Man proposes the “rhetoric of performativity,” of which he can identify no trace in the poetic praxes of Wordsworth and Shelley. But what, we might ask, makes a poetics of catachresis more susceptible to this rhetorical extension than a poetics of prosopopeia? If this is merely a displacement from one rhetorical arena to another, there seems no reason to privilege or exclude either one. It is here that my insistence on the (relative) coherence of Kantian architectonic comes into play, for the fact that the Kantian vision is architectonic fortifies it in a way which was, as a matter of fact, not available to Shelley’s in his poetic volatility. Wordsworth survives personally but fails to accede to the challenge of the Recluse project, though the fragments remain endlessly fascinating (Johnston 1984; Longenbach 1988, 248, 267). Historically, the Kantian architectonic does ultimately founder on the collapse of the theoretical into the practical domain, with consequences that continue to beset us. An emphasis on performativity follows the strategy of emphasizing the praxical, yet so do Lacan’s reflections emerge in the consideration of psychoanalytic praxis. In this state of affairs it is not immediately clear whether the local coherence of the Kantian transition from the mathematical to the dynamical sublime can be coherently extended to Kant’s larger visionary architectonic, or whether instead it presages a global instability, implicitly along the fault line of the theoretical/practical reason distinction or along some other fault line. Howsoever this may be, for present purposes such an assessment is secondary: what will be necessary is to secure the

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comparable transition in the context of the current project, which I identify as the transition from a static (structural) to a dynamic legitimation of modernity and the demand that this transition be secured in terms of appeal to a stable conception of reason. In fact, the conception of poetic reason succeeds by identifying a unified conception of reason which antecedes the distinction into theoretical and practical. The recognition that I take away from Benjamin is that there is a kernel of the “medium of poetic reflexivity” which can be legitimated and so preserved. The key, then, is to fashion a systematic platform for its employment, thereby establishing the systematic conditions for its promotion as a tool (i.e. function) of self-assertion. In fact, much of this has already been accomplished in the second of the two chapters on the logic of lyric above, moving from Lacan’s “The Instance of the Letter” and on to the locative analyses of poetry supplied by Toporov and Jakobson. The work of Derrida and de Man counsels us to beware of the assumptions to which the term ‘modernism’ may tacitly commit us. I have argued that nothing precludes us from using this term with vigilance, and that in fact the concerns of Derrida and de Man dovetail with Blumenberg’s critique of secularization narratives of the modern condition.

10.3 From Modernity to Poetic Reason: Modifying Blumenberg’s Argument Blumenberg’s argument is not presented as transcendental in nature, though it is clearly an argument about conditions of possibility. Can it be viewed as a transcendental argument in anything like Kant and Lacan’s senses? Is there an analogue to the logical table of the functions of judgment or the trajectory of Lacanian stages in the poetic case? If so, what? And what is the “table of categories” to be deduced from it? Previously, I have shown how Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding may be understood as a “lifting” through the threefold machine of derangement/adjunction/redistribution (Bassler 2018, 170–6). Most fundamentally, what is lifted through the machine is Kantian self-positioning itself. Similarly Blumenberg’s metaphorology

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can be understood as the lifting of a higher-order self-positioning by enlisting Blumenberg’s own discussion of Kant’s treatment of symbol in the Third Critique and showing how Blumenberg’s metaphorology can be understood as a generalizing extension thereof. (Bassler 2018, 176–80). Here I add an argument that the consolidation of the systematic conditions for self-assertion in Blumenberg’s argument for the legitimacy of the modern age can in fact be viewed as a transcendental argument for the legitimacy, in particular, of Kant’s notion of self-positioning, which conceptually codifies the “pole” to which self-assertion may be rationally attributed and which is consistent with and a rendering explicit of the commitments of Blumenberg’s own legitimation argument. In this way, the extension of Blumenberg’s original argument will fall in line with the form of transcendental argument appearing in Kant and my reconstruction of Lacan. Self-positioning is adequate to Blumenberg’s legitimation argument and the associated conception of reason since the minimal rationality that Blumenberg posits is a minimal rationality to support self-assertion. As I have already identified, the minimal rationality as Blumenberg identifies it is too narrow to support the dynamical stabilization which is required to complete Blumenberg’s argument, and which in turn demands a broader conception of reason, the poetic reason. The analogue to Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception for this broader conception of reason is the Lacanian subject-(dis)-continuum, understood as the analogous “pole” to which poiesis may be ascribed. While Kant cultivates self-positioning in the context of a transcendental idealism which is also an empirical realism, opening all sorts of questions about the status of the “external,” it is clear that insofar as self-positioning is viewed as the correlate of human self-assertion, it is cultivated in the external medium of the real and only world we inhabit, Our Matrix. Viewed from this perspective, the specification to the artwork should be viewed as a localization of this external medium in which this richer rationality finds its proper locus. The associated poles in this case are therefore the subject(dis)-continuum and the artwork as reflective medium. In the chapters on the logic of lyric I have identified lyrical esotericism as a modernizing function dating back at least to the Vedic context. It is also identified as the degree zero of Jakobson’s poetic function, so that we

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must expect this modernizing function to extend as far back as language itself. The deployment of such a function is obviously not tantamount to the advent of modern agency in Blumenberg’s sense, since this requires the provision of a systematic promotion for self-assertive agency. Furthermore, when we consider lyrical esotericism as a function to be “promoted” to a systematically modern level, the sense of agency must change, for it can no longer be understood merely in terms of self-­ assertion and the rationality Blumenberg associates with it. As it requires both a broader sense of agency affiliated with the subject-(dis)-continuum and a correspondingly broader poetic rationality, the assessment of its systematic promotion must be understood in terms which are at once deeper and broader than Blumenberg’s. This is the focal task of the transcendental deduction given in outline below. Mathematicians often speak of proof sketches, which, though less than full proofs, are sufficient to give the essential ideas of the argument and to indicate secure paths along which a full proof could be obtained. The argument I will supply is a proof sketch in this sense. Our path to the transcendental deduction of poetic reason is now clear. First, we require an argument that Kant’s self-positioning is the explicitation of the assertive pole of the rationality associated with Blumenberg’s argument for the legitimacy of the modern age, and specifically for the systematic promotion of human self-assertion. Second, we require an extension of Blumenberg’s argument which dynamically stabilizes it, and that the associated rationality required for this dynamical stabilization is precisely poetic reason. Third, we require an argument that the subject(dis)-continuum is the replacement for self-positioning requisite when Blumenberg’s minimal rationality of self-assertion is expanded to poetic reason. The provision of these three arguments amounts not only to an argument for the legitimacy of poetic reason, but also provides a rudimentary account of the nature of this reason, understood in terms of the canonical example of the subject-(dis)-continuum acting in the reflective medium of the artwork. Aspects of Arguments One and Two have been sketched in previous work. Here I give them more explicitly and with an eye to the task at hand. It has been the ongoing project of this volume to lay the ground for Argument Three.

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10.3.1 Self-positioning as the Explicitation of Systematic Human Self-assertion Conditions In his book Kant’s Final Synthesis, Eckart Förster begins his discussion of Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre, as I would translate it, doctrine of self-­positioning, by citing Kant’s assertion in the First Critique that “the synthetic unity of apperception is … that highest point to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding” (B134, cited Förster 2000, 101). Although, as Förster acknowledges, the terms change somewhat, the framework for the doctrine of self-positioning in the Opus Postumum remains the same: “again, we start with the act ‘I think’ as preceding all experience, the ‘mere logical function’… The task of the Selbstsetzungslehre is precisely to show how the I as mere object of thought (cogitabile) can become an empirical object given in space and time (dabile)” (Förster 2000, 102–3). Here Kant pursues a response to the central problem in Leibniz’s metaphysics: that, absent a substantial form, there is no intrinsic reason to associate a mind (monad) with its phenomenal body, and hence no reason to ascribe it a particular location in space. Putting the point a bit telegraphically, we may say that in the Opus Postumum the task of the transcendental deduction in the First Critique, lifting the Table of the Logical Functions of Judgment to the Table of the Categories of Understanding, has been both broadened and deepened: by the time we reach the doctrine of self-positioning the task is to lift the bare logical function of the unity of apperception to the field of space and time, and in so doing finally address the Leibnizian impasse. This motivates my translation of Selbstsetzung as self-positioning. In the current context, the fundamental point is that such a deduction is exactly what is required to promote the unity of apperception to a status whereby it could serve as the subjective locus for self-assertion in the world of space and time. This remains the case whether we construe it as phenomenal with Kant, or otherwise—e.g., as Real in Lacan. In both cases the underlying mechanism of the associated deduction remains the same. My point is therefore more basic, and independent of the evaluation of the details of Kant’s argument: self-positioning just is the logical (syntactic) function whose (semantic) lifting moves us from logical to experiential

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space. This connects the narrowest (syntactic) conception of reason with its capacity to serve as a support for human self-assertion, but only by identifying it as experientially positional. Blumenberg’s emergency consolidation of rationality is minimal in the same sense, and so Kant’s concept of self-positioning is the exact concept required for the explicit identification of the subjective condition for Blumenberg’s argument. Förster views the Selbstsetzungslehre as a schematization for outer sense (Förster 2000, 114) and stresses its dependence on the ether deduction. A reasonable objection is therefore that the success of this Kantian deduction is dubious, and in the absence of an explicit, successful deduction, its transposition to the current context cannot possibly be evaluated. The objection is itself cogent, but the approach I have previously providing in terms of the logic of derangement/adjunction/redistribution, in terms of which I have translated the Kantian deduction as a lifting of an original derangement (the logical table of the functions of judgment) through adjunction to redistribution (the table of categories) does provide a general context in which the general strategy of deduction can be supported. Rather than work through the details for Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre, I show below instead how this works in the specific case of the transcendental deduction of poetic reason. As Förster goes on to remark, so far as the Kantian program is concerned, even assuming all of this falls into place, there remains the question of the unity of theoretical and practical reason (Förster 2000, 116). In fact, the distinction between theoretical and practical reason is skewed in Kant in favor of practical reason in a way which leaves it insufficiently legitimated in a way similar to the way in which Blumenberg’s functional-­pragmatic argument fails to provide a sufficient legitimation of the modern age.

10.3.2 Poetic Reason and the Dynamical Extension of Blumenberg’s Legitimation Argument Blumenberg’s legitimation argument is sufficient for identifying abstract conditions for promoting human self-assertion, yet once we consider the systematic promotion of human self-assertion, Blumenberg’s argument is inadequate to address the issue of human self-assertion’s dynamical regulation. Blumenberg’s legitimation argument, like Peirce’s for the

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pragmatic principle, is weak in an important regard in which Kant’s transcendental deduction in the First Critique is not: Kant does not just argue pragmatically for his conception of reason (as a “minimal emergency requisite”), but rather supplies a systematic logical context (the Table of the Logical Functions of Judgment) from which he derives the categories governing the application of reason to the domain of experience. In contrast to Blumenberg’s argument, and like Kant’s, Lacan’s transcendental deduction in the Anxiety seminar is a robust argument. Taking this argument as cue, I suggest that we think of psychopathologies as dynamical instabilities and psychoanalytic praxis as a context for redressing them. Intuitively, instability may be thought of exclusively as a condition of drift, hence hyper-fluidity, but hyper-rigidity should equally be viewed as dynamically unstable. No matter how structurally fixed hyper-­ rigidities may be, such structural fixity does not meet the adaptive criteria which count for dynamical stability. Each particular transcendental deduction identifies the object a as the relevant cause of desire for the diagnosis of the respective psychopathology. Viewed as dynamical instabilities it is the purpose of psychoanalysis to redress, it might even be possible to translate the various psychopathologies into the vocabulary of mis-pacing, but this issue lies beyond the bounds of what need be accomplished here. It may be objected that Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses on the psychopathologies of individuals and so is inappropriate for considering the dynamical stabilization of a cultural condition of human self-assertion. This objection is somewhat narrow-minded given that Lacan identifies individuals as deeply culturally conditioned, and particularly by the linguistic means they inherit. In line with this, while I do not pretend that the context Lacan supplies can yield the full demonstration demanded, I nonetheless think it goes considerably further than one might expect at the outset. This is because the dynamical stabilization which is culturally required is associated with conditions of “individual” expression, as can be seen by the way the modern absorption of Gnosticism becomes critical for the success or failure of modernity as Blumenberg construes it. While Blumenberg conceives of modernity as an overcoming of Gnosticism on the global, cultural level, it is on the level of individual expressions of Gnosticism that modernity will absorb it. There are two main cases that immediately beg consideration. The first is that of

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high-­level spokespersons (Jung, Bloom) who may carry a substantial portion of the population in their wake. Nonetheless, in this case the capacity to absorb Gnosticism culturally just is the capacity to absorb the cultural reception of these individual expressions. An apparently more troubling and challenging instance comes from an insistence such as Harold Bloom’s that the vast majority of what identifies itself as American Christianity just is in fact the Gnostic “American religion” (Bloom 1992). Assuming a scenario such as Bloom describes, in this case we are dealing with a global, cultural phenomenon which, while it manifests itself through individual expression, cannot be driven back, as in the first case, to the programmatic expression of individual Gnostics. Here, it seems, there are two options. Either we must find an argument that modernity, as Blumenberg conceives it, is capable of absorbing these Gnostic tendencies; or, we must conclude that these challenges pose a frontal threat to the legitimacy of the modern age as Blumenberg understands it. The situation is not so clear-cut that either option can be ruled out in advance. So far as this second case is concerned (on either of its narrower or broader construal), along psychoanalytic lines we could ask what sort of needs such Gnostic forms of expression satisfy and go on to seek their dynamical economy. This would reopen the explosive ground Freud recognized most dramatically in his late work Moses and Monotheism, something I have no intention of doing here. Instead, what I propose to do is to specify to something resembling the first case mentioned above, that of “high-order” intellectual expressions of Gnosticism such as Jung’s and Bloom’s, and concentrate on the stability of intellectual investigation in the modern age, suggesting that this provides us with a leading clue for the second case as well. If, as I have insisted, the success or failure of “intense theoretical investigation, carried on with willful acceleration at a high clip,” though not a sufficient condition for modernity’s legitimation, speaks nonetheless to the legitimacy of modernity’s pace, we can use its absence as a falsifier for the success of modernity: “Were analogous endeavors to prove unsustainable in the contemporary or future intellectual climate, this in and of itself would count as a strong mark against the intellectual stability of modern pacing” (Bassler 2012, 204). Can Lacan’s transcendental

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deduction give us any clue as to the stability of such intellectual pursuit? I believe so, not by providing an argument that modernity has definitively established the conditions for such pursuit, but by indicating what at least some of the necessary conditions for such pursuit are. Lacan’s deduction is of the object a as cause of desire; how, we may ask, is this related to any such dynamical stabilization? The answer is that dynamical stabilization is a function of investment, and investment is a function (among other things) of desire. Lacan has therefore provided us with a normative standard for the evaluation of such investment, and it is in this sense that he conceives of his enterprise as supplying a transcendental ethics (Lacan 2008). Though Lacan’s desire is to supply this specifically for the domain of psychoanalytic praxis, I think it is clear that the investigation can yield more general fruits. Desire poses particularly aggravated problems in the context of psychoanalytic praxis, but the account of desire Lacan gives is available generally. Although Lacan insists that he is not himself drawing the philosophical conclusions his investigations would yield, he also never denies that there are such philosophical implications. Lacan’s transcendental argument may thus be taken to provide a template in terms of which the argument for the legitimacy of a dynamically stable modernity can be supplied. Such an argument may be secured according to the following observations. 1. Lacan provides a way to view destabilization as an ethical failure, and specifically with respect to the transcendental ethics of desire which he promotes. What does this have to do with poetic reason? 2. Poetic reason is a reason that does justice to desire. Given antecedent preparation earlier in this book, these two steps can be handled quite simply. Step One: psychopathology is a model for destabilization. Lacanian psychoanalysis proceeds on the premise that this destabilization is consistently a function of giving ground relative to one’s desire. The deduction of Lacan’s object a as cause of desire is the first step in tracing back to the origin of psychopathology in desire: each psychopathology reflects

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the way in which the object a as cause of desire is the semantic ground of destabilization. Step Two: Lacan’s “reason since Freud” is a model of poetic reason in its provision of a reason which is adequate to desire. What remains is to see that this reason just is poetic reason, i.e. a reason of poiesis, where we restrict here to the specific case of making of poetry in the narrow, traditional sense. This is the task of our third subsection, to which we are ready to proceed. However, before I proceed to this final step, let me summarize what I take at this juncture to be in place and what remains outstanding. What we have achieved is an argument that poetic reason, as a reason which does justice to desire, is normative for an ethical standard according to which specifically modern action may be judged. This would hold true more straightforwardly in the narrow case of high-level intellectual production, but the extension to the broader and more challenging case of widespread action in modern context is reasonably clear, though would require working out in detail. For this, a book would be needed which would run roughly in parallel with and respond to (Bloom 1992). The claim is not that the defense of modernity as a successful overcoming of Gnosticism is secured as some kind of proleptic cultural certainty (I don’t think this was ever Blumenberg’s intent), but rather that a normative standard can be achieved against which such Gnosticism is demonstrably praxically inferior. Whether modernity will rise to the challenge of this internal normative ethical standard is an ongoing and historically open question. It will in part depend on the extent to which ventures which exercise a guiding, normative bearing on the larger cultural populace, can meet this standard. If anything like Bloom’s scenario in The American Religion is accurate, this is manifestly not the current case. This is another reason to find the project at hand culturally urgent. I am also under no illusions that the dissemination of these ideas will be either easy or proceed along any one simple path. Work is needed on manifold fronts. In particular, the reading of Lacan in terms of psychopathology as dynamical instability opens up broad prospects for work in the philosophy of culture.

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10.3.3 The Subject-(dis)-continuum as Replacement for Self-positioning I take it as sufficiently established at this point that the subject-(dis)continuum is the appropriate replacement for Kantian apperception when we move from Blumenberg’s minimal rationality to Lacanian “reason since Freud.” What we must see now is that this latter reason is the necessary and sufficient support for an account of poiesis. The account of poiesis I take as a starting point is the German Idealist notion, expressed in various ways by various authors, of cultivation in an external field of reflection, here specifically the field of the “artwork.” In the way it is typically framed among the German Idealists, this account of poiesis falls to Blumenberg’s secularization critique, since so long as a traditional conception of reason is retained, the conception of subjectivity as creative is modeled on a divine notion of creation and yet fails to satisfy its rationality conditions. Poetic creation is therefore defined as essentially “imaginative” and is as such delegitimated as irrational. Kant’s philosophy, as I interpret it, goes some way to redress this problem, emphasizing as it does the central role played by rational judgment. However, even accepting that Kant’s revolutionary conception of the subject as self-positioning is sufficient to locate rationally the application of judgment in the world, it fails to account for how this application of judgment can be rationally grounded in an investment in the world. Blumenberg’s account of the “this-worldliness” of human self-assertion remains limited in this same way. By comparison, Hannah Arendt’s promotion of human self-assertion “for love of the world” indicates a concern for the issue of investment but, absent an account of such love in other than theological terms, threatens once again to fall prey to Blumenberg’s secularization critique. Lacan’s transcendental ethics fills this gap by accounting architectonically for the cause of desire in such a way that it can be understood as a rational category—where, of course, the reason at issue is “reason since Freud.” Now the development within an external medium of reflection can be accounted for in rational terms: it is a field of our

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rational investment, oriented by desire. To support this assertion, we must move from Blumenberg’s narrow, instrumental reason to the broad, poetic reason implied by Lacan’s work. This is the reason no longer of a (merely) self-­positioning subject, but of a subject-(dis)-continuum grounded in its relation to desire. We have now secured our third, and final desideratum.

Notes 1. The context is of course Kant’s “system.” In fact, such an articulation is precisely what, but some time after Kant, and on other grounds, Cantor will protend. 2. I find the decoherence approach to quantum theory philosophically unsatisfactory for analogous reasons. Perhaps the most interesting version of this, in its insistence on quantum histories, is (Griffiths 2002). Although it need not necessarily be classified as a decoherence interpretation, what Griffiths identifies as consistency conditions can also be (and sometimes are) called decoherence conditions (Faris n.d., 4). The comparison is important for this project because of the suggestion I make for a Quantum Psychoanalytic Theory above. 3. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye identifies a fourth level of criticism, which he calls rhetorical, precisely as the theory of genres (Frye 1957, 243–337). 4. My brother-in-law, Sean Brient, who grew up in Texas and now lives in California, tells me there is a California variation on the Texas two-step. In California you start on the other foot. Since there are only two feet, and there are only two steps, this is the only possible variation. Call these the rightist and leftist variations of deconstruction; whether any given deconstruction is a version of the Texan or the Californian two-step remains undecidable. 5. The criticisms which are sometimes wrongly leveled at Curtius would be appropriate in the case of Morris Cantor during the Reagan Revolution (Cantor 1991). 6. Leibniz’ last major essay exemplifies this observation (Leibniz 1977). 7. Harold Bloom reads Curtius’ cut definitively as well. What follows from this is precisely the romanticism for which Bloom identifies Wordsworth

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as inaugurating figure (Bloom 1994, 204). Reading this way makes Wordsworth the analogous figure for Bloom to the role played by the appeal to Schlegel in Curtius. 8. The four categories are: Non-Existence (Asat), Existence (Sat), Images and Sacrifice (Yajña) and Embodied Vision (Rta Dhīh).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Noonday, 1968). Bassler, O.  Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics (Cham: Palgrave, 2018). Bassler, O.  Bradley. The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept (Boston: Docent, 2015). Bassler, O. Bradley. The Pace of Modernity: Reading With Blumenberg (Prahran: re.press, 2012). Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt, 1994). Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983). Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, zweite, erneuerte Ausgabe (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988). Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991). Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953). De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1996). De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1986). De Nicolás, Antonio T. Meditations through the Rg Veda: Four-Dimensional Man (York Beach: Nicolas-Hays, 1976). Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967). Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronnel (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1988).

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Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, an Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1989). Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Borderlines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 1979), 75–176). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Fortieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Hopkins, 2016). Faris, William G. “Review of Consistent Quantum Theory, by Robert B. Griffiths, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002,” available at: https://www. math.arizona.edu/~faris/consis.pdf (n.d.) Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell, 1964). Förster, Eckhart. Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: four essays (Princeton: Princeton, 1957). Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1976). Griffiths, Robert B. Consistent Quantum Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002). Hartman, Geoffrey H. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Hopkins, 1981). Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and the Recluse (New Haven: Yale, 1984). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006). Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 2008). Lacan, Jacques. The Sinthome, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). Leibniz, G. W. Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, trans. Henry Rosemont, Jr. and Daniel J. Cook, Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy no. 4 (Honolulu: Hawaii, 1977). Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford, 1988). Monod, Jean-Claude. La querelle de la sécularisation de Hegel à Blumenberg (Paris: Vrin, 2002). Nohrnberg, James. The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton, 1976). Riffaterre, Michel. Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana, 1978). Shoesmith, D.  J., and Smiley, T.  J. Multiple Conclusion Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1978). Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago, 1988).

11 The Esoteric Geometry of Poetic Reason

Everything remains to be done. Should we be discouraged, encouraged? How are we to begin, here at the end? W.  V. O.  Quine remarked that Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was the book that meant the most to him. I take it that this was inclusive of but not limited to the fact that he grew up, philosophically speaking, with it and alongside it. In an analogous sense, the book that has meant the most to me is Jacques Derrida’s Glas. My answer to my own question, then, is: begin with what you love. In this final chapter I attempt only to provide a point of entry into Glas, one which follows it along the line from transcendental arguments to esoteric geometry. A point of entry is something different from an interpretation. It is something more pragmatic, in the generic sense of the term, but one not unrelated to its philosophical use. In his book Saving the Text, Geoffrey Hartman has provided another point of entry, and I intend the one I offer to complement his, pointing out some of their relations along the way. Anyone who has read Derrida for some time is likely to have noticed how many of his texts take off toward the end, assuming an altogether different pace. This is the case, for example, in the Hegel column of Glas. Liftoff does not occur at an exact point, and on grounds which are vested but neither arbitrary nor, I think, unreasonable, I choose to identify © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. B. Bassler, The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_11

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liftoff at the top of page 272, twenty pages from the end of Glas, when Derrida refers to the transcategorial and the transcendental. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and as does Derrida, so I will allow myself to quote at some length. I begin at the beginning of the paragraph, at the bottom of page 271: To give means (veut-dire, wants to say) to give a ring and to give a ring means to retain: retain the present. (I) give (you) thus (I you) give a ring thus (I) retain (you). I lose so I win. One must put the personal pronouns inside parentheses. To rethink this movement before the constitution of the Selbst [self ]. The annular movement re-stricts the general economy (all things considered [compte tenu], that is to say not considering the loss) in a circulating economy. The contracting, the economic restriction forms the ring of the same, of the return to self, of re-appropriation. Economy restricts itself, sacrifice sacrifices itself. The striction—which no longer lets itself be circumscribed as an ontological category, nor even in any simple way as category, whether trans-categorial or transcendental—is thus also in the position of transcendental trans-category, transcendental of transcendental. Any more than it can fail to produce the “philosophical” effect it produces. (Derrida 1974, 271–2; all translations mine)1

The passage bears a family resemblance to ones we can find elsewhere in Derrida’s work. A most important cognate is this passage from Of Grammatology.2 It is that arche-writing, movement of différance, irreducible arche-­synthesis, opening at once in one and the same possibility, temporalization, relationship with the other and language [langage], cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic system itself, be situated as an object in its field. (Which does not mean it has a real place elsewhere, another (assignable) site.) (Derrida 2016, 65)

As condition of all linguistic systems, arche-writing is their transcendental condition, but the historical-rhetorical conditions of writing guarantee that neither can arche-writing subsist as a consistent transcendental condition in the traditional philosophical sense: insofar as it functions as transcendental condition, it necessarily also functions as “transcendental

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trans-categorial,” “transcendental of transcendental.” This tension is reflected in the paradoxical status of psychoanalysis as a “regional science”: “even if psychoanalysis did not achieve the transcendentality— under erasure—of the arche-trace, even if it remained a mundane science, its generality would have an archontic sense with regard to all regional science” (Derrida 2016, 95). How are we to evaluate this curious counterfactual? For psychoanalysis does achieve transcendentality of the arche-­ trace albeit only under erasure: this is the master argument of “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (Derrida 1978, 196–231). The counterfactual takes us to another level, that of the transcendental trans-categorial and the transcendental of transcendental. For if psychoanalysis did not stabilize this counterfact(ual)—this even if—it could not serve as the transcendental condition it is. That is, as exponentiated modality the counterfact moves us from the transcendental condition to its underlying esoteric geometry. What follows should be taken as a first step in promoting this claim, along with the claim that the limit of Derrida’s deconstructive analysis is marked by the extent of his ability to identify this proleptically as the esoteric geometry of poetic reason. From an analytic position of any sort, deconstructive or otherwise, any such identification is bound to appear recidivist. Not only is it no more so, it is in fact and practice much less recidivist than the retention of the analytic position and its rhetorical fortification. The structure of the underlying geometry stabilized by Derrida’s counterfactual is best approached through his remarks concerning the Saussurean investigation into anagrams, where I suggest Derrida is at his proleptic best. Taking into consideration the trajectory from the former to the latter, one can reconstruct this geometry from the remarks in Of Grammatology and Glas. In the former context, the remarks are ancillary to a consideration of the priority Saussure attributes to (living) speech over (dead) writing: “For Saussure, to give in to the ‘prestige of the written form’ is, as we have just said, to give in to passion” (Derrida 2016, 41). This capitulation is figured as idolatry, which Saussure calls in the Anagrams a “superstition of the letter” (cited, Derrida 2016, 41), yet where, as Derrida notes, Saussure “has difficulty proving the existence of a ‘phoneme anterior to all writing’.” Cross-riffing on Goya, Derrida comments: “The perversion of artifice engenders monsters” (Derrida 2016,

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41). The asymmetry between speech and writing is not reflected in the priority of speech over writing, as remains the case in Saussure, but in the fact that speech cannot serve as transcendental condition for writing— straightforwardly or otherwise—whereas (arche-) writing can serve as the (paradoxical) transcendental condition for speech and writing. Such is Derrida’s reconfiguration of the question of priority, the re-prioritization which engenders the monstrous science of grammatology according to the logical modality in which possibility is a function of impossibility.3 The status of arche-writing remains figural, yet as in de Man this is the figuration of a second rhetoric. Whereas de Man identifies this second rhetoric as performative, Derrida’s second rhetoric is transcendental. For Derrida the status of transcendental argument is inscribed in the esoteric geometry of transcendental rhetoric itself. So construed, Derrida’s project allows the project of this book to be motivated by the question, what is required to move from a rhetorical, supplementary geometry to a poetic, rational one? Though in the Course on General Linguistics Saussure remains committed to the linearity of the linguistic sign—its temporal consecution—, Derrida finds in the Anagrams a paragraph that anticipates Jakobson’s questioning of this feature (Derrida 2016, 78).4 Once again the Anagrams opens out onto the esoteric geometry of the transcendental. And in a final reference to the Anagrams much later in the text, Derrida finds that Rousseau (already) confirms “what Saussure hesitated to say in what we know as the Anagrams, namely that there are no phonemes before the grapheme.” The most “esoteric” aspect of Saussure’s work is squarely located within the Genevan “school of Rousseau,” and this provides considerable motivation for Derrida’s turn to Rousseau in the second, and by far the larger, part of his book. Lacan’s subversion of the linearity of the sign is much deeper than Jakobson’s, and plays out in terms of the temporal dynamics of backward capture I have already considered. Following Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, I identify Derrida’s deepest anxieties not in Hegel and Heidegger, backward smokescreens, but in the more proximate Sartre and Lacan. Glas plays out as an obsessional investigation of the imaginary as category (from Sartre to Lacan and beyond) with the Sartrean collision between Hegelian dialectic and Genet’s martyrdom as

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influence-trigger. If Derrida’s discourse is supplemental (counterfactual), and it is (counterfact), it is so most deeply as an extension of the Lacanian logic of the castration complex. In particular, any political appropriation of Derrida must come to terms with the fact that his critique of phallogocentrism is stabilized as an extension of the logic of castration. We have already seen the complications this generates in considering the problematic status of the historical cut. Derrida’s gambit is the hyper-phallicism of the double-column, analogous to the hyper-transcendentalism of the arche-trace/writing, and it differs from Bloom’s supermimetism only by a slender thread. With such programmatic remarks in place, we may now proceed to a consideration of the anagrammatic subsoil of Glas. It is present throughout, but I will focus on its explicitly thematic outcroppings. I move through the book not linearly, but from the crucial instance outward. At (Derrida 1974, 264), Derrida brings the anagrammatic into conjunction with annunciation, a theme that runs through the book in terms of the role played by Gabriel at the announcement of the immaculate conception (Derrida 1974, 249; IC  =  Immaculate Conception  =  Imperative Categorial). We are at the locus of production of the artwork. According to imagination? According to reason? According to what? Moment of aesthetic religion: spirit contemplates itself in the object it has itself produced, in the work. It no longer has consciousness only of the object (sun, plant, animal, etc.) but consciousness of itself. One is passed from nature to art, as from consciousness to consciousness of self, from the object to subjectivity. This last opposition, like the unilaterality of its two instances, throws itself into relief (se relève) in absolute religion (revealed or manifest). In this ultimate relief, spirit reveals itself in its true figure, but what throws itself into relief and reveals itself here (it suffices to think of what gives way (se dérobe) in this veil-movement to see announce itself, in the anagrammatic throw of the dice, the fermentation of truth) still remains of figural representation. (Derrida 1974, 264)

Why is the fermentation of truth announced in the anagrammatic throw of the dice? The anagrammatism is instanced in the constant shuttling back and forth between what is “reliefed” and revealed, between relèver

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and révèler, recalling always that a throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Key to unlocking this passage is to identify why Derrida would write of an annunciation in the anagrammatic cast of truth’s fermentation. It will help to introduce another passage from the text, where Derrida writes of the throwing into relief (Aufhebung) of the oracle. The context is Hegel’s treatment of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The oracle stands in relation to the time of speech as does enigma to the space of writing. In becoming for-itself, the oracle recovers the universal truths in a language proper to the community: such is, for example, Antigone’s “certain and unwritten law,” the law of the gods that speaks in the heart of the citizens. This relief/raising up of the “natural” oracle suspends chance, accident, the throw of dice in language. The natural and impulsive oracle is the fortuitous case where language stumbles onto the universal truth. (Derrida 1974, 287)

To say, above, that the relève / révèlé “remains of figural representation” (en reste encore à la représentation figurale) is to insist on marking the fortuitous/accidental character of universal truth. To speak figurally once again, Gabriel’s annunciation of the Immaculate Conception is, above all, fortuitous, and Kant’s announcement of the Categorical Imperative is no less an annunciation. To say that these events remain of figural representation is to insist that there is no transcendental grounding of them that could remain within the bounds of classical rationality, that any grounding of them breaks these grounds. For this project, the question then becomes: what do these transcendental groundings announce when we view their enunciation as announcing the advent of another, poetic reason? What do transcendental arguments announce in the Book of Gabe? The answer I have already indicated is that they announce the esoteric geometry of poetic reason. Our task will be to investigate the extent to which Derrida’s esoteric geometry of transcendental rhetoric can be converted into an esoteric geometry of poetic reason. Derrida’s rhetorical geometry is more advanced than de Man’s performative rhetoric, but for the moment its pragmatic advantage is that it is manifestly a geometry of the transcendental. And

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Derrida tells us that this geometry is to be found in the anagrammatic throw of the dice. This geometry provides the subterranean passage from one column to another. It is intimated by Hegel in his assertion that “similarly, universal consciousness draws out knowledge of the contingent flight of birds, of trees, or of the fermentation of the earth whose vapors rob self-­ consciousness of its powers of reflection; for the contingent is the unreflected and foreign, and ethical consciousness lets itself be determined on this point in an unreflective and foreign fashion as by dice” (cited, Derrida 1974, 288, translating from Derrida’s French translation). There is a concomitant bifurcation of space and time which leads to a division in the aesthetic between the durable but external petroglyph and the temporally self-consuming hymn which disappears upon its production. This bifurcation between spatial immobility and temporal mobility is reflected in the aesthetic division between the plastic and the lyric. Specifically, the anagrammatic geometry is rhetorical in that it does not reflect a coherent, synthetic geometry of space-time. This is the geometric analogue of the inability to provide a coherent transcendental deduction along the lines of traditional reason. Transcendental argument, figured rhetorically by Derrida, explodes traditional reason. Insofar as reason is considered analytically—and Derrida’s consideration remains an advanced contribution to this line—the conclusion is inevitable and correct. Gabriel’s annunciation provides transportation to the other column (Derrida 1974, 121), and it is there that we find extended, albeit largely implicit, reflection on Saussure’s compulsive (ritual) and yet hesitant (defense) mania for anagrams. In Saussure’s work, the investigation is predominantly if not exclusively on the anagrammatization of names, which function as fortuitous keywords for investigation. Derrida will construct a complex anagrammatic magnification of his own name in the fourfold Dionysos Erigone Eriopétale Réséda, and we may begin with Hartman’s extended gloss on Derrida’s annunciation of his self-anagrammatization: YET THERE is one dramatic moment in Glas when something like the forbidden name is named, or the absolute vocative is written out. It leads us into the underworld we began with, that of Dionysus. On p. 124 of Glas

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within a development too complex to summarize but which makes me think that “je m’ec …” means je m’écoeure in the literal sense of desiring so much to get at the heart of things, au coeur du coeur—to be so present to another or oneself, that one is ready, at least imaginatively, to kill and dismember as in Dionysian orgies—Derrida puts “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” in the shade by a four-part name of his own: Dionysos Erigone Eriopétale Réséda. This plush vocative with its internal doublings seems to restitute what was torn into little pieces at the beginning. Someone is named, certainly, but is it Dionysus alone? There is a word under the words, a disseminated sound. If we look at the cryptic fourfold as a Saussurean hypogram, then that other name is Derrida.5 (Hartman 1981, 93–4)

Hartman suggests that “the parts of the agglutinated vocative seem to add up as a sum or matrix of sense” (Hartman 1981, 94). We may extract the following points, always in the strategic spirit of establishing a line of entry. 1. The fourfold name is a complex signifier which refers to the “absolute vocative,” the “author’s name.” The name is not ‘Derrida’ or ‘Jacques Derrida’ per se, any more than the referent of ‘4” is | | | |, though the latter name is special in the degree to which signifier and signified converge—yet never absolutely on pain of the signifier-function being nullified. Such convergence is virtual, and what we actually find in its place is the esoteric function of the zero-signifier. We must face the fact that signifiers are marks in the world, cut out from but still resident under erasure in the “referential world” which is the “domain” of their “signification.” As sense adds, shudders multiply, or ghosts. 2. The matrix to which Hartman refers is the underlying geometry of transcendental rhetoric. Even at considerable length, Derrida maps out only corners (angles, tangencies) of this geometry: the gl effect in Glas, the +r effect in the closely related eponymous essay. Here is Derrida’s own primal gloss on the gl effect, a more cutting attempt to uncover an arche-writing, for this is a primal inscription, marked in and on the body, underlying all proper names in the referential sense, which sit atop such effects as superstructure:

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The ring is too tight. Don’t abandon it. What I seek to write—gl—is not some structure, a system of the signifier or signified, a thesis or a novel, a poem, a law, a desire or a machine, it is what transpires, more or less well, in the rhythmic stricture of a ring. (Derrida 1974, 125)

3. Hartman’s cautionary qualification, “seems to restitute what was torn at the beginning” (my emphasis) is crucial, and considerable. The restitution is a restitution effect, created out of language, by language, for language. Recognizing the annular structure of Glas itself, we might even extend Hartman’s caution across the entire phrase: at what seems to be the beginning. I now draw these passages from Hartman and Derrida back toward Derrida’s anxiety of influence in Lacan. 4. The grammato-logic of stricture, deployed in Glas is a logic of the cut. As Derrida’s thematization of it is glottal and sub-vocal, it bears a relation to Lacan’s fifth and final stage of the object a. More generally, the cut corresponds to the crossing of the rim in Lacan’s central diagram, but its closest connections are to levels two (anal), three (genital) and five (vocal). The connection to level two is more obvious, but also more focal, in the Genet column, from which the Derridean passage given above is drawn. Derrida’s gloss is obsessional, but to say that the gloss is obsessional is not to disqualify it. Rather it locates its specific valence, which helps to identify the particular quality of its productivity. To identify this quality, however, is certainly to qualify it, and in such a way that we may locate it with respect to Derrida’s anxiety of influence in Lacan. 5. Rhetorically, the effect of Derrida’s mapping of the geometry of transcendental argument is to magnify it, to indicate the enormity of its scale, by identifying specific “figures in the carpet” in such extensive detail. To reconvert these into the Lacanian context which is the locus of their influence, we could begin by locating them relative to the specific transcendental deduction Lacan has indicated, since conveniently this particular deduction is the one geared to obsessional, and specifically male obsessional, neurosis.6 Harold Bloom identifies a strong misreading as one which forces us to hear the antecedent influence ventriloquizing the valences of the misprision exercised by the

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one influenced. We may hear Derrida’s attempted backward capture of Lacan’s deduction in this way, and so we may credit Derrida with the strength of his misreading. To attempt to conduct the retranslation back into “Lacanian” would not be entirely pointless, but it would be academic. The even deeper antecedence of Derrida’s influence in Sartre (philosopher of an existential psychoanalysis) lies in the line of the imaginary cultivated from Sartre to Lacan. What is most immediately striking is that the places in Glas where Derrida is manifestly concerned with Sartre’s Saint Genet do not obviously bear on this line in any direct way, pointing instead to Sartre’s “humanism” and his “ontological phenomenology.” Though the confrontation with Sartre in Glas is, at least from time to time, more manifest, it is ultimately much more deeply buried than Derrida’s encounter with Lacan. 6. The fourfold name which Hartman identifies as an “agglutinated vocative” is synecdochic for the matrix of agglutination which would constitute the geometric field of transcendental rhetoric, just as any line of an anagrammatic poem synecdochally enfolds the anagrammatic geometry of the poem itself. Hartman writes of a “matrix of sense,” but Saussure instead builds up a vocabulary of the para: he replaces the term ‘anagram’ by ‘paragram’, which Starobinski also finds “more accurate” (Starobinski 1979, 18), going on briefly to write of paranomase and paraphrase; the term ‘paratext’ also appears (Starobinski 1979, 19).7 Starobinski notes that though he writes of it briefly, Saussure does not attend closely to the rhetorical figure of paranomasia, conjecturing that he perhaps feared, whether consciously or not, that focus on this rhetorical figure would compromise his theory of the anagram. We may reverse this to the conjecture that Saussure sensed the capacity of the theory of anagrams to unseat any conception of verbal geometry as rhetorical. The flashpoint of this consideration is the role played by proper names as hypograms: they would be privileged for reasons we could identify in terms of the logic of castration, but to focus on them to the exclusion of a more general theory would amount to a reduction of the anagrammatic to the vocative,8 and this would collapse the anagrammatic geometry back into the rhetorical, even if a second rhetoric akin to de Man’s performative rhetoric or Derrida’s rhetoric of the transcendental. As I’ve suggested

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above, philosophically if not clinically, the logic of castration should be ­understood as a para-semantic shorthand for the deeper underlying network of transcendental proofs. I conjecture that the verbal move from ‘anagram’ to ‘paragram’ is an indication of Saussure’s resistance to the reduction of the anagrammatic to the rhetorical. To acknowledge that the vocative is a special, privileged case is a descriptive necessity; to make it normative neutralizes the innovation which Saussure pursues. With equal force, the innovation pursues Saussure: Starobinski reminds us that in fact Saussure deplored the anagrammatic rules of poetic construction which he identified (Starobinski 1979, 122). It is a testimony to Saussure’s integrity, but also to his obsession, that he pursued the theory of anagrams in spite of the distaste he felt, and it would be a matter for psychoanalytic analysis to identify the extent to which Saussure’s gesture of disapproval was itself defensive. Starobinski asks: “Must it be that the craft of poetry for the ancients was closer to the ritual of obsession than to the motivating power of an inspired word?” (Starobinski 1979, 26). The question is valid, but the way it is posed should not detain us from asking an analogous question about Saussure’s own identification of the theory of anagrams. 7. The shift in emphasis from the vocative to the locative cannot be a global exit strategy from rhetorical geometry. Insofar as it is allied with the locative case, ‘locative poetics’ is a name drawn from the traditional domain of the paradigmatic, associated with rhetoric viewed as a complementary extension of grammar. More fundamentally, the name is also allied with the backwards transition from rhetoric to topics, and is designed to motivate an exit from this traditional condition (Curtius 1953, 79–105). As such, it must be a name which is taken at once literally and figuratively. This split exemplifies the logic of a Derridean deconstruction. The move from rhetorical to poetic geometry does not disqualify such deconstructive identifications: it locates them instead as transitional. The transit to poetic reason, like Wallace Steven’s transport to summer, is a passage which may be declined. Whether you get on the boat or not is a choice, but in order to choose you have to see the boat first. Here we return to the fundamental ground of Derrida’s agon with Sartre, as is made clear by the moral which Sartre draws at the end of Saint Genet: “I have tried to do the

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following: to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality …” (Sartre 1963, 584). Derrida’s Glas is also manifestly a confrontation with the legacies of psychoanalysis and Marxism. The confrontation with Freud is deep; the confrontation with Marx is less profound if more overt: an extended reading from the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach (Derrida 1974, 225ff). Textually, the transaction with Freud is largely by way of reference to Derrida’s previous essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (Derrida 1974, 56). Indirect reference is promoted to indirect self-reference. The reader may justifiably ask for the point of this schematic dissection of Derrida’s Glas on the basis of Hartman’s gloss. I view Glas as the most ambitious and successful attempt to map out the conditions of possibility for a rhetorical geometry of the transcendental, and I view this as the privileged point of comparison for the identification of the corresponding conditions for an esoteric geometry of poetic reason. The work conducted in this volume has been in the service of initiating a transition from transcendental arguments to this esoteric geometric matrix. Obviously, the bulk of the work remains to be done. In what I take to be his next major work along the line of Glas, the commentaries on Blanchot in the volume Parages, Derrida himself maps out the transit to a topical geometry on his own terms. As Glas is “devoted” to the gl effect, so does Parages pursue, among other uncouplings, the para we have already found in Saussure’s Anagrams. This extension is at once a move beyond the proper name and the grammatical category of the noun: In truth the name/noun is never alone. Each of its syllables receives from a sub-marine wave the coming of another vocable—which, imprinting on it a sometimes imperceptible movement, still offers there its memory. And it is the memory of words in, as one strangely says to accentuate the beginning or end of a nomination: here the names/nouns in pa, par, para, ra, rage, age. (Derrida (2003), 16; all translations mine)

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Derrida refers to a “sometimes impracticable topology” and an “incalculable topology,” but the even more basic references are to “the phoronomy of the ungovernable” and “the atopical phoronomy” of the ‘pas’ (Derrida 2003, 11, 16, 25). At another point Derrida writes of a “non-regional topic of the near and far” (Derrida 2003, 34); the proximate reference is to Heidegger’s Entfernung, to which Derrida pairs the French é-­loignement, what we might English as “dis-stancing” (Kettering 1987). The “law without law of dis-stancing is not essence, but the impossible topic of essentiality” (Derrida 2003, 33). Derrida’s phoronomy of dis-stancing is a manifestly catastrophic phoronomy of distress (Derrida 2003, 44, 70), suggesting to my ear and mind a connection to René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory. Beyond the topical, Derrida’s phoronomy is well beyond “the semantic, the etymological—and in general simple language—thus also logic, rhetoric, etc.” (Derrida 2003, 49). Collectively these passages demonstrate Derrida’s awareness of the need for a geometry beyond the rhetorical geometry of transcendental arguments he promotes in Glas. What this phoronomical geometry or topological dynamics would amount to is a story for another time; suffice it to say for now that a rehabilitation of reason as poetic is no part of Derrida’s program. Here, at the end, I now want to give some first indications of what I take this geometric matrix of poetic reason to be, working by comparison with Derrida’s rhetorical geometry of the transcendental in terms of the schematic outline of its features now on offer, keeping his proposed phoronomics in the background as a more positive but tacit point of comparison. It is the transition from transcendental argument to poetic reason which is at issue, and so Glas rather than Parages provides the more appropriate springboard. In the transition from the traditional object to the poetic-subjective solution to the continuum problem, we have passed by way of the cultivation of the poetic subject on the grounds first laid out by Lacan in his promotion of the psychoanalytic subject. The poetic subject differs from the psychoanalytic subject only by a difference in emphasis, but a fundamental one. For even if we understand Lacanian psycho-analysis and Derridean deconstructive analysis as the furthest outposts of analytic reason yet on offer, we are still in search of poetic reason as analytic reason’s

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distinct complement. The key observation is that there are not two distinct subjects associated with two distinct reasons, but one subject and one reason which bifurcates along analytic/poetic lines. Lacan and Derrida reach the analytic subject at sufficient depth that the transition to the poetic subject, understood in terms of a fundamental shift in emphasis, becomes clear. Dieter Henrich has rightly insisted that a new subjectivity comes into being in the development of German Idealism, the “ground-laying subject,” and one which makes the sense of ‘idealism’ at issue altogether distinct from any previous philosophical idealism. Lacan’s subject is an exit strategy from the impasses German Idealism registers in the face of the novelty of this new subject it has still somewhat unwittingly discovered. This exit from the impasses of German Idealism first allows us to recognize the Lacanian, psychoanalytic subject as co-­ extensive with the poetic subject. Working somewhat telegraphically for present purposes, we may ask, as the basic question for the geometry of poetic reason: what correspond to point and line in the solution to the continuum problem associated with this new subject? Here the connection to Glas proves of great value. We may schematize the history of solutions to the labyrinth of the composition of the continuum in terms of three historically overlapping strategies. From Aristotle to Leibniz, we find a first approach to the problem which proceeds by way of denying points any independent value: they are understood as the terminations of lines. From the Arabic Mutakallimun to Cantor we find a second line which attributes the point an autonomous value: the continuum is manifestly composed out of points rather than viewing points as functions of the continuum. A third approach, anticipated by Pascal, is indicated by Derrida’s rhetorical geometry in Glas, following Saussure’s lead, replacing points by linguistic cells, not the primal phonemes Saussure sought but arche-traces compounded, at least in principle, according to the non-classical grammato-logic of the transcendental trans-categorial or regressive transcendental of transcendental. Following Derrida’s suggestive reference to a catastrophe of dis-­stancing in Parages, we might begin by viewing the esoteric geometry of poetic reason as a massive geometric compilation of catastrophic cells, well beyond the bounds of any known mathematical description (Cartier

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2001). Each cell is poetically “charged” along the lines of parapraxical investment already outlined by Freud. A parapraxis is fundamentally a making, not according to the traditional philosophical logic of willing, choice and intention, but according to the New Subject in which the vast majority of making lies below the level of consciousness. The cells of poetic composition are identified retrospectively, and so analytically: in this sense we may speak of poetic geometry as supplying a basis for analysis in the way that the term is used in modern mathematics, where analysis is always analysis of some antecedently given space. This observation suggests that the advent of the New Subject in German Idealism is a revolution whose subsoil is prepared, among other things, by the extensive development of mathematical analysis in the period stretching from Newton to Euler (Hegel 1969, 241–313). Pascal’s anticipation of the New Subject becomes less mysterious, though the connection to his mathematical work demands much more attention. The cells of poetic geometry are differentials (Bos 1974), and they are analyzed as infinitesimals, or better, parafinitesimals. The status of these geometric cells is an obvious and pressing concern for any attempt to specify a geometry of poetic reason. If, as Lacan insisted, the unconscious is structured like a language, then it would seem appropriate to identify the cells of the new poetic geometry as arche-traces, proto-linguistic quasi-punctiform units. Yet everything hangs on understanding what Lacan meant, or even better what vistas he opened, in declaring that the unconscious is structured like a language. Placing the emphasis this way suggests that we should not be too literal in identifying these cells as proto-linguistic, and in any case there are massive questions yet to be considered about the relation between language and mathematics in Lacan’s work. For the moment, these concerns are best addressed in terms of Lacan’s own encounter with the catastrophic and the hesitancy he faced in view of René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory (Thom 1975, 1983). In Year Nineteen of Lacan’s Seminar, … or Worse, Lacan faces Thom’s questioning of the logicist foundation of number. At the heart of this challenge is Thom’s proposal to furnish a typological classification of natural languages that would obviate the need to refer to logic. In particular, it would become possible to see logic as an extraction from language, and

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so doubly derivative with respect to the underlying topological grounding. In this regard at least, Thom follows in the line of Brouwer’s mathematical intuitionism. More useful than the overt response Lacan gives is the tonality in which he presents it: he depicts Thom as finding “in a mathematical function the very line of these curves formed by primal mould,” and even beyond this “he is able to account not only for what is traced out on the wall—this is nothing less than life itself, which as you know begins with mould—but also, through number, algebra, functions and topology, for what occurs in the field of life” (Lacan 2018, 61, emphasis mine). Finding curves and indeed whole figures in moldy stains on walls is precisely what artists do: in particular, Lacan deals at some length with Leonardo da Vinci’s preoccupation with this as a strategy for artistic production. But is what da Vinci does in any sense reasonable? And by this I do not intend that it would simply be pragmatically rational as a strategy for irrationally inducing poetic production: is it an inherently rational part of the poetic process? Given his commitments, Lacan rightly finds this troubling, for it would undermine the logicist commitments of his analytic project. Derrida faces a similar crux in Hegel—should we call this the Hegelian/Thomistic challenge—getting our Thom’s right (or wrong)?9 “The Hegelian system thus commands that one reads it as a book of life” (Derrida 1974, 96), and life is the life of the curve: the circle, the ellipse, and especially the spiral. To grid life by cutting it into quarters kills it, and for Derrida a quadrilateral reading is a bad reading of Hegel (Derrida 1974, 254). Yet the Genet column begins with a Rembrandt being torn into small squares and tossed in the shitter. What is the status of a rect-angular column unadorned by spiraling vines? These concerns reach a climax of sorts in the late passage from the Hegel column where I have marked liftoff, where Derrida identifies annular striction as trans-categorial transcendental and transcendental of transcendental alongside (para) the ontological and transcendental. Here we meet the Derridean matrix in full force: … each time one holds a discourse against the transcendental, a matrix— striction itself—constrains discourse to put the non-transcendental, the outside of the transcendental field, the excluded, in a structuring position.

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The matrix in question constitutes the excluded in transcendental of transcendental, in simili-transcendental, in contraband-transcendental. The contraband is not yet dialectical contradiction. It necessarily becomes it, to be sure, but its not-yet is not-yet teleological anticipation, which makes it never become dialectical contradiction. It remains something other than, necessarily, it is to become. Such is the (non-dialectical) law of (dialectical) stricture, of the place, of the ligature, of the garroting, of the desmos in general when it comes to press (vient serrer) to make being. Pressure of the dialectic. One can follow, if one knows how to read the counter-bend (term borrowed here from the code of heraldry), the spiral enchaining of the circle of circles. And, logic of the anniversary, the imposition at the angle of the curve. (Derrida 1974, 272)

Derrida’s identification of the crux in Hegel is more overt than Lacan’s in Thom. Dialectic’s vitalism lies on the other side of the transcendental: “before Jena, the System-fragment (1800) recaptures the essential of the theses on Christianity: «Das Leben sei die Verbindung der Verbindung und der Nichtverbindung», thus the copula or the ligament of the ligament and non-ligament in which life at once bounds and unbounds (se bande et débande). Now life is being” (Derrida 1974, 97, no end period). What is on the other side for Lacan is not the dialectical, it is the Real: and specifically, it is on the other side of the wall. The wall can be stained, in which case Leonardo can see a Madonna or the back of an athlete, or there can be gullies (ravinements) in the wall, which resemble writing. Lacan goes on to insist that one should never write on walls, contra the inscription of love letters thereon, though “it was a damned good time.” What, Lacan tells us, he is at pains to emphasize is that it’s not necessary to write on walls: Everything that is written reinforces the wall. This is not necessarily an objection, but what is certain is that it oughtn’t to be believed that this is absolutely necessary. It’s useful none the less because, had no one ever written on a wall, whichever wall it might be, this one or another, it’s a fact that no one would have taken a step into the meaning of what might be there to be beheld beyond the wall. (Lacan 2018, 60)

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Then Lacan moves on to Thom, and it becomes clear that his concern is that Thom’s morphological dynamics will lead us to believe there is meaning behind the wall: “it is strictly impossible to endue with the faintest shadow of meaning anything whatsoever that is articulated in algebraic or topological terms” (Lacan 2018, 62). Returning to da Vinci’s athletes and Madonnas, but in terms that manifestly transpose to Thom’s morphological dynamics, Lacan insists, “It is evident, however, that we cannot content ourselves with the confusional meanings. At the end of the day, this serves only to reverberate on the lyre of desire, on eroticism, to call a spade a spade” (Lacan 2018, 62). Lacan is at pains to combat any form of intuitionism that would view semantic content as something embedded in intuition, pre-formed for artists to e-duce. An entire critique of vitalism from Leibniz through Bergson and Whitehead to Thom is at issue (Jankélevitch 1959, 6; Trotignon 1968). Yet as I have already suggested above, Lacan’s logic of castration all too easily falls into a semantic form and goes proxy for the plethora of transcendental arguments which underwrite it. What is needed, then, is an explicitly “syntactic” basis for the catastrophic geometry Thom and Derrida suggest (should it prove warranted and … desirable). I conjecture that such a foundation can be found in the “transcendental syntax” of Jean-Yves Girard, but for now this conjecture can only serve as a promissory note not yet even under-written (Girard 2015; Rouleau 2013). First we will require a general theory of such under-writing as legitimation, and for that, a general theory of poetic reason.

Notes 1. I have checked my translations against the recent English version of Glas by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills (Derrida 2021). 2. The difficult passage in Voice and Phenomenon (Derrida 2011, 6) on transcendental life and living presence in Husserl’s phenomenology is equally important. 3. This bears a signal resemblance to type theory in the way it comes down from Russell’s discovery of the famous “Russell paradox.” What is ­impossible in the absence of typing is rendered possible once a distinction in type is drawn.

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4. The reference is apparently to “Phonologie et phonétique” by Jakobson and Hall (Derrida 2016, 382 n.7) but also to the article “À la recherche de l’essence du langage” (Derrida 2016, 382 n.8). Compare also “Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems” (Jakobson 1971, 697–708). 5. In fact, if we follow Saussure’s usage, it would be more appropriate to identify ‘Derrida’ as the hypogram underlying the cryptic fourfold (Starobinski 1979, 44). 6. The work of Hanna Darboven provides an interesting point of comparison. Her graphomania is directed in a more manifestly mathematical direction. 7. It is not clear to me whether it is Saussure or Starobinski who introduces the term ‘paramime’ (Starobinski 1979, 18). 8. Derrida convokes an analogous extension, but within the domain of a second rhetoric, by appealing to Bataille’s general economy; I would argue that, as limited to the rhetorical domain, such an extension is self-defeating. 9. In fact, the pun has some force, since at least in places Thom characterizes his program as neo-Aristotelean (Thom 1989).

Bibliography Bos, H. J. M. “Differentials, Higher-Order Differentials and the Derivative in the Leibnizian Calculus,” Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences 14 (1974), 1–90. Cartier, Pierre. “A Mad Day’s Work: from Grothendieck to Connes and Kontsevich, The Evolution of Concepts of Space and Symmetry,” Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society 38 4 (2001), 389–408. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953). Derrida, Jacques, Clang, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2021). Derrida, Jacques. Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Fortieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Hopkins, 2016). Derrida, Jacques. Parages, nouvelle edition revue et augmentée (Paris: Galil ée, 2003).

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Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern, 2011). Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago, 1978). Girard, Jean-Yves. “Transcendental syntax 1 : deterministic case,” in Computing with Lambda Terms: A Special Issue dedicated to Corrado Böhm, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2015), 1–23. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981). Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities, 1969). Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings 2 (Hague: Mouton, 1971). Jankélevitch, Vladimir. Henri Bergson (Paris: Quadrige / PUF, 1959). Kettering, Emil. Nähe. Das Denken Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1987). Lacan, Jacques. … or Worse, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). Rouleau, Vincent Laurence. “Towards an Understanding of Girard’s Transcendental Syntax: Syntax by Testing,” M.  Sc. Thesis through the Ottawa-Carleton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, 2013. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1963). Starobinski, Jean. Words Upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven: Yale, 1979). Thom, René. “Causality and Finality in Theoretical Biology: A Possible Picture,” in John Casti and Anders Karlqvist, eds., Newton to Aristotle: Toward a Theory of Models for Living Systems (Boston: Birkhäuser, 1989), 39–45. Thom, René. Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis, trans. W. M. Brookes and D. Rand (Chichester: Ellis Horwood, 1983). Thom, René. Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading: Benjamin, 1975). Trotignon, Pierre. L’idée de vie chez Bergson et la Critique de la Métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1968).

Index1

A

Abrams, M. H., 39, 40, 42n8 Absolute recoil, 245, 250 Adjoint, 89, 218, 233, 288, 306 Adorno, T. W., 290 Agni, 165, 201, 208, 212, 213 Alice in Wonderland, 182 Allegory, 78–81, 88–90, 95, 104n3, 104n6, 147, 150, 288, 290, 307–310 Amboceptor, 271 American religion, 160, 320, 322 Anagram, 202–203, 205, 207, 216, 217, 290, 329, 330, 333, 336–338 Analytic reason, 212, 217, 218, 223–227, 229, 231, 241, 339 Anaximander, 302 Annunciation, 331–333

Anxiety, 42n4, 59, 134, 186, 193, 259–262, 265–272, 277, 278, 280, 319, 330, 335 Apocalypse, 114, 140 Architectonic, 21, 35, 266, 285, 288, 289, 297, 311–313 Aristotle, 84, 121, 236–237n6, 263, 340 Ashbery, J., 21, 115, 163, 164, 178, 180, 182–189, 193, 233–235 Athens (GA), 126 Auden, W. H., 234 B

Bacon, F., 188 Badiou, A., 49, 83 Barfield, O., 309 Barthes, R., 292

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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347

348 Index

Baudelaire, C., 102, 142, 144, 146–150 Beckett, S., 35 Benjamin, W., 18, 19, 27–41, 57, 207, 242, 245, 302, 305, 306, 314 Bishop, E., 234 Black body, 166, 172 Blake, H., 235, 236 Blake, W., 116, 133–135, 137 Blanchot, M., 302, 338 Blavatsky, H., 39 Bloom, H., 68–70, 84, 158–163, 168, 169, 171, 174, 178, 183–186, 188–193, 194n2, 195n9, 201, 207, 210, 293, 320, 322, 324–325n7, 330, 331 Blumenberg, H., 3–5, 11, 18, 21–23, 27–29, 53, 113, 117, 129n3, 130n4, 134–136, 140, 151, 152, 157, 200, 201, 204, 205, 231, 242, 283, 284, 288–290, 294, 296, 298, 301, 303, 304, 306, 307, 314–324 Boas, F., 228 Bochner, S., 31, 176, 180 Boon, J., 18, 21–23, 140–151, 152n4, 157, 158, 210, 219 Brahmodya, 163, 173 Bromwich, D., 231–235 Brouwer, L. E. J., 342 Brown, N. O., 23, 94, 133–142, 144, 149, 151, 158, 159 Browning, R., 169, 171 Bultmann, R., 160 Byron, C., 112

C

Calasso, R., 18, 20, 42n5, 66, 128, 152n2, 158, 162–169, 171–173, 178, 185, 194n3, 194n4 Cameron, S., 171, 177, 194n5 Cantor, G., 84, 104n4, 137, 324n1, 324n5, 340 Castration, 51, 55, 99–103, 268–270, 280, 331, 336, 337, 344 Catachresis, 289, 311, 313 Catastrophe Theory, 54, 339, 341 Categorical imperative, 120, 125, 332 Cavell, S., 18, 19, 27–41, 104n5, 122, 133, 289 Celan, P., 102 Chaos, 32, 33, 167, 199 Char, R., 136 Chicago, 23, 34, 129, 133, 139 Church fathers, 201 Clément, C., 23, 110–112, 114–116, 122, 123, 128 Cogito, 54, 57, 70–74, 91, 95, 103 Cohen, G. A., 112 Comet, 193 Consciousness, 6, 11–13, 74, 79, 126, 127, 130n4, 142, 162, 163, 165, 171, 172, 179, 225, 233, 255, 309, 331, 333, 341 Continuum problem, 5, 6, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 211, 310, 339, 340 Copernican revolution, 48, 113, 117, 120, 124, 129n4, 139, 241, 254 Copernicus, 55, 72, 113, 129n3, 133, 134 Crane, H., 234, 235

 Index 

Curtius, E. R., 15, 104n6, 293–298, 303, 304, 309, 310, 324n5, 324–325n7, 337 D

Da Vinci, L., 342, 344 Dante, 134, 135, 295, 310 Davidson, D., 305 De Man, P., 18, 20, 22, 38–40, 42n7, 42n8, 77–90, 92, 95, 97, 117, 194n2, 215, 284–290, 297, 298, 303–309, 311–314, 330, 332, 336 De Santillana, G., 204 De Saussure, F., 70, 143, 158, 202, 203, 205, 207, 212, 291, 329, 330, 333, 336–338, 340, 345n7 Deconstruction, 292, 293, 296, 297, 324n4, 337 Dedekind, R., 302 Deleuze, G., 8, 53, 99, 146, 166, 182 Derrida, J., 18, 22, 23, 53, 73, 93, 190, 200, 284, 288–307, 313, 314, 327–340, 342–344, 344n1, 344n2, 345n4, 345n5, 345n8 Descartes, R., 70, 71, 73, 164, 300, 301 Desidero, 70–74, 93 Desire, 51–57, 64–68, 70–74, 74n2, 77, 79, 81, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94–101, 103, 110–114, 117–121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 140, 150, 187, 188, 241, 261–263, 265–269, 272, 277–279, 319, 321–324, 335, 344

349

Dialectics, 35, 53, 96, 99–102, 112, 133, 218, 247, 267, 273, 286, 306, 312, 330, 343 Dickinson, E., 21, 24n3, 159–163, 167–174, 177, 178, 183–185, 189, 191, 194n5, 219, 235, 308 Différance, 53, 291, 301, 302, 328 Differential, 157, 182, 341 Di-gloss, 218, 224 Dionysis/Dionysian, 139, 140, 334 Doctrine of essence, 18, 242–259, 267 Dream/ dreaming, 66, 71–73, 92, 126–128, 137, 164–166, 195n8 Dryden, J., 186 Dumont, L., 158 Dynamical stabilization, 21, 283, 315, 316, 319, 321 E

Ego, 66, 67, 71, 99, 105n9, 139, 179 Einstein, A., 165 Eliot, T. S., 172, 233–235 Emerson, R. W., 18, 35–37 Enigma, 163, 164, 332 Esoteric function, 20, 21, 23, 157, 158, 171, 207, 219, 228, 230, 308, 334 Esoteric geometry, 327–344 Euler, L., 341 Euridyce, 187 Everyman, 146, 147

350 Index F

Fadely, P., 125 Fermat, P., 10 Fichte, J. G., 29, 32, 242, 243, 289, 311 Fischer, K., 34 Fletcher, A., 41n2, 75n10, 80, 89, 117, 150, 168, 178, 195n9, 307, 309, 310 Forest, 158, 164, 166, 167, 170–174, 178, 194n5 Förster, E., 317, 318 Fréret, N., 300, 303 Freud, S., 23, 48, 49, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67–73, 91, 93, 94, 100–103, 110, 113, 117, 126, 127, 139–141, 144, 158, 159, 161, 165, 175, 178, 179, 195n7, 195n8, 206, 241, 242, 260, 261, 273, 281n4, 287, 320, 322, 323, 338, 341 Frost, R., 21, 159–161, 163, 173–178, 180–183, 185, 195n6, 234, 235 Frye, N., 31, 116, 310, 324n3 G

Gadamer, H.-G., 290, 304–306 Galileo, 298 Gelikman, O., 6, 117, 159, 160, 173, 186, 187, 189, 267, 280n3 Genet, J., 330, 335, 342 German Idealism, 4–6, 9, 16–18, 22, 23, 27, 41, 236, 242, 284, 285, 289, 290, 303, 306, 308, 340, 341

Ghosts, 92, 125–129, 153n5, 164, 166, 167, 171, 181, 334 Gide, A., 296 Girard, J.-Y., 344 Gnosticism, 21, 134–137, 159–163, 173, 174, 177, 184, 186, 194n2, 201, 319, 320, 322 Goethe, J. W., 195n6, 295, 297, 303 Goya, F., 329 Grammar, 35, 80, 104n6, 169, 191, 213, 228, 230, 337 Griaule, M., 204 Guattari, F., 53, 166 H

Hallucination, 72, 73, 93, 165, 195n8 Hardy, T., 234, 235 Hartman, G., 310, 311, 327, 333–336, 338 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 12, 18, 102, 218, 241–259, 267, 280n1, 287, 305, 306, 312, 327, 330, 332–334, 341–343 Heidegger, M., 162, 291, 299, 302, 330, 339 Henrich, D., 5, 6, 8–15, 340 Heraclitus, 201 Hercules, 163 Herder, J. G., 303 Hermit, 308, 309 Hesse, H., 171 Hill, Geoffrey, 233, 234 Hölderlin, F., 4–6, 10–14, 33, 35, 38, 49, 160, 193, 242 Homer, 290, 295, 310 Hopkins, G. M., 223

 Index 

Horkheimer, M., 290 Horsems, 114, 117, 160 Hugo, V., 311 Husserl, E., 298, 299, 301, 344n2 Hypnosis, 65–68 Hyppolite, J., 242 I

Immaculate conception (IC), 331, 332 Indra, 166, 167, 199, 232, 235 Infinitesimal, 82, 83, 88, 92, 341 Irony, 48, 86–88, 100, 184, 191, 193, 287, 297, 302, 309, 311 J

Jakobson, R., 22, 49, 142, 144–147, 151, 152n3, 212–231, 236n5, 236n6, 237n7, 241, 292, 314, 315, 330, 345n4 James, W., 231 Jansenism, 20 Jauss, H. R., 304 Jena Circle, 27, 29, 38, 41n2, 243, 306 Jouissance, 100–102, 139, 161, 261, 262, 266–268, 272, 277, 278, 281n4 Joyce, J., 39, 136 K

Kafka, F., 66, 128, 162, 171 Kansas, 178 Kant, I., 22, 30–33, 35–37, 41n2, 42n8, 49, 72, 79, 94, 111, 113, 114, 117–120, 123, 124,

351

127, 129n3, 189, 190, 215, 220, 224–226, 228, 252–260, 263–266, 273, 274, 279, 284–289, 298, 303, 311–319, 323, 324n1 Kierkegaard, S., 49, 162 Kircher, A., 300, 301 Kojève, A., 242, 305 Kuiper, F. B. J., 20, 158, 163, 167, 194n4, 199–201, 232, 235 L

Lacan, J., 5, 41, 47–74, 77–104, 109, 139, 159, 213, 241, 284, 330 Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 18, 27, 34, 38 Land of the Dead, 161, 174–176, 179 Lartéguy, J., 166 Legitimation, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14–17, 19, 21–23, 28, 29, 42n7, 47, 53, 64, 69, 100, 124, 125, 127, 134, 136, 137, 139–141, 144, 149, 151, 152, 152n3, 152n4, 157, 158, 185, 194, 200, 214, 220, 224, 229, 241–243, 257, 263, 264, 270, 283–285, 289, 290, 294, 296, 298, 299, 303, 306, 314, 315, 318–322, 344 Leibniz, G. W., 31, 33, 78, 79, 235, 285–287, 300, 301, 317, 324n6, 340, 344 Lévi-Strauss, C., 142–151, 152n2, 152n3, 152n4, 204, 215 Literary absolute, 31, 35, 36, 38–41 Locative poetics, 19, 38, 116, 202, 213, 270, 309, 337

352 Index

Longuenesse, B., 243, 245, 250–254, 258 Lukács, G., 303, 304 M

Mailer, N., 139, 169, 170 Male obsessional, 273, 276, 279, 335 Mallarmé, S., 115, 147–151 Marlowe, C., 186, 235 Materialism, 215, 288, 311, 312 Matrix, 35, 38, 85, 92, 93, 111, 165, 211, 255, 334, 336, 338, 339, 342, 343 Melville, H., 215 Merleau-Ponty, M., 150 Metaphor, 49, 51–58, 60–63, 72, 73, 80, 90, 117, 144, 145, 147, 192, 214, 292 Metaphysical deduction, 224, 254, 266 Metonymy, 49–58, 60–63, 121, 144, 145, 147, 192, 214, 292 Milton, J., 186 Modern function, 157, 171, 200, 203, 290, 308 Modernity, 5, 21, 27–29, 130n4, 134–136, 149, 151, 152, 242, 283–324 Moore, M., 234 Murphey, M., 254–256 Music, 125, 149, 150, 210 Mutakallimun, 136, 340 N

Namchylak, S., 126 Nancy, J.-L., 18, 27, 34, 38 Narcissism, 179, 312, 313

Negation, 100–102, 242–244, 246, 248, 249, 255, 257–259, 262 Neolithic, 204 New Haven, 228 New world, 18, 35, 135 Newton, I., 120, 341 Nietzsche, F., 231, 232, 287 Nohrnberg, J., 195n6, 308–310 Novalis, F., 30–33, 295, 297 O

Object a, 52, 66, 67, 128, 241, 259, 261–274, 277–280, 285, 319, 321, 322, 335 O’Brien, Geoffrey, 164, 183 O’Flaherty, W. D., 164 Oppen, G., 235 Orgasm, 272 Orpheus, 187, 188 P

Paglia, C., 161, 194n1 Paraethics, 121–123 Parafinite, 114, 118, 128, 140, 166, 254–256, 260–263, 286, 294, 302 Parafinitesimal, 341 Paraphilosophical praxis, 93, 112, 114, 121, 135, 313 Paraphysical bracket, 93, 302 Paraphysics, 3–24, 111, 121, 130n6 Paris, 133 Pascal, B., 20, 33, 77–104, 138, 340, 341 Paul, Saint, 162 Peacock, 188, 190–193 Peirce, C. S., 10, 118, 246, 254–259, 318

 Index 

Perse, S.-J., 232, 235 Phallus, 51, 53–55, 100–102, 268, 270–273, 277, 278 Phantom empire, 164, 183 Phatic function, 216–218, 221, 222, 224–226, 229, 230, 237n7 Phenomenology, 93, 244, 301, 344n2 Plato, 6, 162, 164, 165, 172, 185, 247 Pleasure principle, 139, 140, 161, 175, 179, 260, 262, 263 Poetic function, 4, 20, 21, 203, 213–224, 226–228, 230, 236n5, 315 Poetic medium, 19 Poetic reason, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10–12, 14–19, 21–23, 28, 33, 41n2, 47, 57, 64, 79, 87, 100, 125, 127, 134, 137, 139–141, 143, 144, 149, 151, 152, 152n3, 157–159, 185, 187, 188, 194, 200, 207, 212–231, 233, 234, 241–243, 245, 246, 257, 264, 270, 283–324, 327–344 Poetics of genre, 38, 183 Poetic subject, 19, 41, 47, 49, 52, 209, 213, 241–280, 308, 339, 340 Poiesis, 3–24, 31, 48, 57, 77, 124, 125, 140–142, 145, 210, 216, 218, 245, 283, 298, 315, 322, 323 Popper, K., 7 Praxis, 6, 11, 14, 56, 57, 71, 93, 110, 112, 121, 157, 158, 178, 185, 292, 296, 298, 313, 319, 321

353

Princeton, 176, 180 Prosopopeia, 117, 287, 288, 307, 311, 313 Psychoanalytic subject, 19, 41, 47, 48, 57, 69, 241, 260, 261, 339, 340 Purusa, 167 Puškin, A., 215 Q

Quine, W. V. O., 58, 164, 327 Quintilian, 309 R

Rabelais, F., 125 Rg Veda, 165, 200, 201, 203, 208–210, 213 Rhetoric, 79, 81, 82, 86–90, 104n6, 115, 234, 287, 295, 306, 311, 313, 330, 332, 334, 336, 337, 339, 345n8 Rich, A., 234 Richards, I. A., 188 Rieff, P., 23, 68, 69, 94, 100 Riffaterre, M., 85, 290, 311 Rilke, R. M., 125, 164 Rivers, L., 183 Rodin, A., 8, 104n2 Rome, 201, 310 Rorty, R., 234 Rousseau, J.-J., 120, 293, 294, 330 Rsis, 164, 165, 171, 172 Russell, B., 74n6, 327, 344n3

354 Index S

Sabhā, 163, 167, 168, 170, 183, 201, 232, 235 Santa Cruz, 34, 133 Santayana, G., 235 Sartre, J.-P., 330, 336–338 Scale, 100, 142, 160, 161, 195n8, 281n7, 303, 335 Schelling, F. W. J., 242, 243 Schlegel, F., 4, 18, 27–41, 41n3, 42n7, 57, 207, 242, 245, 296, 297, 302, 325n7 Schmidt, A., 260 Secularization narrative, 314 Secularization thesis, 289 Selbstsetzungslehre, 253, 317, 318 Self-assertion, 4, 29, 283, 285, 314–319, 323 Self-positioning, 32, 314–318, 323, 324 Semantics, 143, 169, 206, 207, 210, 223, 230, 231, 278, 280, 317, 322, 339, 344 Sensory logic/logic of sense, 145–147, 150 Shakespeare, W., 41n3, 103, 116, 168, 186, 222 Shelley, P. B., 186, 190–193, 235, 288, 311–313 Soma, 165, 208 Sophocles, 332 Spenser, E., 308–310 Staal, J. F., 234 Starobinski, J., 202, 300, 336, 337, 345n5, 345n7 Stein, G., 164 Stevens, W., 21, 161, 186, 188–193, 231–235

Straw man, 146–148 Subject-(dis)-continuum, 33, 77–104, 104n5, 129, 141, 150, 152, 259, 260, 285, 287, 308, 310, 315, 316, 323–324 Sublime, 94, 100, 115, 191, 192, 270, 284–289, 294, 297, 306, 313 Superwork, 31, 34, 37, 38, 289 Swinburne, A., 186 Symbolism, 50, 102, 140–152, 293 Syntax, 164, 230, 278 T

Table of categories, 22, 189, 225, 254, 264, 303, 314, 318 Table of the logical functions of judgment, 220, 224, 225, 254, 264, 274, 317, 319 Tapas, 164, 165 Tennyson, A., 186 Thom, R., 54, 341–344, 345n9 Threshold, 50, 68, 99, 143, 147, 150, 162, 165, 168, 174, 184, 200, 209, 262, 294, 303 Todorov, T., 35 Toporov, V., 20, 22, 158, 202–213, 236n1, 314 Transcendental deduction, 17, 22, 34–37, 42n6, 47, 52, 57, 152, 157, 189, 200, 216, 220, 224, 225, 228, 231, 241, 254, 259, 260, 262, 263, 265, 266, 269, 270, 273, 274, 283–324, 333, 335 Transcension, 286–289 Transference, 59, 64, 66–68, 71, 92

 Index 

Trope, 49, 83, 117, 144, 190–193, 287, 289, 307, 311 Turkey sandwiches, 109, 110 Type theory, 75n13, 95, 344n3 U

Underwriting, 294 V

V.-David, M., 300, 302 Vāc, 210–212 Valéry, P., 207, 223, 236n1 Varuna, 163, 164, 167, 199, 208 Vasistha, 164, 165, 171, 172 Verbal contest, 20, 167, 185, 187, 194n4, 199–201, 234, 235, 307 Virgil, 310 Visionary design, 35, 105n9, 134, 145, 151, 164, 285, 288, 289 Visvamitra, 166 von Dechend, H., 204 Vratyas, 164, 166, 167, 170, 172, 173

355

W

Warburton, W., 300, 303 Warren, A., 235 Warren, R. P., 162 Watkins, C., 202, 205, 212 Whitehead, A. N., 235, 327, 344 Whitman, W., 41n2, 186 Wilkins, J., 300 Winckelmann, J. J., 288 Wittgenstein, L., 18, 27–41, 67, 75n13, 87, 94, 126–128, 260 Wolin, Sheldon, 135 Wordsworth, W., 189, 287, 288, 311–313, 324–325n7 X

Xlebnikov, V., 216, 217 Y

Yeats, W. B., 190 Z

Zukofsky, L., 139