Textual Practice

Volume 9 Issue 2

Lindsay Smith, Alan Sinfield, Jean Howard, Lindsay Deputy Editor: Smith, Jean US Associate Editor: Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134805037
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since its launch in 1987 TP has been Britain's principla international journal of radical literary studies, continually pressing theory into new engagements. Today, as customary relations among disciplines and media are questioned and transformed, TP works at the turning points of theory with politics, history and texts. It is intrigued by the processes through which hitherto marginal cultures of ethnicity and sexuality are becoming conceptually central, and by the consequences of these diverse disturbances for educational and cultural institutions. Textual Practice is available both on subscription and from bookstores. For a Free Sample Copy or further subscription details please contact Trevina Johnson, Routledge Subscriptions, ITPS Ltd., North Way, Andover SP10 5BE. UK.

Reviews

Josephine McDonagh

Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xxivv+344 pp., £45.00 (hardback)

Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), xi+ 177 pp., £12.99 (paperback)

These books, both dealing with topics in Romantic critical theory, differ markedly in style. The differences are evident throughout—in the vocabulary, the chapter headings, down to the way that the sentences turn. They begin and end differently, have a different sense of a project, and a different notion of a proper scholarly apparatus—what you should and shouldn’t do, for instance, with a footnote (and in Ferguson’s case, to whom you might dedicate your footnotes). The differences in style are in some way comparable with a variance that Ernst Behler draws out between Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel in their views on the proper modes of knowledge acquisition. While Schleiermacher is content to work from a position of puzzlement, to reach up by slow and steady progress towards a higher understanding attained through the accumulation of facts and insights, the latter believed that higher understanding came first. Behler cites Schlegel: ‘It is not sufficient to understand the real meaning of a confused work better than the author understood it himself. You must also comprehend the confusion, including its principles, and be able to characterize and even reconstruct it’ (279). In this comparison Ferguson is like Schlegel, and Behler like the steady Schleiermacher. If Behler hints at the difficulties that Schlegel and Schleiermacher may have had conversing with each other, we may legitimately ask how a conversation between Behler and Ferguson might sound—two critics who may seem to have more in common than not: both academics in North American universities, both scholars of European Romanticism; but who, when we listen in, are speaking in styles that are as distinct as different languages.

Learning a language requires us to be alert to context, but the constituency of a context is, in itself, highly debatable. These two books display strikingly different apprehensions of the limits of context. For Behler, who is writing about a coterie of writers within a relatively short time span, the early German Romantics (the Schlegels, Novalis, Wackenroder and Tieck) in the period 1795 to 1801, the context of his writers is brought to the fore. He includes a wealth of details of meetings, friendships, marriages, educations, collaborations, homes and dinner parties, weaving an intricate fabric of liaisons to form a backdrop to this extraordinary time of intellectual and creative production. Paradoxically we have little sense of Behler’s own intellectual context: he adopts the role of the highly informed observer, watching anonymously as the pageant of Romanticism proceeds before him. Ferguson, on the other hand, gives us a vibrant sense of her intellectual context, while, purposefully, having little to say about the context of Romanticism. Her book is proposed as an intervention in the debates in critical theory that have been provoked—in the main—by the work of Paul de Man, and at her best, she is deft and compelling. Read together, however, the two books raise some interesting questions about contexts for contemporary academic work, about academic audiences, and about the place of history—our own and others’—in critical investigation.

Behler’s book is a clear and scholarly work of synthesis and explication that guides us carefully through the work of these notoriously obscure writers. The proposition is the usual one—that these fragmentary and mystical works are nevertheless supported by a rigorous theoretical infrastructure, which can be abstracted, and then applied, in our interpretation of their work. Thus each of the six chapters ends with an ‘example’, in which the findings of the first part of the chapter are used in a reading of one particular work: for instance, the chapter on mysticism ends with a reading of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Behler’s book is exemplary in its clarity, and will be invaluable to students of German Romanticism—a book to read, perhaps, before attempting Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Literary Absolute.

Early in the book Behler notes in passing the continuing significance of the early German Romantics’ work, in that they foreshadowed the concerns of contemporary critical theory (signalling in particular the work of Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida and de Man), and have become a target of the ‘fundamentalist critique of modernity and postmodernity’ (8). While this is indisputable, Behler, in this book at least, seems surprisingly untouched by the concerns of modernity. There are virtually no further references to these writers, or discussion of the issues that would figure on a modernist (or postmodern) critical agenda. The status of knowledge is never in dispute nor is its relation to the context of its production and dissemination. The French Revolution, for instance, was an ‘influence’, but small in relation to the Germans’ ‘revolution in ideas’. Events and relationships have the odd status of being at once determining and determined: Hölderlin, for instance, ‘[did] not play a major role…because his visit to Jena was accidental’ (17). Despite its avowed interest in material detail, the stance of the book is idealist, mirroring his estimation of the work of the Romantics themselves, existing ‘independent of historical relationships’ (5).

Were Friedrich Schlegel to publish a book today, one imagines that his acknowledgements would be fulsome: ‘Thanks to my brother, August, and to my friends, Johann Fichte, Rahel Levin, Novalis…. And to Dorothea, without whom…’ Behler imparts a strong sense of the cliquishness of Schlegel’s circle—or at least an impression of a small group of writers in constant intellectual exchange. A similar sense is apparent in Ferguson’s book: as the same names crop up in the acknowledgements, throughout the references, and even in the blurb on the cover, one has a feeling that this is a Small World. While the academic terrain of the late twentieth century may be more expansive than that of two centuries ago, in this book’s representation, it is not necessarily more populous.

Nevertheless, Ferguson undertakes a big project that negotiates areas that Behler only hints at. On the one hand she attempts an historical argument about the rise of a concern with individuation, as exemplified within the aesthetic of the sublime, as the primary philosophical problem at the end of the eighteenth century. As she puts it, ‘an anxiety about the relationship between the individual and the type…[was]…the characteristically aesthetic epistemological problem’ (31). At the same time, she presents an argument about the significance of the aesthetic of the sublime for poststructuralism, by linking her readings of the familiar repertoire of the sublime—Weiskel, Hertz, de Bolla—with a critique of deconstructive materialism. In her account, deconstruction is another empiricism, and the sublime in particular is important because it ‘resolved into’ two intellectual positions—formal idealism and empiricism—that have remained in conflict ever since, a struggle which empiricism always wins. Ferguson’s book goes against this current by holding out for Kant’s idealism, which, she claims, used the sublime ‘as the occasion for imagining that an empirical infinite…can be connected with the artificial systems of representing infinity that have no empirical correlates’ (2). Deconstruction’s attention to the technologies of meaning that always exceed meanings themselves and effect an inevitable loss of agency, not only repeats the sublime experience, but does so by endorsing an ‘empirical infinite that makes language and society…the infinite that humans can identify with only at their peril’ (21).

The argument is extremely complex, and difficult not only for its boldness, the independence of its arguments, but also because its different parts, unfortunately, are not particularly well integrated. The book is divided into three unequal sections: the first three chapters deal with philosophical issues that emerge from Burke’s and Kant’s sublime as dealt with by recent theorists; the second three chapters have a more historical focus, in that they examine related debates of the Romantic period; the third section—just one chapter—is a critique of McGann’s and de Man’s claims to materialism. A number of the essays have been previously published, including Ferguson’s influential essay, ‘The sublime of Edmund Burke, or the bathos of experience’, which appeared first in Glyph in 1981. One has a sense that this is an assemblage of essays produced over a long time span rather than a sustained performance. (The book was previously announced, under a slightly different title, as forthcoming in 1988.)

The essays in the short middle section come closest to making an historical argument, and provide the most stimulating and suggestive part of the book—although the relationship between the method here, and, most significantly, the critique of arguments about materialism presented in the final chapter, is not explicitly worked through. These essays discuss some other Romantic discourses—the gothic, the population debates, and travel writing—which, Ferguson argues, share a common preoccupation with the ‘individual and type’ anxiety that, she holds, dominates the period. Thus she provides a compelling reading of Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population as expressive of a worry, not that there are or ever will be too many bodies, but that there are too many consciousnesses. In this way, Malthus becomes like a Romantic poet, sharing a desire for solitude, an escape from the encroaching demands of others. Ferguson suggests an explanation for the massive imaginative impact of an essay which was neither particularly original in its claims nor scientific in its methods; the vastly expanded second edition, published first in 1803, made a more serious contribution to political economy, social policy, and indeed, family planning, but it is the first edition that is endlessly cited in the works of this period. As Ferguson demonstrates, in the inflammatory first edition Malthus traces the borders between barbarity and modernity, delineating the tragic destiny of the individuated, free, modern subject.

Ferguson provides two different contexts for her analysis of Malthus. One is with Wordsworth, who, she argues through a reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’, unlike Malthus, insists on the socialization of consciousness— that there must always be room for at least two (including Dorothy). The other context—surprisingly in a book that is otherwise unconcerned with the category of gender—is the feminist debate about reproduction. Ferguson takes up Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny (1984): while Greer presents a feminist critique of the (still dominant) Malthusian battle between sex and resources, she does not, according to Ferguson, make any claims on behalf of women for consciousness; in that respect, Greer complies with Malthus, whose major anxiety, according to Ferguson, is that women will have consciousnesses too. The point is a rich one, in that it suggests the interrelationships between the histories of gender, reproduction, consciousness and aesthetics. But it is a peculiar one in another sense, because it rests on what seems to me to be a fairly wilful misreading of a passage in Malthus’s essay. The passage in question expresses the concern that, when resources increase, women will be forced to marry beneath them, to men who are unable to keep them in the style to which they are accustomed. This, he writes, will be considered ‘a real and essential evil’ by ‘the generality of people’. For Ferguson, the passage is ‘the only account in his brief history of world civilization which attributes a consciousness to a woman, the only one, that is, that recognizes it might matter how a woman might feel about her lot in life’ (123). But in this passage and elsewhere, Malthus is concerned less (if at all) for the unhappiness of women, than with the social chaos that will be brought about by the class miscegenation that is the inevitable consequence of progress. The term that is notable for its absence in Ferguson’s critique is ‘class’. This is not to imply that in the struggle of the grand narratives, class should necessarily win out. But it is to suggest that it is, to say the least, unlikely that in 1798 gender would have been on the political agenda and class not.

This returns us to the question of context. While Ferguson’s intention to ‘proceed on two fronts’—the theoretical and the historical—is to be welcomed, in this book we are left with the strange sense, not that we are in two places at one time (or perhaps two times in one place), but rather that the two begin to look too much like each other. That is to say, Romanticism’s intellectual and social concerns start to coincide rather too neatly with those of Ferguson’s very particular late twentieth-century agenda. In this case, the contexts of past intellectual labour have been assimilated into those of the present. The decision as to whether we read this tendency as a virtue, a symptom, or a misreading depends on our own intellectual contexts, and our own academic styles.

Exeter University

Lawrence Driscoll

James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 491 pp., $27.50 (hardback)

Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 1993), 365 pp., $25.00 (hardback)

Along with the recent publication of D.A.Miller’s Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Barthes’s Incidents, and Hervé Guibert’s fictionalized account of the last days of Foucault’s life, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the appearance of Miller’s work alongside Althusser’s controversial ‘confession’, adds to the growing interest in excavating the private lives of various poststructuralist philosophers. While both publications created a series of debates in scholarly and popular journals, in France the news of Althusser’s crime allowed the enemies of Marxism to assert how his actions simply reinforced their beliefs that ‘communism=crime [and] philosophy=madness’ (256). In his own way Miller is asking us to accept the same conclusions about Foucault insofar as his analysis suggests that poststructuralism=sickness.

By extracting a posthumous ‘confession’ from Foucault, Miller’s conservative stance allows critics of poststructuralism to be reassured that Foucault was not so much a philosopher as a drug-taking pervert. However, what the works reveal is that both Foucault and Althusser are denied a chance to defend themselves against the charges that are made against them. In the case of Althusser he is silenced by the courts, and in the case of Foucault, Miller decides that the subject of his inquiry is also ‘unfit to plead’. The result is that in both works the lives of the philosophers are laid out before us, allowing us to peruse the micropolitics of their private lives and pass judgement on their actions. While Foucault is unable to defend himself against the conclusions that Miller draws, Althusser is replying to the charges that were made against him, but only from the safety and confinement of the grave. As Althusser points out ‘Any individual who is declared unfit to plead is destined to be placed beneath a tombstone of silence’ (19). In both instances the lives of these two men are reduced to ‘cases’ which are always already closed and decided upon by the discursive formation in which their actions are presented.

Unlike Didier Eribon’s biography, which kept a knowing distance from Foucault’s private activity, Miller takes the ‘hidden’ life as his focus, a decision which generated a marked degree of controversy. Salmagundi devoted most of their Winter 1993 edition to a symposium on Miller’s work, while Alan Ryan in The New York Review of Books finds Foucault’s politics ‘no more plausible than before’.¹ Paul Rabinow complains that the work is ‘cheap and obvious and easy’, while David Halperin and Judith Butler are equally angry with Miller’s project, leading the latter to comment that Miller’s presentation of Foucault’s ‘excesses’, ‘dovetails nicely with [a] culturally reactionary position’.²

What is most troubling about Miller’s book is the catalyst from which it sprang. Miller tells us that the idea of the book occurred to him after hearing a piece of ‘gossip’ which suggested that Foucault had ‘deliberately’ gone into the gay culture of San Francisco knowing that he was HIV positive. Miller wanted to follow this ‘trail of gossip’ so as to settle his mind, because, as he anxiously asks, ‘what if the story were true?’ (376). Yet Foucault has already stated, ‘Do not ask me who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same…. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face’ (19). One...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Bakhtin’s Homesickness: A Late Reply to Julia Kristeva
• History, Narrative and Responsibility: Speech Acts In Henry James’s the Aspern Papers’
• A Conversation With Lynne Tillman
• Technologies of ‘The Child’: Towards a Theory of the Child-Subject
• The Dream of a Common Language: Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft
• Filming Shakespeare In a Cultural Thaw: Soviet Appropriations of Shakespearean Treacheries In 1955–6
• Review Article
• Reviews