View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy Face to Typeface: on Reading and Redemption A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Annemarie Lawless IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Jani Scandura May 2014 © Annemarie Lawless 2014 i Acknowledgements In order to avoid overstating what actually cannot be overstated, I will keep my comments brief. This brevity is in no way indicative of the scale of my gratitude. On the contrary, I hope that the simplicity of the following statements will increase their chances of actually getting read. I would like to thank my adviser, Jani Scandura, and committee members, John Mowitt, Tony Brown, and Cesare Casarino, for their support and encouragement throughout this project. I thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Minnesota, especially Maurits van Bever Donker and John Pistelli, who read my work as it progressed and were always willing to travel with me to thoughts unknown. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Ben, without whom I would quite simply be lost. ii Dedication For Ben iii Abstract Face to Typeface: on Reading and Redemption is about reading literature. More precisely, it is about making sense of signs, about the movement, in other words, from the material sign that we see to an image or figure or idea of that sign that we understand. As such, it aims to move beyond current theoretical approaches to literary criticism, which for the past several decades have been caught in the critique of representation. The classical model of representation is derived from Platonic mimesis, the view that the literary image is a representation or copy of the world, which the critique contends is fundamentally flawed because language displaces the things it purports to represent and is thus destined to miss its mark, to fail. My dissertation does not take issue with that critique, but rather with the aporia that it tends to produce. This project is guided by a very simple question: if language and interpretation are indeed caught in a tautological loop in which the one continuously repeats the other, as I believe they are, then why do we continue to read texts that are essentially “made up,” texts that are about things and people who do not exist and events that never happened? Moreover, what kind of knowledge do such texts impart to us and how do we account for the joy we experience in reading them? Throughout the chapters that compose this dissertation, I answer these questions by turning to Walter Benjamin’s concept of redemption and Gilles Deleuze’s reworking of Spinoza’s “third kind of knowledge,” which is the highest form of knowledge and which is also named “beatitude” because it produces the feeling of love and joy. I continually emphasize the materiality of the text, the sign, and argue that reading is first and foremost a face-to-typeface encounter that always, potentially at least, opens up the possibility of what Benjamin describes as redemption and what Deleuze understands as “a non-subjective living love.” My first chapter considers the precise use and function of the literary figure by tracking the figure of the knight of courtly love as it surfaces in texts by Kierkegaard, Deleuze and Guattari, Erich Auerbach, Michel Foucault. My second chapter examines the figuration of surface in literature and in love, in particular the idea that “meaning” lies behind or beneath the surface, through a discussion of Plato’s Symposium, its influence on Shelley’s poetry and poetics, and on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. My third chapter considers Samuel Beckett’s deployment of the letter M. I argue that the materiality of the sign of M, in which each arch mirrors the other, is a kind of rebus—both an image that reflects and a sound that resounds, a typographic composite of narcissus and echo. I further argue that Beckett also had in mind the medieval practice of using the letter M to allude to the human face, and that as such M marks the site of specifically human and linguistic condition. My fourth chapter is about how the aesthetic image, whether linguistic or visual, can be a vehicle of knowledge, and specifically the type of knowledge that produces feelings of love and joy. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Dedication ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv List of Abbreviations v Introduction: Redeeming Literature; or, what is literary criticism? 1 Chapter One: The Knight Sets Forth 28 Chapter Two: Sur-Face 97 Chapter Three: Beckett and the Letter M 173 Chapter Four: Souvenir 220 Bibliography 265 v List of Abbreviations OGTD Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama . Trans. John Osborne. London, New York: Verso, 1998. Print. SW1-4 Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. Print. DR Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition . Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. LS Gilles Deleuze. The Logic of Sense . Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: The Athlone P, 1990. ECC Gilles Deleuze. Essays Critical and Clinical . Trans. Daniel W. Smith, Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. PS Gilles Deleuze. Proust and Signs . Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. AO Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ATP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone P, 1988. WP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. H.Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 1 Redeeming literature; or, what is literary criticism? In the Trauerspiel study, Walter Benjamin writes that origin “is an eddy in the stream of becoming , and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis" (OGTD 45). Genesis, in other words, names the process by which time is always in radical, absolute beginning, whereas origin is the cut of chronological time, the small eddies within the stream of becoming that mark a relative rather than absolute beginning. With this as a caveat, I will attempt to describe the origin of this dissertation. In the beginning, I was compelled by two lines of questioning: one line of questioning was related to a set of literary texts, the other to a set of theoretical texts, and, as per academic convention, this second line of questioning would justify the asking of the first. At least that was the plan. However, rather late in the process of writing this dissertation—and by late, I mean when I was almost finished with it, though I must also insert the caveat that endings, like beginnings, are also always relative rather than absolute—I began to understand that the practice of justifying literary inquiry through an overarching theoretical model, which is articulated through the use of a specific object or figure or problematic, was opposed to the kind of reading that I was moving towards. I am not talking here about a type of reading that is guided by the poststructuralist critique of representation and logos, which introduced a necessary ethical turn in literary criticism, but which unfortunately also laid itself open to caricature as a mode of reading that inevitably arrives at, to invoke one of its own tropes, undecidability. Rather, I became more and more interested in the idea of redemption that Benjamin invokes 2 throughout his work—borrowed from theology, the concept of redemption for Benjamin quite unabashedly designates the revelation of truth itself. More precisely, redemption in the New Testament (apolytrosis) means freedom from bondage, a deliverance which is procured by the payment of a ransom (a lytron), which happens through Christ, the earthly son of God, the sacred rendered profane. Redemption is therefore not the same as justification (dikaiosis), which happens only through God, and which names the state of being in proper relation to God, of coming under his law. Justification may be likened to the practice of criticism that reads literature in terms of how it conforms to a theoretical model, a law. But redemption is trickier and raises a host of difficulties—what is truth, how can literature, something that is essentially “made up,” be its source, how does it redeem us, and why do we need to be redeemed in the first place? Furthermore, and perhaps of primary concern for the task at hand, how can the work of literary criticism be considered in terms of redemption? I reiterate that this dissertation did not begin with redemption in mind. It began, not with the great stream of becoming, but rather with a concern for three eddies within that stream, and these eddies gradually synthesized in the idea of redemption. The first eddy was the concept of allegory. Benjamin, followed later by Paul de Man, described the process of reading as allegorical, not simply because in reading we produce an image of the text that is other than what the text materially (in terms of the sign, the words on the page) or even literally (the direct or perhaps intentional object of reference) provides for itself, but also because, in a broader sense, reading is itself an allegory of the condition for our experience as linguistic beings. 1 We are constructed by language—we 1 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama , Trans. John Osborne, (London, New York: Verso, 1998) and Paul de Man “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: 3 are named and described by it, we think and learn through it, we communicate with other beings in it.