Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death

273 Pages·2002·1.02 MB·English

by  James Swearingen

Extreme Beauty:
Aesthetics, Politics, Death
JAMES E. SWEARINGEN
JOANNE CUTTING-GRAY,
Editors
Continuum
EXTREME BEAUTY
TEXTURES – PHILOSOPHY/LITERATURE/CULTURE
SERIES
Series editor: Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook,
New York, USA
An interdisciplinary series, Textures addresses questions of cultural meaning,
difference, and experience.
Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death
Edited by James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray
Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality,
Transnationalism
Edited by John Burt Foster Jr. and Wayne J. Froman
Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible
Edited by Wilhelm S. Wurzer
Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History
Edited by Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch
E X T R E M E B E A U T Y
AESTHETICS, POLITICS, DEATH
EDITED BY
JAMES E. SWEARINGEN AND
JOANNE CUTTING-GRAY
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017–6503
First published 2002
© James E. Swearingen, Joanne Cutting-Gray and the contributors 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0–8264–6009–7 (hardback)
0–8264–6010–0 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Extreme beauty : aesthetics, politics, death / edited by James E. Swearingen and
Joanne Cutting-Gray.
p. cm — (Textures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8264–6009–7 — ISBN 0–8264–6010–0 (pbk.)
1. Aesthetics. 2. Arts—Philosophy. 3. Political science—Philosophy. 4. Death. I.
Swearingen, James E., 1939–. II. Cutting-Gray, Joanne. III. Textures (New York, N.Y.)
BH39 .E98 2002
111′.85—dc21
2002074090
The poem “The Language” by Robert Creeley is reproduced on pp. 44–5 from The
Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, by kind permission of the University of
California Press, Berkeley.
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
General Introduction vii
James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray
Part One: An Other Beauty
Introduction 3
1 Feeling the Difference 4
Mario Perniola
Part Two: Art and the Turn to the Postmodern
Introduction 15
2 Breton’s Post-Hegelian Modernism 17
Jean-Michel Rabaté
3 Postponing the Future: Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde 29
Dalia Judovitz
4 When Less Is More, More or Less: Subtraction and Addition in
(Post)Modernist Poetics 40
Peter Williams
Part Three: The Impossible Place of Literature
Introduction 53
5 Chora and Character: Mimesis of Difference in Plato’s Timaeus 56
Max Statkiewicz
6 The Place of Boredom: Blanchot Not Reading Proust 67
Pierre Lamarche
7 Literature, Film, and Virtuality: Technology’s Cutting Edge 78
Joel Black
vi CONTENTS
Part Four: The Rhetoric of the Political
Introduction 91
8 Rhetoric, Politics, Romance: Arendt and Heidegger, 1924–26 94
Theodore Kisiel
9 Hannah Arendt: Literary Criticism and the Political 110
David Halliburton
10 The Politics of Fascism, or Consuming the Flesh of the Other 124
Michael Clifford
Part Five: The Political Imaginary
Introduction 139
11 Post-Colonialism and History: Are We Responsible for the Past? 142
Moira Gatens
12 Indigenous-Becoming in the Post-Colonial Polity 152
Paul Patton
13 The Post-Colonial Threshold of Capacity: “The Other! The Other!” 163
Alfred López
Part Six: Extreme Beauty – Death, Glory
Introduction 177
14 The Simulacrum of Death: Perniola Beyond Heidegger and
Metaphysics? 180
Robert Burch
15 A Deadly Gift: To Derrida, from Kierkegaard and Bataille 194
Kenneth Itzkowitz
16 Glory in Levinas and Derrida 208
Bettina Bergo
Abbreviations 223
Notes 225
Bibliography 245
Index 255
Contributors 258
Editors 260
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
James E. Swearingen and
Joanne Cutting-Gray
The title “Extreme Beauty” is borrowed from Mario Perniola’s “Feeling the
Difference,” leading essay of this collection. Perniola investigates the central
theme and sets the tone for these diverse studies in philosophy, literature, and
culture. Hence the specialist reader may need few introductory remarks. How-
ever, the general reader might entertain a brief reflection on the interaction
of philosophy and literature at the site of the crux between “feeling” and
“difference” which issues in the term “extreme beauty”.
“Extreme beauty” is enigmatic, even an oxymoron. What communication
can there be on the one hand between a pleasing harmony that composes
difference into unity, suspending desire, and, on the other hand, an excess
exceeding all bounds, even marking, in extremis, the point of death? Has the
experience of beauty been confounded with the experience of the sublime? Or
has beauty been released somehow from subjective “experience” of an aesthetic
object? The question of extreme beauty will certainly not be reached from the
unity of knowledge but by feeling difference.
The term “difference”, first in its common, prephilosophical sense, may be
illustrated anecdotally for the non-specialist reader by a classic of American
literature. In the first decade of the last century, historian and novelist Henry
Adams privately printed his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams,
subtitled “A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity” (1907). The book traces
the growth of a distinguished nineteenth-century mind from the relative sim-
plicities of its Enlightenment roots through decades of mounting social and
intellectual perplexity as, vainly in his view, Adams seeks to reduce difference
to the unity of understanding which he calls “education.”
A century later, for us as for Adams, difference, in the everyday sense of
identifiable persons and things-which-differ, multiplies endlessly. At the open-
ing of a new millennium all sorts of differences – cultural, economic, ethnic,
religious – unsettle social stability and dissolve the old dream of the unity of
knowledge. And something else haunts the pages of the Education: no small
part of the book’s grandeur is a pervasive tone of melancholy that betrays
nostalgia for failed unity. Arguably that very melancholy registers a felt
difference beyond empirical differences, a sense of something “far more deeply
interfused” (Wordsworth), like some unspeakable excess that no education can
capture and no concept define.
viii EXTREME BEAUTY
Under the master trope of unity versus multiplicity, Adams conceives diver-
sity within the logic of difference, even as the world at large still imagines a
realm of plural identities and symmetrical forces without remainder. It is a
fantasy that continues to nourish the utopian wish for unity and to suffer
despair at the indefinite postponement of the return of the One. Even liberal
tolerance of difference may belong covertly to the ideology of the One as
balkanization of individual differences reaffirms the preeminence of the
autonomous subject. The persistence of this logic of difference in the philo-
sophical legacy of a thousand years may be commemorated by mention of
Abelard’s Sentences, Aquinas’ Summae, the new science of the seventeenth cen-
tury, and Hegel’s Encyclopedia. When, after Nietzsche, philosophy awakened
from the dream of essence and the one, moving outside the dialectic of same
and other, many voices in the twentieth-century philosophic adventure under-
took to think difference differently. In response to something unrepresentable,
some no-thing asymmetrical with representation, these thinkers – Heidegger,
Levinas, Blanchot, Lacan, Derrida, Bataille, Kristeva, Irigaray, and many others
– acknowledge the partiality of categorial judgment. And so philosophy which
once passed over and repressed whatever could not be represented in its con-
cepts began to give thought to an always ambiguous and unsayable non-
phenomenality that insinuates itself from the springs of unknowing where
knowledge begins.
Enter the term “feeling”. These intimations, not so much of an excess of the
same as of an extreme and nonsymmetrical “other” that thematizing conscious-
ness cannot locate – these intimations may promise more than latter-day efforts
tothink the unthought difference. As though difference that cannot be known
may yet register on sensibility. As though one might feel differences that resist
discursivity. If “feeling-access” to the inaccessible were entertained by phil-
osophy, it might be philosophy still, but philosophy attuned differently.
Would such a philosophy not proceed with a certain modesty about its own
conceptual powers, letting difference be seen, as Levinas says, by a supplemen-
tary reduction of its own hypostases, preventing idolatry of its concepts? Thus
might philosophy return things-heard to the hearing and things-said to the
saying. Philosophy no longer deaf to what exceeds the concept, listening to its
own daemon, Heidegger reading Hölderlin, Socrates practicing music.
As the twentieth century learned to respond to irreducible difference with a
philosophy of unsaying, even a philosophy grown dizzy undoing its own words,
art also took another path. Less a second path, one might say, than a punctu-
ation in philosophy’s sentences. If for Hegel art belonged to an aesthetics of
harmony, to a past completed by the concept, art “after” Hegel belongs to
conflict and enigma, art as Ürsprung, “The Origin of the Work of Art” after
Being and Time. Art broke with the time of philosophy, intruding from nowhere
like Kairos devouring Chronos, a syncopation in philosophy’s dance. The poem,
as Plato knew best, can be dangerous because it belongs to a time older than the
world and disrupts the categories of knowledge that would enframe it. The
poem is felt, and felt differently. No longer flattened into an objective thing or
reduced to the “aesthetic experience” of the self-identical reader, the poem
offers, not a theory, but echoes of infinite diversity, the resounding glory of
GENERAL INTRODUCTION ix
difference. Thus Blanchot can say that “Art – as images, as words, and as
rhythm – indicates the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside, a
neuter existence, nil and limitless; art points into a sordid absence, a suffocating
condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness.”1 Sordid
or randomly beneficent, at the margin of the primal and unthinkable no-thing,
“art keeps awake everywhere the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into
substantives.”2
Having learned to feel the beautiful as the ineffable singular on the hither
side of definitions and ideals, before the distinction of universal or particular,
the question arises, how does the term beauty, thus modulated, communicate
with the second and third terms in the series “Aesthetics, Politics, Death”?
Jacques Lacan’s discussion of Antigone suggests possibilities.3
We imagine ourselves to have left the city behind and come up to the
theater, citizens still but detached for a while from the constraints of the law.
Our preoccupation with goods and services held in suspension, we are suscep-
tible to an unpredictable revision of the city itself. In Creon we recognize the
creature of political power. The object of his desire, foundation of his law, is a
determinate good, namely, the regulation and repression of desire. His polity
works by relegating the end of desire to some point beyond any present, a point
that never arrives, binding his subjects to the service of goods by fear, a law
without limits. Creon’s principial hierarchy, descending from incest taboo, may
require that he condemn Antigone’s relation to Polynices as illicit. Yet it is he
who has decided the foundation of the law and now uses it to judge her claims
of kinship. She may be a citizen of Thebes and wife of his own son, but she may
not scatter dust over the body of a kinsman with whom she has shared an
incestuous womb. The ambivalence of that relation transgresses the foundation
of Creon’s law and shakes the foundation of his city. Confronted by a shining
image of passion without sublimation or repression, his own repressed desire
returns. He overreaches himself and hurtles toward an incalculable destruction.
Inadequate traditional readings of Antigone as representative of one political
order in conflict with another overlook the fact that she and Creon do not
properly coincide. Her image shines through all prohibitions, unbinds the very
good his law seeks to secure. In disrupting the illusory object of constricted
desire, she offers no alternative political content and even arrests criticism of his
law. Her resplendent beauty, impossible coincidence of visual Apollonian form
and imageless music of Dionysian excess – this beauty reveals the repressed
limit, and exposes the first springs of the political imaginary. It is the face of
desire itself freed from the egoisms of power. An extreme beauty that does not
inhibit but gives air to desire.
In her address to the tomb which is not her own, Antigone anticipates her
return to the dark body of maternal earth which gives place to the daylight
world of the city. Her voice resounds with the passion that drives Creon and
surges up within his law. That law expresses its debt to the tomb by sealing up
in silence and forgetfulness the hidden place of its own origin, closing it off
with the force of taboo. In feeling Antigone’s difference we are transported
beyond the discourse of political rationality to desire without repression, site of
unharmonizable forces tending toward unpredictable political practice.