THE OF CONTEMPORARY THEORY

The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory Institution, ,

Justin Clemens

Studies in European Cultural Transition

Volume Seventeen

General Editors: Martin Stannard and Greg Walker

~~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Clemens, Justin The romanticism of contemporary theory : institution, aesthetics, nihilism. - (Studies in European cultural transition) 1. Romanticism 2. Theory (Philosophy) 3. Literature (Theory) I. Title 809 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clemens, Justin The romanticism of contemporary theory : institution, aesthetics, nihilism/ Justin Clemens p. em. -- (Studies in European cultural transition) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7546-0875-1 (alk. paper) 1. Criticism--History--20th century. 2. Romanticism. I. Title. II. Series.

PN94 .C59 2003 801 '.95'0904--dc21 2002074718 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0875-2 (hbk) Contents

General Editors' Preface vi Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Embryonic Remains viii

Part I Contexts

The Institution of Romanticism 3

2 Universal Anaesthesia 40

3 Nihilism, Aesthetics, and Institutions 71

Part II Interventions

4 Sex, Formalization, and Jacques Lacan 113

5 Aesthetic Multiplicity in the Work ofDeleuze and Guattari 133

6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and the Family Romance of Queer Theory 154

7 Cultural Studies, Cultural Policy, and the Professed Anti-Romanticism oflan Hunter 170

8 , or; From the Sublime to the Infinite 192

Index 216 General Editors' Preface

The European dimension of research in the humanities has come into sharp focus over recent years, producing scholarship which ranges across disciplines and national boundaries. Until now there has been no major channel for such work. This series aims to provide one, and to unite the fields of cultural studies and traditional scholarship. It will publish the most exciting new writing in areas such as European history and literature, art history, archaeology, language and translation studies, political, cultural and gay studies, music, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The emphasis will be explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity of cultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues of cultural transition. Martin Stannard Greg Walker University of Leicester Acknowledgments

Following Friedrich Nietzsche's remarks in The Genealogy of Morals, it is tempting to identify the true ends of pedagogical practices with the corporeal transformations effected by disciplinary violence, rather than with the acquired 'capacity' and 'knowledges' that are supposedly the point of the whole procedure. Nietzsche's dictum that 'only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory' mingles here with his countervailing remark that 'that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts' - suggesting the pain inflicted by the internalized dead lives on, dissimulated but indestructible, in the ascetic practices of scholarly work. It is for their indispensable aid in my acquisition of such undead figures that I would like to thank the following people: Bridget Bainbridge, Geoff Boucher, Jonathan Carter, Benedict Clemens, Ruth Clemens, Susan Cohn, Bridget Costelloe, Catherine Dale, , Rachel Hughes, Liam Leonard, David Odell, George Papaellinas, and Dominic Pettman. I must thank Christopher Feik in particular, who not only painstakingly read and reread various drafts of this book, but whose suggestions and intellectual input were critical to its elaboration and completion. I would also like to thank Phil Hunter for his conversations and for his paintings: one of his images, Ghost Paddock II, is reproduced on the front cover of this book. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues at Deakin University for their continued advice and support, particularly Brian Edwards, Ann McCulloch, David McCooey, Michael Meehan, Jeanette Shirley, David Turnbull, David Walker, and Ian Weeks. Russell Grigg has been especially helpful, and commented extensively upon an earlier version ofChapter Eight. This book began as a doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne, under the supervision ofDavid Bennett and Simon During. If it has been transformed, at points, radically, this is due in part to the comments and encouragement of my examiners, J. Hillis Miller and Frances Ferguson- for which I am extremely grateful. Finally, I would like to thank the staff at Ashgate Publishing for their professional support, especially Erika Gafthey and Jacqui Cornish. I am also grateful for the excellent copy-editing of Lindsey Brake. Earlier versions of Chapters Four, Five, and Seven-now substantially revised and at points unrecognizable- first appeared in, respectively, Umbr(a) 1 (1996); Antithesis 8:2 (1997); and The UTSReview4: 1 (1998).Asection of Chapter Three was rewritten as a collaborative piece with Chris Feik, and appeared as 'Nihilism Tonight .. .', inK. Ansell Pearson and D. Morgan, eds, Nihilism Now! Monsters ofEnergy (London: Macmillan, 2000). I am grateful to Andras Berkes-Brandl for permission to quote from the John Forbes' poems from Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl and Schlesinger, 1998) reproduced here; and to the University of Queensland Press for permission to quote from Andrew Taylor's 'Travelling to Gleis-Binario', from Selected Poems I960-I985 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988). Introduction: The Embryonic Remains

A man who is after the truth sets out to be a man of learning; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity sets out, perhaps, to be [an artist], but what is a man to do who is after something that lies between. Robert Musil1

It is undoubtedly more instructive to write with regard to that which we do not want to be at any price than under the suspect image of that which we desire to become. Alain Badiou2

The central contention ofthis book can be stated very simply indeed: contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic -despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought. The simplicity of this contention is, ofcourse, only apparent. For it immediately poses such questions as: what is meant by 'contemporary theory'? What is meant by 'Romanticism'? How are these fields, tendencies, or movements to be delimited and analysed? Is Romanticism a primarily historical or theoretical determination? What other topics and evidence have to be introduced in support of such an argument? What does 'essentially' mean here? What theoretical tools are available for such a project? What status do they themselves have? What are the stakes involved in making such a claim? Whence the (intellectual or persuasive )force of designating such vast and intractable fields as 'Romantic'? If, as I maintain, these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered other than by working through my argument in its entirety, it is evidently still necessary to begin by defining terms, outlining a methodology, and providing justifications, no matter how introductory or provisional. My argument is that Romantic theory continually reproduces and proliferates itself in a regulated circulation between three insistent and uncircumventable 'problems'. These problems are very familiar ones today. They are the problem of the university; the problem of nihilism; the problem of aesthetics. For reasons that will become clearer as my argument unfolds, these could also be usefully rephrased as the aporia ofRomanticism 's institution; the aporia ofits self-diagnosis; the aporia of its proposed solution. To shift vocabulary momentarily, it might also be said that these three problems are the 'environment' into which theoretical Romanticism finds itself thrown, and which-by way of an incessant proliferation

1 R. Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Volume I, trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (New York: Capricorn, 1965), p. 302. 2 A. Badiou, Theorie du Sujet (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 13. My translation. INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS ix ofthemes, theoretical procedures, and zones ofengagement- it ceaselessly attempts to master, without ever being able to do so. In its necessary failure to master its environment, Romanticism tries to transvalue this failure as its own singular success. Romanticism, however, recognizing the insufficiency of the attempted transvaluation, then plunges itself back into the triple torments of its environment - whence the impossible cycle begins again. Ifthe content ofthis book is disproportionately restricted to the analysis ofmajor theoretical texts- from Immanuel Kant through Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou - the story that I am telling remains emblematically Romantic, in a wider sense. Indeed, it might be suggested that it is poets who ultimately authorize the denomination of the system I describe as 'Romantic'. One of the relevant texts, William Wordsworth's, is short enough to be given in its entirety here: Lines WRITTEN WITH A SLATE-PENCIL UPON A STONE, THE LARGEST OF A HEAP LYING NEAR A DESERTED QUARRY, UPON ONE OF THE ISLANDS AT RYDALE. Stranger! this hillock of misshapen stones Is not a ruin of the ancient time, Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the Cairn Of some old British Chief; 'tis nothing more Than the rude embryo of a little dome Or pleasure-house, which was to have been built Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle. But, as it chanc'd, Sir William having leam'd That from the shore a full-grown man might wade And make himself a freeman of this spot At any hour he chose, the Knight forthwith Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments of his unfinish'd task.- The block on which these lines are trac'd, perhaps, Was once selected as the corner-stone Of the intended pile, which would have been Some quaint odd play-thing of elaborate skill, So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush, And other little builders who dwell here, Had wonder'd at the work. But blame him not, For old Sir William was a gentle Knight Bred in this vale to which he appertain'd With all his ancestry. Then peace to him And for the outrage which he had devis' d Entire forgiveness.- But if thou art one On fire with thy impatience to become An Inmate of these mountains, if disturb' d By beautiful conceptions, thou hast hewn Out of the quiet rock the elements Of thy trim mansion destin'd soon to blaze X INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS

In snow-white splendour, think again, and taught By old Sir William and his quarry, leave Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose, There Jet the vernal slow-worm sun himself, And Jet the red-breast hop from stone to stone. 3

Wordsworth's poem presents a number of emblematic Romantic motifs: ambiguous ruins, the figure ofthe traveller, solitude, failure and despair. These are introduced from the beginning by the call, 'Stranger!' The mode of address is an imperative, at once universal (it does not specifY anyone in terms ofsocial hierarchy, profession, or gender) and singular (the narrator later adds 'if thou art one ...'). The very interpellation 'Stranger!' immediately renders the implied reader that singular universal. As it turns out, if the implied reader of the lines had in fact come to the place that the title and the mise-en-scene describe, then that reader must be, by definition, a stranger: the 'rocky isle' is uninhabitable, and the true master of the place is dead. The address, furthermore, evidently constitutes a warning. But of what? As the slogan from a notorious Australian police campaign aimed at schoolchildren once memorably put it: 'Stranger? Danger!' Wordsworth's poem says much the same thing, if more or less economically. There is danger for the stranger, yet the stranger is him- or herself a danger. But what kind of danger? At the most basic level, the danger is that of the stranger's own confusion or delusion: 'this hillock of misshapen stones/Is not a ruin of the ancient time ... '. The warning is a warning against misrecognizing the stones as remains from a distant and heroic human past. Such a misrecognition would be tantamount to an illicit aestheticization. The inscription at once interdicts the rash aestheticisation oftemporal distance, and yet presumes that such an aestheticization is natural, even inevitable. As a stranger could know no better, these lines have been scribbled on the biggest stone as a kind of public service announcement. Read them closely, for they will save you from yourself ... The poem continues in this relentlessly de-idealizing fashion. Not only are the misshapen stones not heroic ruins, but they were intended as the materials for a recently planned folly. And not only has this folly not fallen down, but it was never built. The folly seems to have been planned as a hereditary knight's rather degenerate attempt at solitary enjoyment of his property. The knight, however, realizing that his attempt was doomed to failure - any adult male stranger might come to the place, day or night- abandoned his project before it was truly begun. The irony of the situation should not be underestimated. Sir William, seeking to ornament for his own delight 'this vale to which he appertained/With all his ancestry', would,

3 W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 189-90. The poem first appeared in the 1800 reprint ofLyrical Ballads. My reading here owes much to the superb interpretation given by Cynthia Chase, 'Monument and Inscription: Wordsworth's "Lines'", Diacritics XVII: 4 (1987), pp. 66-77. INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS xi in the very completion of his project, thereby attract and admit others to the spot he desired to enjoy alone. Furthermore, for Sir William to even have contemplated such a deed he had already breached the very tradition that gave him the right to do so. Neither a good hereditary aristocrat nor a good capitalist, the knight had become a stranger to the lands that were nominally his. It seems that he did not, for instance, even realize that his island was a false island, that the water that appeared to separate and isolate it from the mainland was in fact a dissimulated bridge. A stranger need not submit to either John or Charon, belief or money, rebirth or death, to traverse these open waters. The lines 'Then peace to him', following as they do immediately after 'With all his ancestry', suggest that Sir William's quarrying directly spelled his death. The 'quarry and the mound' are indeed 'monuments', not just of the failure of the rather stateless pleasure-dome, but of Sir William's life itself. The graffiti scribbled in slate-pencil upon the cornerstone ('perhaps') of the knight's unaccomplished folly thus constitutes both a mocking epigraph and a profanation of the dead. The writer of the lines - despite the anxiously dismissive and patronizing tone -is not, however, altogether convinced ofthe lack ofvalue of Sir William's project. On the one hand, and at best, it seems that the edifice would only have been a 'little dome', 'some quaint odd play-thing'. At worst, it would have been an 'outrage' (I will come back to this). On the other hand, there is still (an apparently) reluctant admiration on the part of the writer for the 'elaborate skill' that would no doubt have been involved in its making. Elaborate enough, that is, to impress the little avian builders of the locality. Wordsworth cannot make the irony here too sharp, for it would vitiate the assault on his real target. After all, the irremediable failure of Sir William provides a valuable moral lesson for the stranger: sacrifice your own 'beautiful conceptions' upon the mortifYing altar of these miserable fragments! Abandon your dreams, otherwise they will no longer be yours! The paradox of aesthetic imagination severs the knight from natural homeostasis; at the end, the birds and the worms, the bramble and the rose, will reassert the eternal and inhuman democracy of nature. The Knight's failure denotes the failure of human sovereignty. Setting himself against nature, his own ancestry, and the human community (not to mention the canons of good taste), Sir William tries to carve out of nature a site that is his alone, and thereby impose his values on the world. But his self-affirming values are vain and self-negating; their institution would be their destruction; mercifully abandoned, the ruins of his impotent imagination come to resemble the heroic ruins of real earthly power; the lines command that this false resemblance must be unveiled as such. Yet the actual place of the failed imposition of imaginative power remains powerfully scarred by this failure; this fact serves as the aesthetico-moral basis for the poem's Scene oflnstruction. Which only proliferates the interpretive difficulties. What is this place that is neither nature nor culture? How to speak of the temporality of a place that confuses 'now' and 'then'? If the rocks and quarry function as monuments of the master, they are nothing but empty tombs. Has the Xll INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS knight's body been misplaced or has he risen from the grave? When did Sir William die? If the lesson that the lines offer depends on making a strict distinction between the 'recent' and the 'distant' past, the attempted revivification of a past as just past can only confirm that all pasts are equally past- whether centuries or a day. And, indeed, the poem intensifies this sense of the timelessness of the past by neither speaking directly of the knight's death ('old Sir William was a gentle knight'), nor providing an estimated time of death.4 What further complicates matters is that all of these complexities are instituted by the poem that represents them. If the fiction that the poem installs implies that the reader is actually at the site, scanning the lines scrawled 'with a slate-pencil' on the very rock, this fiction confesses itself as such. Unable to pass off its fabulous lines as mere transcription, the poem is itself manifestly invention. Every element in the poem is thereby at least doubled. The dead Knight, for instance, shares the same name as the poet, who has here imaginatively and spontaneously beknighted himself. By sharing his own proper name with the other of whom he writes, Wordsworth no longer occupies the singular universal position of the unnameable stranger to whom the lines are addressed. On the contrary, 'William' becomes a particularized plural - neither truly native nor foreign to the non-place in and on which he writes, and which he produces by that very writing. This doubling also functions to emphasize the ambiguous status of the implied signatory of the lines: only someone who was not a stranger could have written in and of this place, but this is a place where there are only strangers. Blood and soil do not ensure property-rights nor citizenship of the isle (which is thus neither a modem nor a feudal state). It is open to everyone and no one. But in order to enter this open place, one must bar one's own access by abandoning there 'thy fragments to the bramble and the rose'- whereupon one will no longer be simply a stranger. The material ruin ofthe poem is the cornerstone on which Wordsworth will fail to build his aesthetico-moral church. This failure will be his glory; it will be a false glory, and he knows it. And he will try to pass on the lesson he has and has not learned, a lesson which one only comes upon by accident: 'But, as it chanc'd .. .'.Walter Benjamin once concluded his famous book, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, with the statement that 'in the spirit of allegory [German TrauerspielJ is conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment. Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.'5 Wordsworth's form, however, preserves the image of its mutilated failure to the very last. Furthermore, this 'very last' may not be too far off (the elements will surely erase the slate-pencil scores), and- in its untrodden way - there would very few to praise it anyway. 'Stranger!' This imperative is therefore a siren call- even if the siren is mute, ugly, ruined. It calls to the stranger to come. Although it was precisely the possibility

4 Actually, Sir William Fleming of Rydal Hall died in 1736. 5 W. Benjamin, The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, intro. G. Steiner (London: NLB, 1977), p. 235. INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS xiii of untitled and uninvited strangers that destroyed William's 'intended pile', such a stranger can now never arrive. The poem attempts to summon up a community of solitary strangers who will never meet and who, having been told everything and taught the most valuable of lessons, will learn nothing from it. Rather they will in their turn insist on communicating their universal singularity to one another by appending their transient lines on the worn lines ofthe rock. This graffiti will at once constitute a failed work of the imagination and the death warrant of its signatory. If you take the graffiti literally, you will be lost; yet misrecognizing, disbelieving or ignoring it will ensnarl you in a far worse delusion. The word 'outrage', which I noted above, has an extraordinary force in the context: only such an outrage can admit the wandering stranger into the fool's aristocracy of an unnatural death. Pedagogical failure, trace elements, depreciating remains: the movement that the 'Lines' thematizes and enacts- from the failed institution of a miserable dream, to the levelling of the values accomplished by the human world, to the subtle re-institutions of de-idealizing imagination, and round again- is precisely the movement of Romantic thought that I trace in this book. Indeed, this book begins and ends with Wordsworth's poetry, for a number of reasons. First, it has an important historical and institutional significance: Wordsworth is still the central canonical poet ofAnglophone Romanticism, and no viable account ofRomanticism can simply ignore, negate, or circumvent the claims of Wordsworth's thought. Second, it has a particular significance to my argument: though I concentrate on 'theoretical' Romanticism, my argument is calibrated to show how such Romanticism often takes its directives - whether willingly or unwillingly, consciously or not-from 'poetical' Romanticism, and continues to do so to the present day. If the theoretical system I describe of institution-aesthetics- nihilism is already clearly functioning in Wordsworth, then this demonstration has consequences for historical understandings of Romanticism, which then cannot be a simple series of events or a delimitable epoch, but is better thought of as an involuted sequence ofrepetitions-with-differences. Moreover, it shows the dangers that imperil any account that fails to notice the peculiar relations and interferences that Romanticism forges between practices that are often thought under such broad (that is, unanalysed) distinctions as 'poetry' and 'prose', 'theory' and 'action'. If Wordsworth has already elaborated the very positions that Romanticism's enemies often try to array against Romanticism, whatever calls itself anti-Romantic is drawn from the heart of a Romanticism thus doubly disenfranchised. Yet Romanticism wouldn't have it any other way. In 'Contexts', the first section ofthis book, I detail my central claims. These both repeat and differ from the various standard accounts of Romanticism. The first chapter engages with the long-standing and seemingly never-ending debate over what ought to be considered the central problematics, themes, figures, and limits of Romantic philosophy. From A. 0. Lovejoy and Rene Wellek, through Morse Peckham and the Yale School to Frances Ferguson and David Simpson, the arguments over Romanticism's definition continue to rage today. By examining XIV INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS this established canon or tradition of Romantic commentary, I chart the limits and characteristic concerns of Romanticism's incessant redefinitions. I show how this history of Romantic commentary is fractured by two central antinomies, around which the debate has ineluctably unfolded. The first of these antinomies can be phrased thus: Romanticism can be defined: Romanticism is undefinable. The second is: criticism is still Romantic: criticism is not all still Romantic. I show the uncircumventability of this division, and conclude that it is peculiarly central to Romantic thought itself. I argue that this debate enables certain disavowed regularities to continue to pass under cover of irreducible dissension. These antinomies serve to occlude the fact that Romanticism is a discursive response to three aporetic exigencies which constitute the environment for philosophical and theoretical thought after Kant. As stated, these are the problems of the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism. My treatment here does not primarily involve producing a corrective genealogy of these 'themes', although I do to some extent speak of their parallel development. More importantly, however, I claim that Romanticism is a discourse that incessantly re-elaborates itself as a response to these three exigencies, which can only show up within Romanticism itself as moments of extreme and paradoxical torsion. Yet this book is not a detailed or exhaustive analysis of Romanticism as such; indeed, such a project could not be contained in a book of this (or any) length. Rather, I demonstrate the existence of a dynamic central to Romanticism, and then trace the repetition of this problematic- or ones closely related to it-in contemporary theory. My initial remarks lead into the problem that rethinking the academic institution poses for contemporary theory -which tends to characterize its own interests in this regard as 'anti-Romantic'- and thence back to Immanuel Kant, whose work provides the often unacknowledged discursive conditions and directions for these institutional studies. On the basis of this rereading, I at once demonstrate a certain complicity of contemporary theory with its predecessors and attempt to produce a refigured account of this complicity. The second and third chapters- on 'aesthetics' and 'nihilism', respectively - follow a similar logic. In addition to discussions of philosophers such as Fichte, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, I also examine some of the salient historical and institutional history (notably with respect to the Russian nihilists), as well as the work of many contemporary theorists, such as Giorgio A gam ben, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Gianni Vattimo, among others. These chapters demonstrate how the bond between aesthetics and subjectivity is further knitted by the Romantics to a problematic of nihilism, in which the sublime immensity and force of world history overwhelms and is overcome by Romantic theory. In the giddiness of this overwhelming-overcoming, Romanticism scurries back to the grey and painstaking labour of institutional concerns, as it continues to dream of the liberatory powers of Imagination. The first three chapters of this book thus constitute a general delimitation of my field of research. I show how the problems of the institution, aesthetics, INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS XV and nihilism are in fact co-supplementary, and how their complex imbrication continues to determine various contemporary formations that may seem to have surpassed or dispensed with their determinations. Of necessity, these chapters range quite widely over these fraught and difficult topics; nonetheless, I am concerned to demonstrate that there is a definite and describable logic at work in the major strands of contemporary theory, a Romantic logic which proceeds precisely by dissimulating its own characteristic traits - and whose self-dissimulation is therefore amongst the foremost of these traits. If- as I am arguing - the Romantic sense of the failure of the institution at its instituting moment determines a diagnosis that ultimately arraigns the entire world, and thereafter fails to find solace in the only therapy available, this narrative might seem to have its own natural trajectory, that is, institution, nihilism, aesthetics. Things are, however, not so straightforward. In a very real sense, every one of these stations presumes a prior account of its others: plotting a narrative about narratives that describe the impossibility of origins is itself an impossible task. For reasons that will hopefully become clearer in the course of this book, the order of chapters runs from institution to aesthetics to nihilism; the third chapter binds together the previous two. The second part of this book, 'Interventions' (Chapters 4-8), comprises a series of close readings of influential contemporary theorists, working in a number of disciplines. These readings examine in more detail the diverse workings of the Romantic circulation between the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism. The theorists I examine are Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter, and Alain Badiou. Lacan seems to me emblematic of a post-Kantian Romantic subjectivity pushed to its limits; Deleuze and Guattari try to eviscerate all traces of such a subject, at the cost of the revenge of aestheticism; Sedgwick's queer revisioning of Foucault and deconstruction forces her into a rhetorical impasse; Hunter's attempt to negate Romantic principles through an attention to the power-knowledge routines of modem pedagogical institutions requires that he disavow his complicities; Badiou's mathematical ontology drives him, on the one hand, to overly restrict the field of philosophy's operations and, on the other, to a selective reading of a central strain of Romanticism upon which his polemic depends for its force. From my point of view, these theorists have made important contributions to the debate about Romanticism (even if, as we shall see, not always explicitly), and both the value and limits of their contributions are better illuminated ifthey themselves are re-examined in the dark light ofRomantic concerns. Although there are always questions to be raised about the status of a sample set, such a list might still initially appear somewhat arbitrary; furthermore, the concomitant omission of certain key contemporary figures (such as Jacques Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, among others) may seem similarly arbitrary. There are, however, a number of reasons for both my inclusions and my exclusions. Many other commentators have examined XVI INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS the Romantic affiliations of my famous omissions, and I am concerned not to reproduce existing research on the topic.6 (As it happens, however, I do make a number of remarks about such theorists as Derrida, de Man, Bourdieu, and Lyotard, although I do not dedicate them the space that I do others). Moreover, because my argument suggests that Romanticism supersaturates contemporary theory, then it must be possible to discern the former's effects in a variety of persons and places. Hence, I have chosen thinkers who are, at least nominally, from very different places (geographically, institutionally, disciplinarily, politically, and so on), and who often present themselves as hostile to each other. Part of my project is thus to show that the ceaseless polemics Deleuze and Guattari direct against psychoanalysis are the index of a propinquity and a complicity. Finally, the writers I read in detail are what Harold Bloom might call 'strong writers' (although he would undoubtedly cavil with my application of this concept to most of the figures in question)- if they are not all presently as well or widely known as each other, they have all offered powerful and novel theoretical propositions. My argument tries to show not only that should they all be read, but also how the very force of their writings still depends on their engagement with an essentially Romantic situation. These writers can thus function as exemplars of emergent-yet-apparently-divergent fields, nominally 'interdisciplinary' places that are still struggling over the proper 'proper name' for their practice and their place. Even the widespread sense ofthe exhaustion of 'high theory' that has accompanied these developments is not irrelevant to note here - for such a sense of enervation is itself exemplarily Romantic. In Natural Supernaturalism M. H. Abrams wrote that one of the 'prominent developmental patterns' ofRomantic thought is 'the self-moving and self-sustaining system'. This system is 'represented as a moving system, a dynamic process which is driven by an internal source of motion to its own completion' .1 I might, alternatively, characterize my own account of Romanticism as 'a dynamic process, which is driven by three ex-timate sources ofmotion to its own in-completion'. Yet, having said this it is necessary, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, to reiterate that my goal is not 'to establish the "contemporary relevance of romanticism"'. As the philosophers continue: The usual results ofthis sort of program are well known: a suppression pure and simple of history, the dubious immortalization of what is supposedly given 'contemporary relevance', the (far from innocent) occultation of the specific characteristics of the present. Very much to the contrary, what interests us in romanticism is that we still belong to the era it opened up. The present period continues to deny precisely this belonging, which defines us (despite the inevitable divergence introduced by repetition). A veritable

6 I am thinking here ofthe work of Simon Critchley, Peter Dews, D. A. Kaiser, David Simpson, Juliet Sychrava, among others. I deal with some of these writers at greater length in Chapter One. 7 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 173. INTRODUCTION: THE EMBRYONIC REMAINS xvii

romantic unconscious is discernible today, in most of the central motifs of our 'modernity'. Not the least result of romanticism's indefinable character is the way it has allowed this so-called modernity to use romanticism as a foil, without ever recognizing - or in order not to recognize - that it has done little more than rehash romanticism's discoveries. 8 It is, rather, in an attempt to specify further the ruses of 'romanticism's indefinable character' that I turn first to the problem of its institution.

8 P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 15. Nancy has come to modulate this position vis-a-vis romanticism in more recent work, for example, 'we are definitely no longer in the age of Enlightenment or Romanticism. We are elsewhere, which does not mean we are opposed to them or beyond them, as if we had dialectically surpassed them. We are in a sort of simultaneous drawing together of these two epochs; they are contemporaries of ours and we see them wearing thin. One is worn thin to the point of being an extremely dull platitude; the other is stretched out toward the night of extermination', Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 63.