Last Things

Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar

Jacques Khalip

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780823279555
  9780823279548
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823279562
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Literature

The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the "end of things," one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability.

Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

1. The Unfinished World

They had been warned of what was bound to happen.

They had been told of something called the world.

—Donald Justice, “The Wall”

A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself there as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. “I’m cold,” the lover says, “let’s go back”; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

This chapter’s second epigraph comes from the section entitled “Images” in A Lover’s Discourse where Barthes reflects on a kind of amorous wounding that the headnote describes as “inflicted more often by what one sees than by what one knows.”1 He characterizes the image as “cruel” in its prohibitive autonomy, “down to the last finicky detail”: “The definition of the image, of any image: that from which I am excluded.”2 Perceptual exclusion gives way to low-grade romantic pain, as when “leaving the outdoor café where I must leave behind the other with friends, I see myself walking away alone, shoulders bowed, down the empty street.”3 The fading away of the breakup scene has the effect of decreasing both the circumstances and the anguished reporting of them—there is nothing to be known here, and nothing to be seen—but what does such heartache teach about a world that one would like to take leave from?

Barthes’s “sad image” of the lover walking off in medias res offers a queer gloss on a romanticism that dwells with a world left unfulfilled, unfinished, and last. “The image is peremptory, it always has the last word; no knowledge can contradict it, ‘arrange’ it, refine it”: What the image irreversibly says, as it were, coincides with an end of saying, arranging, and refining; it inhumanly exists as a last thing, quite apart from our fantastic desire to perceive it.4 It is no longer in a responsive relationship with us. In this way, the image presents itself as beyond appearance and signification—the lastness of a world and one’s unimaginable absence from it. To further illustrate this point, Barthes offers another sad romantic image in the paragraph that follows: Caspar David Friedrich’s The Polar Sea (Plate 3), a work that, like the notoriously invisible Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’s mother in Camera Lucida (itself an instance of photography’s “last music”), is not shown in the text.5 It is as if Barthes wants to insist here that a world simply cannot (and must not) be made to be seen under the icy circumstances he describes: While the glacial architecture of the painting sets up a traditional scene of sublimity, challenging the imagination with a seemingly unconquerable prospect, it is also a zero-degree void. There is an erotics of abandonment, however, through visual unavailability: Barthes’s lover finds himself in a zone like the one Coleridge’s Mariner enters, one where “the Ice was all between./The Ice was here, the Ice was there,/The Ice was all around:/It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d—/Like noises of a swound.”6 In this last world, the ice simply will not thaw: At once infinite and delimited, it is both here and there, a “between” space or interval that has “no man, no object . . . no road, no way.”

Friedrich’s painting exploits this kind of representational prohibition, depicting something that is not there but is still alluded to in its double title: an older lost painting called A Wrecked Ship off the Coast of Greenland in the Moonlight. That missing work becomes part of the painting’s unfinished status, and its multiple titles hint at the denotative uncertainty about what we are supposed to be seeing.7 But even more, it is important to emphasize that Friedrich paints an event that never happened: the shipwreck of William Parry’s HMS Griper during his expedition to locate the Northwest Passage. This suppositional scene is not simply a counterfactual fantasy in The Polar Sea but rather a way of painting the inhibition of an inhibition. In other words, it does not try to imagine what might have been (i.e., a spectacle of a shipwreck that never was) but rather imagines a nothingness or nonevent, a path never taken and stillborn in the materiality of the painting. What we most immediately do see is a kind of jagged composite or assemblage: a ship coyly peering out from the ice on the right side of the painting, falling westward in the gravitational pull, as colossal shards of ice and snow are stacked against and beside each other—a heap doubled by the iceberg that rhymes with it in the far left-hand corner. Friedrich’s impossible ice-world is a realm of last things, disposed for inspection like commodity forms but not requiring thought to act upon them. Closed off, The Polar Sea does not invite sympathies: It renders to view what it simultaneously forbids.

Within this ice-world, Friedrich paints with and through historical ruination, dwelling in the disaster of an unfinished space where change does not translate into legibility. Norbert Wolff speculates that Friedrich’s evocation of a “catastrophe on an epochal scale” displays his resistance to the “‘political winter’ gripping Germany under Metternich,” but the painting is not quite a work of protest against things as they are.8 After all, the image of a ruined world does not so much intervene as demolish the very notion of “world” as a container within which any dispute is set to happen. In Maurice Blanchot’s terms, Friedrich’s disaster is “not advent. . . . It does not happen.”9 In this way, saying that one sees too much or sees too little misses the point of what is happening here. When the chips are down, everything stays untouched but thinking itself is damaged. When Barthes cites the painting again in his lectures on the neutral, it appears as an example of satori; “Satori doesn’t enlighten anything. . . . [It is] a kind of mental catastrophe that occurs in a single blow.”10

In this chapter, I begin with Barthes’s meditation on Friedrich as a prelude to Wordsworth’s thinking about the intersections between a world, its end, and a nonworld throughout his poetry. Frequently, Wordsworth imagines himself with, inside, or outside a world that may or may not exist, even as his own self turns inward or turns away. If we make claims about something being a world—and let us recall that we sometimes use world as a way station term that resembles but also differs from earth, globe, or planet—the presumption is that the concept of the world is answerable to our desires to participate in something much larger that shelters us. In The Human Condition, for example, Hannah Arendt writes: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”11 In a similar vein of argument, Kaja Silverman, in her own Arendtian book World Spectators, remarks: “We are only really in the world when it is in us—when we have made room within our psyches for it to dwell and expand.”12 What I want to argue is this: Claims about working to make a world or inviting it within us at times prevent thinking about the unfinishedness of a world, as well as what would happen if it conceptually lapsed. If the world is something that we “interpret and give meaning to . . . relate to or feel alienated from,” then in that dynamic lies the need to reflect on world as something unknowable, glimpsed at its last word just as it leaves us behind like Barthes walking away from the café.13

To accept the world too readily is to write and rewrite it as the master-figure that naturalizes the intermittence and erasure of the inscriptive. It might appear counterintuitive to read Wordsworth as a poet of the unfinished world, especially after William Hazlitt’s sobering observation that “he tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him, with ‘the bare trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.’ He sees nothing but himself and the universe.”14 To be sure, Wordsworth emphatically recommends the world in many places, and often enough to make any counterargument seem improbable: “the very world which is the world/Of all of us, the place on which, in the end,/We find our happiness, or not at all.”15 And he is the poet whose “voice proclaims/How exquisitely the individual Mind/(And the progressive powers perhaps no less/Of the whole species) to the external World/Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too,/Theme this but little heard of among Men,/The external World is fitted to the Mind” (“Prospectus to The Recluse,” 63–68).16 It is as if Wordsworth is a stern adherent to what Quentin Meillassoux has called the impasse of “correlationism,” or the problem of only having “access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”17 But even in the lines “the place on which, in the end,/We find our happiness, or not at all,” the not at all, like the now no more, recursively depletes the thought that precedes it; indeed, the words sound like a sotto voce act of doubt passed over the existence of that very place and our happiness in it, as if wondering out loud whether happiness bears any kind of empirical value for assessing the evidence of a world. Wordsworth thus often departs, with much ambivalence, from the “fittings” he proclaims—to fit something is to fix, adjust, and measure, but “fit” also invites us to hear its other meaning—a disruption. Attending to such lapses lets us read the world as a stumbling, unfinished thing that is always last: It disappears just as we most think we are in it or of it. Like the now no more, it is a theoretical splinter or a “form of the unfinished,” a term I borrow from Balachandra Rajan to denote a formal “avoidance of closure . . . [a] poetics of . . . partial inscription” that “carries with it no natural citizenship, no whole from which it was disinherited, or from which its incompleteness has been made to proceed.”18 To unfinish means to leave something undone but not incomplete, to endlessly set aside without a larger governing shape or context. The unfinished is indifferent to the renovating projects of the Enlightenment that putativ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Color Plates
• Has-Been
• Introduction
• 1. The Unfinished World
• 2. Life Is Gone
• Color Gallery
• 3. As If That Look Must Be the Last
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index