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Romanticism After The Holocaust-Geoffrey Hartman PDF
Romanticism After The Holocaust-Geoffrey Hartman PDF
Pieter Vermeulen
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Pieter Vermeulen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.
Vermeulen, Pieter.
Geoffrey Hartman : romanticism after the Holocaust / Pieter Vermeulen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover)
1. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 2. Criticism--History--20th century.
3. Romanticism--History--20th century. I. Title.
PN75.H33V47 2010
801'.95092--dc22
[B]
2009048033
Abbreviations vi
Acknowledgments 138
Notes 139
Works Cited 156
Index 175
Abbreviations
References to Geoffrey Hartman’s works are preceded by the initials listed here
in alphabetical order. Complete bibliographical information for these items
can be found in the works cited section. Hartman’s works are listed there
chronologically by date of first publication, which I have added here in order to
facilitate cross-reference.
1. Books
AM André Malraux (1960)
BF Beyond Formalism (1970)
CJ A Critic’s Journey (1999)
CW Criticism in the Wilderness (1980)
EP Easy Pieces (1985)
FQ The Fateful Question of Culture (1997)
FR The Fate of Reading (1975)
GH The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004)
IJ A Scholar’s Tale (2007)
LS The Longest Shadow (1996)
MP Minor Prophecies (1991)
SS Scars of the Spirit (2002)
ST Saving the Text (1981)
UV The Unmediated Vision (1954)
UW The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987)
WP Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964)
The major event affecting the theoretical imagination in the second half of the
twentieth century was undoubtedly the massive dissolution of time-honored
certainties and distinctions, a process that has been captured in such phrases
as “the demise of metaphysics” or simply “postmodernity.” The late Jacques
Derrida, one of the privileged witnesses of this movement, famously distin-
guished two possible responses to it: one response revels in a melancholic
nostalgia for a lost order, while the other embraces the destabilization of the
traditional delineations between different genders, species, and ethnicities
and affirms this new reality “with a certain laughter and with a certain dance”
(1982a: 27). Such an exhilarating affirmation has long found embodiment in
the heroes that have peopled the theoretical imagination: the nomad, the
hybrid, the transvestite, or the cyborg. And even if other prominent figures
have squarely refused to join that dance—the subaltern, the schizophrenic, the
homo sacer—mournful nostalgia and joyous affirmation have effectively served
as the affective poles organizing the critical forcefield in the last few decades.
It is not certain that they still do so today. Take, as one indication of the recent
disorganization of that field, the strange fact that this crew of iconic figures
has recently been joined in the contemporary critical imagination by that most
unlikely of heroes (if only because he is an American icon), Melville’s Bartleby,
the Scrivener. Following prominent interventions by Gilles Deleuze and
Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby’s famous formula “I would prefer not do” has increas-
ingly begun to disturb the enabling tension between a nostalgia that says “no”
and an affirmation that says “yes.” Being “neither an affirmation nor a negation,”
the paradoxical potency of Bartleby’s deflection is that it effectively manages to
render inoperative the logic that would force him to choose (Deleuze 1998: 70).
Rather than satisfying the demands of a system that requires the actuality of either
strong affirmation or resolute resistance, it opens onto “a sort of reserve or incom-
pleteness; it announces a temporary or provisional reserve” that makes room for
an unactualized but persistent potentiality (Derrida 1995: 75).
So what do we make of the remarkable recent career of Melville’s character?
It certainly seems that the critical embrace of Bartleby’s retreat from action
and actuality signals an all too recognizable anxiety that all action, however
2 Geoffrey Hartman
cultural affairs” (IJ 60). Because his style leaves little room for firm assertions,
and even thrives on the evasion of unambiguous affirmations, there seems to be
very little in Hartman’s work to disagree with.
This book demonstrates that Hartman’s oeuvre deserves—and survives—a
more unflinching and incisive kind of attention. It sets out to do two things.
First, it takes Hartman’s characteristic reticence seriously by relating it to other
patterns, biases, and obsessions in his oeuvre in order to unearth a flexible but
eminently systematic effort to theorize a Romantic mode of remembrance and
imagination that subtends his work. I show how Hartman’s ambition to develop
a theory of modern poetry in his first book, The Unmediated Vision from 1954,
persists in his sustained attempt to develop his monumental interpretations of
Wordsworth—most famously in Wordsworth’s Poetry from 1964—into a deliber-
ately minimal form of aesthetic mediation that can play a paradoxically potent
role in contemporary culture—paradoxical because, like Bartleby, it derives
its performative power from its withdrawal from the available terms of debate.
My emphasis on Hartman’s commitment to aesthetic mediation in general,
and Wordsworth in particular, is of course hardly surprising to anyone who is
in the least familiar with his work. Hartman opens his 1987 volume The
Unremarkable Wordsworth by noting that he has “never been able to get away
from Wordsworth for any length of time,” and the resigned tone of that state-
ment already anticipates that that felicitous inability would persist for the next
few decades, as indeed it has (UW xxv). These elements remain a fixture of
his work from the very beginning until his most recent cultural criticism and his
work on Holocaust memory. Hartman repeatedly rethinks these commitments
in light of his career-long concern to grant them a place in a theory of moder-
nity, and to affirm the viability of a Wordsworthian mode of aesthetic mediation
in the face of cultural forces that seem to deny its potency. In his early work, this
challenge is figured as Hegel’s prediction of the ends of art and history; later
on, it is structuralism, deconstruction, postmodern media culture, myths of
progress, and so-called aesthetic ideologies that force Hartman’s work to reori-
ent itself so as to be able to honor its double dedication to the aesthetic and to
a Wordsworthian mode of remembrance.
My story begins in the mid-1950s and traces how Hartman’s work reaches the
consolidated form it still has today in the late 1970s. The first chapter traces a
peculiar movement of self-correction as Hartman revises his earliest theory of
modern poetry (articulated in The Unmediated Vision), which still relies heavily
on a transcendent dimension, in the decade leading up to what remains his
major contribution to the study of English literature, his book Wordsworth’s
Poetry. The second chapter focuses on the ways this more secular conception of
modernity confronts the major critical players of the 1960s: structuralism, the
New Criticism, Georges Poulet’s criticism of consciousness, and the work of
Northrop Frye. I demonstrate that Hartman’s work at this stage already shares
many concerns and affinities with the contemporaneous work of Jacques Derrida,
which was still unread in the United States in the 1960s. These subterranean
4 Geoffrey Hartman
might have wished. While this reticence is a crucial aspect of Hartman’s project,
I have found it unhelpful to use this as an excuse not to articulate these often
less than explicit arguments in terms that make clear what they can and cannot
contribute to contemporary thinking in these domains. By treating Hartman’s
characteristic circumspection as a crucial aspect of his theoretical efforts rather
than as an excuse to stop investigating his project, it becomes possible to recode
the often merely latent theoretical, ethical, and political dimensions of his
oeuvre in terms that make it possible, or even imperative, to agree or disagree
with his project. While this book does not systematically spell out (any of)
the forms that such a disagreement might take, restoring the possibility of
(dis)agreement ultimately aids Hartman’s work more than preserving it in
a form that only leaves either homage or indifference as available modes of
(dis)engagement. Hartman’s work deserves a more incisive reading, and it is
such a reading that this book initiates.
This book spends more pages on explanation than on principled disagree-
ment. It traces the ways in which Hartman’s project adapts itself to ever new
cultural and intellectual contexts, and how its persistent commitment to a
Wordsworthian ethic and aesthetic orients these revisions. In the process,
it inevitably betrays the latency and unobtrusiveness that define Hartman’s
peculiar Romanticism. While I believe that Hartman’s Romanticism deserves to
be translated in more determinate terms that make it available for affirmation
and critique, adding a sustained critique to that work of translation and
explanation would arguably foreclose rather than enhance the possibilities
of future agreements and disagreements with his project. The two main dis-
agreements with Hartman’s project that I do want to spell out in some detail
concern very explicit aspects of his project: first, its massive investment in a
particular version of English culture that is much more determinate than the
Wordsworthian Romanticism that permeates his work, and second, its reliance
on a rhetoric of trauma and loss, which to a large extent allows Hartman to
carry over his concern with English Romantic poetry into his engagement
with the memory of disaster. If Hartman’s work “prefers not to” theorize its reli-
ance on a rhetoric of loss and on a particular understanding of English culture,
this is in these instances not part of the self-conscious construction of a minor
and unobtrusive form of commitment, but rather indicates that they serve as
pretheoretical, affective catalysts of his critical practice.
In his book The Fateful Question of Culture from 1997, Hartman speculates that
English culture managed the transition from a premodern rural world to an
industrialized society in a way that prevented the traumatization that later led
to the disasters of Nazism and Fascism on the continent. I will have more to say
on the strange temporality of Hartman’s claim that England’s exemplary work
of preventing and avoiding the Holocaust singles it out as an adequate model for
contemporary negotiations of the memories of the disasters that non-English
cultures failed to prevent. The tendency to identify English culture with the
fantasy of an unhindered and untraumatic interanimation of nature and
6 Geoffrey Hartman
confirms the self-correction that Hartman’s work has already performed by that
time—without, however, fully surrendering its initial transcendent ambitions.
In the first section of this chapter, I trace Hartman’s initial ambition to theorize
literature as a distinctive form of knowledge by identifying a rarely acknowledged
intertext of his oeuvre: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The second section
focuses on Hartman’s reception of the work of Erich Auerbach, author of
the monumental Mimesis and one of Hartman’s teachers at Yale, in order to
demonstrate how his work opens new avenues in literature’s struggle with
philosophy. Auerbach reveals the possibility of historical meaning, which
Hartman, as I show in the third section, uses to great effect in the story of
Wordsworth’s gradual poetical development in Wordsworth’s Poetry, even if he
does not fully accept Auerbach’s turn to history. In the final section, I show
how the developmental pattern that Hartman locates in Wordsworth informs a
particular conception of Romanticism as well as a peculiar understanding
of English culture. Such an English ideology, grounded in what Hartman calls
“the Wordsworthian Enlightenment” (“GL” 307, “WE” 33–5), is implicit in
much of Hartman’s work, and becomes most overt in his writings on the
evening star around 1970, to which I turn in my second chapter, and in his
famous claim in The Fateful Question of Culture, to which I return at different
moments in this book, that Wordsworth saved English politics from “the viru-
lence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue” that led to such
disasters in France and Germany (FQ 6–7).
The poet, insofar as he writes poetry, feels himself, and is able to express
himself, as fundamentally in relation, not with any particular, in any particular
way, for any particular reason (though with some thing, in some way, for
some reason), but in relation; so that poetry is more immediate, that is, less
dependent on a relational use of symbols, than ordinary discourse. (39)
that the cliffs and the scene have, by the very fact of entering the mind, caused
a deepening there” (22). Hartman glosses the suspension of normal causality
that the phrase “of more deep seclusion” achieves as follows: “the quality of a
thing redounds on the thing it qualifies and is perceived as its very cause; the
part of the whole appears greater than the whole of which it is a part” (22).
Incremental redundance is the main poetical figure that supports Hartman’s
interpretation of Wordsworth, which is in its turn the cornerstone of the book’s
development of its theory of modernity and of poetical significance. The
tensions we encounter in Hartman’s description of this figure can then indicate
the directions that Hartman’s self-correction of the project of The Unmediated
Vision will take. The first thing to note in Hartman’s description is that incre-
mental redundance enables an altered perception—the quality “is perceived,”
it “appears”—that does not conform to the way things normally confront us.
This new perception points to the scene’s “ultimate referent,” which is a
“subsistent ground of vision” that itself cannot be perceived (23, 26). Poetry
manages to provide an altered perspective on reality, and as such demonstrates
the possibility of transcendent significance; it reconnects a modernity that is
defined by a lack of mediation to a source of significance that, even if it is
no longer self-evidently present, is not for all that irrevocably lost. But how
precisely does incremental redundance achieve this? The rhetorical figure in
which an effect is perceived as the cause of the thing that causes it is “a kind of
metonymy” (Bahti 1979: 602)—more specifically a metalepsis. In the second
part of Hartman’s description, this metalepsis is redefined as the subversion of
a part-whole relation (synecdoche).4 This means that the operation of incre-
mental redundance relies on the availability of part-whole relations, and thus of
a world in which things are seen as parts of an articulated totality.
The problem is that this state of affair contradicts Hartman’s early theory of
modernity: modernity is defined as an era in which phenomena are no longer
mediated and lack all articulation. Hartman describes incremental redundance
as if it merely changes an already intrinsically meaningful reality, whereas poetry,
in Hartman’s theory of modernity, is the very operation that constitutes the
world as meaningful in the first place. This contradiction undermines Hartman’s
project in The Unmediated Vision, as he himself will soon realize. The first problem
with his theory of modern poetry is that it is not sufficiently modern, the second
that it is insufficiently poetical. It is not modern enough because it defines
modernity not as an age that has lost its faith in transcendent meaning, and that
has begun to look for meaning in the historical world, but rather as an age in
which the source of transcendent significance is concealed. It is not poetical
enough because it defines the achievement of poetry as the capacity to tempo-
rarily retrieve that transcendent dimension. Even if it defines poetical achieve-
ment as a particularly intense form of phenomenological vision, such a vision
implies the reduction and ultimate transcendence of the natural, historical, and
literary-historical forces that afflict modern poetry. A more satisfying account
of modern poetry requires a more intrinsic connection between poetical
14 Geoffrey Hartman
The last chapter of The Unmediated Vision is entitled “The New Perseus.” While
the old Perseus used “a resplendent mirror” to escape the mortifying effects of
Medusa’s glance, the new hero “disdains or has lost Athene’s mirror, and goes
against the monster with naked eye” (UV 156). For Hartman, this dramatizes
the dilemma of modern poetry: modern poetry is marked by “an almost total
break with Judeo-Christian traditions,” and therefore modern poets are united
in “their effort to gain pure representation through the direct sensuous
intuition of reality” (156). Modern poetry is committed “to the task of
understanding experience in its immediacy,” yet only in order to convert this
immediacy into “tokens of mediation” or “panentheistic symbols” (164). When
Hartman later comes to reflect on his early theory of modern poetry, he
acknowledges that this scheme simply left out too much reality, and that it
mistook both the meaning of modernity and the capacities of poetry. He admits
that he was wrong “in thinking that because the authority of sacred or canonical
writing had been removed, the artist’s only ‘text’ was nature, the body,
consciousness” (“SA” 214). The desire for an unmediated vision seems “in
retrospect, not a solution but a form of heroism,” whose ambitions had more
to do with a desire for “religious or ritual purification” than with the realities
of modern life. Unable to realize that the chaos of modern life “was already a
chaos of forms,” his earliest work discovered a deep perplexity in perception
only to spirit it away by interpreting it “in metaphysical terms” (214–16).7
Engaging with the modern chaos of forms is not only a prerequisite for doing
literary history, it is also necessary for an adequate appreciation of literary
achievement as such. Immediately after his first book, Hartman’s work defines
modernity no longer by a lack of mediation—understood as the absence of
transcendentally warranted significance—but rather by “the curse of mediacy”—
the idea that an unmediated vision is impossible, and that man and literature
inevitably find themselves “in the midst of things, and specifically in the midst
of the treachery of words” (“MB” 163). In two essays that immediately follow
The Unmediated Vision, “The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature” (1955) and
“The Taming of History” (1957), which deal with Maurice Blanchot and André
Malraux respectively, Hartman underlines that literature has the singular capac-
ity to reflect on its inescapable confinement to the modern chaos of forms.
Literature, that is, still to a certain extent transcends the world to which it is
consigned, but this achievement is no longer accompanied by the claim that it
has a privileged, unmediated access to a reality that everyday life is hiding
from us. Literature plays a crucial role in the life of the mind in that it partakes
of “a deeply human need for the illusion of immediate life,” and does so in the
18 Geoffrey Hartman
medium of words, which are “sign and proof of the impossibility of immediacy”
(“FN” 67–9). It is a crucial medium for negotiating and limiting the temptation
to escape from the mediacy of words into an unmediated vision; it is, in other
words, a medium that trains us to resist the temptations to which Hartman him-
self fell prey in his first book.
In his essay on Malraux, Hartman sets out to test to what extent Malraux’s
monumental Les voix du silence, which is mainly occupied with the visual arts,
can serve as a model for literary history. Whereas Malraux attempts “to achieve
for art a proclamation of independence from history” (“TM” 114), Hartman
situates the distinctiveness of literature precisely in its consciousness of its own
historicity. For Malraux, modern art operates in an “imaginary museum” from
which all historical difference is removed; it is no longer a representation of its
historical moment. For Hartman, such a claim to have surmounted history
sounds too much like Hegel’s absolute knowledge. The diversity of human life
can only be maintained by insisting on historicity, and this is precisely what
literature does. Literature, for Hartman, always expresses its historical moment,
yet is not for all that enclosed in it: works of literature have the power to “some-
how have themselves, or the activity of art, as their subject” (“MB” 148). In
a radical inversion of the theory of modern poetry that we found in The
Unmediated Vision, literature now occupies a crucial place in modernity because
it is both the expression and the interpretation of its place in history.
Importantly, this new conception of literary significance also opens up new
possibilities for the practice of literary interpretation. In the interpretation of
Wordsworth in The Unmediated Vision, Hartman had to explain how Wordsworth’s
language manages to neutralize our habitual relations to things, so as to indi-
cate the persistent possibility of significance. The problem was that Hartman’s
interpretation already had to assume the availability of worldly significance in
order to demonstrate how poetry generates such significance. In this revised
account of literature, literature creates its own significance, because it has the
power to interpret its own historical occurrence. One possible new interpretive
approach that avoids the difficulty of converting linguistic operations into the
reassertion of meaning is the decision to trace literature’s own interpretation
of its operations. This approach informs Wordsworth’s Poetry, in which Hartman,
on his own account, “followed Wordsworth’s self-interpretations as closely as
possible” (WP xii). By focusing on “Wordsworth’s consciousness of conscious-
ness” (xii) Hartman can trace the trajectory of the development of that
consciousness, and present it as a much more satisfying account of modern
poetry than his earlier attempt. Hartman coins the term “problematics” to
describe this form of literary history: “To study the problematics of art would be
to consider each work as standing in a dialectical relation to consciousness and
a critical relation to the whole activity of art” (“MB” 163). Literature’s reflexive
potential also means that each work implicitly formulates its own literary his-
tory, and that part of the work of interpretation consists in tracing the work’s
understanding of its relation to the tradition.
Immediacy, History, Nature 19
Defining literature in terms of its historicity and its reflexivity is vitally differ-
ent from Hartman’s earlier account of literary significance. Still, the fact that
literature is still defined in terms of its meaning-making capacities, and is
thus still considered as a distinctive mode of knowledge, also indicates that the
metaphysical frame of The Unmediated Vision is not simply abandoned. We may
well ask how literary significance is still possible in the modern age—how, that
is, it survives the demise of the idea that “art is an imitation of nature” without
either falling prey to pure senselessness or simply transcending modern reality
(“TM” 118)? “The Taming of History,” the first essay that showcases Hartman’s
early obsession with this question, offers a clue when it supports the claim that
in the nineteenth century “the concept of art as imitation is not lost, but finds
new embodiment in the novel of the great realists” with a reference to Erich
Auerbach’s Mimesis (121). The name of Auerbach, one of Hartman’s teachers
at Yale, and someone to whom he feels a close personal affinity, occurs rather
infrequently in his work. Still, Auerbach’s history of style can help us under-
stand the stakes of Hartman’s more worldly notion of literary meaning, even if
Auerbach’s attention to “the nearly inexhaustible variety of humanity and its
creations” (IJ 173) in the final analysis strikes Hartman as somewhat too
worldy—a divergence that is reflected in the difference between Hartman’s
persistent belief in poetry and Auerbach’s commitment to prose. Tracing the
ways in which Auerbach’s work informs the more secular account of literature
that leads up to Wordsworth’s Poetry—which is dedicated to the memory of
Auerbach—also makes it possible to home in on some of the tensions that beset
Hartman’s displacement of transcendence. I already associated the name of
Heidegger with this imperfect displacement; as will become clear, Auerbach’s
ostensibly worldly and historical realism itself retains a number of traces of tran-
scendence, and Hartman’s peculiar reception of his realism will, if anything,
make these traces more prominent.8
In a “Polemical Memoir” from 1999, Hartman recalls that the “influence” of
Auerbach’s “personal style” on him “had two aspects”: first, “it confirmed the
possibility of going beyond formalism,” and, second, Auerbach transmitted
“a certain demeanor,” being “less a professor than a worldly humanist” (“MM”
xiv–xv).9 These two aspects need to be combined: it is precisely an adequate
literary style that moves literature beyond mere convention and reconnects its
formal features to everyday life. This combination of literature’s expressive and
interpretive capacities is at the core of Auerbach’s notion of mimesis. In his
epilogue to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach
describes the book’s subject as “the interpretation of reality through literary
representation or ‘imitation’” (2003: 554). For Auerbach, literary representation
only qualifies as interpretation when it treats “realistic subjects” “seriously, prob-
lematically, or tragically” (557). Literature is interpretation through representa-
tion, and as such it is the privileged “artistic expression” of “our human conscious
and unconscious apprehension of reality, our attitude towards the world” (Calin
1999: 465). It has the capacity to represent the truth of its historical moment if
20 Geoffrey Hartman
Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, written in exile and published after World War II,
foresaw the end of western history as we know it—of history as a rich, particol-
ored succession of events with personalities and writers dramatically divided
by the pressure of class and consciousness. Auerbach looked at this canvas of
history, on which he saw consciousness strive with consciousness in the Hegelian
manner, with something of Virgilian regret . . . he surmised that we were moving
toward a nivellement which would reduce the autochthonous element and gradu-
ally eliminate both local and national traditions; and for him this beginning of
conformity augured the end of history. (“LH” 379–80)
possible the flourishing of the great realist novel in the nineteenth century. The
achievements of Balzac, Stendhal, and others demonstrate a historical continu-
ity that connects the nineteenth century to the Christian era that Dante brought
to an end, while allowing it to survive itself. The novel’s immanent refiguration
offers, in Laszlo Géfin’s words, “a secularized follow-up to an older, ontologi-
cally based notion of justifying the present in terms of the past” (1999: 36).
While it “may aspire to a deontologized semiotics of immanence . . . it still
contains vestiges of the renounced system” (39). In Hartman’s first decade, the
need for an assured continuity between modernity and the system it ostensibly
renounces—a need that Hartman’s early work inherits from The Unmediated
Vision, even if it no longer directly refers to a transcendent dimension—is
reflected in the idea that English modern poetry is essentially post-Miltonic.
It is after all Milton who managed the transition to modernity, and by recon-
necting to that passage, all English poetry after him testifies to the continuity of
the modern tradition.12 Throughout his career, Hartman codes this continuity
as an English privilege. In the important 1962 essay “Romanticism and ‘Anti-
Self-Consciousness’,” he remarks that the “difficulties surrounding a modern
poetry of vision vary with each national literature.” The differences between
English, French, and German Romanticism are linked to the fact that “for the
German and the French there was no easy return to a tradition deriving its
strength from both learned and popular sources.” While English Romanticism
profits from its connections to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton,
in Germany and France, “[i]n the absence of this English kind of literary
mediation, the gap between medieval romance and the modern spirit seemed
too great” (“AS” 310). In light of Auerbach’s work, we can understand that
such a loss of continuity implies a loss of history and of the rich variety of human
life that allows literature to serve as “testimony to oppose the forces of unifor-
mity and intolerance,” as well as Hegel’s prophecy of the ends of art and history
(IJ 179).
Auerbach’s affirmation of the variety of historical life makes it possible for
Hartman to define literature as a form of resistance against metaphysical
fictions, and as a medium that ties man to the reality it at the same time expresses
and reflexively interprets. This reflexivity replaces transcendence and immedi-
acy as the marker of literature’s uniqueness. In an essay on Blanchot, Hartman
writes that “the inherent temptation is to desert the labour of the negative by
going over into one’s symbols. The artist posits a transcendence (metamorphosis)
of this kind but his art exists in order to resist them” (“MB” 161). Regarding
the work of Camus, Hartman remarks that his prose offers “a strong No” to the
“irreducible metaphysical anguish” that drives man to metaphysical fictions
(“CM” 107–10). For Hartman, the mimetic affirmation of reality is emphatically
a reflexive affair: it offers a “‘yes’ within the ‘no,’ a yes to the no the human
body offers to ultimate fictions” (110). The difference between Hartman and
Auerbach not only has to do with the distinction between poetry and prose:
for Hartman, the affirmation of reality is also explicitly the affirmation of the
Immediacy, History, Nature 23
negation of forces that deny reality by aiming for ultimate fictions. This pecu-
liar combination of reflexivity and affirmation organizes Hartman’s account
in Wordsworth’s Poetry: while the book traces Wordsworth’s “consciousness of
consciousness,” such a focus on his “doubts, revisions, and vacillations” does
not prevent a countervailing emphasis on nature and reality, as Wordsworth’s
mental development precisely consists in a gradual overcoming of his so-called
apocalyptic imagination and an ultimate rediscovery of nature. Wordsworth
learns to overcome an “apocalyptic” obsession “with the supernatural and
especially Last Things” and to resist the “desire to cast out nature and to achieve
an unmediated contact with the principle of things” (WP xiii, xxii). In the end,
his imagination self-consciously “binds” itself to nature—what Hartman refers
to with the term akedah, after the “binding” of Isaac by Abraham (xiii).
In order to underline the peculiar combination of reflexivity, nature, and
poetry (rather than prose) in Hartman’s early work, and to appreciate the way
it diverges from Auerbach, I want to briefly look at an essay entitled “Virginia’s
Web,” from 1961. The essay deals with the work of Virginia Woolf, which is not
coincidentally also the main subject of “The Brown Stocking,” the last chapter
in Auerbach’s Mimesis, in which he interprets Woolf and other modernist writ-
ers as the last stage in the history of prosaic realism. Auerbach writes that these
modernist novelists submit, “much more than was done in earlier realistic
works, to the random contingency of real phenomena” (2003: 538). Especially
Woolf “holds to minor, unimpressive, random events” (546). Near the end of
his essay, Hartman reclaims Woolf for poetry, that is, for the reflexive affirmation
of nature: “I suspect that it is her subject, not her form, which is poetic, for she
deals always with a part of the mind closest to the affirmative impulse” (“VW”
84). Even if poetry, for Hartman, is the “natural medium” for the affirmation of
nature, and even if “[p]oetry gives us this nature more vividly than Virginia
Woolf” (84), Woolf’s subject qualifies her as an essentially poetical novelist.
So what is the difference between the poetical affirmation of nature and the
prosaic affirmation of a merely contingent reality?
Hartman begins by noting that, whereas the study of Woolf traditionally
concerns itself with “her solipsism and her treatment of time and character,”
his essay deals with her treatment of space (71). Woolf’s imagination has an
absolute respect for appearances—rather than for “a world beyond the world
of appearances” (AM 77)—which has to do with the “inherently affirmative
structure of imagination” (“VW” 74). Even before the question of meaning
arises, the imagination has always already affirmed a particular reality. Hartman’s
essay attempts to make sense of the mind’s need for “a substantialized Yes,” of
“the necessity or fatality of some primary affirmation” (74). Still, in the same
way that literature not only expresses history, but also has the capacity to take a
reflexive distance from it, Woolf’s work has the power to “interpolate” a No
to the imagination’s inescapable Yes in order to achieve “a purer affirmation”
(72, 78). One of the dangers involved in the capacity to interrupt the mind’s
affirmative relation to the world is that the relation to nature will make way for
24 Geoffrey Hartman
“pure will” and lose itself in an unbounded self-assertion. Yet this is not the only
danger involved in the dialectic of affirmation and negation: it is also possible
that the mind stops resisting the fatality of affirmation to the point where it
passively blends with space and dies (73–4). Imagination, that is, must resist two
temptations: that of the assertion of the “pure will” and that of a fatal blending
with space. This first threat can easily be recognized as the “apocalyptic” desire
to skip natural reality and break through to an unmediated vision—the error,
that is, that Hartman himself committed in his first book and that Wordsworth
manages to overcome in his second book by ultimately deciding to “bind” his
imagination to nature. Hartman’s description of the imagination indicates that
this binding to nature involves a danger of its own: the danger that nature’s
“intimations of peace and of a happy death of the will” will cancel the distinction
between the imagination and the space it inevitably affirms (73–4).
Hartman goes on to argue that art automatically resists the apocalyptic desire
to break with a nature to which it always remains faithful. Even while artists may
attempt to oppose the fatality of affirmation, they have to do so through the
creation of a work of art “which is its own implicit critique”; the artistic negation
of (the affirmation of) reality “still involves an affirmation—the new work of
art” (74). Hartman proposes to code the moment of self-critique in Woolf’s
project as a tension between “a certain kind of prose and a certain kind of plot”
(74). The function of prose always depends on the structure in which it func-
tions, and in the case of a novel or a story, it always has to be understood together
with plot, that is, “some finite series of events necessary to produce suspense
and move the reader toward the resolving point” (75). For Hartman, plot is on
the side of realism, whereas prose is on the side of expression; plot “suggests a
more natural continuity” and points to the contingencies of everyday life (76).
The tension that Hartman observes between realism and expression breaks
apart two elements that are inseparable for Auerbach. While for Auerbach,
realism is simply the adequate expression of reality, an expression that also
counts as an interpretation, Hartman is here introducing a subtle distinction
between an affirmation of the contingencies of everyday life, on the one hand,
and a form of prose that expresses its relation to reality differently. Prose, that is,
is almost poetry—but not quite: Hartman writes that plot and prose “stand to
each other dialectically as major types of affirmation, the plot line coinciding mostly
with what we call nature, and the prose line intimating something precarious but
also perhaps greater—the ‘Nature that exists in works of mighty Poets’ ” (76–7,
italics mine). Plot affirms our customary relations to things, while Woolf’s prose
indicates something that it can only “intimate” because it is not poetry.
So what is this something? The first thing to observe is that it appears here as
a quotation from Wordsworth, a quotation that is about, precisely, the powers
of intertextual continuity (and the fact that it is quoted in Hartman’s essay
obviously affirms this power). This very mode of appearance already points us
to Hartman’s investment in the continuities of English modern poetry, which,
as I showed, spins a particular variation on Auerbach’s theory of immanent
Immediacy, History, Nature 25
Wordsworth’s poetry not only responds to the impersonal “living Nature” that
Woolf’s prose also intuits, but it also has a privileged access to a greater Nature
because it perpetuates the greatness and might of modern English poetry.
Poetry makes it possible to affirm a natural reality without fatally blending with
that nature’s impersonality. The affirmation of nature is no longer a fatality, as
poetry affirms “a nature persisting through the negative moment” (80) rather
than the random contingencies of life. For Hartman, literary achievement is
26 Geoffrey Hartman
neither mere negation (as it is for Malraux) nor mere affirmation (as it is for
Auerbach), but rather the capacity to reflexively engage the fatality of a primary
affirmation.14 Auerbach’s position threatens to surrender human difference
and individuality to the impersonality of nature. Near its end, Hartman’s essay
comes close to naming Auerbach as its privileged intertext when it mentions
the “brown stocking,” Auerbach’s iconic instance of Woolf’s submission “to the
random contingency of real phenomena” (2003: 538). Hartman refers to it as a
“reddish brown stocking,” as if such attention to random detail threatens to
suck all blood from the human life it thinks it is affirming in all its variety. We
can read Hartman’s description of To the Lighthouse’s Mrs. Ramsey as a veiled
expression of his main objection to the teacher who taught him to overcome
his early transcendent temptation and to find significance in history and nature:
“Although most open to life, sitting by the window, knitting every impulse
into a fabric of thought and feeling, what she worked proved finally to be a
shroud.” Resolutely open to the contingencies of everyday life and affirming
them in the texture of her prose, she forgets to respect human difference
and individuality: “Mrs. Ramsey, thinking to affirm life really affirms death”
(“VW” 82). For Hartman, here as elsewhere, the affirmation of human life
requires the loftier protocols of poetry.
In his book Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Alan Liu offers a “bare paraphrase
of Hartman’s argument.” For Liu, the emergence of the poet’s self-consciousness
“involves a dialectic between ‘apocalypse,’ in which the self moves toward
imaginative independence from nature, and ‘humanization,’ in which the self
restores nature to primacy through the ‘myth’ that nature guided mind beyond
itself in the first place” (Liu 1989: 514n3). Liu’s distinction between the truth of
self-consciousness and the myth of nature is not surprising when we note that
he considers Hegel as the most relevant “precedent” of Hartman’s book—as
opposed to, for example, Heidegger (515n4). Still, when we take into account
the trajectory that led Hartman to the writing of his book on Wordsworth, it
is clear that he turns to Wordsworth in order to underline the decidedly
non-mythic reality of nature. Hartman objects to what he sees as a Hegelian
disregard for historical and natural reality, and his decision to promote
Wordsworth as a counterfigure to Hegel is informed by the conviction that
Wordsworth, unlike Hegel, first and foremost affirms nature’s resistance to
philosophical abstraction. Moreover, Heidegger’s first cameo appearance (in
the chapter on Rilke) already asserted the insufficiency of consciousness’ rest-
less attempt to master the particulars of nature, and the necessity of a moment
of Gelassenheit if we want to gain access to an underlying natural process. In
Wordsworth, the idea of the “heroic priority” of the apocalyptic imagination
(Liu 1989: 514n3) is only a momentary—if repeated—temptation, and not the
last word in the history of consciousness.16
So how can we explain that nature figures in Wordsworth’s trajectory as both
a self-effacing teacher and as an individualizing force that enables the continu-
ity of a modern English poetical tradition? We can connect these seemingly
unrelated aspects of nature by looking at Hartman’s most explicit engagement
with Heidegger’s thought, which we find in an essay on Blanchot from 1960.
Hartman refers to a short essay by Blanchot on Heidegger and Hegel, which
distinguishes what it calls an “essential” from a “worldly” solitude. Blanchot
notes how our existence among the things of this world involves a dissimulation
of Being. Moreover, our human self-actualization separates us from these things,
and this leads to “solitude in the world.” We are not only separated from Being,
but also from the totality of beings. Still, this worldly solitude makes possible
an experience of anxiety that relates us directly to the nothingness of Being
(1955: 264). This is an “essential solitude,” which first constitutes us in our indi-
viduality. Such a movement, in which we first have to disengage ourselves from
worldly particulars in order to be able to relate to Being as such, is of course
reminiscent of Hartman’s earlier interpretation of Rilke’s acrobats. What is
important is that this shift cannot be the object of a volitional intention—it is
not something we can actively pursue, but rather an event that follows the
failure of another project.
Blanchot’s essay blurs this point by equating the (Heideggerian) moment of
anxiety (Angst) with a (Hegelian) struggle unto death (264–5). Yet what this
association does emphasize is that we can only relate to Being as such, and only
Immediacy, History, Nature 29
This is the very structure of a nature that only reveals itself as a guide after it has
enabled the imagination’s assertion of its independence from nature. Gasché
notes that physis “as the holding-sway (Walten) of nature is thesis par excellence”
(55). The poetic thesis responding to this original thesis is then always a metathesis.
This is what Hartman refers to as Wordsworth’s concern with “the very origin of
metaphor, of living metathesis, without which an individual cannot communi-
cate or receive life” (WP 392n17).21
Hartman’s use of “metaphor” as both a generalized structure and a poetical
achievement is extraordinarily enabling: not only does it allow him to adopt
the Heideggerian scenario on which his story depends, it also grants poetry—
which is, after all, the medium in which the potential for metaphor can be
actualized—an essential place in this story. Hartman describes how “Wordsworth’s
greatest poetry” is “a web of transfers” that reveals “a dizzy openness of relation
between the human mind and nature” as well as “to-and-fros (‘traffickings’)
between inner and outer, literal and figurative, or present and past” (WP 66).
This dynamic is more important than the contents to which it is applied: “The
question why the poet is moved is subordinated to the fact that he is moved” (7);
“the soul, remembering how it felt in exalted moments, but no longer what it
felt, continually strives to find a new content” (43).
I noted that Wordsworth’s progress consists in the increasingly successful
stylistic integration of ideas of time and place, which becomes the ever more
successful expression of the metaphorical structure of reality. In the early
Wordsworth—the poet of “The Vale of Esthwaite,” An Evening Walk, and
Descriptive Sketches—encounters with places still lead to an “apocalyptic
wounding” (87), which brings on the fear of “visionary blindness (blindness to
nature)” (87–9). Wordsworth’s style has not yet achieved his mature “dynamism
of contrasts” or metaphorical “blendings”—instead, it is marked by “strong
contrasts and juxtapositions” (104–6). The young Wordsworth suffers from a
tyranny of the eye, and he is overwhelmed by “a multitude of objects whose
strong outlines compete rather than blend” (107). The encounter with place
does not yet acquire any temporal continuity that would allow its integration
with the imagination. The poet is confined to natural particulars, and he has
not yet grasped the enabling role that natural process plays in his existence; he
does not realize that the sum of particulars will never allow him to apprehend
natural process as such. This apprehension is only enabled by a decision
Wordsworth makes on Salisbury Plain. The plain is a “no-place,” and because
it does not offer the eye anything to focus on, it inspires a “horror of the
horizontal.” Wordsworth is saved from despair by his decision to refuse “a
near-apocalyptic horror of the boundless” and to instead accept a “defeat of
the eye which leads him from visible to less visible” (122, 240–1). As Hartman’s
32 Geoffrey Hartman
exclaims “Alas! And I have none” (l. 98), in spite of this last lamb being the
“only one” alive (l. 96), this indicates his radical refusal to have this “one,”
unlike “this one, this single ewe” with which the flock originated (l. 32), in its
turn serve as a source of multiplication. For the disillusioned shepherd, the
lamb is irrevocably the last one, and he no longer invests any hope of regenera-
tion in it. Only this interpretation—which resists Hartman’s recuperative
efforts—can explain why, even when the last three sheep alive are “a lamb, a
weather, and a ewe” (l. 93), the shepherd allows precisely the male lamb to
survive, rather than the ewe, which would arguably retain the residual hope of
future restoration (that the lamb is male is made clear in line 20, where the
shepherd says that “He is the last of all my flock”).23
Hartman’s interpretation of this poem as an illustration of the logic of akedah
would only hold if the lamb were dead or if it were female; it is neither.
Hartman is avoiding the confrontation with a negativity that simply refuses to
carry the promise of a future “binding to nature” (WP xiii). This avoidance is
characteristic of Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth more generally: the
reality of loss is only asserted in order to invest it in “a calculus of gain and loss”
(“IF” 152). The shepherd’s radical despair is pre-emptively overwritten by a
promise of restitution. Trauma, for Hartman’s Wordsworth, is only ever a
psychological crisis in consciousness, and as such serves as an occasion to
remind us of nature’s enabling role in our existence. In the words of one
of Hartman’s privileged touchstones, the famous “Boy of Winander” passage
from The Prelude, trauma only ever delivers a “gentle shock of mild surprise”—
nothing a little English poetry cannot deal with.
rest of Hartman’s career, the fact that he rethinks them time and again in the
light of these challenges testifies to their centrality in his work. Together with
his commitment to the vital importance of the aesthetic as such, they serve as
the immovable reference points that orient his career; and like that commit-
ment to the aesthetic, they always remain closely connected to Wordsworth.
The three essays in which the insights of Wordsworth’s Poetry are generalized
and promoted as a distinct theory of Romanticism and as an English ideology
are “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962), “False Themes and
Gentle Minds” (1968), and “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” (1968), which
are reprinted side by side in Beyond Formalism. The “Anti-Self-Consciousness”
essay presents what Hartman calls “some tentative generalizations” about
Romantic poetry (WP xxi), and it treats German and England Romanticism in
the context of the Enlightenment, and of the issue of the “death of poetry”
that Hartman again associates with Hegel (“AS” 310). Hartman argues that
Romanticism is essentially concerned with finding “remedies for the corrosive
power of analysis and the fixated self-consciousness” (299). This concern with
the “perilous nature of consciousness” is reflected in the figure of “the Solitary,
or Wandering Jew,” who appears in (post-)Romantic poetry as “Cain, Ahasuerus,
Ancient Mariner, and even Faust” (303).24 Against prevailing accounts of
Romanticism, Hartman holds that the Romantics do not opt for a return to
nature or to religion, but rather decide “to draw the antidote to self-consciousness
from consciousness itself” (300). Romanticism interrogates “the ideal of
absolute lucidity,” and turns to art and poetry in order “not to escape or limit
knowledge, but to convert it into an energy finer than intellectual” (299–300).
Hartman writes that “in this progress from primitive to sophisticated kinds of
visionariness, poetic reflection is the refining principle: it keeps nature within
nature, and resists supernatural fancies” (“FT” 67).
Such a definition of Romanticism as essentially concerned with the place
of poetry in a problematic of consciousness needs to be situated against
the background of the famous debate between A.O. Lovejoy’s “On the Discrimi-
nation of Romanticisms” (from 1924), which notoriously questions the possibil-
ity of a unified conception of Romanticism, and René Wellek’s response in “The
Concept of Romanticism” (1948). Hartman’s definition of Romanticism as a
particular problematic and dynamic, rather than a set of fixed positions, not
only responds to Lovejoy’s skepticism (“AS” 300–1), but also corrects Wellek’s
earlier attempt at such a response. Wellek famously defines Romanticism
through “three criteria,” yet he fails to establish a dynamic relation between the
imagination (“for the view of poetry”), nature (“for the view of the world”), and
symbol and myth (“for poetic style”) (1963: 163). While Wellek merely notes
these elements’ “profound coherence and mutual implication” (197), Hartman
positions them as orientation points in a constellation that circumscribes the
problematic that he defines as Romantic. Another vital point of reference for
Hartman’s Romanticism is Morse Peckham’s important 1951 article “Toward a
Theory of Romanticism,” an essay that already brings together most of the ideas
36 Geoffrey Hartman
to other literary histories, most notably German and French literary history.
What is more problematic is that Hartman’s account of English literary history
also informs his most outspoken literary theoretical statements. These state-
ments are found in the essays “The Voice of the Shuttle” (1969) and “Toward
Literary History” (1970), which are printed at the conclusion of Beyond Formal-
ism and are thus presented as a serene summation of the theory that informs
the book’s preceding 19 chapters. In fact, their claim to generality is severely
undercut when we appreciate their reliance on a particular national tradition.
This tradition does not suffer from “the gap between medieval romance and
the modern spirit,” because the connection to “the line of Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton” has never been decisively broken (“AS” 310). Charac-
teristically, this historical continuity is also reflected in and sustained by
an uninterrupted interaction with “English landscape as alma mater—where
landscape is storied England, its legends, history, and rural-reflective spirit”
(“GL” 297). These continuities are reactivated whenever the poets that make
up this tradition interiorize them as a vocation to take on “the destiny of an
individual or a nation” (292).
“False Themes” formulates the German alternative to England’s literary
history in a discussion of Gottfried Bürger’s “Der wilde Jäger” (and that one
poem is made to exemplify the German national condition is at least remark-
able, but it confirms Hartman’s reliance on analogical thinking in this phase
of his work). Hartman first determines “Bürger’s literary situation, and its
difference from that of the English poets,” only to find it wanting: there is “no
one, like Milton, to guide his steps” (“FT” 62–3). Neither is there a significant
relation to nature: the poem is “totally steeped in myth and superstition” and
is unable to maintain a “naturalistic perspective” (64–6). The result is that it
is impossible to patiently bind the imagination to nature: the poem wants to
“make up for Germany’s lost time”; time is “intrinsically demonic,” because “the
mind is not given enough natural time in which to reflect” and becomes “a
mere reflector of compulsions and spectator of fatalities” (64–5). Historical
discontinuity prevents a reciprocal relation between mind and nature. Hartman’s
interpretation of Bürger is less an attempt to understand the particularity of
Bürger’s poetry, or even of German literary history, than an assessment of their
failure to live up to the English norm. Whereas Hartman’s understanding of
English literary history is carefully developed by patient and often impressive
readings of Wordsworth and others, his discussion of Bürger simply serves to
illustrate the difference between the English situation and non-English poetry.
Frances Ferguson has remarked that in the relation Hartman observes between
Wordsworth and England “[o]ntogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as individual
poetic development rehearses literary history” (1991: 488); the assumption of
such a perfect fit between poem and nation leads Hartman to treat the case of
Bürger as symptomatic of the German condition more generally.
The opposition between England’s non-traumatic continuities and Germany’s
apocalyptic ruptures will inform Hartman’s famous claim for Wordsworth’s role
38 Geoffrey Hartman
. . . who is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest among a multitude of
objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one
individual, whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or distracted
by a multitude? After a certain time we must select one image or object, which must
put the rest out of view wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth
as a Head.
William Wordsworth, “Letter to Lady Beaumont”
This text is but one of three essays that Hartman published in 1966, and in
which he positions himself in relation to the dominant critical paradigms of
the period: structuralism, the New Criticism and Georges Poulet’s criticism
of consciousness (in “Beyond Formalism”), and the archetypal criticism of
Northrop Frye (in “Ghostlier Demarcations”). In Hartman’s career, “1966”
does not signal the discovery of French theory—as I showed in the first chapter,
Hartman has been thoroughly familiar with French thought since the very
beginning of his career—but rather his coming out as a critic of criticism.
On the strength of his work on Romanticism and French thought in his first
decade, Hartman self-consciously comes to claim his place among rivaling
critical voices and approaches.
Before I turn to these three important essays in the second section of this
chapter, I demonstrate that in the case of Hartman, the advent of Derrida
does not signal the interruption of a dogmatic American slumber, if only
because his work has been in dialogue with European literature and thought
from the beginning. Indeed, far from necessitating a major reorientation of
his work, Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism confirms the movement
of self-correction that structured the first decade of his career. It ratifies
Hartman’s own insight in the untenability of The Unmediated Vision’s metaphysi-
cal theory of modern poetry that is centered around a transcendent source of
meaning, a theory for which Wordsworth’s Poetry offered a more historical and
secular alternative. While this alternative no longer explicitly invokes a tran-
scendent source of meaning, Hartman’s accounts of Wordsworth’s trajectory
and of the English imagination emphatically hold on to the possibility of
meaningful development and significant orientation. The third section of this
chapter demonstrates how Hartman takes up the challenge of (post)structural-
ism by rethinking his English ideology in the terms suggested by semiology
and structuralism. His revised account of the English exception focuses on the
thematic of the evening star, which does not, like the sun, serve as a transcen-
dent center of meaning, but which can still function as a point of orientation in
a post-metaphysical world. Hartman’s attachment to such a reference point
and his refusal to abandon the things of the world to a resolutely disorganized
freeplay indicate that his embrace of the lessons of (post)structuralism was
never unconditional.
accounts of the history of criticism note that American academia soon managed
to control these shocks by enlisting the work of Derrida for strictly formalist
approaches to literature; in such accounts, American deconstruction becomes
“simply another version of New Criticism’s traditional methodology of close
reading” (Nealon 1992: 1266–8).2 Hartman’s work is often seen as paradigmatic
of such an apostasy from deconstruction’s radical promise. Hartman’s first two
essays on Derrida (from 1975 and 1976) are then considered as somewhat
disingenuous and unserious attempts to mobilize the authority of Derrrida
for Hartman’s own case for a creative criticism (about which more later); they
use Derrida’s work in order to license Hartman’s own “ludic and libertarian”
critical exuberance (Norris 1982: 99; Berman 1988: 261).
Frank Lentricchia’s book After the New Criticism from 1980 offers a fairly
typical account of Hartman’s reception of Derrida. Lentricchia begins his story
with Derrida’s “quietly subversive appearance on the American scene,” and
laments that this subversive dimension is soon obfuscated by the likes of
Hartman (1980: 160).3 According to Lentricchia, Hartman reduces Derrida’s
work to a brief for the “unbounded freeplay” of his own “verbal revels” in his
attempt to establish himself as “the philological athlete of American poststructur-
alism” (162, 180). The “Yale formalists” embrace Derrida’s affirmation of freeplay
while forgetting that this affirmation, for Derrida, also involves a call to “historical
labor”—a call that, for Lentricchia, has “the effect of moving us on . . . in order
to interrogate, from within writing, and on wholly temporal and cultural
grounds, what (if not naked being) does shape and inform the play of signifi-
cation” (174). Instead of investigating the historical conditions that make
signification possible, Yale formalism “establishes writing as a monolith itself
that forever escapes determination,” and to do only that is, Lentricchia writes,
“to see only the negative side of Derrida (Hartman, de Man, and Miller have
chosen to see little else)” (179–80).
By presenting Hartman’s (and others’) deafness to Derrida’s call for histori-
cal labor as a conscious choice, Lentricchia is suggesting that they willfully
suppress a vital aspect of Derrida’s intervention. Lentricchia hears Derrida’s
call near the ending of the essay “La Différance” (1968), which, he writes, is
“echoing the conclusion of ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’” (172). Yet it is only
by listening to the way this echo distorts its origin—something Lentricchia fails
to do—that we can arrive at a more adequate understanding of Hartman’s
relation to Derrida. The ending of “La Différance” invites us to accept the
absence of a “unique name” and of a fixed center “without nostalgia”; instead,
we “must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—
with a certain laughter and with a certain dance” (Derrida 1982a: 27). Derrida’s
essay presents nostalgia and affirmation as two options between which we must
choose, and for both Lentricchia and Derrida in 1968 it is clear that we must
decide in favor of the latter. Still, the essay from 1966—which the ending of “La
Différance” echoes—presents the relation between nostalgia and affirmation
somewhat differently. In the conclusion to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida
42 Geoffrey Hartman
For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accen-
tuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that
today there is any question of choosing—in the first place because here we are
in a region (let’s say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category
of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first
try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible
difference. (265, translation modified)
Derrida evokes a region in which we are not so much faced with an imperative
to choose as with the impossibility of even knowing what such a choice might
be about.
When we take a closer look at “Structure, Sign, and Play,” we notice that this
region strongly resembles the condition of Hartman’s work after the demise
of the metaphysical framework of The Unmediated Vision. Derrida begins by
evoking an “event” that “has occurred in the history of the concept of
structure”: we have witnessed the “decentering” of the center that traditionally
functioned “to orient, balance, and organize the structure.” This event took
place when “it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were,
the desire for the center in the constitution of structure, and the process of
signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions to this law of
the central presence” (247–9, translation modified). While the center of the
system traditionally “permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form,”
such a controlled freeplay is no longer possible when the system has been
decentered and can no longer be totalized (248). Derrida names “two ways
of conceiving the limit of totalization,” of accounting for the impossibility of
organizing systemic freeplay. First, this limitation is reflected in the “vain and
breathless quest” of the “empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse”
to master “an infinite richness”—a nostalgic attempt that is doomed to failure.
This first limit still conceives of the “event” in the history of structure in terms
of a relation between a subject (or a discourse) and the world, even if this
relation is profoundly unhinged. Derrida’s second limit is more radical, in that
it no longer locates the limit to totalization in the subject or in discourse, but in
“the nature of the field,” in the unbounded freeplay of the elements themselves,
which lack “a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions”
(260). These two limits to totalization correspond to the two interpretations
of interpretation—nostalgia and affirmation. In Lévi-Strauss, Derrida locates
Literature after Structure 43
figures is obviously a common ritual for any young critic who wishes to claim his
place in the fields of criticism and theory. These essays are unified by an abiding
concern for the survival of literature and by a remarkably consistent investment
in literary form, as well as in the vital importance of form and narrative for the
life of the mind. The “beyond” in the phrase “beyond formalism” that Hartman
uses to sum up his critical position points to the interactions between mind,
time, and world that testify to Hartman’s persistent phenomenological orienta-
tion, an orientation that his temporary engagement with system and structure
does not fundamentally alter.
“Ghostlier Demarcations” is the textual record of an assigned “assessment
of Northrop Frye’s work” for the English Institute (Krieger 1966: v). In the
mid-1960s, Frye’s archetypal approach was still massively influential in the field
of literary studies. Hartman sees Frye’s work as the “latest and most ambitious
exponent of a systematic criticism”; for Hartman, Frye occupies “a new vantage
point with its promise of mastery and also its enormously expanded burden of
sight” (“GD” 109). This promise of mastery is fulfilled when a “total form” is
attained—when criticism achieves “the synoptic vision of art as composing a
simultaneous order” (“GD” 114, “AA” 157). Hartman’s emphasis on mastery,
system, and simultaneity in his characterization of Frye clearly recalls his early
concern with Hegel’s vision of the ends of art and history; the reference to
“total form,” for its part, also recalls Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” which
talks of “total form” (la forme totale) when it notes that the traditional function
of “the center of a structure” is to orient and organize the coherence of the
system in order to allow “the freeplay of its elements inside the total form”
(1972a: 248; 1967: 409). It is not surprising that Hartman writes that Frye “seems
to approach the concept of structure with which structuralism . . . is concerned”
(“LH” 361). Hartman’s analysis of Frye’s total form is, in other words, also an
oblique critique of structuralism.6
“Total form” is achieved by adopting a “new” point of view, which Hartman
explicitly associates with “the point of view of the Hegelian end-state” (“GD”
115, 123). Unsurprisingly, Hartman compares Frye’s Hegelianism unfavorably
to the work of Auerbach; for Hartman, Frye’s “visionary politics” is too optimistic
about the challenges of technology, and is oblivious of the threat that technology
poses to the “fully individuated civilizations” that are at the vanishing center of
Auerbach’s Mimesis, “a book almost obverse in temperament to Frye’s Anatomy”
(110, 119). Hartman concludes the first part of his essay by assessing the
current situation of literature and of criticism:
What, then, is the future of historical criticism? Can the aura of the individual
work be saved? Or is Frye’s totalizing approach, which looks more and more
Olympian, the true alternative? The theory of literature, like literature itself,
seems to have entered the crisis stage in its attempt to find the relation of the
particular, the “dreadful sundry of this world,” to any authentic concept of
totality. (119, italics mine)
46 Geoffrey Hartman
the world. For Hartman, poetry and criticism thrive only in a rigorously inegali-
tarian economy. While poetry is not a divine gift, but merely a privileged thing
among things, criticism can still elevate it to an exemplary status that, even if
it is not purely transcendent, can still organize the world. Such an investment
in poetry as a placeholder for the residual possibility of meaning and order
in a world that threatens to unravel will remain a crucial component of
Hartman’s work.
Hartman’s concern with the specificity of poetry recurs in the text he read
in Berlin, “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure.” Hartman, very
much like Derrida, situates the question of structuralism in the “crisis” that
occurs now that the classics have lost the “power to be models for communal
behavior,” which has led to “a deepening insight into the nature of model-
making” and of mythmaking (“AA” 152). Myths are now taken to be not only
analogous with one another, in that “they show a correspondence of function if
not of structure,” they are also “homologous, or of the same structure.” This
perspective obviously threatens to obliterate the distinctiveness and the “formal
differences of literature” (“GD” 122). Countering structuralism’s insistence on
the similarity of ostensibly distinct phenomena demands a strategy to assert the
specificity of different kinds of mediation. While in Hartman’s early work, this
strategy—then aimed against Hegel’s vision of the end of art—consisted in the
affirmation of national distinctions, he counters structuralism by demanding
that it exerts “a genuine historical consciousness vis-à-vis itself” (“AA” 154).
Structuralism, that is, needs to ponder its relation to the literary phenomena
it describes in the hope, again, of arriving at a more authentic form of
totalization.7
Hartman’s historical reflection takes the form of an examination of “the
progress of structuralism in England and America” (154), which leads to a
restatement of his critique of Frye and an application of this critique to Lévi-
Strauss. The central term in this discussion is “mediation,” which, for Hartman,
again points to the possibility of restoring a sense of orientation and direction
in a post-metaphysical world—that is, after the metaphysics of presence. Media-
tions, we read, “presuppose a discontinuity, a separation from the presence
they seek”; when we are faced with “a radical discontinuity between firsts and
seconds, between original and copies,” mediation can constitute “as it were, a
‘third’ moment which allows us to return to an origin, to recover, if only at
moments, some link between second and first” (159). This radical discontinuity
is both “temporal” and “logological” (160): it signals a “distancing intrinsic to
language,” which is, for Hartman, just as for Derrida, by definition cut off from
the plenitude of being (“VS” 340). Yet Hartman’s approach to this intrinsic
distancing again reveals his divergence from Derrida: while Derrida affirms that
“the nature of the field” of language “excludes totalization” (Derrida 1972a: 260),
Hartman accepts this situation only to opt for a certain nostalgia that harks
back to order and totalization, even if the totalization he is after is more authen-
tic than that of Frye or Lévi-Strauss. As always, it is literature that sustains his
Literature after Structure 49
belief in such a more benign order. Hartman underlines his difference from
structuralism by identifying its desire for the “purity of presence and self-presence”
(“AA” 164), and by making this desire part of his own critical reflection, which
thus manages to incorporate an awareness of the absence of a center and of the
futility of that desire.
So how does poetry figure in this scheme? Hartman situates Lévi-Strauss in
“the functionalist tradition” on the basis of his conviction that “[t]he function
of myth is to allow man to keep on functioning” (162). This leads Hartman
to the question of what “a firm and adequate conception of the role of art in
human life” might look like (152). Such a conception cannot be arrived at by
a purely structuralist approach, but demands that we take seriously “our imme-
diate impression of myths”—only in this way can we “respect surfaces as well
as depths,” and avoid skipping over the reality of appearances. When we return
to our immediate impressions, Hartman notes, “what is most obvious in [myths]
is the instability of the story-line, or of the ‘mediator’ found for a particular
problem” (152). What is most remarkable, in other words, is the way in which
myths resist their reduction to structure. Hartman makes this point after quot-
ing “one of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘myths of reference’”:
The instability of social relations is most remarkable here. If the story reveals
a “structure” it is clearly that of the unreliable mediator . . . We easily perceive
how tenuous the thread of the tale is, as tenuous as existence itself. It is almost
as if the narrative line were the life-line. Thus we find a direct structural
equivalent to that “periodic discontinuity in the mediatory process” previously
mentioned. (164)
for these approaches (this is especially clear in the case of Frye); at the same
time, they signal a strategic awareness that he cannot afford to dismiss such
movements as structuralism and archetypal criticism, but rather needs to enlist
them for the critical effort to preserve poetry—a concern that will move to
the center of Hartman’s activity as soon as his criticism begins to address con-
temporary culture around 1970.
We find the same concern in the third and last of Hartman’s essays from 1966
that I want to discuss, the important “Beyond Formalism.”8 Hartman opens
his essay with a redefinition of formalism: it is not, as F. W. Bateson holds,
“a tendency to isolate the aesthetic fact from its human content,” but rather
the “method” of “revealing the human content of art by a study of its formal
properties” (“BF” 542). As the essay on structuralism already indicated, Hartman’s
idea of form is immediately connected to human existence. Indeed, form is
even essential to existence, and this is why “to go beyond formalism is as yet too
hard for us” (543). The rest of the essay aims to demonstrate that the errors
of the New Critics F.W. Bateson and Cleanth Brooks and of Georges Poulet’s
criticism of consciousness are a result of their failure to appreciate the essential
connection between form and mind. According to Hartman, the faults of
the self-avowed formalists Bateson and Brooks are due to “their not being
formalistic enough,” while the “avowed anti-formalist” Georges Poulet “is
more formalistic than he thinks” (542). By showing how these critics’ mis-
understanding of the relation between mind and form leads to interpretive
errors, Hartman’s essay demonstrates the correctness of his own complex
understanding of that relation.
The essay compares Brooks’ and Bateson’s different interpretations of
Wordsworth’s famous Lucy poems—an exercise already performed by E. D Hirsch
six years earlier (E. D. Hirsch 1960)—only to conclude that they do not live up
to the formalism that they profess. Remarkably, these interpretations are not
formalist enough because they are not historical enough and fail to take into
account Wordsworth’s self-understanding of his place in the history of English
literature (one of the themes of Wordsworth’s Poetry). Bateson’s view is “non-
historical . . . in that his understanding of the poet does not harmonize easily
with the poet’s understanding of himself,” whereas Brooks fails to “relate the
new and subdued style to the more overt style it replaced” (544). A more
adequate account of Wordsworth’s poetry has to focus on the way this poetry
understands its own relation to its precursors; it requires a “‘formalistic’
exercise in literary history” that traces a generic history of the lyric and explains
the emancipation of Wordsworth’s modern lyric from the “pointed” style that
precedes it (548)—an exercise that Hartman undertakes in great detail in the
1965 essay “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” which
forms an essential appendix to Wordsworth’s Poetry. While Hartman’s correction
of Brooks and Bateson can easily be linked to his earlier work, it is also clearly
connected to the two other essays from 1966 in that Wordsworth’s poetry is
not only the object of criticism, but is also marshaled as an exemplar for
Literature after Structure 51
already reveals a consolidated critical position. This position is not only character-
ized by an emphasis on literature’s capacity to serve as an exemplar for criticism,
but also by its insistence on the essential connection between literary form, the
life of the mind, and the structures of existence, as well as on the need for some
kind of order and orientation that can persist after the demise of the metaphysics
of presence. Hartman’s work no longer depends on a transcendent organizing
power, but it still believes that exemplary objects can—and should—organize
and orient the relations between minds and things. This need for a minor and
subdued form of semi-transcendence is reflected in Hartman’s revision of his
English ideology as a poetics of the evening star.
him at a saving distance from the desire to transcend relation (173). Instead of
Satan’s denial of relationality and dependence, the relation between Adam and
the sun is that of a “cooperative hierarchy” between two creatures, which,
because they exist in the same realm of creation, instigates Adam’s “need for a
participatory knowledge” (172). The result of this dynamic is a series of differ-
ent economies of sympathy. At first, the image of the sun suggests “an entirely
unhurtful, sympathetic, even symbiotic relation: what one creature takes from
another benefits both”; the sun and the self, in other words, mutually reinforce
one another. This harmony is distorted, however, when “Eve part-takes from
[Adam] and leaves a scar,” a rupture that instigates the “desire for knowledge”
that threatens to turn into a “horrid sympathy,” into a relation that attempts to
deny the hierarchical distinction between sun and self (174). Such a sinister
integration would amount to a denial of the fall, to a “denial of creatureliness”
(176). This error—or rather, this sin—is clearly if implicitly associated with the
methodological hubris of Frye and structuralism.
In an exceptionally dense passage, Hartman describes the task of resisting
the denial of creatureliness in semiotic terms; it is also an attempt to transfigure
the sun and turn it into a sign:
The sun is but a sign clarified by a series of awakenings. Emphasis falls on the
interpreter, on the mediation of both natural light (consciousness) and
supernatural light (dreamvision). Adam’s first sight is already an interpretive
leap which transforms perception into vision and makes us intensely aware of
the difference between truth in its ordinary and its transfigured form. The
image falls apart, into nature as we know it, and a glorified superstructure . . .
Yet, though in Adam’s image, there is a quiet cooperation of nature and
imagination, sign becomes symbol so proleptically, imagination so imposes
on nature, that an intrinsic discontinuity appears . . . The imaginative dis-
tance between nature and vision is so great that halving it is like halving
infinity. The continuity between them is discontinuous enough to appear
unbridgeable. (176–7)
Many things are happening in this passage, and as few of them are self-evident,
a bare paraphrase may be useful. The passage notes the tendency of Adam (and
a whole metaphysical tradition with him) to overinterpret the sun as the divine
source of significance. As such an overestimation merely leads to a devaluation of
the created world and the excessive glorification of an imaginary “superstructure,”
Hartman underlines that the sun does not exist in splendid isolation; it is not
a self-contained symbol, but a sign that exists in relation to other signs that
constitute it as a privileged sign, and on which it thus depends just as they
depend on it. Only from this semiotic, post-theological perspective can the
relation between minds and things appear as a manageable continuity, rather
than as a forbidding discontinuity, even if the ontological discontinuity between
presence and existence persists.
54 Geoffrey Hartman
However complicated this sketch of the human condition may be, we can yet
recognize the contours of Hartman’s earlier revision of Lévi-Strauss in it: the
ontological discontinuity between the realm of truth and the created world is,
as it were, projected onto the hierarchical relation between different created
things in order to generate a continuity that somehow remedies the ontological
gap between presence and existence. Thanks to the redefinition of the sun as a
sign to which we can relate, light does not just disappear from the world but
continues to make it possible for order and meaning to flourish. To return to
Derrida’s terms, Hartman’s sun-sign allows him to survive the demise of structure
and to imagine a world that, because it is centered around the sun-sign that it has
generated in its midst, ultimately remains closer to the old dispensation than
to the feared reality of unbounded freeplay. Again, Hartman follows Derrida’s
critique of structure, but he still responds to it with a nostalgic, humanist
project in which real distinction remains possible.
The framework that we see emerge in “Adam on the Grass” is not only a
reaction to the challenge of structuralism, as this challenge is only one of the
many forces that Hartman attempts to negotiate in his career-long attempt to
make sense of our post-theological world in a way that allows the privilege of
poetry to persist. In Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman’s solution was stage-managed
by the discrete propaedeutics of Nature. This propaedeutics functions in a
remarkably different way in Hartman’s interpretation of Paradise Lost. For
Hartman, the infinite distance between nature and transcendent truth is
reflected in Adam’s consciousness as the “small margin between vision and
ecstacy,” which is also “the educable margin” (“AG” 177–80). Milton’s God’s
program of education, like that of Wordsworth’s Nature, consists in “the grad-
ual attuning of man to the consciousness of what he is” (180). Still, Milton’s
God does not just operate invisibly: he explicitly mandates Raphael to guide
and monitor the execution of this program. It is Raphael’s task to “interpret
the sun” (184)—the very operation that turns the sun into a sign in the long
quotation above. Raphael, that is, teaches by his own example: he teaches man
to interpret the sun by himself exemplarily initiating that process of interpreta-
tion. We here see the same structure that we encountered in Hartman’s essays
from 1966, as Raphael subtly shifts from being God’s envoy to instantiating an
exemplary form of interpretation that serves as a semi-transcendent example
for further acts of interpretation—just as poetry, in Hartman’s essays from 1966,
has to teach criticism how to relate to poetry.
As the downgraded sun is something that requires interpretation, Hartman
also qualifies it as a hermeneutical challenge; it is the site of an excess that “brings
language close to a limit of expression” (188). Hartman’s semi-transcendent
points of orientation are typically sites of semantic overdetermination or inde-
terminacy, which again ensures that poetical language qualifies as a particularly
adequate medium for providing such orientation; poetry is a form of language
that is “radically oblique in terms of sign function” (“VS” 347). In “Adam on the
Grass,” the crucial moment of obliquity is Adam’s recollection from Paradise
Literature after Structure 55
Lost on which the essay opens: “I found me laid / In Balmy Sweat, which with
his Beams the Sun / Soon dri’d, and on the reeking moisture fed” (VIII 254–6).
Hartman does not cease to underscore that “[t]he key phrase is ‘Balmy Sweat’”
(“AG” 187): he writes that the phrase “stands out,” that it is “emphasized,” that
its “focus” is “reinforced,” only to end with the assertion that this intense focus
“leaves us suspended between a simple and complex reading of the phrase”
(187–8). For Hartman, these two readings do not cancel each other out: he
duly notes that the phrase can both signify the blessings of a “‘sympathetic’
cosmos” (171) and indicate “the sweat of the curse” (188), but there is no
need to decide between these two significantly different interpretations. Instead,
the meaning of the phrase remains suspended in “the region between logos
and mythos” (189). Milton’s phrase, and poetry more generally, can achieve a
suspension of meaning because in poetry, the “same phonemic space . . . is
competed for by opposite meanings” (188), and this achievement grants it a
semi-transcendence that allows it to stand out among the more unequivocal
things of the world.
Poetical figures can serve as a point of orientation for the subject precisely
because their obliquity inspires a situation of heightened interpretive demand—
what Hartman in 1973, in a reading of Keats’ two Hyperions, will define as
“spectral symbolism”: in Keats, “it is just this absence of a precise referent
together with the heightened sense of self they produce, which make them [the
spectres] ominous” (“SS” 2). The moment when this interpretive burden asserts
itself in The Fall of Hyperion is unsurprisingly associated with another semi-
transcendent celestial object. Failing to solicit a response from Moneta, the
poet has to bear “The load of this eternal quietude, / The unchanging gloom and
the three fixed shapes / Ponderous upon my senses, a whole moon.” Hartman
notes that the moon is “traditionally the symbol of the border between higher
and lower, mortal and immortal realms,” and this makes it a perfect candidate
for the function of the under- or overdetermined point of suspension that
enables the subject to totalize the things of this world. The “whole moon,” that
is, makes it possible to consider the “three fixed shapes” as a totality, a “whole”;
the phrase “whole moon,” then, no longer only has a temporal meaning, but
becomes another instance of enabling ambivalence (“SS” 9–10).
Milton’s sun and Keats’ moon make it possible to avoid both a dangerous
transcendence—which, for Hartman, is always associated with the threat of
apocalypse—and a demoralizing leveling of the world. Such minor celestial
objects allow Hartman to restate the valorization of temperance that was already
apparent in the English ideology that we observed in his early work. The most
elaborate instance of this valorization, and the most overt update of that ideology,
is the 1971 essay “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’.” Hartman
argues against a “formalist” interpretation that understands “To Autumn” as a
“triumph of form . . . pure of content”; instead, “it is an ideological poem whose
very form expresses a national idea and a new stage in consciousness” (“PI”
305–6).9 “To Autumn” illustrates what Hartman identifies as Keats’ “Hesperian”
56 Geoffrey Hartman
ideal is its refusal of the example of “the first significant way station in the
Westering of the Poetical Spirit”: Virgil’s “method of mediation, the self-
conscious acceptance of a secondary, ‘translating’ function” (198–9). Unwilling
to accept the belatedness and secondariness of the climate in which he writes,
Blake is unable to confine himself to the evening: “his are dawn and not
evening poems” (“DF” 226–7). His refusal of “Hesperia” condemns him to
“a lapsed Orientalism” (“PI” 328n16, “BP” 199). Yet the evening is not the only
element of Hartman’s national ideology that Blake misses, as he also refuses to
accept autumn as the perpetual postponement of winter. Blake does not accept
winter as a realm that remains hidden from man, as “a force which man cannot
humanize” (202). Rather than accepting winter as a season that transcends
human life, he “seems to say to Winter ‘Thou hast thy music too’” (202). By
abandoning a humanizing refusal of transcendence, Blake threatens to over-
reach the limits of the human condition. The result is that he lacks a point of
orientation: for Blake, “[t]he poetical spirit is now seen to blow from all corners
of the globe,” which leads to a “confused, if high-spirited” disorientation from
which Blake’s poetry never recovers (202–3).10
Blake’s ambition to transcend his human limitations inevitably associates him
with Northrop Frye—which is not surprising, given the importance of Blake for
Frye’s critical career.11 As I noted before, in his essay on “the Anglo-American
adventure” of structuralism, Hartman notes that structuralism and Frye fail to
take into account a “discontinuity that is temporal (like winter) and logological”
(“AA” 160). Hartman elaborates on this remarkable parenthesis by coding “the
difference between Frye’s theory of literature and a true theory” as the distinction
between two myths: that of Ceres and Proserpina, which he uses to characterize
the position of Frye—and, implicitly, Blake—and that of Orpheus and Eurydice,
which illustrates a “true” theory of literature and is associated with Maurice
Blanchot. The Orpheus myth stages “the figure of a mediation that failed, of a
presence not brought back,” and thus recognizes the discontinuity and second-
ariness that mark the human condition. The myth of Proserpina, for its part,
celebrates a “natural cycle” in which winter is merely one element among
others in an economy in which man plays no essential part (160–1). Frye and
Blake commit complementary errors: Blake denies that “[w]inter really win-
ters,” and insists “on immediacy, on a directness to the source which Virgil’s
example and the body of classical tradition impede” (“BP” 199–202); Frye also
fails to appreciate the vital importance of poetry’s lesson of secondariness,
and his theory thrives too cheerfully on “the accepted loss of art’s temporal
immediacy” (“WA” 29).
To underscore the consistency of Hartman’s work in this period, we can note
that, in an essay from 1973, Hartman refers to this “domain of the secondary”
by the term “écriture.” Hartman writes that “[w]riting is living in the secondary,
knowing it is the secondary. To be conscious is already to be writing. That is the
curse, or the blessing” (“SA” 222–6). This secondariness defines Hartman’s
58 Geoffrey Hartman
There will be no unique name, not even the name of Being. It must be
conceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of
the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland
of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche
brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.
(1982a: 27)
The essay on Blake ends with “a view of Blake as homo ludens,” “his maskings a
gay science, an applied humanistic magic” (“BP” 205), a “conflagration,” to
which Hartman opposes a “concordance mov[ing] closer to contamination”—
“outside the myth of the purely maternal” language, which is, as we know, also
the myth of Ceres (“AG” 179, 192).
“La Différance” goes on to oppose the affirmation of the absence of the
proper name to what Derrida calls “Heideggerian hope” (l’espérance heideggerienne),
which is a “quest for the proper word and the unique name” (1982a: 27). Hartman
accepts that there is “no unique name”; instead—and this is entirely character-
istic of Hartman’s compromise between freeplay and structure—there is “the
dual name of the star, Hesper (Vesper) and Phosphor (Venus), evening and
morning star . . . symbolic of a continuity that persists within apparent loss”
(“ES” 90). Venus is a planet that famously has two names: as such, it frustrates
the Heideggerian hope for a unique name, but that does not render it incapa-
ble of functioning as a point of orientation. The evening star captures the logic
of Hartman’s compromise between freeplay and orientation more adequately
than Milton’s sun and Keats’ moon.12 The essay “Reflections on the Evening
Star” from 1971 is the clearest example of Hartman’s grounding of a particu-
larly English kind of poetical continuity in a substellar thematics. He describes
the evening star as a “surrogate moon,” which makes possible “a vivid sense of
hierarchy” that is the obverse of the “sublime” and “epiphanic” philosophies
of transcendence that it displaces; he calls this obverse of transcendence a
“descendentalism” (87–97). Hartman again conceives of the relation between
subject and star as a semiotic one that comes to replace a metaphysical frame-
work. He describes Hesperus as “the moon of its own twilight zone” which
evokes “a spot of time in which a richly ominous signifier is all there is”:
which “Spenserian allegory laments itself” (“NF” 118, 126–7). Hartman’s argu-
ment that English Romanticism survived the death of God by situating itself in
relation to the evening star in no way guarantees that a similar feat of survival is
still possible in the present. The question is whether poetry can itself become a
kind of evening star for the present, and teach the world to preserve it in the
same way that it itself learned to relate to the evening star. Hartman writes that
the theme of the evening star managed to achieve two things: it limited the
“fear of discontinuity, of a break in personal or cultural development,” yet it
also limited “a vatic overestimation of poetry which, putting too great a burden
on the artist, made this break more likely” (“ES” 123). It assured, in other words,
that the world’s demands on the subject did not overwhelm it, and that poetry
remained available as one strategy for coping with the world. It helped the sub-
ject to renounce its desire for a transcendence that would threaten the relations
between the subject and the things of the world. So how can poetry itself occupy
a position in our culture from which it can transmit the lessons of continuity
and renunciation? And even if these lessons are successfully transmitted, how
can they be recognized as specifically poetical lessons? At the beginning of the
1970s, these are the questions that Hartman’s work can no longer avoid.
Chapter 3
The search for a theory of modernity in which poetry would find a privileged
place occupied Hartman’s early work and found a temporary resolution in
Wordsworth’s Poetry. Still, the theoretical settlement of the question of poetry’s
privilege amounts to very little when poetry becomes an increasingly margin-
alized medium in contemporary life. This realization moves to the center of
Hartman’s critical activity in the early 1970s. While Hartman’s work earlier
negotiated the relation of literature to such formidable competitors as philoso-
phy, death, and logic, it is now “engaged in assessing the relation of art to life in
a context that obliges us to consider the relation of art to culture.” Life is now
emphatically “life in a culture,” and it is the task of criticism to take on the full
density and complexity of such a life. At the same time, criticism must strive “to
maintain some distinction between art and popular culture while characterizing
art as a type of knowledge which is not against life” (“TR” 281–2). That Hartman
writes that criticism must maintain art’s distinction is telling: it signals a certain
resistance to the more forbidding observation that such a distinction may already
be lost, that already, as Hartman will write only in 1975, “[l]iterature is so easily
assimilated or coopted that the function of criticism must be to defamiliarize it”
(“FR” 260). As I show in the first section of this chapter, Hartman’s resistance to
this idea asserts itself as a blind spot in his earliest pieces of cultural criticism
written around 1970. In the next section, I look at the difficulties besetting
Hartman’s attempt to make a case for the vital role of poetry in contemporary
culture. The rest of this chapter traces how Hartman manages to recuperate
poetry’s failure to prevent its own demise by making poetry the medium that
preserves the possibility of loss. This paradoxical affirmation of poetry’ vital cul-
tural role goes hand in hand with a more realistic diagnosis of contemporary
culture—a diagnosis that Hartman’s work at first resists and moderates.
Our “waste land” . . . is not a desert but a dump: we suffer from too much
rather than from too little, from the rate of change and inexorable accu-
mulation of cultural detritus . . . Actually there are two heaps between which
we live: that of the signifiers, the outmoded signs, myths, allusions, and
styles, and what the signifiers supposedly signify: reality, the Vietnam war,
the war in our cities, all such immediate pressures that disable the signifiers
from another angle. Our sense of existence, of being-in-the-world, is at once
heightened and undermined by an endlessly inflowing contemporaneity.
(“ST” 306)
64 Geoffrey Hartman
There is, according to Kant, a sense of the sublime—he calls it the mathemat-
ical sublime—arising out of sheer cognitive exhaustion, the mind blocked
not by the threat of an overwhelming force, but by the fear of losing count or
of being reduced to nothing but counting—this and this and this—with
no hope of bringing a long series or a vast scattering under some sort of
conceptual unity . . . Professional explainers of literature have only to try
locate themselves in the current intellectual scene . . . in order to experience
the requisite mental overload, and possibly even that momentary checking of
the vital powers. (Hertz 1978: 62)1
Hertz goes on to call this “feeling of the inadequacy of [the] imagination for
presenting the ideas of a whole” “the reader’s or hermeneutical sublime”
(72–3).2 He also refers to this mere accumulation that disables a meaningful
synthesis (Kant 2000: 135, 142–3) as an “excess that cannot, in Jacques
Derrida’s phrase, be brought back home to the father” (Hertz 1978: 75). As
I suggested in my discussion of Hartman’s take on French Romanticism, the
mathematical sublime offers Hartman the scheme to translate his disagreement
with Derrida into a diagnosis of contemporary culture.3
This also means that Hartman’s cure for this cultural condition will look very
much like his response to the challenge of Derrida. The mathematical sublime
is a psychological version of Derrida’s freeplay, and to the extent that it makes
possible a transcription of freeplay in psychological terms it already announces
a nostalgic containment of it. The massive overload of signifiers may be over-
whelming, but it can always be contained in the “ecology or interanimation
of mind and world” (“DC” 166).4 Because this psychological ecology can resolve
the crisis of culture, Hartman uses it as a framework in which he can affirm
the cultural role of literature and art. Aesthetics, he remarks, “should really be
called psychoesthetics” (157), and this is the name that Hartman’s effort to affirm
the vital importance of art and literature intermittently receives.5 He coins the
term in the 1973 essay “The Dream of Communication,” which was published
in a Festschrift for I. A. Richards. Hartman defines Richards’ work as an earlier
form of psychoesthetics, only to immediately declare this version obsolete on
account of its “benevolent normativeness” and its unquestioned belief in the
“‘premillenial’ perfectibility of the whole stimulus-response relation” (159).
Richards has, in other words, failed to anticipate that the mathematical sublim-
ity of contemporary culture would radically unhinge the interrelation of mind
and world. Today, Richards’ “idealized stimulus and response pattern” has to
make way for “an unbalanced ‘excess’ (of demand) and ‘defect’ (of response)
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 65
The sacrifice feared by one who has internalized demand is simply that of
the whole principle of mimesis: of a magical correspondence of internal
action and external effect, of a mimetic aiming at “The Real Thing.” In
semiotic terms, of wishing to convert symbols into signs with real, immediate
reference. (174)
Art restores the ecology of mind and world—which in the Kantian scenario is
the function of the imagination—by limiting our demand upon the world. Its
work of renunciation preserves our capacity to maintain a mimetic relation
to the world, and it limits what Hartman calls “the anxiety of demand itself ”: an
anxiety “rooted in the fear that everything that can be used can be used up; that
demand creates the danger of depletion” (176).
Hartman reinscribes art in the sublimity of contemporary culture by having it
affirm the mimetic communion between mind and world, which he emphatically
refuses to sacrifice in the service of the assertion of reason. Still, we must note
that the articulation of this solution requires a reformulation of the problem to
which it is meant to serve as a solution: poetry does not so much penetrate a
sublime cultural crisis, but rather comes to correct a comparatively mild unbal-
anced ecology of mind and world. Hartman’s avoidance of the radicality of this
condition also becomes evident when his psychoesthetics ends up redefining
66 Geoffrey Hartman
the poem consists of one propositional sentence that, in fulfilling itself, also
cancels itself out. Complete in line 7 (at the semicolon), the proposition ironi-
cally does not suffice the mind which proposed it and which now, running on,
begins to defend itself by a “structured and mounting negation” . . . This kind
of poetry does not wish to become thought or afterthought. (“PP” 256–7)
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 67
“This kind of poetry” wishes to cancel the statement it makes, and thus to
exemplify the erasure of our pathetic impositions on the world. For Hartman,
poetry’s example delivers a lesson as well as “the cleansing power” that allows
this lesson to intervene in the present (256). In this reading, the poem is
produced by a “wintery” mind, by a mind that is capable of the movement of
renunciation that it exemplifies in the poem. This wintery mind is then also
the “listener” that the poem’s last stanza evokes: “ . . . the listener, who listens in
the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the
nothing that is” (ll. 13–15). This “listener” has successfully reduced his being to
a “nothing himself.”
Yet as the incongruous gender marker in this last phrase indicates, the mind
that produces the poem is not the disembodied abstraction Hartman must want
it to be if the poem is to play the cultural role he has is mind for it. Hartman’s
reading of the poem in fact relies on a category mistake. It is obvious that a
negation can cancel a proposition; but when Hartman introduces the “mind
which proposed” this proposition into the picture, we are reminded that this
negation is itself also a proposition made by this mind.7 While a negation can
retract the meaning of an earlier proposition, it is impotent to cancel its own—
and the earlier proposition’s—status as, indeed, a proposition. Before poetry’s
power of negation can begin to cancel the pollution of nature, it must contrib-
ute to it. Importantly, this is not a failure of Steven’s poetry alone: the failure is
generic, as it derives from the status of poetry as a man-made fiction, as a work.
Hartman’s attempt to formulate the essential connection between the lesson of
renunciation and the medium of poetry ends in poetry’s demonstration that it
is generically incapable of fulfilling this role.
If we take poetry’s fateful compulsion to contribute to the pollution of the
world into account, Stevens’ poem makes, if anything, more sense than in
Hartman’s reading of it. “One must have a mind of winter” then expresses
the necessity of the fiction of an individuated (“one”) and anthropomorphized
(“mind”) prop for the movement of cancelling the pathetic pollution of
nature. In this way, the poem reminds us that the withdrawal from the snowlands
it evokes is only possible because its fictional mind has in advance been decreed
to be “of winter.” The “mind of winter” is a man-made fiction, a pure device, a
mere “nothing” that, in the terms of the last stanza, can behold the “[n]othing
that is not there” (itself) and “the nothing that is” (winter); being “nothing
himself,” and being designed with the sole purpose of disappearing into the
winter it beholds, it has never been anything apart from this winter. The snow
man is “a figure created from the landscape by a human being but who, once
that human has departed remerges with the landscape” (Hoag 1979: 91). The
poem itself is an imposition on the landscape, and the only way in which
the human can depart from it is by ending the poem. The poem has by that
point irrevocably taken place, and cannot itself be erased. Traditional interpre-
tations of the poem state that “[g]enerally speaking, the poem has destroyed
the pathetic fallacy” (Bové 1980: 195);8 generically speaking, it has demonstrated
poetry’s incapacity to refrain from imposing its own “ideas and anxieties” on
68 Geoffrey Hartman
poetry is not capable of delivering. So what does this mean for Hartman’s
critical project? One theoretical option that emerges would be to redefine the
vocation of criticism: criticism would then no longer labor to define and pro-
mote the vitality of poetry, but would become a testament to this incapacity,
a rehearsal of that impasse, or even a methodical attempt to radicalize it. This
will be the trajectory adopted by de Man, but it is not the road Hartman will
take. As I demonstrate below, he takes up the challenge of the incompatibility
between poetry’s linguistic operation and its cultural force and incorporates
this dissociation in an entirely more paradoxical defense of poetry.
I now turn to another of Hartman’s attempts to affirm the essentially poetic
nature of his cure for the cultural condition he confronts. The 1972 essay “The
Sublime and the Hermeneutic” takes on this challenge by turning to the poetry
of that most unlikely of poets, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. While the threat
of Hegel’s antihumanism hovered over Hartman’s early work, Hartman here
confidently asserts that Hegel was “truly a humanist,” “concerned with defining
the powers of man, with detaching the being called man from a divine or
overshadowing matrix” (“SH” 153). In the light of Hartman’s earlier work on
the evening star, it is not surprising that Hegel has been won over to poetry’s
side through a confrontation with the stars. Hartman focuses on “Eleusis,” a
poem that Hegel addressed to Hölderlin in 1796 and in which “the thought-
annihilating stars (Gestirn) become through the mediation of ‘Phantasie’ the
sublime brow (Stirne) of monitory spirits” (149). Interestingly, the passage
Hartman quotes from the poem stages a variant of the snow man, as well as of
Kant’s “all-embracing vault.” When the speaker lifts her eye to “the arch of the
eternal heavens” (des ewigen Himmels Wölbung, Hegel 2002: 312–17, l. 26),
This “humanist” Hegel begins to look very much like Wordsworth. This con-
nection is made more explicit in the essay “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth.”
Hartman notes that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit does not end in the self-
satisfaction of a “moment of ultimate recollection,” but that, very much like in
the passage from “Eleusis,” spirit returns to the forms of the world and “the
mind starts fresh as if all were lost” (“EW” 182). This ultimate “change of what
is known into Anschauung” delivers the mind from the burdens of history and
religion and allows it to become “the very basis of human freedom” (“EW” 183–6,
“SH” 152).11 Hartman explicitly presents the parallels between Wordsworth
and Hegel as the lesson that philosophy has to learn from poetry. The point of
Hartman’s discussion of Hegel’s poem is that the young Hegel had indeed
learned that poetical lesson in 1796, before he again forgot it in his mature
philosophical work.
Hartman locates Hegel’s poem on “the threshold of the passage from
Geister-geschichte to Geistes-geschichte,” the point where Hegel’s sublime distance
from the Greeks turns into a merely “hermeneutic” distinction. Hartman quotes
a passage following the speaker’s earlier “experience of the sublime,” in which
the goddess Ceres is addressed (150):
Hartman wants to see in these lines the story of how contact with the goddess
leads to understanding (Verstehen) through the interpretation (Deuten) of images.
As such, the passage would illustrate the reduction of the sublime gap between
man and goddess to a discontinuity that poetry can manage. The trouble with
this interpretation is that the poem relates this passage in the past subjunctive,
and thus underlines the irreality of this scenario, and therefore also poetry’s
inability to achieve absolute insight.12 In fact, the rest of the poem makes it
quite clear that Ceres has left not even a sign or a trace for the speaker to inter-
pret: “there remained / no sign of your festival, no image’s trace [keines Bildes
Spur]!” (ll. 65–6). What moves the poem even further away from Hartman’s
intentions is that it goes on to consider the impossibility of expressing the divine
mysteries inspired by Ceres in “dull signs” as evidence of these mysteries’ emi-
nent value (ll. 68–9). Hegel’s poem does emphatically not advertise poetry’s
powers to gain insight into divine truth, but rather condemns its own linguistic
status for its failure to reduce a sublime separation to a merely hermeneutic one.
Instead of asserting the superior capacity of the imagination in maintaining a
meaningful connection between mind and world, poetry ends up lamenting its
own linguistic limitations.
The first part of Hegel’s poem still believes in the possibility to withdraw from
“the day’s boring noises” and to find refuge in “memory,” “sweeter hopes,” or
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 71
the imagination (ll. 8, 12, 25). By the time it arrives at the passages Hartman
quotes, the hope of ultimately reconnecting the imagination with the particu-
lars of a “slower reality” has already been destroyed (l. 22). The invocation of
“the arch of the eternal heavens” immediately follows this disappointment, and
serves as a compensation for the inability to relate meaningfully to the world.
The rest of the poem rigorously maintains the separation between the divine
and the earthly phenomena that fail to incarnate it. The linguistic sign is just
one such phenomenon, and the poem knows all too well that it is incapable
of connecting the sensuous with the intelligible (Nägele 1985: 28). Because it
situates the linguistic sign on the side of the sensuous, and at a remove from
the intelligible, the wordplay in the shift from the stars (Gestirn) to the human
brow (Stirn) is not, as Hartman wants it, an expression of the humanizing work
of poetic language, but instead a symptom of the disappearance of the human
in the freeplay of signifiers.
Ten years after the composition of “Eleusis,” Hegel returned to the mysteries
of Ceres in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at the moment in the development
of spirit when sense-certainty gives way to perception (Wahrnehmung). Here
the “Eleusian mysteries of Cerus and Bacchus” are credited with being “the
most elementary school of wisdom,” because they have taught the nullity of
“sensuous things,” of mere particulars when they are not understood in relation
to the universal (Hegel 1977: 109). Hegel restates this lesson as a theory of
language: “those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-
objects . . . if they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if
they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This [das
sinnliche Diese] that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to
consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal” (109–10). While poetry
in “Eleusis” had to remain silent in the face of the truth, language has here
become “inherently universal.” Language has captured the power of silence,
and the universal is no longer consigned to the realm of the unsayable but
now lodges within speech itself. Language can marry sensuous objects with
significance, and the capacity to relate the internal to the external, the mind to
the world, is not the privilege of poetic language alone. Indeed, Hartman’s
ambition to single out one privileged form of language is subject to Hegel’s
analysis of sense-certainty: in the attempt to state the distinction of poetry as
well, “each and every bit of paper is ‘this bit of paper,’ and I have only uttered
the universal all the time” (Hegel 1977: 110).
What Hartman believes to be Hegel’s true humanism is not the triumph of
poetry Hartman wishes it to be. According to Hegel, the lesson of the nullity of
sense-objects is one “[e]ven the animals are not shut out from”; indeed, they
“show themselves to be most profoundly initiated” into it. In cruel contrast to
the example of the snow man, and in total disregard for Hartman’s depletion
anxiety, “they do not just stand idly in front of these sensuous things . . . they fall
to without ceremony and eat them up” (109). The lines from “Eleusis” that
Hartman mobilizes to demonstrate poetry’s capacity to assure man’s meaningful
72 Geoffrey Hartman
continuity with history and with the world not only end up condemning poetry
as a cause of discontinuity, but they also point forward to Hegel’s uncharacter-
istically graphic depiction of a world that is marked by the indifferent
multiplicity and interchangeability of all sensuous things and in which man is
merely, in Alexandre Kojève’s words, an animal “of the species Homo sapiens”
(Kojève 1980: 159n6). This bleak picture makes a curative intervention all the
more urgent, but it does not make it any more likely that poetry will be the
medium in which this cure arrives. It may be time for criticism to admit loss, or
at least to admit loss as part of the solution.
life and death or between past and present is possible instills the fear that the
event of loss itself may be threatened. In the course of the 1970s, Hartman’s
commitment to maintain literary distinction and his diagnosis of contemporary
culture combine in what Alan Liu has referred to as “an anxiety that may
be called the fear of the loss of loss” (1996: 558). For Liu, this anxiety is a
particularly postmodern phenomenon, and it sets the agenda for critical prac-
tices such as the New Historicism and also, as I argue, for Hartman’s defense of
poetry. The task of such projects is that of “rehears[ing] loss,” of “verifying the
‘lostness’ of the lost object” (558). Because this critical work intervenes in a
“historical chaos where nothing is definitely obsolete” (“CD” 211), it at once
tests the very “possibility of loss in an otherwise closed, lossless, post-historical
world” (Liu 1996: 558–60). For Hartman, poetry’s distinctive virtue is that it
can demonstrate the continuing viability of experiences of loss. Because this
demonstration takes place in a cultural situation where such experiences are
no longer available, poetry becomes the placeholder for the possibility of loss
as such. Poetry’s cultural power consists in its affirmation of the possibility that
things can still withdraw from the compulsive half-life of the present, and there-
fore of the hope that they can yet be restored to a condition that is more than
that of an indifferent half-presence.
Through its affirmation of the possibility of loss, poetry holds out the
promise of a future correction of culture’s current condition. I noted before
that Hartman’s account of this condition was informed by his reception of
Derrida: Derridean freeplay corresponds quite closely to the uncontrollable
multiplicity and interchangeability of things in contemporary life. It is then
at least remarkable that from 1975 on, Hartman will devote a number of essays
to Derrida’s work (later collected in the 1981 book Saving the Text) that enthu-
siastically advocate Derrida’s work as a vital model for criticism—for the very
criticism, that is, that is supposed to aid poetry’s intervention in a culture that
the same Derrida’s work had prefigured. How are we to understand Derrida’s
double role in Hartman’s cultural criticism? Liu’s analysis of the postmodern
“loss of loss” begins to suggest a solution to this problem. For Liu, the “critical
work of mourning” is “able to acknowledge that the poetry itself is a work of
mourning,” and that as such it registers “not just the loss of particular history
but . . . the fact that history considered universally is loss. History, as it were, is
the perpetuation or retention of the process of loss” (559). When nothing can
be lost, there can be no meaningful distinction between past, present, and
future, and therefore no history. Poetry’s affirmation of loss restores the possi-
bility to structure the chaotic present by relating it to what no longer belongs to
it. In terms of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play,” this recreation of a point of
orientation signals a nostalgic longing for a centered structure, in which the
center serves “to orient, balance, and organize the structure . . . but above all
to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what
we might call the freeplay of the structure” (1972a: 247–9). For Hartman, history,
as “the perpetuation or retention of the process of loss,” is the organizing
74 Geoffrey Hartman
principle that poetry can resurrect in order to limit the freeplay of the chaotic
present. Hartman’s defense of poetry under the banner of loss thus undeniably
invests in a suppression of the condition of freeplay;14 at the same time, within
the domain where all hope of an alternative to the current crisis is stored—the
domain of poetry and criticism—Derrida’s vocabulary of non-presence, traces,
and dissemination, as well as his own exemplary exegetical practices, can help
to describe and demonstrate poetry’s (and criticism’s) disruption of the disori-
ented status quo. Hartman’s enthusiasm for Derrida, that is, operates within the
carefully insulated domain of literature, where it can help bolster poetry’s claim
as a cultural force.15 Hartman welcomes Derrida’s work as an event “in the
history of commentary” (ST xv, “IS” 92), and his contribution to the revival of
loss makes him “a conservative thinker” (ST 24).
We yet need to understand how poetry’s work of verifying loss relates to the
ecology of literature knowledge that Hartman proposes in his psychoesthetics,
and in his affirmation of mimesis, understood as the correspondence between
the internal and the external world. Alan Liu notes that Freud’s version of the
work of mourning presupposes the prior verification “that the loved object no
longer exists”; only on the basis of this verification can the self slowly let go of
its attachments to the loved object and begin the actual process of mourning.
In the “closed, lossless, post-historical world” that we inhabit, however, “‘reality’
itself is . . . the lost object and so cannot serve as the testing principle for its own
loss” (1996: 560). In this situation, the confirmation of the possibility of loss
implies the restoration of a stable reality that can again serve as the testing
ground for future mourning. In “The Dream of Communication,” the essay
that inaugurates his project of psychoesthetics, Hartman invokes this moment
in the Freudian protocols of mourning when he hints at Kant’s mathematical
sublime, in which the self fears the sacrifice “of the whole principle of mimesis,”
which is the very possibility of relating the self to the world (“DC” 174n33). We
can now appreciate that poetry’s verification of the possibility of loss, and
thus of restoring the possibility of reality-testing, is also an affirmation of the
principle of mimesis, and of the close association of self and world. Poetry’s
mimetic operation assures the possibility of losing (mourning) the mourned
(lost) object, and in this way limits “the anguish involved in turning away from
a mourned object toward its substitute or the mourning self” (174). Poetry
counters the infinite substitutability of things that cannot escape our “relentless
synchronicity” and restores us to the reality of irretrievable loss (Christensen
1994: 454).16 Poetical mimesis reminds us that things are not simply inter-
changeable, and that therefore loss still matters.
Tom Huhn has noted that mimesis need not be understood as a mere matter
of imitation, but instead “occurs by way of a particular relation to substitutability”
(Huhn 2004: 6). For Huhn, mimesis is a mode of emergence out of indifference:
it is “the name of the attempt to come to appearance without falling prey to
the confines and exclusions of conceptuality” (6). For the Kantian sublime and
the Hegelian dialectic alike, the particulars of nature appear as insufficient,
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 75
Fiction treads as gently as on the grave of people whose lives were unconsum-
mated. It should not be a false completion but rather a requiem acknowledging
the unsatisfied nature of their lives and the restlessness of their ghost . . . if
stories give events an afterlife, it is because they enable the dead to haunt the
living. (“WL” 400)
Frye. In order to see how this objection relates to the critical work of preserva-
tion that Hartman begins to advocate from the 1970s on, I want to briefly focus
on Hartman’s 1975 critique of Michael Riffaterre’s reading of Wordsworth’s
“Yew-Trees,” in an article entitled “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis”
that was published in the pages of New Literary History. In 1973, Hartman had
already restated his earlier criticism of Frye by referring to the ease with which
Frye finds a substitute for a determinate loss: the critic is always “late” in
relation to the work of art, and Frye, according to Hartman, “refuses to get
excited about this”; for Frye, “[a]rt has already ‘substituted’ itself for experi-
ence” (“WA” 28). Hartman compares this position unfavorably to the work
of Harold Bloom, which emphatically “does not accept substitution as a
principle of order” (28), and maintains the anxious relation between art
and experience. In the first part of his reading of Wordsworth, Riffaterre
recommends precisely a virile refusal of the experience of loss as part of the
process of interpretation. Riffaterre calls the error of what Hartman would call
the principle of mimesis “the referential fallacy”: for Riffaterre, “the literary
phenomenon is limited to the text-reader relationship,” and as “a poem is
self-sufficient,” interpretation “is sufficiently informed by a consideration of
the two possible (and in no way mutually exclusive) organizations of that
lexicon: semantic . . . and rhetorical” (1973: 231–6). Riffaterre states that
“[i]nterpretation should never go beyond that in the text which is within the
reach of just about any sensible reader” (249).
Against this flaunting of an unperturbed common sense, Hartman asserts
poetry’s capacity to make the reader experience the limits of the reach of sensibil-
ity, and thus to sense the possibility of loss. Hartman praises Riffaterre’s reading
for achieving “one of the highest aims of commentary”: local illumination
“together with the foregrounding of a structure that provides a skeleton key
for other poems” (“UA” 167). Yet Hartman demonstrates that this focus on
structure, and thus implicitly also on spatiality, goes at the expense of the
temporality of poetic experience. He proposes to slow down the poem’s
progression towards a “United worship” (l. 31) by offering what he calls a “Yew-
nited” reading: “Slowing the reader makes him aware that the forms of
language, like those of nature ‘have a passion in themselves’ . . . The slowing of
reading also makes him aware of time” (“UA” 174). The rest of Hartman’s essay
demonstrates that this temporal awareness implies an acknowledgement that
the finitude of poetic language is inseparable from the finitude of the referents
of poetry, and that one cannot survive without the other. Hartman writes that
Wordsworth’s poetry “is in many ways the most ghostly poetry ever written: one
in which speech itself is near to fading out; like echo, or the voice of genius
that dies with the tree it inhabits” (186). “Words need saving only as much as
the things they stand for” (181)—and this “standing for” does not refer to the
substitution of words for things, but rather to things’ properly mimetic mode of
emergence in the conservational medium of poetry. A logical consequence of
poetry’s capacity to create a space in which things can emerge is that every
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 77
description becomes a peculiar kind of speech act: “the very phrase ‘There is a
Yew-tree’ . . . is a perpetuation wish rather than a descriptive statement” (183).
Poetry not only asserts its capacity to allow things to emerge, and thus to pre-
serve their tenuous mode of existence, it also allows the reader an experience of
the possibility of loss. The upshot of this is an acute “reader-responsibility”: the
reader “must decide how much darkness is to be developed” (176), as the
perpetuation of sensuous particulars now depends on whether poetry’s power
will be perceived. The result in Hartman’s work is an increasingly moralized
program for critical reading: “criticism has to decide what ‘presence’ to give
to the text . . . a critic has to decide what his language is supposed to do”
(“FR” 268). While poetry still failed to place a demand on the reader in the
reading of “The Snow Man,” it now manages to do so through the mediating
agency of experience: Wordsworth’s “grounding of allusion in experience—in
the personal and mortal experience of time” places “the burden of responsiveness
directly on the reader.” Just as poetical mimesis restores historical difference in
a world of generalized indifference, it also rescues the critical and historical
agency of the disoriented selves that inhabit that world: “The verse adjures [the
reader]; demands grace of him; and no poet who reads so easily at first puts as
resolute and lasting a demand on the reader” (“TH” 290–1).
“Resolute and lasting”: in light of Hartman’s awareness of the increasingly
tenuous place of literature in contemporary culture, it is tempting to apply
Hartman’s own analysis of Wordsworth’s “Yew-Trees” to these words and read
them as “a perpetuation wish rather than a descriptive statement.” Hartman’s
intermittent insistence on the continuity of literary power is an anxious attempt
to connect to the fantasy of transmission that his earlier work celebrated as a
“peculiarly English relation of new to old” (“FT” 67). In his book Sustaining
Loss, Gregg Horowitz assesses the peculiar modernity of modern art along lines
that apply here. In all past art, for Horowitz, “we can locate an implicit concep-
tion of generations as bound together through representational and affective
practices . . . The making of art was a culture’s way of making its future by
tending its past, of receiving from its past a mandate and license to preserve
that past and pass it on” (2001: 13). This dispensation dates back to “those times
when we humans still had a history” (5). Now that such a history has been
superseded by the chaos of the present, the function of art has to be redefined
accordingly: instead of cementing the connection between successive genera-
tions, art now plays a central role “in making vivid—in experiencing” the loss of
transmitted norms. In modern art, according to Horowitz,
threatened by the risk that they may overburden these things—what Hartman
earlier called the danger of depletion, and what he in a 1974 article on the
eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart refers to as the fear that “our
appetites—including that for presence—put a demand on the order of things
which that order may not be able to satisfy” (“CS” 433). The self’s dedication to
sensuous particulars, and to the medium in which this care finds expression,
always exists in tension with “the inevitability of self-assertion” (“FR” 258),
and the point of Hartman’s psychoesthetics is that art must strive to maintain
the tenuous equilibrium between proper concern and excessive imposition.
This psychological dimension of Hartman’s defense of poetry is part of a
“restored theory of representation” that, he writes, “should acknowledge the
deconstructionist challenge as necessary and timely, if somewhat self-involved”
(ST 121).
Hartman generally uses the notion of “voice” to indicate the tenuous
presence of the self in linguistic representations, and to refer to the “magic in
the web” of signification (“FR” 254). The idea of voice “contains both the
idea of expression and that of representation” (“TR” 280). It serves the same
function in Hartman’s theory of representation as the affirmation of loss in his
diagnosis of contemporary culture, as it allows us to structure and orient a
chaotic multiplicity of signifiers. The notion of voice allows readers to make
sense of the multifarious paradoxes and difficulties they encounter in the texts
they confront by structuring them as reflexes of the tension between the self’s
“desire for visibility,” which threatens to go at the expense of the world, and the
imperative to take care of that world and the medium in which this visibility
must find a place (ST xxii–iii). Voice is thus as much a methodological device as
an expression of the same literary humanism that we earlier encountered in
Hartman’s double take on Derrida.
The strong, undeconstructed notion of subjectivity that informs Hartman’s
idea of voice is a methodological fiction, and should not be mistaken for
an ideal that we should strive to actualize (“FR” 255).19 Hartman notes how
Wordsworth’s poetry emphasizes “the conceptual disharmony between self and
character”; between these two moments, “[t]here is no easy progression; the
structure, in fact, is that of an interrupted pastoral” that is itself nothing
more substantial than “[t]he path that leads from invocation to echo to mute
reflection” (“TH” 287–91). Wordsworth’s characters convey the impression “of
voices overheard in the dark . . . individuated yet merging back into night”;
“In Wordsworth, voice is ghostly because it is a wandering sound in search of
character or completion.” The self is forever imperfectly individuated, and the
notion of “character” therefore maintains “a link to the question of mimesis,”
which, as I demonstrated in the previous section, also renounces completion as
a way of allowing things to emerge in their capacity to be lost (“WL” 404).
The dedication of Saving the Text, Hartman’s book on Derrida, reads “for the
subject.” This “subject” not only refers to Derrida himself (the book’s subject),
but also underlines Hartman’s ambition to salvage a form of subjectivity,
80 Geoffrey Hartman
however tenuous and incomplete, from his confrontation with Derrida. This
dedication to the subject recurs in Hartman’s objections to the work of
I. A. Richards. “The two paths not taken by Richards,” Hartman writes, are those
of “a theory of symbolic action” (as it was pursued in the work of Kenneth
Burke) and “a theory of speech-acts” (“DC” 162). Richards, like Freud, “fails
to connect the drive for representability with the drive for presentability”
(172). Hartman’s psychoesthetics thus requires the idea of a “communication-
compulsion,” a “vis representativa,” which allows us to understand the restored
notion of representation as composed of both “the social-ethical [notion] of
presentability (Vorstellen) and the expressive-aesthetic one of representability
(Darstellen)” (172). Art is a form of representation that “‘represents’ a self which
is either insufficiently ‘present’ or feels itself as not ‘presentable’” (173), and
thus allows this self to find a place in culture. Hartman’s theory of the relation
between representation and individuation is fully consistent with the project of
the affirmation of loss and the containment of the contemporary sublime: the
explicit focus on the individual merely rephrases Hartman’s commitment to
the persistence of humanism that also informs other aspects of his project.
In my next chapter, I demonstrate how Hartman’s extensive critical work on
Wordsworth in the late 1970s and early 1980s locates a tight articulation of the
issues of individuation, representation, and loss in Wordsworth’s poetry.
Yet before this intense reengagement with Wordsworth, it is in Hartman’s
1974 essay on Christopher Smart’s Magnificat, subtitled “Toward a Theory of
Representation,” that his complementary concerns for the self, for natural
phenomena, and for the medium of language are most clearly brought together.
To conclude this chapter, I briefly turn to this essay in order to illustrate a cru-
cial problem in Hartman’s project in this period, to which his imminent return
to Wordsworth will attempt to find a solution. The essay on Smart opens with the
psychoesthetic issue of the “difficulty of self-presentation,” of the “separation-
anxieties” that the self experiences in “seeking to ‘emerge’” (“CS” 431) and that
can only be moderated through the operation of (poetic) “re-presentation”
(430–1). These separation anxieties are complemented by the (by now familiar)
anxiety of depletion (433). While language is the medium in which our “demand
on the order of things” is formulated, the problem is that it is also part of
the order to which this demand is addressed: Hartman writes that “in Smart
the very medium of representation—visionary language itself—has become
questionable . . . The anxiety for survival has associated itself with an anxiety
for language-source, liturgy, and the entire process of representation” (433).
“[I]n seeking to ‘represent’ the creature, the poet discovers that language
too is a creature in need of reparation” (438). What is remarkable here is that
Hartman, by emphasizing poetry’s concern to guarantee the survival of the
linguistic medium, attributes to poetry the preservational task that he earlier
ascribed to criticism. Poetry has adopted criticism’s mission of preservation, a
task that criticism had only assumed when it became increasingly clear that
poetry was no longer capable of taking care of its own persistence. By locating
The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 81
criticism and poetry within the same realm of mimesis and representation,
Hartman can endow poetry with the conservational capacities that he earlier
ascribed to criticism—and that were, more specifically, ascribed to it in order to
preserve a disempowered poetry.
So what form does poetry’s care for its own medium take in the case of Smart?
The form it does most emphatically not take is the one Hartman earlier tried
to read into Stevens’ “The Snow Man”: the limitation of demand and the
assertion of continuity. Hartman’s catalogue of Smart’s rhetorical devices reads
as follows:
We may well ask what has enabled the shift from Hartman’s earlier advocation
of the Snow Man’s posture of renunciation to his celebration of Smart’s
“accumulative, additive” method, and his “spirit as playful as that of the
creature portrayed” (440–2). The key is what Hartman calls the “homeopathic”
nature of Smart’s promiscuity. The trope of homeopathy will become central to
Hartman’s later cultural criticism (SS 116, 208), and is there defined as the idea
(borrowed from Adorno) that “art can stand in opposition to modern society
only by identification with that against which it rebels” (FQ 85). In Hartman’s
project, art always occupies a position of cultural correction, and it can unprob-
lematically identify with the culture it opposes, as such identification will not
interfere with its oppositional potential. Art’s opposition to culture is a central
tenet in Hartman’s work, and this means that it can even adopt a Nietzschean
“affirmation en jeu” (“CS” 452n19) as its local strategy of identification with—
and correction of—the freeplay that reigns in the chaos of contemporary
culture.20 It is not hard to see that this is another version of Hartman’s double
take on Derrida: Derrida can both describe a postmodern cultural condition
and prescribe a strategy to oppose it, because that strategy is only deployed
within the one domain that resists the dictates of culture.
The recurrence of this issue in the Smart-essay allows us to appreciate the
problem it poses for Hartman’s project. In this project, Smart’s method of
“add-oration” (443) is as much a “device of conservation” as any other stylistic
device would be. As Hartman’s project has already decided what the task of
poetry and criticism ought to be, they cannot but play that role, and the
differences between various poets and various critics threatens to become as
irrelevant as that between poetry and criticism. Smart’s poetry will do as well as
that of Stevens, or indeed as the work of Derrida. Hartman’s concern to assert
the distinctiveness of poetry, in other words, has led to the impossibility of mean-
ingfully distinguishing different poetical and critical projects. His celebration
of “the perpetual motion machine of Smart’s poetry” (445) is only possible
82 Geoffrey Hartman
Once we realize that it is not so much the confusion as the smoothness of the
juxtaposition that is striking, we may begin to suspect that the confusion is only
admitted in order to make room for an apology in the name of Kenneth Burke.
Burke is elsewhere in Hartman’s work explicitly claimed as part of an “Anglo-
American” critical project (“AA” 151, BF ix, CW 30–101). The unsolicited nod
to Burke may suggest that what Hartman finds missing in the smooth shift from
poetry to Derrida is, precisely, the distinctive mediation by an Anglo-American
consciousness.22 The essay goes on to confirm this suspicion by immediately
turning to “an intermediate figure, more congruous with Smart, and exerting
through Proust some influence on French thought,” to John Ruskin—said to
be “a less problematic exponent” of “the theory of representation” (452). When
Hartman writes that Ruskin’s “prose may be the best nature-poetry in the
language” (453), it becomes clear that the more “problematic exponent” of the
theory of representation who is never named is indeed William Wordsworth.23
While Wordsworth has inspired Hartman’s case for the cultural role of poetry
in the first place, Hartman’s campaign has enlisted the help of the likes of
Derrida and Smart, in whom the image of Wordsworth is hard to recognize.
The task Hartman faces is then that of restoring Wordsworth’s undisputed
centrality to his project.
Chapter 4
that we reclaim, whether it actually existed or not” (FQ 16n13). It conveys “the
still unmediated, accessible, and integral—yet barely so—presence of a half-
perceived and half-created mode of life,” of “a pastoral culture, which fades into
memory before it has emerged into maturity, like the twilight presence of Lucy” (FQ 72–6).
In order to understand what we have to make of this potentiality whose actuality
does not seem to matter and this life that is never complete and even fails to
emerge into maturity, I turn to a series of seven remarkably consistent essays, all
published between 1977 and 1985, in which Hartman develops his definitive
understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry. This account will inform Hartman’s
efforts to promote Wordsworth as a vital remedial force in the lossless wasteland
of postmodernity—a cultural condition I have extensively diagnosed in the pre-
vious chapter. Collectively, these essays give us what Hartman will later call, in
the title of the book in which the essays are collected, “the unremarkable
Wordsworth.”1 This “unremarkable” poetry is a cultural force that, precisely
because it is decidedly slight and unobtrusive, can make a genuine difference in
an overcrowded and media-saturated present. I begin by looking at the first of
these essays, “A Touching Compulsion,” in order to understand Hartman’s claim
for Wordsworth and to give it a place in Hartman’s critical project. In the second
part of this chapter I turn to the way this claim organizes Hartman’s other con-
temporaneous discussions of Wordsworth in order to complete the picture of
Wordsworth that Hartman is promoting in The Fateful Question.
The ghostliness that the young Wordsworth experiences is a spell that cannot
be undone by touching alone; there is no empirical evidence that would be
sufficient to assure him of the stability of nature. What troubles him is his
inability, or his refusal, to accept that nature can live while the mother is dead.
Wordsworth refuses to give up the “regressive” belief that if nature is alive, then
the mother cannot be dead. The vertiginous logic of the difficult passage that
I just quoted is then as follows: if nature is alive (and it is), then the mother is
not dead. If the mother is dead (and she is), then nature is not alive, and this
opens “the abyss of idealism” that compulsively draws the poet back to a reality
that, once it is confirmed to be tangibly there, cancels the assured absence of
the mother, and returns us to her ghostly undeadness. Nature is both alive and
not alive, while the mother is both dead and undead, and all that reality testing
can do is extend the poet’s frustration with the immovable law of the excluded
86 Geoffrey Hartman
middle, which here as elsewhere makes it impossible to have your cake and eat
it too.
In a move that is typical of Hartman’s work, the laws of logic are only brought
in so as to allow literary language to transcend them and to create a space where
human life can neutralize the forces that threaten it. Wordsworth’s particular
mode of “artistic representation” indeed creates such a space that can accom-
modate the poet’s regressive belief in the persistent undeadness of the mother.
This mode of representation must not be understood as a “re-presencing” of
what is lost (28). Wordsworth’s poetry does not aim to reanimate the dead.
Instead, his is a poetry “that fixes so constantly, retentively, on bare markers,”
which at the same time are “strangely individuated” and “seem to point to what
has departed” (24). These markers give a determinate, tangible shape to “a
deepened awareness of loss,” and this allows them to interrupt the restless
cycle of compulsive touching (26). In Wordsworth’s mode of representation,
“the absent one remains absent,” and what is depicted is merely “the legacy of
this absence” (29).
Importantly, such a presentation of absence does not mean that Wordsworth,
for reasons of decency and tact, avoids to confront a loss that would be poten-
tially verifiable. Instead, the relevance of this kind of representation for the
contemporary condition is precisely that it is also fully effective in a situation in
which no verification is possible because reality itself has disappeared as a
testing ground; Hartman writes that “[t]hings remembered or imagined are
viewed as absent not because they are lost (though they may be) but because
their ‘trace’ is hard to substantialize as a noun or name” (29). This mode of
representation carefully refrains from answering the question whether the
absent thing (or mother) is actually lost, and it therefore merely affirms things’
(or mothers’) capacity to be lost. Wordsworth’s poetry gives a determinate
shape to, and thereby affirms, a mere potentiality. The logical trick it plays is
that it presents things as neither dead nor alive, and therefore as both not dead
and not alive. Instead of remaining transfixed to the ghostliness and to the
logical impossibility of a nature that is both alive and not alive, Wordsworth’s
poetry reshapes nature into a compound that is at the same time (verifiably)
not dead and marked by its preserved potentiality to not-be (alive). The mother,
for her part, is palpably not alive, but is represented as “absent rather than
dead” (29). Poetry affirms both her preserved potentiality to not-be (alive) and
her actual absence, but this absence is not the same as her death; it affirms her,
in the most paradoxical way, as both not alive and not dead. Wordsworth’s poetry
is a medium that makes this absence palpably present, and this literary magic
creates a space for a situation that the laws of logic rigorously exclude. The spell
of ghostliness is undone in a “capable negativity” (“BT” 197); such is Wordsworth’s
poetry’s peculiar strength, “the sort of strength,” Hartman writes, that “we are
not yet fit to perceive” (“WO” 213).
In order to make poetry’s capable preservation of the potentiality to not-be
more perceptible, we can turn to Giorgio Agamben’s work on the notion of
Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 87
potentiality. While this may not be the most familiar part of Agamben’s
oeuvre—that prize undoubtedly goes to his work on the homo sacer—it presents
an elegant formulation of the paradoxical power that Hartman observes
in Wordsworth’s poetry. Agamben’s work on potentiality mainly consists in a
powerful reconceptualization of potentiality as “not simply the potential to do
this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality”
(1999: 180). This different kind of (im)potentiality does not disappear in
its actualization but rather “maintains itself in its own privation” (182). Impo-
tentiality becomes constitutive of all potentiality and of its actualization, and
thus “there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind
actuality but passes fully into it as such . . . it preserves itself as such in actuality”
(183). If, for instance, I happen to be a writer, I have the potentiality to write,
but I equally have the potentiality to not-write, and this different potentiality
will continue to haunt the book that I will end up writing with the possibility of
its own nonexistence. This impotentiality, as a preserved capacity to not-be and
to be lost, is the same thing Wordsworth’s poetry, for Hartman, manages to
affirm. For Hartman, the affirmation of the persistence of impotentiality assures
that the “progressive” knowledge—which Wordsworth shares with Freud—
that nature is alive while the mother is not is compatible with Wordsworth’s
“regressive” belief that nature cannot possibly be alive while the mother is dead.
This is something that reality-testing and compulsive touching could never pull
off. Wordsworth’s poetry restores reality as an “affective presence,” as “an object
of desire rather than an aversion to be overcome” (“TC” 22, SS 84). The ghostli-
ness that troubled the young Wordsworth is undone by the poetic preservation
of the “regressive” belief that incited that ghostliness in the first place.
But how does this structure constitute an advance over Freudian psychoanalysis?
Hartman appends a reference to Freud’s essay “Die Verneinung” (“(de)negation”)2
to the paragraph in which he presents Wordsworth’s logical conundrum. This
short text neatly brings together the progressive knowledge of logic and the
regressive investment in retained affect that Wordsworth’s poetry so uniquely
manages to connect:
Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into
consciousness, on condition that it is negated [daß er sich verneinen lässt].
Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is
already a lifting [Aufhebung] of the repression, though not, of course, an
acceptance of what is repressed. We can see how in this the intellectual
function is separated from the affective process . . . The outcome of this is a
kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what
is essential to the repression persists. (Freud 1975 :373–4/1984: 437–8)
investment in the very thing whose demise is being accepted intellectually. The
process of (de)negation thus seems to bring along a split that allows conscious-
ness to accept a painful loss while at the same time holding on to the very reality
that it knows to be lost; as such, it represents an incomplete stage in the ego’s
renunciation of affect and its acceptance of a new and less satisfying reality.
In order to understand Hartman’s exact relation to this split, it is useful to
linger on Freud’s essay a little longer. The dissociation of sensibility that it intro-
duces can easily be seen as part of a story of individuation, and even as the very
birth-scene of consciousness, which in the passage quoted above “learns” to
separate itself from its affective relations to the world. Freud’s essay has in fact
been interpreted in this way by Jean Hyppolite, the Hegel scholar we already
encountered in the first chapter.3 It will come as no surprise that Hyppolite
gives Freud’s essay a decidedly Hegelian twist. Hyppolite reads Freud’s
Aufhebung, in which the repression persists, as the self’s first properly Hegelian
“negation of negation” (1971: 390). This Aufhebung offers the first instance of
the intellect’s capable suspension of affect, an operation that will be repeated
at each stage of the progress of consciousness in the famous Hegelian narrative
of self-actualization. This separation between intellect and affect asserts itself in
Freud’s essay, according to Hyppolite, as a dissymmetry between “a process of
affirmation based on the unifying tendency of love, and the genesis, on the
basis of the destructive tendency, of a negation whose function it is to give rise
to the intellect, and even to the very place of thinking” (389). For Hyppolite, the
process of negation brings along a distinction between two kinds of affirmation:
on the one hand, a simple affirmation of a given reality, and on the other, a
process of negation that negates a given reality only to ultimately negate itself,
and so affirm that reality in a properly intellectual way. For Hyppolite, this
“higher” affirmation is much more important than the basic kind of affirmation:
“Primordial affirmation is nothing other than affirmation; negation, on the
other hand, is more than just wanting to destroy” (391).
What negation can do more, Hyppolite explains, is to “suspend content”
(388). This suspension creates a “margin of thought, an appearance of being in
the form of non-being” (395). This “margin” in being creates a separation
between inside and outside, between subject and world; the achieved inside
(the subject) then returns to the outer world in order to verify “whether some-
thing which is in the ego as a presentation can be rediscovered in perception
(reality) as well” (Freud 1975: 375/1984: 439). Two possibilities arise here: if
the inside presentation is found to exist in reality as well, this reality is now
affirmed in a more than primordial way; if it is not, the loss of that reality has
been duly verified, and the ego can begin to learn to adapt to an impoverished
new reality. In Hyppolite’s progressive scenario, the ego realizes intellectually
that it has lost something, and it manages to cope with that loss without being
hindered by its affective attachment to the reality it has lost. Returning to
Hartman’s claim for Wordsworth, we can appreciate that this is the reason
that Hartman is unsatisfied with what he calls Freud’s progressive knowledge.
Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 89
The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an
object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to
refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there . . . But it is evi-
dent that a precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects
shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction. (375–6/440)
coherent but entirely incompatible readings” which cannot “exist side by side,”
and indeed “have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one
reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by
it” (de Man 1979: 10–12)? The young Wordsworth’s situation is also a confron-
tation with undecidability. The mature Wordsworth’s poetic capacity to master
that impasse and to hold these two experiences together without having them
undo each other must then also be seen as a victory over deconstruction—as
the creation of a properly undeconstructible poetic fact.
In his earlier Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman traced the development of
Wordsworth’s career in order to show how Wordsworth managed to achieve
a progressive integration of incompatible elements, which resulted in the
formidable marriage of imagination and nature. In Hartman’s later work on
Wordsworth, the repeated encounters with incompatible elements are not
integrated in a developmental account, but their successful resolution is predi-
cated as a virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry as such. This is most evident in the
ease with which Hartman’s different essays in this period move from an initial
discussion of a particular textual complexity to statements of Wordsworth’s
achievement, not by way of a meticulously traced progression (as was the case
in Wordsworth’s Poetry), but instead through a generally rather underdetermined
accumulation of excerpts from Wordsworth’s corpus that all serve as so many
pieces of evidence for Wordsworth’s achievement—for, as Hartman calls it, the
“fact Wordsworth was able to create” (“UW” 327). Wordsworth’s achievement is
not so much read as a way of coping with the challenges of a Freud or a Hegel,
but it is instead posited as a full-blown alternative to them. Wordsworth’s mature
poetry appears as a catalogue of “partial and contradictory structures of unifica-
tion” that share a common undeconstructibility (“PR” 173).
Hartman’s essays on Wordsworth time and again return to the short lyric “A
slumber did my spirit seal,” one of the so-called Lucy poems, which collectively
mourn the death of a girl called Lucy.
It is not difficult to see why this poem would be of particular interest for
Hartman: it evokes the transition from a Lucy untouched by “earthly years,”
and thus by loss, to a Lucy who has become part of nature, which chimes only
too well with the combination of loss and invulnerability that is central to
Hartman’s work on Wordsworth.5 Hartman’s numerous discussions of this
poem typically focus on the transition between the two stanzas. Hartman
observes a nonprogressive succession from the first to the second stanza, which
correspond quite closely to the two moments he distinguished in “A Touching
Compulsion”: what was there the regressive belief in the continued existence of
the mother is here described as “an inward, unconscious power of idealization
that deludes the poet into thinking Lucy is immortal” (in the first stanza), and
the consoling articulation of that belief with a “progressive” form of knowledge
is described as “a consciousness of death” that is subsumed in “a language of
nature too deep for tears” (“WW” 148–9). It is crucial that the first moment of
illusion is not denied in the second stanza, but is instead “preserved . . . within
the elegiac form” (“EW” 189). Hartman writes that the relation between the two
kinds of consciousness depicted is “more like image to afterimage than illusion
to the shock of disillusion” (“TC” 27, “IF” 146); the poem’s closure “leaves that
illusion its moment of truth” (“IF” 146), in the same way that Lucy’s passage
from life to death leaves intact, or even fulfills, “the immutability attributed to
her” (“TC” 28).
Again, this experience of loss is compensated for by a simultaneous aware-
ness of invulnerability—Wordsworth’s poetry “removes an object of love by
moving it beyond touch” (“IF” 147, “RM” 10). Lucy’s life and death never quite
emerge into full actuality, as she moves from being withdrawn from fatality and
contingency in the first stanza to a removal from the world of motion and force,
of seeing and hearing, in the second. As such, Lucy is emblematic of what Anne-
Lise François has called “the figures of non-emergence structuring Hartmanian
thought” (2006: 19).6 For Hartman, Wordsworth gives a poetic shape to Lucy’s
impotentiality by preserving that which “resists foregrounding” (François 2003: 58):
Wordsworth’s poetry of impotentiality constructs an underdetermined relation
between a stanza depicting “hope against time” and one depicting that hope’s
“particular fulfillment,” and this poetic construction gives shape to a statement
of immutability. “The link remains inarticulate, like nature itself”—and yet it
links (“PR” 170).
This version of Wordsworth remains a constant in Hartman’s work from the
late 1970s on. This longevity can be explained by pointing to its advantage over
Hartman’s earlier account of Wordsworth’s poetry. That earlier interpretation was
a response to the Hegelian verdict of the ends of history and art. Wordsworth’s
trajectory served as a demonstration that historical meaning was still possible in
the absence of a transcendent principle of significance. Still, this lesson was not
intrinsically connected to the medium of poetry, and this realization informed
Hartman’s attempt to tie Wordsworth’s lessons to the cultural force of poetry,
an effort I discussed in the previous chapter. The remarkable thing about this
Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 93
later version of Wordsworth is that its preservation of loss is at the same time a
poetic structure and a (basically ontological) statement that can compete with
the insights of a Freud or a Hegel. Moreover, these two aspects are irrevocably
connected: the ontological lesson has no existence except as a poetic structure.
Poetry thus becomes a genuine alternative for philosophy. Perhaps the clearest
indication of this spectacular claim for poetry can be found in Hartman’s essay
“Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth,” where Hartman proposes “elation” as a new
translation for Hegel’s notoriously complex term Aufhebung, which is normally
translated as “sublation.” In the previous section, we saw how Hyppolite picked
up on this word in Freud’s definition of the process of (de)negation. In the
“Elation”-essay, Hartman appropriates this term for Wordsworth’s poetry.
Hartman’s redefinition of the term suggest that elation needs to be thought of
as an essentially poetic structure. It functions “like a hymen over consciousness,”
as “an elated, unclosured form of mourning that . . . resists premature burial”;
elation gives shape to a particular loss, “if only in this tomb or crypt of words”
(“EW” 189–90). In the case of Wordsworth’s poetry, Hartman writes, “[t]he
form of dealing with death is now drawn as if directly from language” (189).
Wordsworth’s creation of this particular poetic structure counts as an unde-
constructible fact. In several articles, Hartman refers to Wordsworth’s particular
mode of language as an encompassing “euphemism.” While a euphemism is
normally “simply a figure of speech covering up naked truth,” and thus all too
easy to demystify, Wordsworth’s poetry embodies an “underlying and resistant
euphemism” that heeds language’s “inbuilt commitment to avoid silence” (“IF”
148–53). Wordsworth’s poetry gives shape to something that does not have to
emerge, while “the aphasia it circumscribes remains perceptible” (148). Its
particular mode of representation does not repress the moment of loss, but
encrypts it in a literary creation that makes the poetic process “difficult to
psychoanalyze”; this poetry “resists overconsciousness and demystification”
(“RA” 215, “UW” 325). Wordsworth’s poetry affirms its referent’s capacity to be
lost, while it in the same movement lends this referent a “nonspecific quality”
that saves it from becoming the target of deconstruction or demystification
(“TU” 38). It is a form of closure “with healing effect” because it “phantomizes
presence” by creating “limits that prove to be liminal” (“WW” 121, 150). That
Wordsworth’s poetry presents its referent in such a way that it cannot be
demystified, analyzed, or denied gives an additional meaning to the epithet
“unremarkable” that Hartman puts in the title of the volume in which most of
his essays on Wordsworth are collected. In Wordsworth’s poetry, according to
Hartman, “it is hard to describe in a rigorous manner the relation between
marked and unmarked features” (“CI” 266), and this elevates it to the status of
a “signpost or marker, which intimates a state of quasi-divine impassiblity” that
makes it immune to “semiotic analysis” (“UW” 331–2). As such, it sets a definite
limit to the “process of remarking” (321) and manages to be truly “unremark-
able,” which has to be understood as another name for the “undeconstructible”
I mentioned before.
94 Geoffrey Hartman
Yet for all the self-confidence Hartman displays in his claim on Wordsworth,
we may well ask from where Wordsworth’s “euphemia” derives its power? After
all, Hartman’s work on Wordsworth is written in an age that has, by Hartman’s
own admission, almost reduced poetry to utter powerlessness. Hartman always
situates Wordsworth’s capable euphemisms in contrast to less benign forms of
linguistic power, which is of course a neat way of avoiding the more fundamental
question of whether it indeed has any power at all. The distinction Hartman
introduces is always that between “[b]lessing and curse, euphemism and slander,
praise and blame” (“WW” 132). Wordsworth’s poetry is “a transfiguration of the
cursing principle,” a conversion of “bad omens . . . into blessings” (“WW” 132,
“TU” 44, “UW” 330). But what is it that these blessings achieve? As Wordsworth’s
mode of representation recovers an affective relation to nature and to historical
reality, poetry’s blessings constitute an act of “care for the extraordiness of the
ordinary” (“WW” 156), and thus affirm “the actualizing or performative rela-
tionship between words and things” (“PR” 175). The gesture of blessing does
not aim to correct or complete nature, but it instead restores natures as what
Tom Huhn has called “a source for potentially faithful, affirmative reiterations”
(Huhn 2004: 7). In a “consciously minor” repetition of the grandiose marriage of
imagination and nature that organized Hartman’s earlier work on Wordsworth,
these blessings give a shape to things’ non-emergence, thus preserving “the
negative gap between promise and fulfillment” (“WO” 185; François 2003: 54).
Poetry, Hartman writes, “is a marriage-covenant” with nature, the performative
institution of “the contract between word and thing” (“TU” 42, ST 19).
Wedding vows and contracts are of course textbook examples of speech-acts.
And again, nothing is more uncertain in the cultural context in which Hartman
makes these statements than poetry’s performative power. The rest of this chapter
shows how Hartman’s work reflects on the question of poetry’s power, and how it
addresses this difficulty by adding a religious dimension to poetry’s linguistic
magic. More specifically, it establishes a close, and far from self-evident, relation
between poetry’s capacity to bless, and the divine speech-act par excellence.
In the essay “The Poetics of Prophecy” from 1981, Hartman tells the story of
Wordsworth’s famous ascent of Mount Snowdon. The poet here “climbs through
darkness to ‘see the sun rise’,” only to be confronted with the moon that “takes
over in a kind of silent harmonization”; this “sound of harmony” leads the poet
back from the effect (“and there was light”) to the cause, to “the scriptural text”
that first gave rise to this harmony (“Let there be light”) (“PR” 172). “Let there
be light” is the divine speech act that Wordsworth, like a Moses of poetry, will
bring down with him in order to profit from its immense performative power.
Wordsworth not only adopts (the contents of) the wish “for the return of light,”
but more specifically also “that wish in the form of God’s first words” (“TU” 47).
This wishing power, this “fiat power working tacitly and harmoniously” (“PR” 178),
underlies the particular performative power of Wordsworth’s verse, even when
it does not rise to its thematic surface. Wordsworth’s verse are an actualization
in which the “ur-fiat” is precariously preserved (198).
Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 95
Wordsworth’s poetry shelters this ur-fiat in the same unique way that it shelters
its other referents: while it gives an audible form to the source from which it
borrows its assured power, it is also aware of the possibility that this capacity may
at all times be lost. And because this particular loss would immediately mean
the end of his poetry’s own effectivity, Wordsworth’s use of his borrowed powers
“turns on and around the consciousness of change and instability” (“BT” 201).
This explains a certain reticence in uttering the convergence of the “primordial
speech act” and the “primordial wish” (“WO” 199),7 because, when passing
into actuality, “its very success, its potential fulfillment, might go against nature
by confirming the omnipotence of wishful thinking” (“TU” 46). Wordsworth
preserves this unuttered proto-fiat in its “silent yet all-subduing aspect”
(“PR” 178).
It is clear that this religious dimension is not unproblematic, and especially
not when Hartman will later call upon the poetic achievement that this divine
link makes possible in order to intervene in contemporary culture. For now it
is important to see how Wordsworth’s relation to the divine wish is again
structured in terms of non-emergence and of the precarious conservation
of potentiality, which recurs throughout Hartman’s work on Wordsworth.
Wordsworth’s power only exists as a response to something more original,
something that forever precedes it. Wordsworth’s achievement is in this sense
always “late.” An essay Hartman published in PMLA in 1978, entitled “Blessing
the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style,” provoked the irritated response of
Spencer Hall, who not only objected to Hartman’s interpretive liberties in the
essay, but also correctly pointed out that for all his stylistic bravado, Hartman
had failed to distinguish Wordsworth’s “later style” from an “early” style (Hall
1979: 140). This omission becomes explainable (but not therefore excusable)
when we note that Hartman often ascribes a particular lateness to Wordsworth’s
style as such. For Hartman, Wordsworth’s poetry is an “antiphonal” response “to
the phoné of a prior experience”; phone is here defined as “voice or sound
before a local shape or human source can be ascribed”; Wordsworth’s poetry
then locates this previously unlocalized voice in nature, and this turns nature
into “something that speaks ‘rememberable things,’ as something that textual-
izes a phantom voice” (“WO” 193–4).8 Because this phone is always referred back
to the inaugural “let there be voice,” the poetic response to it can be “both a
minor poem and a considerable text” (213). Every celebration of nature occurs
under the sign of a preserved impotentiality; the act of connection is always
secondary to a moment of non-integration. As Hartman writes, “no easy,
integrating path leads from absolute or abrupt image to the mediation that
preserves it” (185–6).
The privileged example of Wordsworth’s constitutive lateness is the poem
“A little onward lend thy guiding hand.” This poem opens with a quotation of
Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a device that indicates the usurpation of Wordsworth’s
mind by a foreign voice (“DD” 205). Milton’s unintegrated lines are the
intertextual grounding of an even more alien phantom voice that determines
96 Geoffrey Hartman
Lacan and Derrida oppose in “Western philosophy” (“FC” 86–93);13 the specular
name is explicitly identified as a “fantasy” that is “at once degraded and recalled
in the wounding word” (“WW” 139). Yet in spite of these protestations, as a
specular act of naming, it again ascribes a privileged role to language and to
poetry, and is thus indispensible in making possible Wordsworth’s attempt
to identify “naming and blessing” (“BT” 201), as well as Hartman’s own related
attempt to reorient Derrida’s position that we are “wounded” by language in
the direction of the “affective” issue of words that can also “heal” (“WW” 121–3).
Our linguistic wound can only be sealed “with healing effect” when language
has been empowered by a specular speech-act (150).
It is remarkable that these vaguely religious themes in Hartman never receive
(any of) the name(s) of the divine. In Hartman’s mature work, the religious
dimension is never made more explicit than in frequent statement about false
claims to religiosity—thus phrases like the “quasi-religious” (“NW” 104), “ersatz
religions” (“AC” 101), the “cultural evangelism” of the “saints of secularization”
(“CC” 379), an uninvestigated “residual religious pathos” (FQ 155), and so on.
These scattered reproaches become somewhat less incidental when we observe
how consistently they are levelled at Hartman’s most important intertexts: so
Derrida’s work is “only occasionally reflective of analogies to its own project in
religious writing” (“WW” 121); Benjamin, who serves as the main illustration
of Hartman’s speculations on the specular name,14 “continued to look . . . to
the origin of all names in the Garden God had planted eastward of Eden”
(“FC” 112), while his socioeconomic interpretation of Baudelaire is regrettably
marked by “the unspoken vigor with which it excludes a rival perspective, the
religious” (CW 64); Freud, for his part, “was always distrustful and demystifying
towards eudemonic feelings,” while he yet, unbeknownst to himself, held
sacred the dream of “a purified language that remains uncontaminated”
(“IF” 151, 154); Lacan’s purported secularism, finally, remains indebted to the
ambition to “build a new communitarian model on the basis of psychiatric
experience” (“FC” 89).
So what to make of these statements? Alexander Argyros and Jerry Aline
Flieger have suggested that Hartman’s attribution of an often unacknowledged
religiosity to these thinkers can be understood as “a symptom of Hartman’s own
cathexis to theology,” an investment in theology that “stems from his stake in
literature as pathos” (1987: 62). While the preceding discussion has made clear
that they are definitely on the right track, a more subtle analysis is nevertheless
possible here. Looking closely at Hartman’s statements above, it is clear that
they all state in one form or another that the subjects of these statements
(Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Benjamin) are more religious than they know, and that
because they do not know it, they are not religious enough. Put differently, they suggest
that unacknowledged religion is all too secular, and not religious enough, and
in a strange twist, they at the same time imply that the secular is unacknowl-
edged religion. Considering this concern with unacknowledged religion
together with Hartman’s continued reticence in avowing his own theory’s—or
Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 99
and propose a more mindful relation to death. In the rest of this section, I focus
on Benedict Anderson’s account of the nation’s aesthetics of mourning and
Jean-Luc Nancy’s very different take on the place of death and mortality in
order to let the singularity of Hartman’s position emerge.2 Hartman proposes
an aesthetic mediation of loss that does not abstract from the particularity of
death, but that rather understands its own aesthetic operation as essential to
the emergence of a particularity that it cultivates as a precarious ground of
community.
Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities proposes to study the
nation as “an imagined political community” (1991: 6). By calling this type
of association “imagined,” Anderson means that this community can only
be imagined, that is, that it cannot be perceived in a concrete and ready-
made shape anywhere. For Anderson, the nation is a particular “style” in which
community is imaged, and an essential component of that “style” is the nation’s
stylization of death. This stylization must affect the citizen in a way that has
made it possible, “over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people,
not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7). Death is
given a shape and significance that inspires citizens to desire rather than fear it.
Anderson’s account of this aesthetics comes in a famous description of a
particular kind of communal tombstone, which occasions a scene of mourning
that is emblematic of the culture of nationalism.
and the power of this figuration is such that it renders death available as an
experience that can be shared by all citizens. Death becomes a potentially
generalizable experience, and the citizen is constituted as a national subject
precisely by sharing in this experience. By surrendering the singularity of death,
the cenotaph provides the occasion for the citizen’s identification with “the
nation as formalized anonymity” (69). It presents the citizen with the prospect
that her own death, when it comes, will be “instantly assimilated into the
common death for the sake of the collective” (Glowacka 2006). The nation’s
aesthetic ideology depends on the complete erasure of the inassimilable singu-
larity of finitude and loss; the cenotaph’s work of monumentalization must
fence off “death’s resistance to its own universalizability” (Redfield 1999: 68).
The nation’s abstraction of death is also an erasure of death; it is a form of
mourning that simply forgets the particular losses on which it thrives.
Still, Anderson’s account also indicates a place where the ideological recu-
peration of death can be interrupted: the cenotaph’s operation is threatened
by the always imminent possibility that the “real bones” of the dead can still
be gathered or that their names can still be recalled, and that it will become
clear that the dead resist the anonymity of aesthetic figuration. The nation’s
aesthetics of mourning is always in danger of being interrupted by the return of
a death that can still be named and exposed and that can no longer be enlisted
for a collective experience of belonging. This means that a form of community
that is founded in a different mourning and that refuses to erase the memory of
loss has to resist the cenotaph’s work of neutralization; it has to find a different
“style” for its aesthetic mediation of loss. For Hartman, poetry can serve as a
“communal tombstone” that does not hide the “real bones” or the names of
the dead. To return to Hartman’s privileged example, Wordsworth’s poetry
emphatically preserves the name of Lucy, and it remains firmly grounded in
a particular memory that can neither be rendered anonymous nor be recuper-
ated as the reader’s own. Wordsworth presents Lucy as withdrawn from every
claim upon her, both when she was alive and now that she is dead. Because
it gently resists the desire to identify with the death it represents, poetry
interrupts the operation of the cenotaph; by taking on the role of Anderson’s
“busy-body” who refuses to forget the real bones and the names of the dead, it
renders the neutralizing operation of the cenotaph inoperative and intimates
a form of community that does not rely on the fateful alliance of forgetful
mourning and aestheticization that grounds the nation.
While Hartman’s community rejects an aestheticization of death that denies
death’s singularity, it yet depends on a moment of aesthetic mediation in
its effort to shape and preserve that singularity. In order to appreciate
Hartman’s difference from other forms of community that are critical of the
nation’s aesthetic ideology, it is helpful to briefly relate his work to the way
Jean-Luc Nancy inscribes death in his theorization of the inoperative
community, the radically critical model of community that has been most
influential in literary and cultural studies. As nationalism’s aestheticization of
Mourning, Testimony, Community 105
death forecloses the possibility that death is ever encountered as an event that
exceeds every frame that aims to impose a meaning on it, attempts to imagine
community differently have to find another way to relate to the death of the
other. The experience of the death of the other is at the heart of Nancy’s
attempt to re-think community in The Inoperative Community. This notion of
community is explicitly opposed to so-called immanent forms of community,
which for Nancy constitute nothing less than “the general horizon of our time,”
and thus also include the nation as the dominant form of modern community
(1991: 56). What is typical of such immanent communities is that they effect
themselves as their own work; they actualize themselves as the development
and the accomplishment of their own given essence, without being affected
by anything external to themselves (3). Nancy ascribes a different meaning to
the term “community” than that of a shared identity or essence. For Nancy,
community “names a relation that cannot be thought as a subsistent ground or
common measure” (Fynsk 1991: xiv); it refers to an existence “in common” that
resists “fusion into a body” (Nancy 1991: xxxviii).
This relation reveals itself in the exposure to the death of the other. Nancy
writes that while millions of deaths may be justified “as insurrections against
social, political, technical, military, religious oppression,” these deaths are not
for all that successfully “sublated” (13). While operative communities attempt to
promote death as “the infinite fulfilment of an immanent life” and to make
the dead productive for the communities’ immanent (self-)development, “the
unmasterable excess of finitude” that is revealed in death always exposes the
community to its outside. The singularity of death obstinately insists on death’s
“senseless meaning,” a meaning that cannot make sense within the terms of
an established community and that always exceeds these terms (13–14). Death
and loss, for Nancy, are not reabsorbed in the immanence of an imagined com-
munity, but rather make possible “the crystallization of the community around
the death of its members, that is to say around the ‘loss’ (the impossibility) of their
immanence” (14). A more responsible and more faithful relation to the death of
the other becomes possible by insistently refusing to “operate the transfiguration
of [the] dead into some substance or subject” (15). In this sense, Nancy’s
inoperative community is grounded in a melancholic refusal to hide from the
excessive character of the death of the other, and to all too successfully overcome
grief and recuperate death for the promotion of collectivity. The exposure to
the death of the other can bring about what Dorota Glowacka has called “the
interruption of the myth of communal death by death” (2006).3
Remarkably, Nancy not only links his notion of community to death, as is also
the case in Anderson and Hartman, but he also explicitly grants a place to litera-
ture in the “interruption” of immanent communities, which makes it possible
to compare his work to Anderson’s cenotaph and Hartman’s Wordsworth. The
second and third chapters of The Inoperative Community, which are entitled
“Myth Interrupted” and “Literary Communism,” offer an elaborate and idiosyn-
cratic discussion of literature. Nancy here develops the idea that the immanent
106 Geoffrey Hartman
community engenders itself by figuring itself through myth. Myth is, for Nancy,
a structuring power that gives the community its purpose and legitimacy; it
legitimizes the community’s immanence, that is, its capacity to generate itself
without being affected by anything external. Critical notions of community
must then strive for “the interruption of myth.” Importantly, this interruption
does not itself constitute a new myth, but rather “a movement,” or what Nancy
calls “the propagation, even the contagion, or again the communication of
community itself that propagates itself or communicates its contagion by its
very interruption” (1991: 58–60). The “name that has been given to this voice of
interruption” is literature (63). Literature is a singular, punctual, interruptive
event that explodes the immanence of the community. In literature, “the pas-
sion of and for community propagates itself, unworked, appealing, demanding
to pass beyond every limit and every fulfillment” (60).
Nancy underlines literature’s status as a critical event that interrupts the
operation of aesthetic ideology in order to reveal a more genuine form of
community, which we also encounter in our exposure to (the other’s) death—
an experience that aesthetic ideology aims to neutralize. Literature is “the
indefinitely repeated and indefinitely suspended gesture of touching the
limit” (67). What Nancy tends to underemphasize is the fact that literature
is not only a singular power, but is also necessarily a representation and,
indeed, an aesthetic mediation.4 Hartman joins Nancy in promoting literature
as a force that can interrupt the neutralization of experience exemplified by
the nation’s cenotaph and that intimates a different form of community; he
does so, moreover, by also linking that literary power to loss and death. Still,
Hartman diverges from Nancy in seeing the experience of literature not as an
equivalent of our exposure to the death of the other, but rather as an aesthetic
mediation, as a minimal moment of monumentalization that makes possible a
different form of community by giving shape to a remove from that trauma.
The reason Hartman grounds his sense of community in a consciously medi-
ated and mitigated experience of remove rather than in a particularly intense
exposure to trauma is his fear that this very intensity will make it impossible
for this trauma to be absorbed and assimilated, or indeed to be experienced at
all. For Hartman, traumatic exposure is unwittingly complicit with aesthetic
ideology’s neutralizing operation in that it also endangers the possibility of
experience. In Hartman’s work on Holocaust memory, to which I turn in the
third section of this chapter, this concern returns in the attempt to articulate
Holocaust video testimony as a genre that preserves the possibility of genuine
experience in a world saturated by visual media that endanger the possibility of
experience. As always in Hartman, experience is understood as an experience
of non-experience, of a mere potentiality or latency.
Poetry, for Hartman, preserves the exposure to the death of the other within
the linguistic tombstone it erects. By introducing a moment of mediation
between us and that death, it makes that death experienceable for the first
time. Poetry refuses material or melancholic purity, because such purity makes
Mourning, Testimony, Community 107
In a closely related essay, Hartman writes that literature assumes a vital role
in the “struggle for experience, for a more than abstract sense of the past, or
virtual sense of the present” (“PM” 264). Literary experience is a power that can
resist hegemonic tendencies toward abstraction and neutralization.
The question remains how that capacity can take shape as an alternative
social or political vision. The essay “Art and Consensus” recognizes the need
for a “countervision” that is “all-encompassing but free of religious excesses
and desperado politics” (“AP” 281). The experience of art, that is, must be
packaged as a decidedly non-apocalyptic political vision aiming for consensus.
It is an index of the difficulty of articulating what this consensus should be
about that the essay does not manage to put forward more than the importance
of a consensus about, precisely, the need for a particular kind of consent. The
essay opens with the assertion that “what turns commentary into criticism, what
gives it critical edge and focus, is, above all, its concern for the quality of public
agreement about works of art” (272). Criticism aims “less at consensus than at
quality of consent,” and this quality is cultivated in the experience of literature
or art. Hartman underlines the importance of “close reading,” which he
defines as “a form of exegetical bonding that does not deprive us of quality of
consent” (273). This position is entirely in line with what Hartman’s notion
of community makes us expect: it relies on a moment of experience that does
not disable a moment of critical distantiation and reflection. This particular
experience defines art’s relevance for the public realm: art stages a “drama of
individual assent—art’s demand on each of us and our response or resistance
to it,” which “should carry over and influence . . . the quality of our consent in
public and political matters” (274). The experience of art, that is, wakes citizens
up to their freedom to make up their own minds.
Hartman’s articulation of the vision that art fosters does not become any
more specific than this assertion of freedom. He is careful to distinguish it from
a complete “liberty of interpretation” (274)—after all, this freedom is the effect
of art’s demand on us. The experience of art “demands some bonding” (274),
and not just any bonding: the experience of art interrupts the default affirma-
tion of “a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” (FQ 102);
it interrupts the unconscious submission to the neutralizing operations of
aesthetic ideology and televisual culture, and opens up the possibility of a
“qualitative” consent that is not just instilled by seductive propaganda that “can
effectively bypass questions of consent” (“AP” 276). In passages such as these
the mixed loyalties of Hartman’s politics are unmistakable: Hartman criticizes
the anonymization that culture and politics promote in order to automatize the
affirmation of the status quo and to neutralize the possibility of dissent; yet
he calls on the experience of art to raise people’s consciousness, and therefore
the possibility of dissent, only to ask them to consciously assent to the necessity
of assent, that is, to the fatality of “some bonding.” In a move that is entirely
characteristic of Hartman’s work, a radical claim for the critical force of art and
literature is raised, but instead of keeping this “opening . . . for a redemptive
Mourning, Testimony, Community 109
act” (281) resolutely open and undetermined, Hartman forecloses this excessive
dimension by streamlining it with a more sober and realist agenda. Hartman
writes that we “write criticism” because “we are moved not only by the work of
art itself but also by a vision of art’s attachment to the cause of liberty and
democracy” (276). Art wakes citizens up to their freedom to consent, and as
Hartman’s political imagination remains restricted to the tension between
liberty and consensus, this automatically means that art is essentially linked to
freedom and democracy.
What is missing here and elsewhere in Hartman’s mature cultural criticism is
a more fine-grained account of how art operates within contemporary society,
and how it relates to other social institutions. One of the reasons for the lack of
attention to alternative institutions is probably that such a more nuanced
account could challenge the radical privilege of art and literature—after all, we
can easily imagine other sites where citizens can be reminded of their freedom
to consent. As I will show, Hartman does recognize the genre of Holocaust
video testimony as one such site, but he remains uncompromising on the
privilege of literature and art. Both “Art and Consensus” and “Public Memory
and its Discontents” end with an assertion of their persistence: Hartman under-
lines that “[w]e still have the arts,” that there is “an actual artistic heritage”
(“PD” 111); even if the effectivity of Shakespeare’s drama is no longer assured,
“[t]here is some comfort . . . in knowing that his work has survived” (“AP” 282).
The conviction that literature has the inherent capacity to foster a particular
kind of experience has to compensate for the doubts about whether that
experience can still find a place in contemporary society. The one thing
Hartman’s work refuses to mourn and to which it remains stubbornly—indeed,
melancholically—attached is the “scandal” that “the formalism of literary
language persists” (“HH” 241), the “fact that texts exist” (ST xv), and the
“plain presumption of the text” (“CI” 274).6 Hartman’s eloquent claim for
Wordsworth’s peculiar capacity to mourn is propelled by his own inability to get
over Wordsworth.
remarkable, especially when we realize that Saving the Text is for a great part
a commentary on Derrida’s Glas, which is in its turn for almost half
its length—or, bearing in mind the book’s infamous layout, half its width—a
commentary on Hegel that explicitly focuses on Hegel’s conviction that
“Christianity is the Aufhebung of Judaism” (Critchley 1998: 204). Sure, there is
Hartman’s textual and stylistic celebration of the fact that “Glas is of the House
of Galilee” (ST 19), but those who may be tempted to read this as an identity-
political mobilization of Derrida should consider that Hartman writes that
Heidegger also belongs there (xiv). Hegel’s take on the Jews later becomes the
subject of two eminently equitable considerations (“JT” 90–2, “JI” 204), yet even
on the many occasions when Hartman, in the wake of his well-publicized
work on Holocaust testimony, has been called upon to address the question of
Jewish identity, it is still his careful refusal to claim this moral high ground
as the firm common ground of a Jewish identity that is striking. Indeed, such
reticence and moderation are central aspects of the Jewish identity Hartman
only reluctantly articulates.
One example of such a reluctant address comes near the end of the essay
“The Longest Shadow,” published in 1989, in the middle of the First Intifada.
Hartman notes that “Israel is a state like any other and must defend itself,”
especially since the possibility of “the destruction of the Third Temple” has
become especially palpable in the light of “the 1967 and 1973 wars” (“LS” 26).
This statement is immediately followed by a seemingly defensive non sequitur:
“Where else, within a context of such danger, do you find maintained a culture
of argument and a system of values that prize study so much and do not see
faith demanding a sacrifice of intellect?” (26). Of course, the most obvious way
to understand this question is to consider it as a rhetorical question, that is, as
a statement that merely uses the rhetorical device of a question in order to
emphasize the actuality of what it seems to question—in this case, the unique-
ness of Israel’s via media. In this interpretation, Hartman’s question is reduced
to an unambiguous statement of ethnic and national privilege, and as such
rendered available for either political condemnation or affirmation. What is
lost with this interpretation is the possibility of taking this question literally, that
is, as a question rather than a statement. In this literal reading, Hartman’s
question expresses a genuine interest in the capacity of culture and intellect to
persist in an Ausnahmezustand that all too often aims to do away with thinking,
in Israel or elsewhere. In order to understand Hartman’s position, we need to
consider both of these readings together: Hartman’s position on Jewish identity
is both an affirmation of Jewish privilege and an expression of a more general
investment in the values that he associates with this privileged position. While it
is not wrong to read Hartman’s position as “barbaric” support for the victors in
the triumphal procession of history, such a condemnation is incomplete to the
extent that it fails to factor in Hartman’s characteristic reticence in formulating
that position. His decision to phrase the idea of Israel’s national privilege as a
question makes it possible to understand his approach to the Jewish question as
112 Geoffrey Hartman
less a firm position than a reflection “that manifests itself as the merest potenti-
ality for either civilization or barbarism” (Docherty 2006: 70).
Hartman’s question acknowledges the strategic usefulness of “[t]he movement
encouraging ethnic affirmation” (“LS” 20) for the promotion of Jewish identity
without therefore restricting the capacity of culture to survive a state of excep-
tion to Israel alone. In the last paragraph of “The Longest Shadow,” which
immediately follows this question, Hartman explicitly links this potentially
generalizable model to its essentially textual nature:
It was the Jews’ textual, not their territorial, ambition which united them . . .
Yet this very people was taken out of its place and transferred—raus, raus—
to that ultimate Umschlagplatz, the death camp, in a matter of days and hours.
We were like a great tree that had weathered the centuries and in a day
is uprooted, dismembered, and thrown to the flames. (26, first and last
italics mine)
volume Midrash and Literature, which Hartman edited together with Sanford
Budick. The volume proposes to look at “both the historical, cultural, Judaic
phenomenon of midrash itself, and the resemblances between midrash and
similar critical phenomena . . . in contemporary literature, criticism, and
theory” (“IM” x). Hartman’s turn to questions of Jewish identity and forms
of Jewish interpretation such as Midrash “is not a matter of pride or ethnicity
but of intellectual and spiritual equity” (“JT” 96). Judaism is what refuses “self-
glorification” as “the basis for group consciousness” without therefore giving up
the basic need for such a shared consciousness (“ME” 148). Hartman’s version
of this is markedly different from other mobilizations of the Jewish experience
in critical theory that promote this experience as a vehicle for “the idea of
exodus,” “the exigency of uprooting,” and “the affirmation of nomadic truth”
as “an authentic manner of residing” (Blanchot 1996: 230–2). These quotations
from Maurice Blanchot’s short text “Being Jewish,” which is characteristic of
this line of reception, offer examples of the all too familiar casting of the figure
of the Jew as “the sublime Other of modernity” (Rose 1993: x), as the figure of
a radical homelessness “recalling us to the exigency of strangeness” (Blanchot
1996: 234). For Hartman, such an “identitarian nonidentity” (FQ 81) is an
idealization that remains blind to the need for a measure of mediation and
normalization.8 In the terms of the previous section, the idea of the wandering
Jew as an authentic nomad is a version of critical melancholia that fails to under-
stand that the categorical refusal of mourning and mediation condemns the
subject to a vicious circle of retraumatization and immobility. “Homelessness,”
for Hartman, “is always a curse, not an ideal,” and using it to characterize one
particular community is a way of cursing that community (FQ 158).
So what does this mean for Hartman’s place in the critical landscape? By
denying itself the purity of a melancholic position, Hartman’s imagination of
community misses its main opportunity to be recognized as a viable critical
position. And in the politicized domain of cultural criticism, it can easily enough
be misperceived as a straightforward case of particularist ethnic self-promotion,
as became apparent in a brief exchange between Hartman and Edward Said in
1989 (again, in the middle of the First Intifada). Hartman’s and Said’s failure to
engage with each other’s work in any sustained fashion is itself remarkable,
especially in the light of their shared allegiance to the heritage of Erich
Auerbach (which Said first put in print with the 1969 translation of Auerbach’s
essay “Philologie und Weltliteratur,” a text from which Hartman repeatedly
quotes). In 1976, after the publication of Said’s book Beginnings, Hartman still
hailed Said as a thinker “who share[s] the same concerns” as the Yale critics
(“CD” 203). Moreover, Said’s overtly “non-identitarian conception of human
community” depends, as has often been remarked, on “turning the very cate-
gories of the Jewish experience and applying them to the Palestinian case”
(Hussein 2004: 17; Aschcroft and Ahluwalia 1999: 130).9 As the possibility of
such a transfer is explicitly inscribed in Hartman’s notion of community,
it seems natural enough to assume that Hartman and Said could agree that
114 Geoffrey Hartman
a shared ethnic identity is irrelevant to the possibility of sharing the same concern.
The one confrontation of Said and Hartman that has appeared in print, however,
makes clear that the way in which Hartman voices his view of community—that
is, as both specifically Jewish and potentially generalizable—could, in the critical
climate of the 1980s, not be recognized by Said as a position that he can sub-
scribe to. In that climate, Hartman’s circumspection could not possibly be
perceived as anything more sophisticated than an instance of Zionist propa-
ganda. As such, this exchange is emblematic of the misfit between Hartman’s
notion of community and the critical climate in which it was coined.10
The occasion for Hartman’s response to Said in the pages of Critical Inquiry
in 1989 is Said’s earlier response to an article in which Robert Griffin had
attempted to refute Said’s alleged equation of Zionism with racism (Griffin
1989: 611). Said’s response to what he terms Griffin’s “spectatorial” stance
displays, in the words of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, a “disturbing combination
of bombast and self-pity” (2006: 128), and culminates in the rather startling
surmise that “Griffin is actually ‘Griffin,’ an ideological simulacrum whose only
purpose is to attack, defame, harass, Palestinians with the aim of stopping their
irreversible progress toward self-determination” (1989a: 646). Said’s statement
combines at least three all too familiar tropes: the object of his criticism is
dehumanized; once dehumanized, it is presented as part of a conspiracy against
Palestinian lives; finally, because this conspiracy aims to stop an “irreversible
progress toward self-determination,” it is also cast as the backward other of the
project of modernity. These accumulated tropes make it all too easy to identify
the enemy of what Said calls “our people,” especially when he adds that
Griffin’s response “is therefore the verbal equivalent of the Israeli occupation”
covering up “the shameless killing and oppressing of Palestinians” (646). It
is not hard to see what Said considers his own response to be the verbal equiva-
lent of, as Hartman was to discover.
Hartman’s short response finds fault with Said’s “barely concealed ‘Don’t
mess with me, you nonentity’” (“LC” 199), and with Said’s decision to “merge
with a community” “in the arena of a communal passion like politics and
justice.” Whatever the notion of community that Said subscribes to may be,
Hartman’s point is that his rhetoric in effect ends up confirming the stand-off
between mutually incompatible identity positions. Said’s rhetoric reduces a
verbal exchange to a conflict between different ethnic identities, which does
not hold out any hope for reconciliation. For Hartman, as we have seen, ethnic
affiliation is but one moment within a broader concern for a form of commu-
nity that is not closed in on itself. This concern does not imply a strict neutrality,
as Hartman explicitly states when he acknowledges that he “holds a position
very different from Said’s on many points,” and that “dispassionateness on either
side is not a possibility.” Yet this partiality does not preclude the hope, which
Hartman expresses in his last sentence, that he “would have written the same
letter had an Israeli literary scholar sought to discredit in this manner the intel-
lectual capacity and personal identity of a less famous writer.” For Hartman,
Mourning, Testimony, Community 115
work is continuous with his cultural criticism of contemporary life. For Hartman,
the domination of the visual media endangers access to history and to whatever
resists full visualization, and it also contributes to the erosion of experience—as
such, it is complicit with the operations of aesthetic ideology I presented in the
first section of this chapter. Hartman proposes the genre of video testimony
as a cultural force that can counter such neutralization and that can restore
the possibility of a genuine experience of non-presence. That video testimony
functions as an update of Wordsworth for a visual age is also evident from the
fact that it is explicitly linked with a thinking of community. The issues of Jewish
identity and of Holocaust memory are not intrinsically related in Hartman’s
work; rather, they can be seen as two—admittedly privileged—areas of his work
that are modeled on the example of Wordsworth’s poetic achievement and the
form of community it intimates.
Hartman’s case for video testimony is very similar to his case for the relevance
of art and literature. He claims that art is particularly “effective in ‘embodying’
historically specific ideas,” and its way of mediating these ideas is both more
specific and more indeterminate than in “the memorializing fables common
to ethnic or nationalist affirmation” (“PD” 104, 107). Art has the capacity to
introduce a rupture in the stifling continuity of homogeneous, empty time, and
to oppose the erosion of experience and the spread of moral indifference.
Testimony similarly opposes “a simplified and overcollectivized memory-image,”
as it captures “a vernacular and multivocal dimension” that is “too diverse and
specific to become institutionalized or sacralized” (“PM” 269–70). Hartman’s
writings on the Fortunoff Video Archive develops a “poetics”—or an “optic”
(“ET” 495)14—of testimony that is supposed to adequately engage in the
struggle for experience. The first important characteristic of this optic is that
it is, indeed, optic: it directly takes on the visual media, which are the main
opponent in the contemporary struggle for experience. Hartman describes his
optic of testimony as “counter-cinematic”: “our technique, or lack of it, was
homeopathic: it used television to cure television, to turn the medium against
itself, limiting while exploiting its visualizing power” (“TD” 9).
Hartman sees a double problem with television. First, TV is simply too
powerful a “form of communication”: its accumulation of ever more data has a
“powerful, repetitive, everyday—and so potentially trivializing—effect,” until
the information and images it keeps feeding the viewer can no longer be
“assimilated,” “absorbed,” or even experienced (“ET” 499, 504; “HL” 175).
Second, TV not only erodes experience, it also contributes to the “derealization
of ordinary life” and to the “ghosting of reality” by emitting “a hyperbolic form
of visuality” (“TD” 1–5). Unlike “a verbal or literary medium,” TV fails to
“respect the absence of . . . absent things” but rather “conveys the illusion not
of making absent things present but present things more present” (1). TV, in
short, multiplies presences to the point where whatever resists visualization no
longer finds a place and can no longer be experienced, and everything blends
in a phantom space of hyperbolic visuality.
Mourning, Testimony, Community 117
Video is important because the voice as such, without a visible source, remains
ghostly. That is, when you take away the visual, when you just hear the voice,
the effect is that of disembodied sound, as if from the dead, from an absence.
Voice has its own affective quality, but we feel it essential to add a face to that
voice, to reduce the ghostliness, even to re-embody the voice. (“ET” 494).
that does not imply uniformity” (“HT” 254). Importantly, this community
cannot possibly be specifically Jewish, but is inescapably transcultural. Video
testimony foregrounds a necessary removal from the experiences that the
witnesses recount, and this makes these memories radically “un-claimable”—
which is to say, equally available or unavailable to everybody who is willing
to share that distance. The experience of removal can circulate and travel
across cultural borders—indeed, it cannot help but transgress such borders,
as the one thing it does not allow is being “claimed” as a sacred and exclusive
possession. The genre of video testimony makes possible an experience that
interrupts “a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” in a visual
culture (FQ 102), and as such it also enables an escape from the identitarian
and exclusionary forms of community that such worldliness so fatefully tends
to promote.
Video testimony can be understood as an aesthetic form that mediates a
generational remove from the experiences that are being recounted in a way
that makes it possible to absorb and experience that remove. As such, it
generates the position of what Hartman calls the “adoptive or intellectual
witness” (“HT” 260), who is “a bystander after the event who observes it from an
ambiguous position” (“SI” 39). The intellectual witness is, on the one hand,
“detached or belated” in relation to the event as well as separated from it by a
“more constitutive distance . . . intrinsic to intellectual inquiry,” while he is also,
on the other, unable not to be addressed by it and therefore called to “a more
participatory state of mind” (39–40). Video testimony makes possible a complex
combination of aesthetic mediation, intellectual distance, and generational
removal that in its turn enables an active reception of the past. It emphatically
refuses to exploit the visual media’s capacity to retraumatize the viewer, and to
recreate the dissociation that is inherent to trauma. For Hartman, such shock
therapies upset the tenuous balance between aesthetic, intellectual, and
generational distance.
In order to appreciate the stakes of Hartman’s claims for video testimony’s
capacity to generate community, it is helpful to look at the potential ravages in
response to which he develops these claims. Hartman considers video testimony
as a technology that can prevent these calamities, and this explains why these
dangers are in their turn connected to competing “optics” of memory. If video
testimony is a mediation that makes it possible to directly experience one’s
generational dissociation from the Holocaust in a way that ties the viewer to
these memories without retraumatizing her, a first danger in the mediation of
catastrophe is a failure to let that dissociation be experienced. Hartman observes
this danger in Schindler’s List, which for him merely repeats television’s invisible
assault on experience. Television has become “an intimate part of home,” and
as such it “it becomes a treacherous servomechanism conspiring with a residual,
delusory omnipotence of thoughts” (“TD” 4). Schindler’s List feeds the same
illusion: Hartman writes that “the premium placed on visuality by such a
film made me deeply uneasy. To see things that sharply, and from a privileged
Mourning, Testimony, Community 119
position, is to see them with the eyes of those who had the power of life and
death” (“CA” 83). The film’s ambition to encompass the enormity of the events
through visual means does not achieve the reality-effect that it intends, but
instead leads to a film that is not realistic enough, as it fails to capture the
texture of “the daily suffering in camp or ghetto” that the genre of the video
testimony does pay attention to (“CA” 83–8).15 For this reason Hartman follows
a broad critical consensus and prefers Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which does
attempt to recover and communicate the details of how the Holocaust was
implemented. Still, Lanzmann comes very close to the second danger involved
in the mediation of catastrophe: not a failure to let the events be experienced,
but a failure to emphasize the moment of dissociation that separates the viewer
from them. Lanzmann’s approach sometimes risks a “vicarious overidentifica-
tion with the victim” (“HT” 257). The main marker of Lanzmann’s desire for a
quasi-“mystical correspondence” is that, for all his commendable attention to
detail, he “does not appear to be all that interested in the survivors’ life or
afterlife” (“DV” 44, “CA” 86).16
It is the third risk involved in the mediation of traumatic memory that really
drives home the stakes of video testimony. This is a scenario in which the horrors
of the past are merely presented, without any mediation of their distance from
the viewer. In this case dissociation is forced upon the public in a way that
makes it impossible to assimilate this remove as part of their identity. When it is
impossible to meaningfully connect to the catastrophes from which the viewer
is removed, she is abandoned to what Hartman calls “the vertigo of indecisive-
ness or nonidentity,” which can foster “by reaction even more dangerous . . .
assertions” (“PN” 99). Hartman is thinking here not only of “the proliferation
and dailiness of second-order images of trauma” in the media (FQ 130n12),
but also of discourses of postmemory that describe how traumatic memory is
passed on to later generations, and of aesthetic practices that rely on so-called
secondary trauma—that is, on “producing rather than screening the effect of
trauma” (M. Hirsch 2001: 8). For Hartman, the shocks of unmediated or
unscreened traumas cannot be absorbed and assimilated and merely address
us on an affective level—which gives rise to a lack of control that in itself
generates frustration and, potentially, the desire for violent overcompensation.
Hartman’s work on video testimony is emphatically a second-generation dis-
course that is primarily interested in the question of how to manage a factual
remove from experiences that one yet cannot fail to be addressed by. The main
dangers involved are processes of secondary traumatization, in which a factual
“lack of memories and a lack of continuity” register as a “vertigo . . . in which
suffering takes the place of inheritance” (van Alphen 2006: 477). For Hartman,
video testimony, as well as other aesthetic mediations of the Holocaust, must
embody the ghosts that trauma generates in a way that prevents such a vertigo
of nonidentity. Such a “non-traumatizing mode of representation” should aes-
thetically refigure a generational remove as a manageable and tenable intellectual
distance (“HA” 155).17 In the context of present-day memory culture, in which
120 Geoffrey Hartman
it is “no longer possible not to know,” yet where the accumulation of “positivities”
has led to “an extraordinary and melancholy record” rather than to “appreciable
ethical lessons” (“TD” 12), it generates the possibility of assimilating knowledge
of the past in a way that neither retraumatizes the viewer nor forces her to deny
her knowledge.18
Hartman’s refusal of secondary traumatization as a strategy to “reconnect
and reembody [a] memorial fabric that has been severed by catastrophe”
(M. Hirsch 2008: 110) ties in with his fear that a failed embodiment of the
ghosts of the past will be followed by an identitarian vertigo that will in its
turn generate a reactive overassertion of identity. This logic not only informs
Hartman’s case for video testimony, but it also undergirds his ambitious claim
for Wordsworth’s role in preventing an English Holocaust in The Fateful Question
of Culture. Wordsworth responded to the phantomization and abstraction of life
that coincided with the advent of industrialism with an adequate poetical
embodiment of “what in English culture was previously unrealized or semi-
articulate,” and this saved England from the virulent nostalgia that would
ravage the European continent in the twentieth century (FQ 7). France and
Germany failed to translate a pre-industrial sensibility into a modern idiom,
and this led to the cultivation of an unprogressive and overidealized vision of
the past as a fantastic alternative to a discontented modernity. Wordsworth’s
mediation of the trauma of the transition to modernity, in contrast, made the
rural past a nurturing force within, rather than a counterforce to modernity. The
analogy between Wordsworth’s past achievement and video testimony’s present
promise not only helps us understand the particular form that Hartman’s case
for video testimony takes, but it also implies a close affinity between present-day
afflictions such as retraumatization, identitarian vertigo, and the danger of
overidentification, on the one hand, and some of the psycho-social conditions
that failed to prevent the Holocaust on the other. It suggests that the deteriora-
tion of modernity was, among many other things, an effect of a disabling sense
of vertigo and belatedness.
This idea, which is merely implied by the structural analogy between
Wordsworth’s poetry and video testimony that underlies Hartman’s mature
work, is made more explicit in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s
famous essay entitled “The Nazi Myth,” which locates the scenario of a failed
embodiment leading to vertigo and then to an overassertion of identity at the
origin of Nazism. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write that while Europe after
the collapse of Christianity in the eighteenth century redefined itself through
the historical imitation of classical models, Germany found itself in a particu-
larly difficult position: they write that “[t]he drama of Germany was also that it
suffered an imitation twice removed, and saw itself obliged to imitate the imitation
of antiquity that France did not cease to export for at least two centuries.
Germany, in other words, was not only missing an identity but also lacked the
ownership of its means of identification” (1990: 299). Germany had no forms of
its own to mediate the trauma of the collapse of Christianity, nor could the
Mourning, Testimony, Community 121
French forms that were available satisfy the desire for identity. Germany suffered
what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy tellingly call “the vertigo of an absence of
identity,” and this vertigo will fatefully panic Germany into an exclusionary and
identitarian myth of purity. Once these implications of the barely disguised
analogy that informs Hartman’s optic of video testimony are made explicit, we
can see that it is important to underline—more emphatically than Hartman
himself does—this optic’s potential to offer an alternative to traditional forms
of Gemeinschaft and to intimate an explicitly transcultural form of community.
In a recent essay entitled “The Humanities of Testimony,” Hartman once
again underscores the vital importance of an adequate representation of
the past. He argues that an appropriate depiction of the past can restore the
“hopeful space for reflection and decision” that extreme conditions had
closed off. Hartman writes: “That hope, defeated and bitter in retrospect, had
suggested that a different decision was possible, a choice that could have
saved a life. What is left of hope is the fiction of communion, of the revival
of sympathy—and so of understanding—but only via the representation of
such failed moments” (“HT” 256). What do we make of this argument for the
capacity of artistic representation to redeem failed opportunities? The first
place to look is certainly the work of Walter Benjamin, which has become an
increasingly apparent intertext in Hartman’s work since the mid-1970s. An idea
that informs the one voiced here occurs most famously in the second of his
“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin’s unforgettable reference
to “women who could have given themselves to us” (1969: 254). The most
complete version of this idea is the dictum that “[r]emembrance can make
the incomplete (happiness) complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete”
(qt. De La Durantaye 2000: 17). It is the second part of this statement that is
relevant in the context of the Final Solution. It affirms that acts of remembrance
have the power to restore “a defeated potentiality” (CW 77). Remembrance is an
act of “decreation” that manages to see such a defeated potentiality as not always
already “under the sign of actuality, but in its own right” (De La Durantaye 2000:
19–21). This capacity for decreation is central to Agamben’s notion of potentiality.
Remembrance is not a completion of what was or wasn’t, but is instead an
affirmation of the sufficiency of potentiality, even if such a potentiality has never
been, and will never be, actualized. I have earlier theorized this affirmation of
potentiality as the structure of a form of mimesis that does not see the incomplete
under the sign of its (conceptual) completion, nor the unknown under the sign
of its full conceptual explanation. The position of the intellectual witness that
the genre of video testimony generates is then part of a community that is
grounded in this revised sense of mimesis.
This community, which I earlier differentiated from aesthetic ideology and
from a fully inoperative community, is neither resolutely post-mimetic nor
mimetic in a traditional sense.19 And it is on this idea of community that Ronald
Reagan declared war on May 5 of 1985 when he visited the military cemetery
at Bitburg—where also members of the Waffen SS are buried—in order to
122 Geoffrey Hartman
a logic ends up producing ever more identity and reinstating “once again the
contested notion of privilege, as well as essentialist, and at worst racial, slogans
that have bedeviled an era of catastrophic nationalism” (171). In a postmodern
context, the proliferation of canonical works and of identities leads to an
unmanageable multiplicity of “works that claim a share of greatness,” which
makes “the process of restitution” appear “endless” (167, 170). The problem
with this is not only that it fails to make room for a non-identitarian notion of
community, but also that it can lead to disastrous consequences in contempo-
rary visual culture. While it is not necessarily the case that every affirmation of
identity will in its turn spawn a violent and expansionist regime, it manifestly
is the case that the sheer ubiquity of such affirmations contributes to a climate
of vertigo and derealization that may invite the reactive creation of fantasies of
purity (172).20
“Criticism and Restitution” not only predates Hartman’s most extensive
critique of identity politics in The Fateful Question of Culture by eight years, it
also comes nine years after the publication of Criticism in the Wilderness, a book
in which Hartman defends a form of “creative criticism” and opposes positions
that see criticism as purely subservient to literature. One of the essay’s merits is
that it allows us to appreciate the continuity between these two issues. Hartman’s
worries about the effects of identity politics and his defense of a creative criticism
are informed by closely related concerns: in the same way that the proliferation
of identities might lead to a sense of derealization and to the erosion of experi-
ence, the reliance on privileged literary works—in which these identities can
recognize themselves—can lead to a multiplication of literary objects that
threatens literature’s status as a locus of experience. Hartman writes that “a lost
masterpiece, once recovered, is like an objet trouvé” (168), an object that can be
understood and judged, but that cannot, in an “era of restitution,” become an
occasion for experience (SS 147–8). The objectification of literature not only
occurs under the influence of identity politics, but is further intensified by a
reorientation of the study of literature that no longer considers the work of
literature as a “practical, pedagogical object,” but rather as “an object of theoreti-
cal knowledge” (Comas 2006: 44–54).21 Hartman’s plea for a creative criticism is,
among other things, an attempt to counter this reduction of literature.
Of course, Hartman’s campaign for a creative criticism in the late 1970s can to
a certain extent be seen as simply a self-serving plea for the creative license of
his own idiosyncratic critical practice. Still, in 1989 “Criticism and Restitution”
looks back upon this campaign in terms that are remarkably continuous with
Hartman’s analysis of postmodernity and his investment in experience. Creative
criticism offers an alternative to what Hartman calls “a strange inertia in our
progressive thinking” whose effort to rescue marginalized works of literature
simply perpetuates a “modernist art-ideology” in which the artwork becomes “a
sacrificial idol” (“CR” 167). This reduction of literature constitutes a profound
limitation of creativity. Hartman opposes “a hierarchical prejudice which holds
that creativeness can be achieved only in certain genres, to which other genres
124 Geoffrey Hartman
are subordinate” (166). Instead, he maintains that we should not restrict “the
locus of creativity,” as a critical essay “can be as inspiring and nurturing as poem,
novel, or painting.” Asserting and practicing the creativity of criticism is one
way of opposing the fateful objectification of literature.
Criticism in the Wilderness is essentially an extended argument for creative
criticism. In its very first sentence it is called “a book of experiences rather than
a systematic defense of literary studies” (CW 1). This emphasis on experience
supports the book’s contention that “objectification may be a way of neutralizing
the experience” of literature (31). Apart from a demonstration that something
like a creative criticism actually exists in the works of Walter Benjamin, Kenneth
Burke, and others, Hartman’s argument also contains a historical case. This
part of the book recounts the story of “how the English critical tradition . . .
consolidated itself as a via media institution,” which is the situation in which the
book aims to intervene (“NW” 92). Hartman objects to the “teatotalling”
“friendship style” and the “sublimated chatter” that has dominated this tradi-
tion (“TT” 32–3). Still, he emphatically situates his own work, and therefore
also this book, in this Anglo-American tradition. His critique of the English
tendency to disregard “a more intellectual ‘Continental’ tradition” aims to
contribute to “an independent American perspective” that overcomes this
English limitation by incorporating continental insights and materials (CW 4, 10).
The creativity of this American creative criticism will not consist in a simple
rupture with English examples, but rather in its creative critique of these
examples’ disregard for a body of continental thought that it itself welcomes
under the name of theory.22 “Critical creativity” names a more responsible and
more challenging way of engaging with European and English legacies; it
redefines the very notion of creativity and brings it close to forms of mediation
and belatedness that are familiar from other parts of Hartman’s mature work.
Hartman’s history of English criticism consists of three moments. First, there
is what he calls the “Arnoldian Concordat,” which restricts the role of the critic
to being the uncreative “herald of a new literature of imaginative reason,” which
Matthew Arnold found wanting in his own age (“NW” 93). While Arnold still
recognized the pervasiveness of the critical spirit, as well as the intricate relation
between criticism and creative literature, the New Critics follow T. S. Eliot and
hold that there is no such thing as a critical creativity; what Hartman calls the
“New-Critical Reduction” (the second moment in his history) argues that
“the significant work of art is indeed . . . intelligent but denies the obverse, that
there could be a ‘creative criticism’” (93). Hartman situates himself in a third
phase of modern criticism, which he terms the “Revisionist Reversal.” The
revisionist opposes “those who abstract creative power from the critical essay”;
she “acknowledges the intellectual element in art but reinvests criticism with
creative potential” (CW 8). Hartman’s contention that there is such a thing as a
medium that is both creative and critical must not only be read as a brief for the
stylistic bravado of deconstruction, with which Hartman is routinely linked in
the 1970s. It is also an attempt to correct “the falsification, even repression, of
Mourning, Testimony, Community 125
Romantic origins in Arnoldian and much New Critical thought” (CW 9). Arnold
famously held that the Romantics, for all their creative force, simply did not
know enough—that they were spontaneously and naïvely creative because they
lacked critical insight. Hartman’s different defenses of Romanticism—from his
anti-self-consciousness theory in the 1960s to the Wordsworthian preservation
of potentiality since the 1970s and 1980s—amount to a demonstration of “the
intelligence of the Romantic imagination,” a position that conclusively negates
Arnold’s and Eliot’s pseudo-historical schemes by depriving them of the fiction
of a naïve and unselfconscious Romanticism (“PS” xxiii). The title of the book
refers to what Hartman calls Arnold’s “fiction of presence,” which was his
belief “that our errand in the wilderness would end” and that “a new and vital
literature would arise to redeem the work of the critic” (CW 15). For Hartman,
“this wilderness is all we have,” and Romanticism has shown us how to inhabit
this realm, even if no redemption is forthcoming.
There is an obvious paradox in the combination of a defense of creative criticism
and of a Wordsworthian Romanticism whose achievement is unobtrusive and
unremarkable. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hartman uses a critical style that
has been derided as the antics of a Hermeneutical Mafia (William Pritchard’s
phrase), while his work promotes its most important critical object for its
unremarkableness. How can the English via media be dismissed and promoted
in the same critical oeuvre?23 A short answer can begin by noting that, in spite
of the analogy between postmodern visual culture and the degrading thirst
after outrageous stimulation in Wordsworth’s age that undergirds Hartman’s
late work, these two moments differ radically in terms of the possibilities that
they offer for critical and creative agency. Indeed, the analogy is constructed in
the first place to allow Hartman to interrogate that difference, and to speculate
what a critical update of Wordsworth’s achievement might look like. While
Hartman can repeatedly note how the contemporary condition was accurately
prefigured when Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface diagnosed the “fatal convergence
of industrialization, urbanization, and journalism during the Napoleonic wars,”
this does not mean that there is a contemporary equivalent for Wordsworth’s
authoritative intervention in the Lyrical Ballads: their capacity “to retrain ear,
eye, and imagination, to wean them from the age’s degrading thirst after ‘outra-
geous stimulation’” (“HL” 179). In the age of television, it is only a genre such
as video testimony that can—however wishfully—be credited with the capacity
to retrain its audience. Literary creativity only survives in the domain of literary
criticism, a domain that has little or no access to the “ear, eye, and imagination”
of a broad audience.
In an essay from 2000, Hartman voices the suspicion that there is “a structural
corruption which makes it ineffective to try to modify by discursive means (such
as this essay) what goes on” (“TD” 2). This embarrassed marginality is a crucial
aspect of Hartman’s paradoxical performance. Hartman’s critical practice
remains oriented by a theory of euphemistic and unremarkable literary media-
tion that Wordsworth managed to introduce in the public domain in an age
126 Geoffrey Hartman
when literature’s force could still be experienced; in the present, poetry cannot
possibly penetrate the popular imagination, and this motivates the criticism
that still preserves that poetical achievement to promote itself as a site of experi-
ence by adopting a form that foregrounds its own creativity and complexity, in
the hope of being able to resist indifferent absorption and to provoke a genuine
experience in the reader. While much literary criticism in the 1980s openly
displays its political awareness, often without acknowledging its factual removal
from the places where it could actually make a difference, Hartman’s work is
haunted by literature’s loss of public authority; it mourns that loss in its struggle
to become an occasion for experience that, to the extent that it preserves the
very possibility of experience, also keeps the memory of literature alive.
Even if Hartman’s case for a creative criticism does not foreground this
dimension, the rest of his output make it entirely unsurprising that the double
emphasis on creativity and experience also indicates a concern with the media-
tion of the past, even with questions of mourning. Creative criticism is also
a way of “keeping an ‘archaic’ endowment alive by inventing a new kind of
dialogue with it” (FQ 190). The first part of Criticism in the Wilderness features
three chapters that are titled “The Sacred Jungle,” and that present often rather
idiosyncratic interpretations of six critics that help Hartman make his case for
the viability of a creative criticism. These critics are Thomas Carlyle, T. S. Eliot,
Harold Bloom, Walter Benjamin, Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke. It is not
easy to infer Hartman’s motivation in deciding for this particular line-up—if he
had intended to present a genealogy of his own critical practice, the inclusion
of Eliot is at least surprising, and the absence of Derrida (who features promi-
nently in other portions of the book) inexplicable; the inclusion of Benjamin,
moreover, makes clear that neither does Hartman aim to have this line-up assert
the viability of an independent Anglo-American perspective (CW 9–10). These
six critical positions can most relevantly be related to each other when we focus
on the way in which they connect their critical practices to the tasks of memory
and preservation. Indeed, as soon as we bracket the book’s programmatic
celebration of a recovered critical creativity, it becomes perfectly possible to
read it as a catalogue of critical economies of mourning.
I want to conclude this chapter by sketching the vague contours of this
catalogue, which will allow me to restate one last time the paradox underlying
Hartman’s creative criticism. Hartman writes that Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
deploys “a richer and rougher English . . . that pretends to be contaminated by
German”; this decision is not just a curiosity but rather a “creative historio-
graphical act,” because it conjures up “a fearful reality that hovers over English
history” and its reliance on “via media institutions” (49–50). Carlyle’s critical
preservation of the past opposes the tendency to privilege works of art over works
of commentary, which “monumentalizes a dead man’s relics, turns them into
the icon of a power that continues to operate its reversals and obliterations . . .
by means of the very act—criticism—being downgraded” (103). In this concep-
tion, the present is simply overwhelmed by the force of the past, and criticism
Mourning, Testimony, Community 127
is unable to mediate that power in a way that energizes the present. A comparable
sense of fatality informs Harold Bloom’s understanding of literary history—
which Hartman took up before in a review of The Anxiety of Influence—which
can only assert “a negating triumph of (past) art over (present) art, as well as
of life over art” (105). While Hartman opposes such fatalism, he also considers
Eliot’s attempt to escape from it through his famous impersonality thesis as an
all too facile denial of the power of the past. Eliot tries to limit “the return of
the dead” by flattering our capacity “to bear or recreate the past” (55): while
he “does not deny our spiritual and intellectual burdens . . . he would like
critics and poets to meet them as problems of craft, translation, and verbal
digestion” (58), and not as an occasion for an experience of a past that is
preserved through such an experience. Frye, for his part, fails to adequately
redress that failure in his attempt to restore the “public ability to respond to
mythopoeic art.” In Frye also, the “offensiveness” of poetry is denied through
the excision of experience and the promotion of a conception of “art as
knowledge”—a hygienic measure that Hartman dismisses as a false “redemp-
tive purification” (61, 88, 90).
For Hartman, Frye and Eliot lack one crucial insight: they fail to realize that,
while a refusal of preservation through experience can certainly alleviate the
burden of belatedness and avoid the fatalism that paralyzes the positions of
Bloom and of a self-confessed uncreative criticism, such a refusal is powerless to
make the insistence of the dead disappear. Instead, they survive every attempt
to dispense with them and continue to require mediation if the present is to
become inhabitable at all. Hartman introduces the work of Kenneth Burke to
remind us that “the work of purification never consumes the evidence of its
labors,” and that this evidence leaves “a residue called literature” (137, 142).
The impossibility of dispensing with the past once and for all also takes a promi-
nent place in the discussion of Benjamin. Commenting on Benjamin’s writings
on Kafka, Hartman observes:
expect from Hartman himself.24 This elaboration focuses on the famous angel
of history from Benjamin’s ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History. Hartman
reads this angel as a counterfigure to “philosophies of progress that discount
the dead or vanquished”: “It is he who keeps the dead alive, that is deadly, who
envisions for us their defeated force rather than their easy transumption by the
latest political rhetoric” (75–6). This idea echoes the notion, formulated in the
second Thesis and discussed in my previous section, that remembrance can
render the complete incomplete, and that the decreation of the past makes it
possible to consider potentiality no longer under the sign of actuality, but rather
for itself. Benjamin’s angel informs the idea of
present. As we know, in The Fateful Question and elsewhere, Hartman’s work does
not resist the temptation of misreading this as evidence that Wordsworth suc-
cessfully prevented such a rupture in England. This should not prevent even
more Benjaminian materializers from gathering counterevidence to the idea
of such blissful English continuities—in Iraq, Pakistan, the Cape, and other
places where things grow slowly, precariously, if at all.
Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust
Over more than half a century, Geoffrey Hartman’s critical practice has assumed
many different shapes, the most frequent of which have been the critical inter-
pretation, cultural promotion, and theoretical contemplation of literature. In
all of these (not so) different guises, his work has been marked by a consistent
attempt to articulate literature with such notions as the human, memory,
history, and natural reality. Even if his earliest work, The Unmediated Vision, still
promoted literature’s capacity to neutralize the actuality of things and to directly
access the reality that underlies them, this was soon corrected by the assertion
of literature’s ability to immerse itself in historical reality. This position was in
its turn modified by a countervailing emphasis on literature’s simultaneous
capacity to keep a reflective distance from the reality in which it participates, a
power that Hartman’s mature work theorized as a paradoxical capacity to affirm
the actuality of things by preserving their potentiality. While this investment in
potentiality constitutes a return to the concerns that motivated his earliest work,
the crucial difference is that in Hartman’s mature work the affirmation of
potentiality no longer requires the sacrifice of the mind’s relation to the reality
of the things of the world.
Throughout Hartman’s work, literature’s essential role in safeguarding
the connections between the human mind and the particulars of nature and
history has intermittently—yet systematically—been called mimesis. His defense
of literature has explicitly or implicitly relied on the suggestion that interrupt-
ing the tenuous interrelations between man, nature, history, and literature
would cancel man’s very capacity to relate to phenomenal reality. Literature
alone stands “between us and the death of nature to imagination” by keeping
us mimetically attached to the life of things (WP xiv). Yet there is an obvious
irony in making literature the privileged placeholder of the connection between
mind and things: the insistence on the exceptional powers of literature threatens
to go at the expense of a more encompassing concern for phenomenal reality,
while it is yet in the name of such a concern that literature is being privileged.
This difficulty manifests itself on different levels and at different moments in
Hartman’s work. In The Unmediated Vision, there is the theoretical embarrass-
ment that literature’s capacity to preserve the multiplicity and materiality of
things is actualized through the poetic neutralization of these things, while in
132 Geoffrey Hartman
the later work the literary care for particulars turns out not to be tied directly to
the medium of poetry. If Hartman seems to sacrifice the distinction of literature
in his work on Holocaust video testimony, his later work still refuses to abandon
literature to the realities of our media-saturated present.
In my last chapter, I have focused on another version of that refusal: the ten-
sion in Hartman’s mature work between the specificity of Wordsworth’s poetry
and the exportation of Wordsworth’s achievement to different domains—those
of memory, community, identity, the media, and criticism. I have repeatedly
referred to the most overt display of Hartman’s unconditional commitment to
Wordsworth’s poetry, his claim in The Fateful Question of Culture that it has helped
prevent an English Holocaust. When we look at that book in some more detail,
we can see that this explicit claim interferes with a more implicit, yet also more
enabling, Wordsworthian subtext. As such it offers a culmination, rather than a
resolution, of the tensions that have organized my account of Hartman’s career.
The book is first of all a diagnosis of the contemporary condition of culture and
of the notion of culture. Hartman already initiated an analysis of this notion in
the introduction to Minor Prophecies, his 1991 collection of essays. The word
“culture” there carried two meanings, which were clearly dictated by the culture
wars in the aftermath of which the book positioned itself: thus on the one hand
there is a sense of culture which stresses “intimacy and identity” with “a particu-
lar community,” and which in the final analysis amounts to “a new isolationism,”
and on the other we have “the sum of those institutions that persuade us that
knowledge is a good,” which creates an enlarged space for “play” and “secular
grace” (MP 7–11).
It is hard to see how these two senses of culture could ever be articulated with
each other, yet this is precisely what Hartman achieves in The Fateful Question.
Here, one sense of culture is again that of a “purely affirmative” “monolithic
and complacent culturalism” that sees culture as “a collective and destined
form of identity” (FQ 2, 10, 177). This “notion of ‘a culture’ as a distinctive and
unified whole” is opposed to “‘culture’ as an ethos that guarantees the free play
of ideas and the individual exercise of imagination in the context of tradition”
(40–1). What these two notions share is that they both “keep[ ] hope in embodiment
alive” in a cultural condition of generalized abstraction and “phantomization”
(21–6). While “a culture” does this by demanding the unconditional fidelity
of its members, and “culture” by situating freedom “in the context of tradition,”
in both cases the appeal to culture aims “to redeem imagination from abstraction, to
achieve . . . a more embodied and less alienated way of life” (180). These two
kinds of culture are no longer opposed as an error and its correction; instead,
they are related as different responses to “disembodied thought and unearned
abstraction” (61). The shift from one to the other does not require a massive
conversion; it merely demands a slight reorientation that makes “what seems
intransitive transitive again” (38).
So how can mutually intransitive, self-enclosed identities enter a medium
that affirms their interconnectedness? And how can this interconnectedness
Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust 133
***
Poetry is a power that allows us to resist the overwhelming immediacy of an all
too present contemporaneity; it operates “through a sense of charged absence”
that opposes “literal immediacy and full presence” and allows us to reconnect
136 Geoffrey Hartman
with history and imagine “a present in excess of what is available through extant
social concepts” (Kaufman 2005: 205). The value of the aesthetic experience
that poetry makes possible can be summed up in three theses: first, poetry
can enrich our capacity for experience (“Erlebnismöglichkeiten . . . bereichern”);
second, it enriches our capacity for expression (“Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten”); and
third, poetry is an emphatically human activity that is both determined by history
and determining history in its turn (“geschichtsbedingt und geschichtemachend”).
This conception of poetry’s peculiar power is derived from a particularly intense
encounter with the poetry of Wordsworth; the debt to Wordsworth is expressed
in the further thesis that his poetry offers an alternative to the “nostalgic political
ideal centering on rural virtue” that led to the atrocities of Nazism (FQ 7).
While this continental “rural virtue” is obviously very different from the virtues
of English “Kleinbürger” who heroically resisted Nazi bombardments by patrol-
ling “Englands Felder” with shotguns and explosives, it is much more peculiar to
attribute this English capacity for critical agency and resistance to Wordsworth’s
poetry, which can “‘precisely in these dehumanized situations . . . awaken [wach-
rufen] the memory of situations more worthy of humanity.”
The association between the experience of Wordsworth’s poetry and the
emergence of critical and historical agency is certainly peculiar—but not
totally unprecedented. The above theses on art and on the connection between
Wordsworth’s poetry and the English resistance against a dehumanized present
are not in the first place a summary of Hartman’s take on Wordsworth, although
they are also that. They are recorded on 24 August 1940 in Bertolt Brecht’s
Arbeitsjournal (1994: 417–18). Brecht, who was then living in Finnish exile, is
brought to these thoughts after a quick perusal of Matthew Arnold’s edition
of Wordsworth’s poems. Brecht is struck by Wordsworth’s poem “She was a
phantom of delight,” and reflects that “this work so remote from us” shows
“how varied the function of art is, and how careful one must be to lay down
the law.”3
When we consider it carefully, we can see that Brecht’s record of his experi-
ence of Wordsworth already performs the claim that he is making about poetry’s
capacity to help us exceed the limits of “what is available through extant social
concepts.” Brecht’s experience of reading Wordsworth motivates him to express
his appreciation for what extant concepts and political orthodoxy would want
him to denounce as “kleinbürgerliche Idylle.” It is perhaps not less demanding
to imagine the secret affinities between Hartman and an uncompromising
Marxist like Brecht. And while the critical orthodoxy militates against a recogni-
tion of such affinities, it is yet undeniable that Hartman shares the conception
of “aesthetic experience as a provisional, formal suspension-negation of extant
ruling concepts” and therefore as the basis of an enriched capacity for history
and for experience that Robert Kaufman has unearthed in the works of, among
others, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht (Kaufman 2002: 66n33). There is a related
affinity between Hartman’s Romanticism and a strand of Romantic criticism
Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust 137
that, even if it is more willing to abandon the privilege of literature, still mobilizes
“whatever the peculiarly edgy blend of aesthetics and critique once known as
the literary . . . will be named” for an “ethos of the unknown” that can resist
the dominant drive for information and innovation by restoring the history of
“things destroyed in the name of creation” (Liu 2004: 8–9). What makes it
particularly hard to appreciate such connections is that Hartman’s work time
and again decides not to leave the radically open-ended dimension of aesthetic
experience that it promotes resolutely indeterminate, but rather identifies it
with a determinate vision of the achieved reciprocity between mind and world.
This commitment to a particular form of mimesis and the parallel investment
in aesthetic potentiality do not cancel each other out—they are the two halves
that, even if they do not add up to a whole, constitute the singularity of
Hartman’s Romanticism.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
1
Douglas Kneale has shown that the “Short Discourse on Method” already brings
together many of the concerns “that would be deepened and elaborated through-
out Hartman’s oeuvre” (1996: 582–5). See Elam and Ferguson (2005: 6) for the
claim that Hartman negotiates “the Hegelian enterprise” from his first book to
his most recent work, and Balfour (2006: 16) for the crucial role of the relation
between Wordsworth and Hegel for Hartman.
2
See Roth (1988: 66–80) for a discussion of Logic and Existence as a Heideggerian
revision of Hyppolite’s earlier Hegelian historicism. The vital difference between
Kojève and Hyppolite is that Kojève reads the advent of absolute knowledge as a
passage within human history, while Hyppolite perhaps too readily assumes that
it is not part of human history at all. See also Butler (1987: 79–93).
3
See Leitch (1988: 162) for this “bracketing” of everyday relations. Gerald Bruns’
remarkable essay on The Unmediated Vision emphasizes the book’s insistence on
“the physicality, density, and self-subsistence of things themselves” (2005: 116).
It is vital to underline that, for the early Hartman, these “things themselves”
can only be perceived once our customary relations to them are successfully
neutralized.
4
See Timothy Bahti’s gloss on the figure of “incremental redundance”: “In more
conventional terms, this figure involves a synecdochal procedure and is actually
a kind of metonymy, whereby an effect (a ‘quality,’ or property) is posited as a
cause” (Bahti 1979: 602). Hartman himself notes that “[t]he figure is more than
a common ambiguity or a simple synecdoche” (UV 23).
5
In Wordsworth’s Poetry, the distinction between “nature” and “Nature” is not sys-
tematic, as it is in a 1961 essay on Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (“DS”). See also
note 18 for the gradual development of Hartman’s understanding of nature.
6
See Arac (1987: 23–34) for a good sketch of Hartman’s conditional embrace of
Heidegger in his “attempt at an anti-Hegelian historiography.”
7
See Wohlfarth (1979: 70–2) for a brief demonstration of how The Unmediated
Vision perpetuates the metaphysics of presence that it thinks it is overcoming.
See Atkins (1991: 21–9) for a rather misguided attempt to show how the book is
“proto-deconstructive in aim and strategies.”
8
Significantly, the 1966 reprint of The Unmediated Vision adds a “Prefatory Note” in
which Hartman acknowledges his debt to Auerbach, and in which he writes
that Dante—the key figure in Auerbach’s work—is as crucial for the question
of mediation “as Wordsworth or Nerval.” Even though the theory of modern
poetry in Hartman’s first book is very different from Auerbach’s theory of realism,
140 Notes
Irving Wohlfarth has remarked that they deal with the same problematic: “The
Unmediated Vision was an appendix to Auerbach’s inner history of Western
consciousness, one version among others of the modern artist’s metaphysical
dilemma in a post-theological age” (1979: 70). Hartman’s decision to preface
each chapter of his first book with a passage “that served as a springboard to
an author’s entire oeuvre” was influenced by Mimesis (IJ 168). He sketches his
relation to Auerbach in a long appendix to his memoir (IJ 165–80).
9
The extent of Hartman’s identification with Auerbach cannot be underestimated.
Both were German Jews who spent the Second World War in exile, and both
dedicated their lives to the study of a European culture that this war seemed to
have discredited. In order to appreciate the complexity of Hartman’s memory of
Auerbach, consider the following two quotations. The first is from the 1999
“Polemical Memoir”: “He [Auerbach] once told me the story of a violinist forced
to leave Germany and wishing to take up his profession in America. Alas, his
violin no longer emitted the same ‘tone’ in the new country” (“MM” xiv). The
second is from Hartman’s account of his own passage to England in March 1939
(first published in 1989): “My passage to England was uneventful. But during the
long train ride to the port in Holland, the boys with whom I traveled . . . become
restless; they fool about with the one family object I was able to take along, a
violin. We all play on it, or rather with it; a string breaks. Later, in Waddeston, we
play some more with it; another string breaks. Eventually the case cracks, we can
see a label inside. On it there is a signature. It identifies the unrepairable instru-
ment as a Stradivarius” (“LS” 15).
10
Incidentally, Auerbach’s “Figura”-essay owes its publication in English by
Meridian Books in 1959 (in a collection entitled Scenes from the Drama of European
Literature) to Hartman’s “encouragement” (“MM” xv).
11
Auerbach’s continued confidence in the possibility of refiguration, even after
the demise of the Christian worldview, also betrays a metaphysical remainder in
his work—which Hartman’s reception of Auerbach will, if anything, intensify.
In his book on “the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God,” Mark Taylor discusses
the principle of typological (or figural) interpretation—and quotes Auerbach’s
definition of it—and submits that it always presupposes the “logos doctrine,” that
is, an “interpretation of the logos as the creative principle of cosmic order” which
ensures that the typological “association of events is not arbitrary”: “the relation
between type and antitype is discovered rather than fabricated. As the primal ground
and enduring substance of all created order, the logos is the principle of unity that
underlies all experience” (1984: 59). While there are very real differences between
Hartman’s earliest work and the rest of his first decade, his work continues to
presuppose an underlying principle of significance, even if literature no longer
can, or no longer has to, refer to this principle.
12
Hartman’s interpretation of Milton as the first modern English poet is confirmed
in the 1958 essay “Milton’s Counterplot,” in which Hartman begins the project of
a literary history of English modern poetry. This essay brings Milton quite close
to Auerbach’s Dante: Milton is said to celebrate “creation’s triumph” and “man’s
free will,” and Hartman concludes that “Paradise Lost was written not for the sake
of heaven and hell but for the sake of the creation” (“MC” 117, 123).
13
Hartman repeats the hierarchical distinction between two senses of reality in
“The Heroics of Realism,” an essay from 1963. While this essay again does not
Notes 141
18
The fact that self-consciousness is inaugurated without a radical rupture with
nature again shows that Liu’s interpretation of the the “heroic priority” of the
apocalyptic imagination underestimates Hartman’s belief in the fundamental
continuity between nature and the imagination. In the fourth chapter, I show
how this belief also informs Hartman’s mature interpretation of Wordsworth. For
further evidence that the idea of the priority of the imagination in Wordsworth
was simply not yet available to Hartman in the period leading up to Wordsworth’s
Poetry, we can compare Hartman’s 1962 article “A Poet’s Progress” to the chapter
entitled “The Via Naturaliter Negativa” in Wordsworth’s Poetry. The book chapter
basically repeats (and extends) the article, but with crucial substitutions that
make clear that Hartman, at the time when he was writing the article, still con-
ceived of nature as appearing in only two ways: nature is either an external object
or an internal power. Because Hartman still lacked the idea that nature can
also assert itself through the works of mighty poets, and that the activity of the
imagination was therefore not necessarily opposed to nature, he still conceived
of the imagination’s work of individuation as a transgression that needed to
be corrected. Whereas “the purpose” of the 1962 article is to establish “that
Wordsworth came to realize that Nature itself led him beyond Nature” and that this
transcendence “is shown by Wordsworth as inherent in life” (“PW” 214, italics
mine), in the later book version we read that “Wordsworth thought nature itself
led him beyond nature” (WP 33, italics mine).
19
The essay “Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope,” published in the same year
as Wordsworth’s Poetry, offers another installment of such a Heideggerian history
of English literature. Hartman discusses how Marvell’s initial desire to abandon
the particulars of nature for “a vision of a world beyond this world” gives way to a
valorization of the natural world as “both obstacle and mediation” (“MS” 152–3).
Hartman reads Marvell’s poem “The Garden” as a morphology of “a tragic
or ironic flaw” in the idea of hope itself (160), which comes very close to
Wordsworth’s critique of the apocalyptic imagination. That this Heideggerian
structure is not confined to the interpretation of Wordsworth underscores its
importance for Hartman’s work.
20
For Hartman, the complexity of the meaning of nature, the changes in the poet’s
relation to it, and the undecidability that results from these difficulties are
less problems to be worked through in an analytic way than occasions for the
development of an extended narrative that manages to mediate often incompat-
ible elements. Throughout his work, he considers narrative as a privileged device
for the mediation and the humanization of moments of rhetorical, logical, or
even existential crisis—which is connected to his conviction that literature can
oppose the alleged anti-humanism of logic and philosophy. In the important
essay “The Voice of the Shuttle” from 1969, Hartman defines a poetical figure as
an indeterminate middle in between overspecified ends (“VS” 340), which has to
do with the capacity of figures to undo fixed determinations and to create a space
for narrative, and thus for man (see “IC” 642). Hartman notes that the phrase
“The Voice of the Shuttle” is generated by a double metonymy: the substitution
of effect for cause (“voice”) and of cause for effect (“shuttle”) significantly
increases the distance between cause and effect (“VS” 339), and thus makes room
for narrative. Marc Redfield has taken issue with Hartman’s interpretation, and
has argued that “it is the trope of personification, not double metonymy” that
Notes 143
does the work “through which unliving things take on a ghostly life and linguistic
presence” (2006: 5). Still, narrative is this linguistic presence, and because
Hartman’s double metonymy is also a minimal process of narrativization, this
double metonymy is, for Hartman, a trope of personification. The importance of
narrative for Hartman also marks an important distinction between his work and
that of Paul de Man. Even though there are very real affinities between their
respective interpretations of Wordsworth, de Man tends to dismiss narrative as
a failure to sustain an authentic temporal insight (allegory), while Hartman
sees narrative as a crucial process of humanization. See Rajan (1990: 355) for
the argument that “the major difference between de Man and Hartman” can be
glimpsed from the fact that Wordsworth’s Poetry is “the narration of a difference
that is synchronically distributed into a diachronic rhythm of oscillation.”
See Vermeulen (2007a) for my account of de Man’s and Hartman’s different
rereadings of the “Boy of Winander”-passage from The Prelude.
21
Hartman explicitly connects Heidegger and Wordsworth in these terms in the
essay “Wordsworth Before Heidegger,” where Hartman writes that Heidegger’s
work restores “the rule of metaphor”: “Heidegger discloses the prepositional
values of a discourse which we have sentenced to a purely propositional mode.
He is always prepositioning us” (“WB” 198–201). Hartman’s belief in literature’s
power to neutralize the violence of a necessary position is related to his discus-
sion of “the necessity or fatality of some primary affirmation” in “Virginia’s Web.”
Hartman’s work differs drastically from that of Paul de Man on this point. For de
Man, “the initial violence of position can only [ever] be half erased, since the
erasure is accomplished by a device of language that never ceases to partake of
the very violence against which it is directed” (de Man 1984: 119); for Hartman,
literature is “a device of language” that can interrupt this cycle of violence.
22
Hartman’s concern with the process in which poetic individuation occurs through
a struggle with a poetical precursor predates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of
Influence, which is routinely credited with coining such ideas, by almost a decade.
Hughes (1981: 1139) and Chabot (1975: 427) misunderstand the relation
between Bloom and Hartman. See Sprinker (1983: 49–52) for the more adequate
thesis that Wordsworth’s Poetry “can be seen to anticipate Bloom’s troubled brood-
ings over the situation of post-Enlightenment English poetry.” See Newlyn (1996:
616–17) for remarks on the differences between Hartman and Bloom; “‘WH,”
Hartman’s own review of Bloom’s book, for Hartman’s take on these differences;
and IJ for Hartman’s account of his personal relations to Bloom.
23
See Johnson (1984) for further examples of Hartman’s insensitivity to gender.
24
We can recognize in these solitary figures, whose solitude increases with their
knowledge (“AS” 303), a version of Blanchot’s wordly solitude, which I discuss in
the third section of this chapter. While Blanchot’s worldly solitude is interrupted
by a moment of “essential” solitude, I show that Hartman, in his revision of
Blanchot, promotes literature as a force that can help overcome worldly
solitude—which is precisely what happens here.
25
In a similar way, it can be said that the central themes and positions of
Wordsworth’s Poetry are already prefigured in A. C. Bradley’s Oxford lectures
on Wordsworth. The alignment of Bradley’s and Hartman’s interpretations of
Wordsworth is almost a critical commonplace; see Arac (1987: 71–2, where
Bradley and Hartman are opposed to the parallel pairing of Arnold and Adams),
144 Notes
Bourke (1993: 62), and Chase (1993: 6–7); also Fry (1996: 541, where Bradley
and Hartman are further situated in relation to Pater) and Johnston (1990). See
Bourke (1993: 61–5) for the crucial role of Bradley in the shift in Wordsworth
criticism from moral philosophy to a phenomenology of mind.
26
The need to include Byron is a legacy of Wellek; see Peckham (1951: 21–2n12)
and Wellek (1963: 187). See McGann (1992) for a different account of the
special position of Byron in theories of Romanticism.
27
Peckham will revise his theory of Romanticism on the first pages of the inaugural
issue of Studies in Romanticism, and on a number of occasions after that. His
first revision redefines Romanticism in terms of a particular kind of subject-
object relation; only in 1970 does he seem to have found a properly dialectical
solution, a discovery he credits to Hegel’s Phenomenology, a book “all students of
Romanticism . . . should read—repeatedly” (1970a: 218). See Peckham (1970b:
36–83) for two installments on Romanticism from 1964 and 1965, in which the
influence of Hegel is not yet apparent.
28
Daniel O’Hara notes that “Wordsworth’s Poetry marked the completion of a critical
redefinition of romanticism” and that the advantage of this definition is that it
allows us to see “dialectical and complex intertextual affiliations among the ‘Big
Six’” (2004: 3, 8). While I am here focusing on the remarkable achievements of
Hartman’s notion of Romanticism, it is clear that such a restriction to the “Big
Six” is an important limitation. One consequence of the claim that Hartman’s
Romanticism is decidedly more dialectical and more inclusive than Peckham’s is
that M. H. Abrams’ important Natural Supernaturalism, which was only published
in 1971, is then a step back to a more selective Romanticism. See Thorslev (1975:
564–7) for this point.
Chapter 2
1
For a recent reassessment of Derrida’s paper, see the symposium on 40 years of
“Structure, Sign, and Play” in the pages of Theory & Event (Bishop and Phillips
2009).
2
See Bové (1983: 3–5) for an overview of different versions of this continuity, and
Norris (1985: 191–7) for Paul de Man’s and Hartman’s very different positions in
this continuity. See O’Rourke (1997) for an excellent riposte to the claim that
American deconstruction constitutes a “domestication” of Derrida.
3
Even if Hartman seems to epitomize everything Lentricchia finds wanting in the
so-called Yale School, he at least avoids the equation of Hartman with “Yale
formalism” as such. In Christopher Norris’ authoritative publications on
American deconstruction, the attempt to have Hartman (together with Hillis
Miller) exemplify what he calls “deconstruction ‘on the wild side’” leads to the
fiction of an amorphous group of unidentified critics who are united by their
resemblance to Hartman, whose position is itself only defined in relation to this
gang of lookalikes: thus we read about “critics like Hartman” (1988: 162, 216),
“some, like Hartman” (213), or “those critics, like Geoffrey Hartman” (1982: 91).
This approach saves Norris the trouble of describing the specificity of Hartman’s
position and of identifying his relation to other critics.
Notes 145
4
This was already noted in one of Geoffrey Bennington’s catalogues of misreadings
of Derrida; see Bennington (1994: 49n7). See Derrida (1972b: 162–3) for another
statement from 1968 that presents the two interpretations of interpretation as
“the choice between two strategies.” Engström (1993: 199–201) discusses a
similar problem with a comparable section in the work of Lyotard.
5
See Fletcher (1972) for a patient and productive attempt to make sense of the
structure of Beyond Formalism.
6
See Angermüller (2000) for another version of the idea that Derrida’s comments
on Lévi-Strauss could be perceived “as implicitly pertinent to Frye,” a claim that
Hartman’s essays from 1966 confirm.
7
Hartman’s decision to apply a historical consciousness to structure and to treat it
as part of a phenomenological problematic comes remarkably close to the young
Edward Said’s understanding of structure in his book Beginnings (1975). Said
notes that “form, or structure, is always a difficult mixture of need, absence, loss,
and uncertain appropriation. Structure is the sign of these things—as much a
yearning for plenitude as a memorial to unceasing loss” (1975: 320). Said’s book is
a magisterial study of how different kinds of “beginnings” can allow us to address
this situation of lack, which comes very close to the way Hartman develops the
theme of the evening star, as I show in the third section of this chapter.
8
This essay was first presented at a 1966 Colloquium at Yale, which for the first
time brought J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Hartman together at Yale. This
colloquium has received nothing like the attention the Johns Hopkins Sympo-
sium has had, but the participation of these figures, and the fact that among the
work presented there were papers on Auerbach, Curtius, Lukács, and Poulet
make it a crucial moment in the intellectual history of American deconstruction.
See Miller (1966) for a reflection on the colloquium.
9
Hartman opposes the notion of ideology he uses here to Marx’s separation
between the “material life-process” and its “phantom . . . ideological reflexes and
echoes,” a separation he does not accept. He asks: “Is literature . . . the English
ideology, or is it in its own way a ‘material premise’?” (“PI” 329n22). Hartman’s
notion of ideology has less to do with the deformation of a material reality than
with poetry’s capacity to function as—in Adorno’s phrase—a “geschichtlicher
Stundenschlag,” a “philosophical sundial telling the time of history.” See Kaufman
(2000: 690–1 and 2004: 360–1) for a discussion of Hartman’s remarks here, and
the rest of Kaufman (2000) for a demonstration of how Hartman’s conception of
the relation between literature and ideology yet comes close to that propounded
in The German Ideology.
10
In an essay from 1982, Hartman opposes Blake to Wordsworth and Coleridge,
writing that “[i]n the imaginative ecology of the era Blake is on the side of super-
natural imagination . . . there is a problem of navigation, or of readerly orientation”
(“EM” 246). One year later, in a Festschrift for Northrop Frye, Hartman returns
to his criticism of Frye and Blake in a reading of Keats (“RA”).
11
See Hughes (1981: 1138–9) for good remarks on the close connection between
Hartman’s reception of Blake and his view of Frye.
12
See Terada (1993: 44–5) and Ferguson (1987: 38–9) for the career of the evening
star in literary theory.
13
For the first discussion of Coleridge in these terms, see “AS” (306–7). In the
essays written in the period under discussion here, “CS” (430–1), “DC” (172),
146 Notes
“ES,” “FR” (259), “NF” (123), “SS” (10–11), and “WL” (402) all present Coleridge
in a similar way. See “BF” (553) for a somewhat different Coleridge. In Hartman’s
later work, “The Ancient Mariner” will be revalorized because its understanding
of trauma is, for Hartman, “more realistic” than Wordsworth’s, but not therefore
to be recommended. See “HA” (168n41), “TK,” “TL” (269), and FQ (45) for this
later Coleridge.
Chapter 3
1
Hertz’s paper originally appeared in a volume of English Institute papers edited
by Hartman. See “RR” for Hartman’s acknowledged debts to Hertz. Hertz’s char-
acterization of the state of literary studies in terms of the mathematical sublime
was further popularized in the 1980s by Jonathan Culler. See Comas (2006:
27–30) for this.
2
Hertz borrows the first phrase from Kant, the second from Thomas Weiskel. Marc
Redfield has reminded us that one name for the successful sustainment of an
embodied unity in the face of the generalized disorder that characterizes
contemporary literary studies is “Harold Bloom.” See Redfield (2004: 231n23)
for the suggestion that Hertz’s essay “may be taken as, among other things, an
indirect critique of Bloom.” See Sprinker (1983: 49–54) for a comparison of the
critical postures of Hartman and Bloom.
3
Steven Helmling remarks on Fredric Jameson: “It also seems to me worth saying
that of all Jameson’s successes, among the most startling, because it is, prima facie,
the most implausible, is to have credibly and sustainably predicated ‘sublimity’ of
the postmodern in the first place” (2001: 116). I argue that Hartman was there
first. The connection between our postmodern contemporaneity and sublimity
has not always been as obvious as it has come to seem after Jameson, and, as
Helmling’s analysis makes clear, least of all for Jameson himself. It is remarkable
that in The Prison-House of Language (1972), which yet notes “a profound conso-
nance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied
nightmare which is our culture today” (ix), we find no association of structure
and sublimity.
4
The centrality of this concern in Hartman’s work makes it all the more remark-
able that his work has not had a greater impact on the field of ecocriticism,
especially in light of that field’s historical links to the study of Wordsworth. See
Simpson (1999: 258) for an earlier version of this observation. See Bate (1991: 8)
and Oerlemans (2002: 30–1) for ecocritical dismissals of Hartman’s Wordsworth
criticism. See “RM” and “WG” for Hartman’s claim that Wordsworth was “the
first eco-critic.” François (2003) is the most up-to-date claim for the ecocritical
relevance of Hartman’s Wordsworth.
5
See Goodman (2006) for an accurate review of the different installments of
Hartman’s psychoesthetics; see also O’Hara (2004: 5–6).
6
Hartman refers to Adorno to explain this distinction, and this allows us to
appreciate that Hartman’s use of the term “mimesis” to denote the “magical cor-
respondence of internal action and external effect” also derives from Adorno
(“DC” 174). In the Dialektik der Aufklärung, Adorno and Horkheimer oppose
“mimesis” to “false projection,” the difference being that between a mimetic
Notes 147
quite close to the position of Alan Liu, especially as Liu has rephrased this posi-
tion in terms that are increasingly remote from those of literary studies (see Liu
2004). Indeed, the Romanticism that connects Christensen, Liu, and Hartman
has more to do with an investment in historical experience and in the recreation
of past possibilities (Liu 2004: 378) than with a commitment to literature.
17
See also Anne-Lise François’ pertinent question to Hartman as to “the relation
between completion and supplement—how are we to distinguish the kinds of
minimally confirmatory, all but redundant acts of finalizing affirmation . . . from
potentially infinite supplementary reiterations?” (2006: 21).
18
See Atkins (1991: 90–3) for an elaboration of this idea.
19
Hartman’s refusal to complement his negotiation of Derrida’s work, especially
his deconstruction of phonocentrism, with a dismissal of the concept of voice
may seem like a self-serving inconsistency. The affirmation of voice must here be
understood in the light of Hartman’s earlier use of the “still small voice” (from
the motto of Wordsworth’s Poetry) as a marker of the persistence of the human in
the face of the (Hegelian) machine of logic. See also Stanley Cavell’s gloss on “an
intimacy and an abyss between the ambitions of the Anglo-American analytical
settlement and the new French upheavals”: “A symptom of this intimacy and
abyss is Derrida’s sense, or intuition, that the bondage to metaphysics is a function
of the promotion of something called voice over something called writing; whereas
for me it is evident that the reign of repressive philosophical systematizing—
sometimes called metaphysics, sometimes called logical analysis—has depended
on the suppression of the human voice” (1982: 17). Hartman’s adherence to
the notion of voice is much less a sign of his attachment to the “metaphysics of
presence” than an elaboration of “the fact that the appeal to the ordinary, as an
indictment of metaphysics, strikes one, and should strike one, as an appeal to
voice” (17). See the fourth chapter in Bruns (1982) for the same concern in
terms of the opposition between “systems” and “tongues.”
20
The reification of this homeopathic structure in Hartman’s project can also be
described, in a (not very) different register, as an immunization of the contagious
threat of Derrida’s pharmakon, the logic of which is sometimes described as
homeopathic (Llewelyn 1986: 39). Such a fixed relation between art and culture
will later be problematized as the question of “cultural causation.” See FQ 16n13
for Hartman’s most explicit attempt to address this issue. See de Graef (2004:
24–5) and Vermeulen (2006) for discussions of this note.
21
See CW (138–44) for a closely related juxtaposition of Smart and Derrida.
22
After all, Smart can hardly be described as a representative of Hartman’s English
canon—which is why he can be described as “a great British extracanonical poet
considered quite crazy by his contemporaries” (“HG” 347).
23
See Liu (1985) for another treatment of Hartman’s invocation of Ruskin in this
passage.
Chapter 4
1
These essays are “TC,” “BT,” “WO,” “DD,” “PR,” “UW,” and “IF”; “IF” is not
reprinted in UW. The 2009 essay “WM” provides Hartman’s most comprehensive
statement of his mature interpretation of Wordsworth.
Notes 149
2
James Strachey, the English translator of Freud’s essay, decided to translate the
German Verneinung as “negation” rather than “denial,” in order to avoid confu-
sion with the German verleugnen (Freud 1984: 438n1). As the term “negation” has
itself by now become pretty much an unmarked term in academic discourse, and as
the phenomenon Freud describes is often referred to in English as “denegation,”
I will use the term “(de)negation.” Page references are first to the German and
then to the English version of Freud’s essay.
3
See Macherey (2004) for a useful extensive contextualization of Hyppolite’s read-
ing. While Macherey correctly notes that Freud’s short text does not necessarily
invite interpretation as a full-blown theory of knowledge (an interpretation it
receives in Hyppolite’s discussion), the note in which Hartman refers to Freud’s
short essay leaves no doubt that Hartman, like Hyppolite, has entertained the
possibility of reading it in this way (“TC” 223n2). This makes it possible to see
“A Touching Compulsion” as an implicit rejoinder to the kind of interpretation
of Freud’s essay that Hyppolite offers.
4
See McQuillan (2005) for a discussion of my last quotation from Agamben in
relation to Heidegger. See De La Durantaye (2000) for the best elaboration of
Agamben’s notion of potentiality that I am aware of, which places it in relation to
the work of Paul de Man in a way that is congenial to my discussion here. See also
De La Durantaye (2009).
5
See Marshall (1987: xvii–xx) for Hartman’s different discussions of this poem in
relation to the readings of Paul de Man, F.W. Bateson, and Cleanth Brooks. The
centrality of Lucy for the different moments of Hartman’s psychoesthetics has
been remarked by Kevis Goodman (2006: 17).
6
This structure was also noted by Kenneth Johnston: “All Hartman’s exemplary
texts have the same structure of event-leading-to-elided-significance” (1981: 475).
Compare this to Donald Marshall’s quite different (and rather misguided) obser-
vation that Hartman “could be called the critic of the ‘and yet’” (1990: 97n30).
7
The most famous example of Wordsworth’s reticence in using the performative
power to wish is found in the “strangely tentative” lines “I could wish my days to
be / Bound each to each by natural piety”(see “TU” 46). One way of appreciating
the fact that Hartman’s later Wordsworth presents a vision of the whole oeuvre,
while his earlier work was concerned with Wordsworth’s poetic trajectory is by
noting that while the essential touchstones in Hartman’s earlier work were such
scenes of transition as the Simplon Pass and Snowdon-passages and the “Boy of
Winander”-passage, the later Wordsworth can much more adequately be captured
in such clichés as the binding of natural piety, “recollection in tranquility,” and
“intimations of immortality.”
8
See Rapaport (1985: 159–64) for a good discussion of this textual movement in
Hartman’s work.
9
See Warminski (2001: 22–8) for the notion of the “super-performative” in de
Man, in terms that allow the difference from Hartman to emerge clearly. For the
remarkable transitivity of the divine speech-act, consider Hartman’s comment
on a passage in Exodus where God calls on Himself: “the formal effect of the
apostrophe is to suggest that God constitutes Himself as a ‘Thou,’ renewing that
mode of address for the watchers in the cleft who will bring this very cry to the
ears of the community that repeats it in its own voice” (“JT” 107). We can phrase
this issue in terms more congenial to the philosophy of religion, rather than in
150 Notes
terms of speech-acts: what we witness here is the tension between the familiar
topos of “an originary affirmation . . . that precedes and enables any subsequent
discourse on negativity” and the (deconstructive) realization that “the conditioned”
also “conditions the condition” (De Vries 1999: 141–2).
10
See Hartman’s discussion of Jacob’s struggle with the angel in “SF” for an explicit
meditation on the connection between our relation to the specificity of the
Hebrew Bible and the belief in “a specific and authoritative act of designation”
(“SF” 84).
11
Robert Con Davis’ reading of “FC” makes a similar point (1985: 136–43 and
151–3). Davis, like Argyros and Flieger, argues that Hartman’s misreadings of
Derrida and Lacan testify to his resistance to their radical import, although his
claim that Hartman resists them in the name of “American formalism” (153)
is ultimately less compelling than Argyros and Flieger’s case for Hartman’s
adherence to “Kantian aesthetics and religious pathos” (1987: 53)—although
I also somewhat modulate that case later on in this chapter.
12
This correction of Lacan operates according to the same scenario as Hartman’s
revision of Freud’s Verneinung in his theorization of Wordsworth’s euphemism.
For another version of this scenario, see “TS,” an essay that supports its central
claim “that spirit has become textualized” by overlaying Genesis 1 with Genesis 2:
“The earlier depiction showed the spirit of God as a hovering force in the form-
less darkness,” while in the later picture, “the very art of description is friendly
and naturalistic” (“TS” 168–71).
13
See “FE” (157–8) for the claim that Lacan’s project itself strived for universality,
for “a modern Latin of the intellect.”
14
Indeed, Gershom Scholem’s essay “Walter Benjamin und sein Engel,” where
the relation between Walter Benjamin and his angel is explicitly linked to the
“Agesilaus Santander”-passage that is the cornerstone of the section concluding
Hartman’s “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection,” may well have been a deci-
sive motivation (and at the very least an inspiration) for Hartman’s revision of
Lacan (Scholem 1972).
Chapter 5
1
This section aims to locate in Hartman’s work what Ortwin de Graef has called an
“alternative supplementing both the extended family and the pathological sacri-
ficial abstraction of extreme nationalism, powered as they both are by personally
imagined sympathy” (2004: 48). De Graef’s discussion of The Fateful Question
notes that Hartman is obviously aware of the need for such a supplement to
sympathy, while he in the last analysis “refuses to abandon sympathy” and keeps
returning to Wordsworth. I argue that Wordsworth offers Hartman an experi-
ence that is rather different from sympathy, and that he both enables and limits
Hartman’s articulation of a supplement to sympathy.
2
I confront Anderson and Nancy on their own terms in Vermeulen (2009).
3
See FQ (119–20) for Hartman’s most emphatic remarks on the irrevocable
“exteriority” of “unsublime death.” See FQ (18n18) for Hartman’s understanding
of the difference between his own approach and Anderson’s.
Notes 151
4
While Nancy in The Inoperative Community fails to emphasize that literature is not
only a force that radically “un-works” community and has the capacity to offer a
definite imagining of community, see Vermeulen (2009) for some instances of
Nancy’s more nuanced approach to this problem in his later work.
5
In order to appreciate Hartman’s removal from the critical mainstream in the
1980s, consider the following two statements. In a text written in 1981, Daniel
O’Hara interprets the fact that such otherwise very different figures as Denis
Donoghue and Michael Sprinker object to Hartman’s Criticism in the Wilderness on
very similar grounds as proof that Hartman “has touched a nerve” in the founda-
tions of critical practice and that “he represents the future of the profession”
(1985: 97–101, 114). Only six years later, Donald Marshall’s foreword to The
Unremarkable Wordsworth reports the decline of Hartman’s visibility in the field
of criticism in a tone of resignation: “The appearance twenty-five years ago of
Wordsworth’s Poetry marked an epoch in the study of that poet and of romanticism
generally . . . Hartman’s essays . . . gathered here are once again revolutionary,
though their character and importance are much less likely to be perceived and
absorbed” (1987: vii).
6
This explains the oddity of Hartman’s treatment of Gianni Vattimo in Scars of the
Spirit. Hartman first sums up Vattimo’s case for a new “non-transparency” in a
transparent society in a way that makes us assume Hartman’s full agreement, only
to then take Vattimo to task for his “‘fortunate fall’ apology for the media,” that
is, for not tying this claim for non-transparency to the privilege of art (SS 145–9).
See also Michael Sprinker’s concise statement of Hartman’s politics: “Hartman is
troubled by the politics of art, though more because he fears the degradation of
art by politics than the aestheticizing of politics in the work of art” (1983: 59). For
an even-handed consideration of Sprinker’s argument against Hartman, see
Norris (1988: 205–12).
7
In the mid-1980s, Hartman coins the term “fundamentalism’”to refer to the
deliberate denial of the textuality of community. He writes that “secular funda-
mentalism” results from a failure to “acknowledge the otherness of a text” (“CC”
379–81), and that it is “a challenge to freedom of interpretation” (“AC” 87) that
scorns “both normative Rabbinic exegesis and ‘deconstructive’ literary criticism”
(“ME” 149). In Scars of the Spirit, fundamentalism is described as a failure to
“respect a phenomenological blankness or indeterminacy at the heart of things,”
which leads to an “assertive rhetoric” that “is often supported by the claim that
Scripture has a univocal kind of transparency” (SS 142–9). Unsurprisingly,
Hartman’s description of Islamic fundamentalists (in his “Epilogue” to Scars of
the Spirit entitled “9/11”) casts them as very poor readers of Wordsworth indeed:
“I find it impossible to respect a culture that in fact denies childhood . . . Or
movements that wound secular time by seeking to end it” (234).
8
See Santner (1993: 7–30) for a more elaborate account of the problems with such
a “playful nomadism” that works through an inability to mourn yet overlooks the
vital importance of a “‘good enough’ empathic environment.” See “LS” 19–20 for
autobiographical remarks on how Israel appears “as an embodied dream” yet
does not therefore restore an “organic relation to place,” and thus instantiates
the very structure of community I have been elaborating here. In the introduc-
tion to The Power of Contestation (2004), which is co-authored by Hartman and
Kevin Hart, we find an acknowledgement that in his thinking of community,
152 Notes
“Blanchot comes close to allegorizing the Jews out of history” (23). Blanchot’s
text was originally published in 1962, but it already points forward to Blanchot’s
and Nancy’s work on community in the 1980s, most directly when we read that
the “Hebrew . . . memorial of the origin . . . has nothing of the mythical about it”
(231). See Zarader (2000: 64). My critique of melancholia, Blanchot, and this
view of Judaism is indebted to the work of Gillian Rose. See Rose (1996a) for a
critique of Blanchot’s “interminable dying” and its foreclosure of the polis; Rose
(1993: ix–xi) for an unambiguous dismissal of a conception of the Jew as nomadic
other; and Rose (1996b: 77–100) for the claim that Hartman’s “reference to
Midrash as method may be distinguished from presentations of Judaism as the
sublime Other of modernity.” Rose proposes to distinguish Hartman’s Judaica
from “four other presentations of Judaism”: those of Harold Bloom, Emmanuel
Levinas, Edmond Jabès, and Jacques Derrida (83). see Brisman (2005) for
another assessment of Hartman’s take on Midrash.
9
This affinity between Said and Hartman can at least in part be traced back to
their interpretations of Auerbach’s “exile.” For a discussion of Hartman’s recep-
tion of this exile, see Vermeulen (2007b and 2007c); for Said, see Apter (2003),
Marrouchi (1991: 64–5), Mufti (1998), and Said (2004).
10
See Comas (2006: 31–41) for the argument that Said’s paper at the “Politics
of Interpretation” conference from 1981 was the crucial event that “provided
mainstream academic critics with an enunciatory position from which they
could, without professional discomfort, write political criticism.” In a review of
Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Said already remarked on what he perceived as
“examples of ethnocentrism and of studied quietism quite as bad as Camus’s” in
Hartman (1971: 940).
11
Hartman remarks that Said’s “rhetoric is appropriate to satire rather than to
critical inquiry. What is admirable in Swift and Pope is not so in this attack on
someone who seeks—like Said himself—a voice in politics” (“L” 199). Hartman
here claims for “critical inquiry” the freedom not to take a stand, a position to
which Said already objected in his review of Beyond Formalism, and against which
he invoked the example of, among others, Swift (1971: 940–2). Interestingly,
Hartman also observes the tendency to reduce a nonpartisan position to a posi-
tion of guilty partiality in the reactions to the de Man affair. For Hartman, the
prevailing reaction to de Man’s disgrace consists in a reinterpretation of the
alleged nonhumanity of de Man’s view of language, of his critique enunciated
“not from a competing ideological . . . position but from the point of view of
language itself,” as an “all too human” position (“JP” 139). Instead of maintain-
ing the obvious tension between de Man’s early and late work, these reactions
link up both parts in “a totalizing figure that claims to unify everything” (140).
Hartman’s response characteristically refused the choice between “denunciation
and defense” (147). See also IJ 80–5.
12
To add insult to Hartman’s injury, the editors of Critical Inquiry, in a commentary
to this skirmish, remark on Hartman’s “neutral criteria of propriety” that “[w]e
may hope for the elevated disinterested discourse of angels, but we have to settle
for the passionate, engaged voices of men and women in real historical situations”
(203), as if Hartman had never acknowledged that “dispassionateness . . . is not
a possibility,” and as if the compatibility of historical situatedness and the hope
Notes 153
work of mourning” and hold the capacity to retraumatize, and thus to connect
the second generation to the first (2001: 13, 28). See “HA” (153–7 and 165n10)
for Hartman’s most explicit refusal of strategies of secondary traumatization.
18
This emphasis on the way in which knowledge can be assimilated to experience,
rather than with epistemological issues per se, can be seen as a belated answer to
the question Hartman had raised on the very first pages of The Unmediated Vision—
the question of how literature can be a distinctive kind of knowledge. Only
in 1995 will Hartman advertise this move “from epistemological baffles to an
underconsciousness deeply involved in story, speech act, and symbolic process”
as a specifically literary kind of knowledge (“TK” 545). For the most explicit
knowledge-claim on behalf of literature, see “BS” (5–7) on “a specifically literary
coming-to-knowledge” that “is an energy as well as a form of knowledge.” See the
remarks on “knowing well” in “WE” (40–1) for the repetition of this claim in
the name of Wordsworth. Jones (1993) locates Hartman’s refusal to “produce
knowledge” in his different readings of Lucy in the reception history of the
Lucy Poems and in the development of the profession. The cognitive bias of
Hartman’s earliest work is noted in Elam (1996) and Bruns (2005). For Hartman’s
abdication from epistemological issues, see Frances Ferguson’s brilliant sketch
of Wordsworth’s Poetry. Ferguson identifies Hartman’s method as a form of phe-
nomenology that epistemologizes ontology only to arrive at “the renunciation of
claims of knowledge” (1991: 487–90).
19
In the traditional mimetic logic of aesthetic ideology, the “‘type’ functions in a rhe-
torical capacity as a prefiguration of its own fuller realization” (Redfield 1999: 25).
In such a mimetic community, “[t]he formation or fiction of the polis . . . is the
mimesis and the fulfillment of nature” (23). As I noted before, the revised sense
of mimesis does not consider culture as the fulfillment of an incomplete nature.
See Anne-Lise François’ gloss on Hartman’s concept of nature: “the figure of
‘Nature,’ when it appears here and elsewhere in Hartman’s work, is not the name
for that which is to be conserved or saved from destruction at the hands of humans,
but on the contrary a trope or figure for a saving act of disappearance . . . such that
discontinuity may occur with the minimum of rupture, or conversely, continuity
itself . . . appear a minor miracle” (2006: 21).
20
Hartman’s occasional suggestions that every culture that is “purely affirmative in
its ideology . . . is simply not yet expansionist or domineering” (FQ 10), which
easily lead to the conclusion that for Hartman “[m]ulticulturalism is reduced to
a form of tribalism implicitly analogous to Nazi philosophy” (Goffman 1998:
1068; also Foley 1985: 115–18), always need to be read against the background
of the cultural condition that incites such pure affirmation in the first place:
“because there are so many of these cultures and subcultures . . . no single culture
will be secure enough to give up identity politics . . .” (FQ 148). See SS 197
and 198 for two concise statements of the dialectic of cultural retrieval and
compensatory affirmation.
21
See FQ 177 for a restatement of the same issues in terms of culture: “political
idealism—what is left of it—has taken refuge in a representation of culture: culture
as a collective and destined form of identity. Unfortunately, this development not
only sins against the inner dynamics of culture, its creative and unpredictable
potential, but allows cultural issues to become a political pawn in the ethnic wars
besetting nation-states.”
Notes 155
22
Which is not to say that Hartman’s challenge was not met by a counterassertion
of American isolationism. Such a strengthening of one nation under God—a
God which is decidedly not Hartman’s—is especially glaring in Helen Vendler’s
review of Criticism in the Wilderness. Vendler’s essay consistently tropes the book as
a merely annoying outsider-report on “our” institutions. It is the markers that
define Hartman’s outsider-status that tell most about the critical scene Hartman
is intervening in, when Vendler describes the book as “a passionate essay on
American culture by a foreigner (Hartman is German-born, and teaches com-
parative literature at Yale)” (1988: 42). A comparison with Edward Alexander’s
attack on Said is instructive. See note 14 above.
23
Donald Marshall comes close to formulating this question when he writes that
Wordsworth “makes the language of poetry continuous with the prose of the
world,” and yet “[t]he transfer of Wordsworth’s spirit to prose is one step in the
forging of an Arnoldian critical tradition which Hartman . . . began to break
open in the fifties” (1990: 83–4). Paul Fry writes about the “inverted circum-
stances” whereby in our twentieth century, “the inferior lights of Wordsworth
must be welcomed as antidotes to the inflammations of the times” (2006: 26).
24
If only because, in Michael Sprinker’s memorable description, this essay
“affords the curious spectacle of a mind in the act of replicating itself in
another” (1980: 228).
25
For Michael Sprinker’s objections to Hartman’s self-professed materialism here,
see Sprinker (1983: 58–62).
Coda
1
The centrality of Adorno in The Fateful Question is noted in reviews by Terry
Eagleton and David Simpson (Eagleton 1998; Simpson 1999). Still, Hartman on
two occasions locates the limitations of Adorno’s work in the fact that “he has
little to say about the romantic reaction” (FQ 17n15, 97n48).
2
See, apart from the introduction to The Power of Contestation, which is co-written
by Hartman and Kevin Hart, “FS,” “HH,” “SL,” “WN,” “WT,” and, of course, FQ.
3
Kaufman (2005) drew my attention to this passage in Brecht. I am partly drawing
on Kaufman’s excellent discussion of it.
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Heidegger, Martin 12, 15–17, 19, 28, 44, 58, imagination 3, 4, 23–4
111, 139n2, 139n6, 142n19, 149n4 dialectical relation to nature 5–6, 28,
on individuation 28–9, 90 30–3, 35, 36–7, 46, 94, 131, 139n5,
and Rainer Maria Rilke 15–17 142n18, 142–3n20
on Verborgenheit 15–16 and memory 107–8, 112, 132
and Wordsworth 27, 28–31, 32, 90, and reason 26–7, 64–6, 69–71, 147n10
143n21 immanence 10, 14
hermeneutics 52, 54, 64, 69–70, 125, and community 105–6, 112
140n11, 147n12 in Erich Auerbach 21–2, 24–5
Hertz, Neil 64–5, 146n1, 146n2 see also transcendence
Hirsch, E.D. 50 immediacy 10–12, 17–18, 22, 57, 117, 133,
Hirsch, Marianne 119, 120, 153–4n17 135–6
historicity 18–19, 20, 42, 101 impotentiality
history see potentiality
literature and historical incremental redundance
experience 17–26, 72–5 in “Tintern Abbey” 12–14, 139n4
Hölderlin 69 indeterminacy 54, 56, 107, 116, 133, 137,
Holocaust 4, 78 142n20, 151n7
and aesthetic mediation 101, 106–7, 109, individuation 27, 28–30, 32, 78, 80, 88, 90,
115–22, 134–5 142n18, 143n22
and belatedness 120–1 interpretation 32, 50–1, 53–5, 76, 108,
and England 5–6, 37–8, 135–6 151n7
and Jewish identity 111, 115 and expression 18, 19–20, 22, 24
and Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg Hartman’s early theory of 9–10, 12, 17
Cemetery 121–2 and indeterminacy 54–5, 90–1, 111–12
and Wordsworth 83–4, 116, 133–6 of poetry 33–4, 66–72
see also video testimony two interpretations of interpretation 40–4
homeopathy 81, 116, 148n20 see also Midrash; typology
hope 21, 32, 33–4, 92, 121, 132, 142n19 intertextuality 24–6, 29, 32, 95–6, 144n28
in Martin Heidegger 44, 58 Intifada, First 111, 113
in Walter Benjamin 128–9 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 113–15, 122
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 8, 11, 16
Horowitz, Gregg 77–8 James, Henry 51
Huhn, Tom 74–5, 94 Jameson, Fredric 146n3
humanism 19, 44, 54, 58, 79, 80, 107 Jarvis, Simon 147n9
and animals 71–2 Jewish identity 4, 107, 110–15, 116, 118,
and antihumanism 10, 42, 69, 141n14, 141n15
142–3n20 Johns Hopkins conference, 1966 39
and G.W.F. Hegel 10, 69–72, 147n10 Jacques Derrida’s contribution to 40–4,
Hyppolite, Jean 144n1
on denegation (Verneinung) 88–90, 93, Johnson, Barbara 143n23
149n3 Johnston, Kenneth 143–4n25, 149n6
Logic and Existence 10, 139n2
Kant, Immanuel 15, 64–5, 68–9, 74, 146n2,
identity politics 115, 122–3, 132, 154n20, 150n11
154n21 Kaufman, Robert 101, 136, 145n9, 155n3
ideology 110, 114, 122, 123, 152n11, 154n20 Keats, John 55–6, 58, 59
aesthetic ideology 3, 100–4, 106, 107, 108, compared to Wordsworth 56
121–2, 151n6, 154n19 knowledge 127, 132, 143n24, 149n3
English ideology 9, 34–5, 36–8, 40, 52, absolute knowledge 10–11, 18, 139n2
55–7 literature as a form of 9–11, 19, 34, 15, 61,
and Karl Marx 145n9 72, 110, 154n18
Index 179
narrative 27, 49, 142n20 and loss 87, 89, 99, 125, 133
nature 12–17, 85–7, 89–92, 94, 129–30, 133 in Walter Benjamin 109–10, 121, 128
and culture 154n19 Poulet, Georges 3, 40, 50–1, 145n8
dialectical relation to the problematics
imagination 5–6, 28, 30–3, 35, 36–7, 46, as a form of literary history 18
94, 131, 139n5, 142n18, 142–3n20 psychoanalysis 84–5, 87, 93, 96–7
and intertextuality 24–6, 37, 141n17 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques;
natural process (natura naturans) 14–17, Lewin, Bertram; psychoesthetics
30–3, 54, 139n5, 142n18, 142n19, psychoesthetics 64–5, 72, 74–5, 79, 80, 84–6,
142–3n20, 154n19 146n5, 149n5
New Criticism 3, 40, 41, 50–1 and I.A. Richards 64, 80, 84
and Matthew Arnold 124–5
New Historicism 73 Rajan, Tilottama 10, 43–4, 142–3n20
Newlyn, Lucy 143n22 Reagan, Ronald 121–2
Nietzsche, Friedrich realism 19–23, 24, 83–4, 119, 128,
Nietzschean affirmation 41, 42, 43, 44, 58, 81 139–40n8, 140n13–4
nonhuman, the 9–10, 152n11 Redfield, Marc 2, 103–4, 142–3n20, 146n2,
Norris, Christopher 144n2, 144n3, 151n6 154n19
nostalgia religion 17, 35, 70, 94–5, 96–9, 135, 141n16,
and the Holocaust 9, 83, 120, 133, 136 149–50n9, 150n11
as a response to the end of metaphysics 1, representation 17, 19, 51, 78–82, 106,
41–4, 48, 54, 58, 64, 73, 147n14 1 154n21
in Christopher Smart 80–2
O’Hara, Daniel 144n28, 146n5, 151n5 of the Holocaust 116–22
ontology 22, 29–30, 44, 49, 51, 53, 54, 93, and presentation 78–80
102, 154n18 in Wordsworth 86, 89–90, 93, 94
see also aesthetics; mimesis
pathetic fallacy 66, 67, 147n8 restitution 34, 122–3
Peckham, Morse 35–6, 144n26, 144n27, retraumatization
144n28 see secondary trauma under trauma
pedagogy 27, 54, 60, 123 Richards, I.A. 64–5, 80, 84
Pfau, Thomas 29–30 Riefenstahl, Leni 153n14
phenomenology 45, 145n7 Riffaterre, Michael 76–8
phenomenological vision 11, 13, 14 Rilke, Rainer Maria 8, 11, 12, 14–17, 27, 28
and (post)structuralism 43–4 and Martin Heidegger 15–17
see also The Phenomenology of Spirit under Romanticism 2, 6, 8, 9, 29, 125, 141n17,
Hegel, G.W.F. 155n1
poetry and anti-self-consciousness 35–6, 125
compared to prose 21–6 critical misrecognition of 124–5
as a privileged genre 6, 11, 17–20, 47–8, and England 22, 34–8, 60
54, 59, 61, 67–74, 136–7 as a form of memory 2, 4, 136–7,
postmemory 119 147–8n16
postmodernity 1, 3, 4, 122–3, 125, 146n3, in France 62–3, 64
147n14 theories of 35–6, 144n26, 144n27, 144n28
and loss 72–4, 84, 85 and Wordsworth 36–7
poststructuralism 4, 41, 101 Rose, Gillian 113, 151–2n8
and deconstruction 43–4 Roth, Michael 139n2
and phenomenology 43–4 Ruskin, John 82, 148n23
potentiality
and actuality 1, 2, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 90, 92, sacrifice 59, 89, 111, 122, 123, 131
95, 99, 102, 106, 107, 110, 112, 128, 131, and akedah 33–4
133, 134, 135, 137 of the imagination 65–6, 68, 69, 74, 78
in Giorgio Agamben 86–7, 90, 121, 149n4 see also akedah; mimesis
Index 181
Said, Edward 110, 152n9, 152n10, 155n22 theology 16, 53, 54, 96, 98, 134, 139–40n8,
Beginnings 113, 145n7 153n16
discussion with Hartman 113–15, 122, transcendence 92, 54
152n11, 153n13 and descendentalism 58
Santner, Eric 100–1, 151n8 in Hartman’s early work 11–14, 15, 17, 20,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 141n14 21, 22, 26, 40
Scholem, Gershom 150n14 and semi-transcendence 47–8, 52, 54–6
Shakespeare, William 22, 37, 96, 109 see also immanence
Simpson, David 146n4, 155n1 transparency 73, 151n6, 151n7
Smart, Cristopher 44, 79, 80–2, 148n22 trauma 32, 101, 102, 106, 107
compared to Jacques Derrida 81–2, 148n21 Hartman’s rhetoric of 5, 6–7, 29–30, 32–4
solitude 28–9, 143n24 and redemption 33–4
specular name 96–8, 99 secondary trauma 106, 113, 118–20,
and Jacques Lacan 96–8, 150n14 128–9, 145–6n13, 153–4n17
and Walter Benjamin 97–8, 150n14 untraumatic continuity in Wordsworth 5,
speech-acts 80, 94–8, 149–50n9 6, 33–4, 36, 37–8, 90
divine speech-act 94–6 see also loss
and the specular name 97 Trilling, Lionel 153n13
Spenser, Edmund 22, 37, 60 typology 20, 140n11, 154n19
Spielberg, Steven 118–19, 153n14, 153n15
Sprinker, Michael 143n22, 146n2, 151n5, undeadness 85–7
151n6, 155n24, 155n25
star Valéry, Paul 8, 11, 16
see evening star Vattimo, Gianni 151n6
Stevens, Wallace Vendler, Helen 155n22
“The Snow Man” 66–8, 75, 81, 147n8, Verneinung
147n12 see denegation (Verneinung)
Strachey, James 149n2 video testimony 4, 101, 106, 107, 109,
structuralism 3, 54, 59 115–21
in America 40–1, 43–4 compared to Schindler’s List and
and Anglo-American criticism 39–40, Shoah 118–19
48–50 and Fortunoff Video Archive for
Jacques Derrida on 41–3, 45, 48, 145n6 Holocaust Testimonies 4, 115,
and Northrop Frye 45, 53, 57, 145n6 116, 117
and phenomenology 43–4 relation to Wordsworth 116–17
sublation Virgil 21, 57
see Aufhebung (Hegel); elation voice 79, 95–6, 106, 117, 128, 142–3n20,
sublime, the 56, 58, 64–6, 70, 80, 134, 148n16
147n10
mathematical sublime (Kant) 64–5, 68–9, Wandering Jew, the 35, 113
74, 146n1 Warminski, Andrzej 68, 149n9
substitution, logic of 33–4, 42 Weiskel, Thomas 65, 146n2
and mimesis 74–5, 76, 78 Wellek, René 35–6, 144n26
and mourning 74–5, 100 winter 57
supernatural 23, 27, 35, 53, 141n15, 145n10 and Martin Heidegger 14–16
and Wallace Stevens 66
Taylor, Mark 140n11 wishing 25, 66–7, 77, 94–5, 149n7
television 115–17, 118, 125 Wohlfarth, Irving 139n7, 139–40n8
testimony Woolf, Virginia 21, 23–6, 140–1n13, 147n7
see video testimony To the Lighthouse 26
textuality 91, 95, 96, 150n12 Wordsworth, William
and community 112, 151n7 “The Boy of Winander” 34, 129,
see also intertextuality 142–3n20, 149n7
182 Index