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Aesthetics and Poetics from Kant to Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan Jacob

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Aesthetics and Poetics from Kant to Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan Jacob TO REVERSAL: AESTHETICS AND POETICS FROM KANT TO ADORNO, BLANCHOT, AND CELAN JACOB MCGUINN Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Statement of originality I, Jacob McGuinn, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third part’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the college has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signed: Jacob McGuinn Date: 7th August, 2017 Details of collaboration and publications: N/A Abstract This thesis reads radical indeterminacy into the reflective judgements of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement through points of connection between Kant’s aesthetics and the philosophies and writing of Theodor Adorno and Maurice Blanchot. These re-situate the ‘ends’ of Kantian aesthetics in the historical situation of the 1960s and 1970s. In turn, this historicising of Kantian aesthetics reinterprets its original content. Such double reading – from Kant forwards, and back to Kant – is configured through what I call ‘reversal’: the indeterminacy of aesthetic reflection calls for a reverse ‘reading’ of itself which is not self-defeatingly determined by the aesthetic. Kant thus gives us the vocabulary for re-reading his aesthetics of reflection, and from this other indeterminacies of reflection, despite his attempt to organise and explain reflective relations through consistently with philosophical form through judgement. To read Kant outside his or any philosophy’s economy, the task demanded by Adorno’s theory and Blanchot’s writing, asks for poetic readers and writers such as their near- contemporary, Paul Celan. They understand Celan’s poetry as making legible how Kant’s aesthetic might be thought reflectively, thus showing that the indeterminacy Kant attributes to reflection can be aesthetically experienced without being effaced by the philosophical judgement implying that indeterminacy. This turn back, the turn of verse, forms the hinge between Adorno’s and Blanchot’s dialectical and political thinking, allowing the common sense, the un-institutionalised ‘we’ Kant thinks ratifies aesthetic judgement, to remain negative or ‘unavowable’. Aesthetics still structures the reading of poetry, but such poetry makes the indeterminate implications of Kantian aesthetics legible. ‘Disconnection’ becomes the organising principle for reflection and politics, implied by but now freed from aesthetic judgement, made visible by a poetry of ‘reversal’. We conclude by finding the development of these ideas in two major elegists of Celan, Geoffrey Hill and Jeremy Prynne. Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...……………………………………………………………….………..1 INTRODUCTION Indeterminate Aesthetics, aesthetic indeterminacy …………………………………………………2 1. Aesthetics of indeterminacy ………..…..……………………………………………………...2 2. Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno and Blanchot …...…………………………………………..10 3. From aesthetics to poetics ………………………………….………….……………………...15 CHAPTER ONE On Reversal: Kant, Hegel, and reflection in aesthetics …………………………...……………….25 1. Not Hegel: Hegel, Kant, and negativity ……………………………………………….……...26 2. On reversal: Kant’s aesthetic and teleology of reflection and reflecting judgement ................ 38 3. Reversal again: indeterminacy, figurability, and poetry ……………………………………...52 4. On method ……………………………………………………………………………………57 CHAPTER TWO Saying We: community from aesthetics to exile ………………………………………….………..62 1. Framing community: May ’68, politics, and history …………………………………………66 2. No-man’s land: judgement from Kant to Adorno …………………………………………….68 3. The ‘unavowable’ common sense: community from Blanchot to Kant ……………………....81 4. Celan, exile, disorientation …………………………………………………………………...96 CHAPTER THREE Towards a non-transcendent aesthetic: dialogue, presence, dialectic …………………………...115 1. Dialogue to dialectics ……………………………………………………………………….116 2. Blanchot – the fragmented present of writing between le pas au-delà and désastre ……….131 3. Adorno – ‘progressive impossibility’: meaning and the future from Negative Dialectics to Aesthetic Theory …………………………………………………………………………….152 CHAPTER FOUR The figure of snow: Celan, elegy, aesthetics ………………………………...……………………..174 1. Celan and figuration …………………………………………………………………..…….175 2. Over and over: the elegiac aesthetic …………………………………………………………199 CONCLUSION The necessity of indeterminacy: from aesthetics to politics ………………………………………221 APPENDIX: Poems………………………………………………..………………………………..232 APPENDIX: Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………………..240 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………………….241 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I want to thank my supervisor, Paul Hamilton, without whom this thesis would not have been conceived, let alone completed. His generous reading, and his generous support, have been invaluable, as has his advice throughout. I could not have done without either his understanding or his consideration – or his humour. Mark Currie’s timely interventions have been likewise invaluable, prompting me into directions I had not envisaged. Anything of value here is due, no doubt, to them. I am wholly grateful for the support of friends and colleagues in the English department at Queen Mary – and beyond: Joel Grossman, Hetta Howes, Ivan Juritz, Rosie Langridge, Martha McGuinn, Lily Parrott, Anna Robin, Sophie Seita, Laura Staab, Calum Watt, David Wylot – for conversation. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And lastly, I am always grateful to my family, for love, and to my father, my first teacher, for our ongoing conversation. 1 INTRODUCTION Aesthetic indeterminacy, indeterminate aesthetics But no commentaries! Poetry first (then France, Germany etc. later!) Paul Celan to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange In this introduction, I firstly give an account of my reading of Kant’s aesthetic, and the turn to Adorno and Blanchot required to undertake this reading. I establish the concepts and terms I will address in the thesis: indeterminacy and reflection. I secondly frame in greater detail the critical intervention of reading, firstly, Adorno and Blanchot in the context of Kantian aesthetics, and secondly, Adorno and Blanchot together in their historical situation. Finally, I give an account of the relation between these questions and poetry, and show that their ‘reversal’ of Kant needs poetry for its full articulation, as demonstrated with especial historical aptness by Celan. 1 – Aesthetics of indeterminacy Determining the aesthetic: reflection and reflective experience ‘Aesthetics’ is the part of philosophy that thinks about experiences of beauty (and a range of other ‘aesthetic’ experiences and features), in nature and art. But the scope of this definition is inherently expansive. Does aesthetics concern the experience of beauty, or the features of an object that let us judge it to be beautiful? And why should aesthetics only measure ‘beauty’ – surely aesthetic experience leads to a host of possible judgements other than just ‘beauty’? And what, indeed, would an aesthetic judgement signify? Would it refer to the judger’s experience, or to the features of an object, and would such reference ‘mean’ something in the same way that other philosophically delineated judgements do? Does saying that something is ‘beautiful’ make the same conceptual impression on an experience/object as scientific judgements? To say, ‘this is a tree’ is more determinate than to say, ‘this tree is beautiful 2 (to me)’. What, indeed, does ‘beautiful’ mean, and is its validity conceptually, and therefore universally, grounded? I think that we can resolve this expansiveness of aesthetics not by finding a correct determination of what aesthetics is, or of how it functions, but by characterising its ‘expansiveness’ itself, its resistance to determination. The difficulty in defining aesthetics derives from the ‘reflective’ experience it thinks. Difficulty in definition, and in determination, is precisely what, for Kant at least, provokes aesthetic reflection. And my questions here are likewise reflective, in the sense that they do not refer to concepts but instead require singular, and reflexive, consideration. Each of these questions is ‘bent back’ upon itself (to invoke the etymology of reflection), and thereby turns back upon the conditions of asking, and thinking, them. To say that something is beautiful requires us to think about what saying that means, and not merely to decide whether that judgement is correct or not. And whether we are concerned with the features of the experience of beauty, or with the features of a beautiful object, we are pressed to measure the relation between subject and object: the features of an object are only beautiful when experienced, and the features of experience are shaped and constituted by the features of the object being experienced. The formal
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