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THE DESERT in MODERN LITERATURE and PHILOSOPHY Crosscurrents

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THE DESERT in MODERN LITERATURE and PHILOSOPHY Crosscurrents The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy Desert The in Modern Literature CROSSCURRENTS Series Editor: Christopher Watkin This series explores the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. ‘xxxxxxxx’ xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx Aidan Tynan xxxxxxx The Desert in Modern AIDAN TYNAN AIDAN Literature and Cover image: xxxxxx Philosophy Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com ISBN 978-1-4744-4335-7 Edinburgh Wasteland Aesthetics AIDAN TYNAN edinburghuniversitypress.com THE DESERT IN MODERN LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Crosscurrents Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences Series Editor Christopher Watkin, Monash University Editorial Advisory Board Andrew Benjamin Martin Crowley Simon Critchley Frederiek Depoortere Oliver Feltham Patrick ffrench Christopher Fynsk Kevin Hart Emma Wilson Titles available in the series Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux Christopher Watkin Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism Gerald Moore Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer Nicholas Davey The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology Mathew Abbott The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Amaleena Damlé Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences Wahida Khandker The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead Leemon B. McHenry Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future Stephen Zepke Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière Robert Boncardo Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy Danielle Sands Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou Sarah Hickmott The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics Aidan Tynan Forthcoming Titles Visual Art and Projects of the Self Katrina Mitcheson Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series- crosscurrents.html THE DESERT IN MODERN LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Wasteland Aesthetics Aidan Tynan Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Aidan Tynan, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4335 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4337 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4338 8 (epub) The right of Aidan Tynan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Series Editor’s Preface vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1. Desert Desire 6 2. Desert Immanence 52 3. Desert Refrains 94 4. Desert Islands 138 5. Desert Polemologies 177 Conclusion: Beyond the Carbon Imaginary 221 Bibliography 228 Index 248 Series Editor’s Preface Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as mathematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of performing a predeter- mined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition. Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross- disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore vi Series Editor’s Preface vii nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-disciplinary enterprise. Christopher Watkin Cambridge February 2011 Acknowledgements Since I first conceived the idea for this project about ten years ago, a great number of people have contributed in a great number of ways towards the final product. I am especially indebted to Chris Müller, whose influence and support have been crucial to me, and who has proved a salvation on more than one occasion. In addition, I am enor- mously grateful to Ian Buchanan, Oliver Dawson, Tom Harman, Tim Matts, Reuben Martens, Ceri Sullivan, Caleb Sivyer, Martin Willis and all of my colleagues at Cardiff University, past and present. My parents Ted and Carmel have my respect and gratitude, now and always. Thanks are due to Chris Watkin for carefully reading the entire manuscript and offering some key suggestions and corrections. Thanks are likewise due to Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press for her exemplary editorship and advice. I would like to thank the postgraduate students who have taken my Ecotheories module over the past few years. Our classroom discussions helped shape and refine my thinking on many of the issues explored in the following pages. A period of research leave generously provided by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University gave me the time necessary to complete this book. Finally, it is with deepest love and eternal admiration that I thank Sophie, who has been a singular inspiration and an abiding light in the darkness. Without her, this book would not exist. viii For Sophie ix Introduction The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts! Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘Devastation’ means for us, after all, that everything – the world, the human, and the earth – will be transformed into a desert. The being of an age of devastation would then consist precisely in the abandonment of being. Such a matter is, however, difficult to think. Martin Heidegger, ‘Evening Conversation’ For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Stay in the desert long enough, and you could apprehend the absolute. The number zero was holy. Margaret Atwood, ‘Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet’ It is entirely fitting that there is no simple or self-evident approach, no clear path, to the topic of the desert. We can grasp it as a natural wilderness or as a barren wasteland, as an ecology sometimes unusually rich in life and surprisingly fragile, as an idea of geographical extremity or alterity, as a sacred or accursed site, as a metaphor for nullity, as a subjective or existential terrain, or as an object of sheer aesthetic exulta- tion. This book moves freely between these and other conceptions of the desert. I remain guided throughout, however, by a set of philosophi- cal texts, beginning with the work of Nietzsche, in which the desert is figured principally as a speculative topology, aplace of thought where an exhausted metaphysical tradition can imagine its self-overcoming. An immediate objection may be that this philosophical topology is not a real desert but a mere metaphor or rhetorical strategy, one concocted, furthermore, by a Western subjectivity ill equipped for life in desert 1 2 The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy places. The objection is legitimate, but my response – on which this entire project rests – is twofold. First, it is not at all obvious where the distinction between the real and rhetorically constructed desert lies. Even scientists have noted the problem of comprehensively determining what a ‘real’ desert is – as one scientific text puts it, ‘no single, conclusive ecological definition of the term “desert” has been accepted’.1 In any case, all places are, to one extent or another, rhetorical or semiotic constructions. Deserts seem especially so precisely because they challenge life’s ability
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