Geoffrey Hartman

Also available from Continuum

Interrupting Auschwitz, Josh Cohen

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida, Ruben Borg
 Geoffrey Hartman
Romanticism after the Holocaust

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 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.

Pieter Vermeulen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4411-9324-7 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
 Contents

Abbreviations vi

Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma 1

1. Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature 8
2. Of Climatology: Literature after Structure 39
3. Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 61
4. Grave Immunity: Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 83
5. “Darkness makes abode”: Mourning, Testimony, Community 100
Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust 131

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)

2. Articles, Essays, Reviews, Interviews

“AA” “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure” (1966)
“AC” “The State of the Art of Criticism” (1989)
“AE” “Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz”
(1994)
“AG” “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum” (1969)
“AI” “The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas
Chare” (2004)
“AP” “Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics” (1992)
“AS” “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” (1962)
 Abbreviations vii

“BF” “Beyond Formalism” (1966)

“BH” “Benjamin in Hope” (1999)
“BM” “Introduction: 1985” to Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (1986)
“BP” “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’” (1969)
“BS” “‘Breaking with every star’: On Literary Knowledge” (1996)
“BT” “Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style” (1978)
“CA” “The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” (1995)
“CC” “The Culture of Criticism” (1984)
“CD” “Literary Criticism and Its Discontents” (1976)
“CI” “Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony” (1980)
“CM” “Camus and Malraux: The Common Ground” (1960)
“CR” “Criticism and Restitution” (1989)
“CS” “Christopher Smart’s Magnificat: Toward a Theory of Representa-
tion” (1974)
“DC” “The Dream of Communication” (1973)
“DD” “Diction and Defense in Wordsworth” (1980)
“DF” “The Discourse of a Figure: Blake’s ‘Speak Silence’ in Literary History”
(1987)
“DS” “Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of the Poet’s
Mind” (1961)
“DV” “Introduction: Darkness Visible” (1994)
“EM” “Envoi: ‘So many things’” (1986)
“ES” “Reflections on the Evening Star: Akenside to Coleridge” (1971)
“ET” “The Ethics of Witness” (interview by Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay)
(2002)
“EW” “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth” (1987)
“FC” “Psychoanalysis: The French Connection” (1978)
“FE” “Freud for Everyman (and Everywoman)” (2005)
“FN” “The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature” (1955)
“FR” “The Fate of Reading” (1975)
“FS” “Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit” (2003)
“FT” “False Themes and Gentle Minds” (1968)
“GD” “Ghostlier Demarcations” (1966)
“GL” “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” (1968)
“HA” “Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma” (1996)
“HG” “Homage to Glas” (2007)
“HH” “Holocaust and Hope” (2003)
“HL” “Communication, Language, and the Humanities” (1981)
“HR” “The Heroics of Realism” (1963)
“HT” “The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction” (2006)
“HW” “History-Writing as Answerable Style” (1970)
“IC” “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman” (interview by Cathy Caruth)
(1996)
“IF” “The Interpreter’s Freud” (1984)
viii Abbreviations

“IM” “Introduction” to Midrash and Literature (1986)

“IP” “Introduction” to The Power of Contestation (2004)
“IS” Interview by Imre Salusinszky (1987)
“JI” “On the Jewish Imagination” (1985)
“JP” “History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man” (1988)
“JT” “Jewish Tradition as/and the Other” (1993)
“LC” “Letter” (letter in Critical Inquiry) (1989)
“LH” “Toward Literary History” (1970)
“LL” “A Life of Learning” (2000)
“LS” “The Longest Shadow” (1989)
“MB” “Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist” (1961)
“MC” “Milton’s Counterplot” (1958)
“ME” “Meaning, Error, Text” (1985)
“MI” “Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979”
(interview by Robert Moynihan) (1980)
“MM” “Polemical Memoir” (1999)
“MS” “Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope” (1964)
“NF” “‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: A Brief
Allegory” (1968)
“NW” “The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos” (1983)
“PD” “Public Memory and Its Discontents” (1994)
“PE” “Passion and Literary Engagement” (2004)
“PI” “Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’” (1973)
“PM” “Public Memory and Modern Experience” (1993)
“PN” “Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by Northwest” (1981)
“PP” “The Poet’s Politics” (1970)
“PR” “The Poetics of Prophecy” (1981)
“PS” “Preface to the Second Edition” (preface to the second edition of
Criticism in the Wilderness) (2007)
“PW” “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa.”
(1962)
“RA” “Reading Aright: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’” (1983)
“RF” “Reflections on Romanticism in France” (1970)
“RH” “The Reinvention of Hate” (1996)
“RL” “Religious Literacy” (1988)
“RM” “The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s
Profane Illumination” (2006)
“RR” “Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’” (1994)
“SA” “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” (1973)
“SF” “The Struggle for the Text” (1986)
“SH” “The Sublime and the Hermeneutic” (1972)
“SI” “Shoah and Intellectual Witness” (1998)
“SL” “Maurice Blanchot: The Spirit of Language after the Holocaust” (2004)
“SP” “A Short History of Practical Criticism” (1979)
 Abbreviations ix

“SS” “Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats’s

Hyperion” (1974)
“ST” “Signs of the Times” (1971)
“TC” “A Touching Compulsion: Wordsworth and the Problem of Literary
Representation” (1977)
“TD” “Memory.com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era”
(2000)
“TH” “Self, Time, and History” (1975)
“TL” “Trauma within the Limits of Literature” (2003)
“TK” “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” (1995)
“TM” “The Taming of History: A Comparison of Poetry with Painting Based
on Malraux’s The Voices of Silence” (1957)
“TR” “Theories on the Theory of Romanticism” (1971)
“TS” “Text and Spirit” (1999)
“TT” “Tea and Totality: The Demand of Theory on Critical Style” (1986)
“TU” “‘Timely Utterance’ Once More” (1985)
“UA” “The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre’s Interpretation
of Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’” (1975)
“UW” “The Unremarkable Wordsworth” (1985)
“VS” “The Voice of the Shuttle” (1969)
“VW” “Virginia’s Web” (1961)
“WA” “War in Heaven” (1973)
“WB” “Wordsworth before Heidegger” (1987)
“WE” “Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment” (2005)
“WG” “‘Was it for this . . .?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods” (1990)
“WH” “The Weight of What Happened” (1983)
“WI” “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry” (1965)
“WL” “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History” (1975)
“WM” “Wordsworth and Metapsychology” (2009)
“WN” “Words Not From on High” (2003)
“WO” “Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth” (1979)
“WR” “Wordsworth” (1969)
“WT” “ Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing” (2002)
“WV” “Witnessing Video Testimony” (interview by Jennifer Ballengee)
(2001)
“WW” “Words and Wounds” (1980)
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction:
Romanticism after Trauma

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

well-intended, may only end up adding to the wreckage of modernity and to

the pile of debris that Walter Benjamin’s angel of history impotently watches
growing skyward. On this interpretation, Bartleby’s neutralizing gesture emblema-
tizes a widespread skepticism about the possibilities of concrete action—although
the conjuring of Bartleby, especially in the work of Agamben, can sustain calls
for grandiose, even messianic, forms of intervention and change. But a less
dejected reading is also possible. What if the critical adoption of Bartleby
signals the recovery of a potentiality that has remained latent in earlier efforts
to imagine the wake of modernity and metaphysics? This potentiality may,
for one thing, be closer to the complexity of Derrida’s own position than many
of these earlier efforts, as I argue later (Lambert 2000: 183–9). It points to
the quiet persistence of a deliberately minor and scrupulously polite mode of
engagement with the disasters of the present and the memories of the past
that cannot be conflated with either vocal refusal or determinate affirmation.
The currency of Bartleby indicates the timeliness of such subdued forms of
commemoration and engagement that, far from wishing to dominate current
debates on memory, community, media, and ecology, yet hold out the possibil-
ity of neutralizing the polarization between resistance and affirmation that all
too often paralyze such debates.
The central argument of this book is that the work of Geoffrey Hartman has
over the last half century carefully theorized and embodied such a minor mode
of commemoration and engagement. It locates in his work a paradoxically
powerful form of Romanticism that responds to the exigencies of past and
present by giving shape to a mental ecology that makes room for that which
resists actualization. Even if Hartman’s work is often missing from most of
the debates that currently entertain the theoretical imagination—with the
notable exceptions of the memory of trauma in general, and the Holocaust
in particular—this book demonstrates that it can make an as yet unremarked
contribution to them. Whether as an advocate of Romanticism in the 1950s and
1960s, as a reluctant fellow traveler of American deconstruction in the 1970s, or
as a pivotal presence in the domains of trauma studies, Jewish studies, and the
memory of the Holocaust, Hartman, like Bartleby, has scrupulously avoided
polemical self-assertion. He has, moreover, consistently theorized such reti-
cence and circumspection as a particular Romantic ethic and aesthetic that, so
this book argues, is surprisingly timely.
The unfortunate upshot of this characteristic lack of self-promotion is that
Hartman is today mostly treated with a pious reverence that precludes a more
critical engagement with his work. A 2006 issue of the Wordsworth Circle
dedicated to his work calls itself “a deviant homage,” and it often seems like
homage is the only appropriate mode in which to address Hartman’s oeuvre
(Redfield 2006). Even the very texture of his writing seems to invite a mode of
superficial appreciation: as has often been remarked, Hartman’s essayistic style
deliberately eschews point-scoring and definite assertions; he himself describes
it as a “subprophetic” mode and a “nondeclamatory, low-key engagement in
 Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma 3

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

connections not only modify the available accounts of Hartman’s—and the

other so-called Yale critics’—engagement with Derrida in the 1970s, it also
offers evidence that the poststructuralist reception of Derrida’s deconstruction
missed vital elements of his work that did find a hearing in the work of
Hartman. The third chapter maps Hartman’s attempts to reconcile his theory
of modern poetry with a cultural criticism of what can, in retrospect, be recog-
nized as the emergence of postmodernity in the early 1970s. Hartman’s revised
theory of poetry discovers that its relevance crucially depends on its ability
to factor in the decline of poetry as a cultural force. Hartman’s work accommo-
dates the hard lesson of poetry’s loss of authority by making poetry the
placeholder of loss in a world in which the domination of actuality and visibility
threatens the very possibility of loss; poetry emerges as a form of “memorial
mimesis” that functions both as a particular mental ecology and a mode of
remembrance and that serves as a counterforce against a contemporaneity that
hastens forgetting and depletion.
It may seem strange to argue that Hartman’s project already achieves its
definitive shape in the late 1970s. After all, it is only in the 1980s that Hartman’s
work branches out into the domain of Holocaust memory, which has since
then become at least as important as his more purely critical and theoretical
practice. This remarkable extension of the range of Hartman’s concerns makes
clear that when I refer to his work from the late 1970s on as his “mature” work,
I do not mean to identify it as a stale period of unproductive stasis. Still,
Hartman’s work with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
at Yale University, and its connections to his work on trauma and on Jewish
identity, can easily be coordinated with his ambition to guarantee the persis-
tence of memory and the viability of the mind’s interactions with others and
the world; as such, they are perfectly continuous with Hartman’s “mature”
interpretations of Wordsworth, to which I devote my fourth chapter, and which
similarly promote a deliberately unspectacular mode of reference and preserva-
tion. This mode serves as a vital alternative to more grandiose schemes that are
tempted to cancel the mind’s reliance on its natural and cultural environments
and that fail to appreciate the sufficiency of phenomenal reality as such, rather
than of its virtual or transcendent alternatives. In the last analysis, both Hartman’s
work on Wordsworth and his work on the memory of the Holocaust testify to a
Romanticism that is dedicated to the resilience of the imagination and to the
reality of the phenomenal world.
Mapping Hartman’s consecutive reorientations and reinventions of his
project in ever new intellectual and cultural climates is only one of the aims of
this book. A second ambition, which comes to the fore in the fifth chapter and
in the coda, is to explore the viability of Hartman’s consolidated take on the
relation between modernity and the aesthetic in a variety of current critical and
theoretical debates. Hartman’s work has engaged the momentous issue of the
memory of the Holocaust, as well as discussions on media, community, ecology,
and Jewish identity, even if not always as systematically and as firmly as one
 Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma 5

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

imagination is a staple of Hartman’s work. What it fails to take into account is

that, even if England has arguably to a large extent been spared the extreme
violence that the European continent did inflict on itself, this has not prevented
it from exporting violence and suffering in the name of imperialism and colo-
nialism, or even of a war on terror. Hartman’s repeated mobilizations of the
example of England in his cultural criticism fail to acknowledge that England’s
spectacular avoidance of national trauma coincided with the massive exporta-
tion of trauma. This does not mean that Hartman’s approach to the memory of
the Holocaust can simply be dismissed as Eurocentric: in my fifth chapter,
I explain that this approach is inherently transcultural to the extent that it
proscribes all exclusive claims on particular experiences of loss and suffering.
What it does mean is that Hartman’s persistent attempt to think modernity in a
way that makes room for the privilege of literature fails to take into account the
colonial and imperial dimensions that are yet crucial elements of that modernity.
If the mode of remembrance and engagement that defines Hartman’s Roman-
ticism is to be able to take on those very different traumas, it will have to sever
its associations with the particular vision of England that sustains it.
Of course, Hartman’s peculiar affective investment in England can easily be
explained away by relating it to his life story. A Scholar’s Tale, his memoir from
2007, reminds us that the young Hartman was evacuated from Germany on a
Kindertransport to England where he spent the rest of the war. His stay in the
countryside fostered his receptivity to English nature and poetry, especially
Wordsworth’s. England served Hartman as a life-saving alternative for the
Holocaust, and his critical mobilization of England in his thinking on the
memory of disaster honors that alternative. Yet in a book such as this one that
is, unlike Hartman’s memoir, not so much interested in tracing an “intellectual
journey” as in testing the development and consistency of an intellectual proj-
ect, it is important to underline that there is a momentous difference between
an avoidance of or an escape from the disaster (as in Hartman’s autobiography),
on the one hand, and an adequate survival of it on the other. Hartman’s deci-
sion to honor England’s crucial role in his own escape from the disaster by
deploying it as a crucial reference point in his cultural criticism cannot prevent
a certain slippage between these different temporalities.
What goes for England also goes for Hartman’s insistent recourse to a rheto-
ric of trauma, disaster, and loss throughout his oeuvre. Such an emphasis on
negativity may suggest that the Romantic ethic and aesthetic at the core of
Hartman’s project constitutes a particularly potent mode of survival that can
teach us how to live on after trauma. Yet just as it is more accurate to say that
England allowed the young Hartman to avoid the Holocaust rather than teach
him how to survive it, Hartman’s Romanticism thrives on an avoidance of
(or an escape from) the utter negativity of trauma rather than on the capacity
to survive it. His Romanticism is powered by a fundamental faith in the mind’s
resilience that robs experiences of dispossession and pain of their radical
hopelessness. My second major critique of Hartman’s project is that it often
 Introduction: Romanticism after Trauma 7

cultivates this (rhetorically effective) confusion and fails to make a distinction

that is yet all-important for an understanding of the stakes of his work. His
Romanticism is not a strategy to cope with the aftermath of trauma, but rather
an ethic and aesthetic that intervenes in a culture that is manifestly saturated by
the images, memories, and aftershocks of trauma, but whose members are
not for all that directly exposed to radical trauma themselves. It does not aim
to offer an antidote to suffering, but wants to function as a paradoxically
potent force in a media-saturated culture in which traces of suffering circulate
promiscuously. Such a culture, in which direct traumatic experiences are less
readily available than the refracted images of the suffering of others, can with-
out too much difficulties be recognized as our contemporary Western culture.
Inevitably removed from yet unavoidably addressed by memories of past disas-
ters and images of contemporary terror, this is the context that Hartman’s
Romanticism engages. Like Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” his Romanticism
contains the promise of a salutary disengagement from the dictates of the
present as well as an acknowledgement of the fatality of our disengagement
from the reality of trauma and the trauma of reality. If I have entitled this book
Romanticism after the Holocaust, it is in order to mark such a distantiation that is
both an inescapable fact and a hopeful promise.
 Chapter 1

Counter-Spirits: Immediacy, History, Nature

. . . him who looks

In steadiness, who hath among least things
An undersense of greatest; sees the parts
As parts, but with a feeling of the whole.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude

The publication of Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 in 1964 immediately estab-

lished Geoffrey Hartman as one of the most important postwar interpreters
and advocates of English Romanticism, and of Wordsworth in particular. While
Hartman’s name will later be routinely associated with the American fate of
French theory (in the 1970s and 1980s) and with the memory of the Holocaust
(since the 1980s), his contributions in these fields are undergirded by a particu-
lar interpretation of Wordsworth that was already underway in his early work.
Hartman’s later engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan,
and Paul de Man and with broader cultural issues should not be understood as
an escape from the provincial confines of his early Romanticism, if only because
this early Romanticism was developed in dialogue with a surprisingly wide range
of European literature and thought. Hartman’s first book, The Unmediated Vision
(1954), featured chapters on Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry; he
published a short book on the French writer and politician André Malraux in
1960, and introduced the work of Maurice Blanchot to American audiences
in two seminal essays.
Hartman’s first decade is not only crucial because it reveals the decidedly
unprovincial groundwork of his Romanticism, but also because it performs a
spectacular self-correction of its original position. While The Unmediated Vision
celebrates poetry’s capacity to escape linguistic and historical mediation and to
achieve a direct vision of reality, such a belief in an unmediated vision fails to
account for the biological, linguistic, and historical determinations of human
life, and Hartman’s work after The Unmediated Vision is an attempt to correct
this failure by relocating literary significance within historical time. Indeed, one
of the reasons that Hartman responds so immediately to the work of Derrida
in the 1970s is that Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence
 Immediacy, History, Nature 9

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).

1. The Dream of Immediacy

Hartman prefaces The Unmediated Vision, the book version of his doctoral thesis,
with “A Short Discourse on Method.” These few pages display a precocious
awareness of the difficulties of interpretation, and they offer the earliest instance
of Hartman’s characteristic conviction that neither definitive understanding
nor total liberty of interpretation are possible. They acknowledge the tension
between the viability of “a thousand varied approaches” and “uniqueness
of meaning” (UV ix), between the multiplicity of different “equally valid” expla-
nations and the “unity or identity to which [they] all tend” (xii). Hartman
reconciles these divergent tendencies in his ambition to achieve “a unified
multiple interpretation,” which he also describes as “a method of interpretation
which could reaffirm the radical unity of human knowledge” (ix–x). Such
an affirmation of the link between literature and human knowledge is long
overdue, as “[w]e have barely started to attempt to understand literature as a
distinctive mode of knowledge in which the processes, or, better, the desires of
the human mind find their clearest expression” (xi). Literature, that is, testifies
to the rich variety of human life, and the task of literary criticism is to assert the
viability of literature as a mode of knowledge that is different from abstract
knowledge (xi). One implication of Hartman’s remarks is that such non-literary,
10 Geoffrey Hartman

abstract knowledge is also, somehow, nonhuman knowledge. Although The Unmedi-

ated Vision does not explicitly identify this form of knowledge that threatens
both literature and human life, Hartman’s work will soon begin to associate it
with Hegel.1
Hegel is an insistent intertext in Hartman’s work: as late as 2002, he provides
the title for Hartman’s Scars of the Spirit, and he plays a central role in Hartman’s
essays on Derrida, which are collected in Saving the Text (1981). In Hartman’s
early work, Hegel is less an object of discussion than the name of an affectively
charged idea that hovers in the background of his project. He is described as
a “master of dead spirits” and an “unshakable ghost” that haunts modern
literature, which operates under his “curse” (“TM” 115, “FN” 66–7). The curse
affecting both literature and man is Hegel’s famous “prophecy concerning
the end of art with the triumph of philosophy and the coincidence of the real
and the ideal” (“FN” 75). In the 1950s, this dictum was often complemented by
declarations of the end of history that were also associated with Hegel. The vast
influence of Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) on
postwar thought has been well-documented, but it is especially Jean Hyppolite’s
Logic and Existence from 1952 that can help us understand the threat that
the end of history poses to literature and man. In this book, Hyppolite’s
“disciplined antihumanism” (Rajan 2002: 40) focuses on the transition from
history to absolute knowledge (the last stage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit)
and concludes that this transition constitutes the passage from human life
to nonhuman knowledge. Absolute knowledge comprehends both nature and
history, and it also comprehends itself. “This self-comprehension,” Hyppolite
writes, “is not a plan similar to a human plan. Hegelian logic sublates every
human and moral view of the world” (1997: 188). As this scheme is dominated
by philosophical logic, literature has no essential place in it (40).2 In light of
this threat, we can see why Hartman wants to demonstrate that literature is a
form of knowledge that differs from such a gesture of self-comprehension that
annuls human diversity. Even if literature is not itself interested in describing
the rich variety of human life, the very fact that it exists as a non-abstract form
of knowledge turns it into a testimony to such diversity.
Literature’s distinctive form of knowledge must relate to the truth in a
way that is different from a philosophical approach. In the case of absolute
knowledge, no aspect of the truth remains external to knowledge, and all tran-
scendence becomes immanent (Hyppolite 1997: 41). Literature, in contrast,
retains a moment of “vertical transcendence,” as the linguistic and historical
material that constitutes it keeps it at a distance from the infinite (Hyppolite
1946: 543). What is special about literature, for the early Hartman, is that in
spite of this distance, it yet has the capacity to directly grasp the true reality of
things. This belief in directness is one meaning of the title of Hartman’s book.
Still, the idea of an “unmediated vision” also refers to another crucial aspect of
the book, which links its case for literature to a particular theory of modernity.
For Hartman, the modern age is marked by a lack of mediation, and poetry has
 Immediacy, History, Nature 11

the singular capacity to “re-mediate” this modern condition; modern poetry

presents evidence for the continued availability of a transcendent source of
meaning that is no longer simply present in the world, as was the case in the
pre-modern world. The pre-modern world was characterized by a mediated
vision: in this period, “[n]either man nor his soul . . . can be preserved unless
his life and his faculties seek the mediation of Christ, and the Church, Christ’s
temporal incarnation and visible continuance” (UV 148). It is Descartes who
breaks with the idea of the divine mediation of the natural world: he “breaks
away from the mediated vision, and supports his break by appending the
continuity of life, creation, and thought directly to God” (148). After Descartes,
natural and historical objects of experience are no longer automatically charged
with divine significance, and this means that poetry must suspend its customary
relations to the things of this world in order to achieve a singularly intense
kind of phenomenological vision. Through this achievement, poetry directly
indicates God, the source of things’ significance; even if the modern condition
has temporarily hidden this source from us, poetry can remind us of its con-
tinued existence. Modern poetry, in other words, is no longer the mimesis or
imitation of historical and natural reality, but an attempt to achieve a vision that
pierces through worldly objects in order to connect directly to their source of
significance.
Descartes’ break with the mediated world also means that poetry must now
use words differently. In the pre-modern world, words not only had an arbitrary
meaning “as words,” but they were at the same time also symbols of the divine
(161). Now that mediation is no longer self-evident, “[e]verything is in potentia
equally sign and equally symbol” (161). In an age when words and things are no
longer experienced as symbols (that is, as mediated), poetry must reaffirm the
faded distinction between symbol and sign. Through the creation of symbols,
poetry can to a certain extent escape the tensions and confusions generated by
our habitual relations to things; symbols are “signs having the power to release
the mind from the tyranny of the eye, as from all singular impressions” (127).
Such an ability to bracket language’s normal relations to the world and to the
tradition also implies that modern poetry cannot rely on poetical examples, but
must radically break with them. Modern poetry, in other words, has the double
capacity to transcend the boundaries of a world that is no longer self-evidently
mediated by divine significance and to demonstrate the continued possibility of
transcendent meaning. And because it does not collapse the tension between
an unmediated world and that world’s transcendent source of significance (as
Hegel’s absolute knowledge does), it distinguishes itself from abstract forms of
knowledge, and as such testifies to the radical unity of human knowledge.
This theory of poetry’s place in modernity informs Hartman’s interpretations
of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry. These interpretations show how
precisely poetry manages to transcend history and reality, and how it brackets
the customary relations between mind and things.3 Hartman will soon realize
that his early conception of modern poetry is untenable, and that he has to find
12 Geoffrey Hartman

a way to locate the possibility of significance within history, rather than in

poetry’s supposed capacity to transcend it—especially since literature has to
affirm the viability of a specifically human kind of diversity. Before we look
at this remarkable self-correction, I briefly focus on Hartman’s discussions of
Wordsworth and Rilke in order to pinpoint some of the difficulties besetting his
early theory of modern poetry, and to identify another intertext that will survive
Hartman’s revisions of his early theory: the work of Heidegger.
The chapter on Wordsworth, which is centered around a discussion of
“Tintern Abbey,” describes Wordsworth’s achievement as the successful neutral-
ization of “relational thinking” (39). This “remission of the relational will and
its assertion” means that the particulars of creation can present themselves as a
mere “matter of fact,” and that “the description of experience is kept pure of
the arbitrary or associational connections which are the necessary product of
a searching mind” (8). The bracketing of customary relations and of human
projections makes room for a connection to a more genuine reality: “The poem
for Wordsworth, the aesthetic intuition, is not the result of an epistemological
act but of an epistemological event: a mutual and transcendent principle of
generosity has gone into action” (182–3n34). Poetry’s capacity to neutralize our
habitual view of things and to break through to an immediate vision testifies to
the existence of a sustaining “principle of generosity,” of “a transcendental
principle blending” mind and world (20, 25). Poetry liberates us from particular
relations, only to reveal a more essential condition of relatedness:

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)

Hartman states Wordsworth’s achievement in terms that can easily be coordi-

nated with the theory of modernity and of poetical achievement that undergirds
The Unmediated Vision as a whole. Still, demonstrating this achievement through
interpretation is another matter. Indeed, the question remains, “by what process
Wordsworth’s poetry suggests this great consummation?” (21).
Hartman names this process “incremental redundance”; his demonstration
centers on Wordsworth’s evocation near the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” of
“these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts
of more deep seclusion” (1993: 116–20, ll. 4–7). Wordsworth here manages to
bracket the conventional causal connection between the “scene” and the
“thoughts,” and to replace it with the suggestion of a transcendent principle of
connection: “The phrase ‘of more deep seclusion’ has a referent of which we
are hardly conscious because a transcendent one immediately suggests itself. It
is the cliffs that cause the scene to appear more secluded, it is the thoughts that
are by nature more secluded even than the scene, but the suggestion persists
 Immediacy, History, Nature 13

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

achievement and these determinants of historical experience than Hartman’s

early project can provide.
Hartman’s chapter on Rilke, like that on Wordsworth, is concerned with
the distinction between our ordinary perception of nature and a “sensuous
intuition” of “[n]ature’s untranslatable concreteness.” It aims to trace Rilke’s
poetical transformation of “transience into continuous motion,” and his
capacity to conjure an “eventfulness without event,” an “audibility without
sound,” and a “visibility without image” (86–94). Hartman’s interpretation
takes off from “Die Erwachsene,” one of Rilke’s so-called Dinggedichte. Hartman
writes that Rilke’s poetry blurs the distinction “between the human and the
natural object,” and thus manages to “suggest a broad identity” in response to
“the call and summoning (Lockruf) of all Creation” (74–5). It masters “the
invincible variety and multiplicity of perception” by ordering them in an
“inevitably transcendent direction” (75–6, 89). Poetry achieves an “inflexible
aloofness from the things of this world,” a Gelassenheit that makes room for the
contemplation of “a pure physical fruit” that is constitutively “independent
of human will” (79–87). Rilke, like Wordsworth, achieves a heightened form
of perception through the neutralization of the mind’s ordinary desires and
projections; his poetry revels in “the sudden upward radiation of a thing
on entering consciousness” (87). His poetry saves things from their unmedi-
ated existence and reveals how “[a]ll things carry with them the mark of a
transcendent orientation” (87).
This phenomenological reduction of reality is a response to the demise of
traditional mimesis—a concept that here begins its remarkable trajectory
through Hartman’s work. Hartman singles out Rilke’s fifth Duineser Elegie as
a “[s]uccessful metaphysical statement” that exemplifies this transition from
traditional imitation to modern poetry (38). The passage Hartman interprets
stages a group of acrobats who, in their attempt to build a human pyramid,
discover that there is no point in trying to “mimic the automatic and immanent
fertility of the natural world.” Their attempt to imitate nature falters when
they find it impossible to mimic the one “season almost unknown to man,
namely true winter.” Still, winter is only apparently unnatural, infertile, and
meaningless; in fact, it is the “season in which life is secretly and radically
renewed, the season of death preceding resurgence” (80). The cycle of nature
thus contains a moment in which natural life disappears, and in which it
disguises itself as its own absence. Yet precisely because of this paradox, the
acrobats’ failure to come up with an imitation of winter paradoxically turns
their attempt into a successful re-enactment of natural process: “inasmuch as
the pure physical fruit is a more spontaneous product of Nature (phusis, natura
naturans) than the rest of nature (natura naturata, die Kreatur) the acrobats have
achieved their end” (80).
The paradoxical success of the acrobats closely resembles the achievement
of modern poetry in the face of the modern lack of mediation: the impossibility
to imitate the particulars of nature leads to an affirmation of a totality that
 Immediacy, History, Nature 15

encompasses these particulars—whether that totality is called the divine, a

principle of generosity, or “a purely physical process” that subsumes “the source
and end of life” (78). The acrobats’ failure to make sense of a part of creation
(natura naturata) becomes the successful affirmation of natural process as a
whole (natura naturans, phusis). This distinction between nature and Nature
will prove all-important in Hartman’s plotting of Wordsworth’s development in
Wordsworth’s Poetry, and this makes it all the more vital to understand how he
models that distinction here. In a reading of Kant’s third Critique in his essay
“Economimesis,” Derrida describes the process in which “[t]he artist does not
imitate things in nature, or, if you will, in natura naturata, but the acts of natura
naturans, the operations of the physis” (1981: 9). Mimesis, that is, intervenes
“not only as one would expect in reproductive operations, but in the free and
pure productivity of the imagination as well” (6). The end of reproductive
mimesis does not spell the end of a “divine teleology” and of the possibility of
poetical success, because the free productivity of the imagination allows an
analogy between artistic and divine creation (UV 153). Derrida writes that “since
an analogy has already made natura naturans the art of an author-subject, and,
one could even say, of an artist-god, mimesis displays the identification of human
action with divine action—of one freedom with another” (1981: 5). As Hartman
writes, “[g]reatest art is not imitation of nature but repossession of the book of
Genesis” (“TM” 125). Therefore, the less free productivity depends on nature,
“the more it resembles nature”—the kind of nature that Hartman will capitalize
in his interpretation of Wordsworth (Derrida 1981: 9).
Marking the distinction between particulars and totality by a mere capital
has a venerable precedent in Heidegger’s distinction between beings (Seiende)
and Being (Sein), and it is no surprise that Hartman’s interpretation of Rilke
explicitly invokes Heidegger in order to model the complex relations between
different aspects of nature.5 While Hegel, as I noted, hovers over Hartman’s
work as a threat to literature and to human history, Heidegger provides
Hartman with a script to smuggle residues of his early transcendent temptation
into the ostensibly secularized theory of modern poetry that informs Wordsworth’s
Poetry.6 Hartman seems to be invoking Heidegger when he glosses winter, the
season “in which life is secretly and radically renewed,” as a time of “hidden
growth, Verborgenheit, that perpetual and winter-like stasis in which the secret
ripeness gathers” (UV 80). Hartman links this idea of hidden growth to
Heidegger’s conception of phusis as “Erde.” Erde, according to this definition, is
not to be thought of as mere sedimented matter, rather, “[d]ie Erde ist das,
wohin das Aufgehen alles Aufgehende und zwar als ein solches zurückbirgt”
(qt. 189n8). As Heidegger also writes, “[i]m Aufgehenden west die Erde als
das Bergende” (1977: 31). The earth, in other words, is pictured as a safe haven
that collects all things that emerge. Yet as Hartman’s association between this
dynamic and the Verborgenheit of winter underlines, this totality itself does
not appear in the world, but comes very close to being the secret truth of a
“subsistent ground of vision” (UV 23) that we can only reach by bracketing our
16 Geoffrey Hartman

customary relations to the particulars of nature—which means, in the case of

poetry, by abandoning traditional mimesis.
In the 1943 text “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” which is central to Hartman’s
understanding of Heidegger’s work, Verborgenheit is valorized as an essential
moment of truth. For Heidegger, Dasein relates to truth in a relation of
Gestimmtheit. This Gestimmtheit is crucially a relation to the totality of Being,
rather than to a sum of particular beings: it is “eine ek-sistente Ausgesetztheit
in das Seiende im Ganzen,” which is not the same as the sum of all beings that
are already known (Heidegger 1954: 18). The truth is not revealed through the
accumulation of worldly particulars, or through the mimesis of the particulars
of nature that Rilke’s acrobats initially attempt, but rather through an entirely
different relation to Being as a whole (im Ganzen). The acrobats, as we know,
achieve this more essential relation precisely through the failure of their attempt
to imitate nature. In Heidegger too, the relation to the whole is revealed at the
limits of accumulation and calculation: “Dieses ‘im Ganzen’ erscheint aber im
Gesichtsfeld des alltäglichen Rechnens und Beschaffens als das Unberechen-
bare und Ungreifbare” (19). This “Unbestimmte, Unbestimmbare” escapes the
categories in which we normally capture the world, and it activates a relation to
a dynamic of concealment and unconcealment that Heidegger identifies with
the truth as such.
This explains the paradoxical success of Rilke’s acrobats: the failure of their
“man-willed and artificial” attempt at mimesis (UV 80) liberates them into a
dynamic of concealment and unconcealment to which the imitation of nature
could never have granted them access. Such a shift from imitation to a move-
ment in which nature and life intermittently present themselves as statis and
death is already announced in their decision to build, of all things, a pyramid,
a construction that, in the words of Derrida, “consecrates the disappearance of
life by attesting to the perseverance of life” (1982b: 82), which is precisely the
logic that we find in Hartman’s description of winter as a “season of death”
in which “life is secretly and radically renewed.” What matters here is less a
responsible exegesis of Heidegger—for one thing, the relation between the
dynamic of truth and poetry (or art) would deserve a much longer discussion—
than an understanding of the way a crucial movement in Heidegger’s work
informs the relation between natural particulars and natural process in
Hartman’s later interpretation of Wordsworth in Wordsworth’s Poetry. Of course,
Hartman’s decision to borrow this movement for a description of natural
process—rather than of Being—is itself significant: it presents this movement
as a physical process, and avoids unwelcome metaphysical, or even theological
implications. Still, the fact that this movement already finds a place in The
Unmediated Vision, in which theological concerns play an enabling role—not
least in its chapters on Wordsworth and Hopkins—indicates that Hartman’s
later Wordsworth will not be the fully secularized poet he may initially appear to
be. The discussion of Heidegger points to the persistent difficulty in Hartman’s
early work of relating poetical achievement to the historical, material, and
 Immediacy, History, Nature 17

literary-historical determinants of modern life, rather than to their reduction

and transcendence.

2. Auerbach and the Possibility of Historical Meaning

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

it manages to recognize “the enigmatic richness of daily life” as an “incomparable

historical vantage point” (IJ 176; Auerbach 2003: 553). Because the individual
author-subject is part of the continuity of history, his most faithful expression of
historical reality becomes at the same time the most adequate interpretation of it
(Costa-Lima 1988: 489–90).
But how can we simply assume the truthfulness of historical particulars? In
his important 1938 essay “Figura,”10 Auerbach constructs an opposition between
allegorical interpretation, on the one hand, and the Christian exegetical
principle of the figura (more commonly known as typology) on the other. While
allegory abstracts historical particulars into ahistorical meaning, the figura
distinctively maintains the historical particularity of the two events it connects
by interpretation: “figura is something real and historical which announces
something that is also real and historical”; it distinguishes itself by “the historic-
ity both of the sign and what it signifies” (Auerbach 1984: 29, 54). The figura
connects two distinct moments in a historical continuity: “The two poles of the
figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within
time, within the stream of historical life” (53). The figura assures that historical
significance is possible without the need to transcend history; it assumes that
there is a meaningfulness that is intrinsic to history.
In order to appreciate how Auerbach could offer Hartman a convincing
alternative to the framework of The Unmediated Vision, we also need to ask
where he locates the particular modernity of modern literature. In The
Unmediated Vision, it will be remembered, modernity was inaugurated by
Descartes, after which transcendent meaning lived a merely subterranean
existence and depended on the poetical reduction of everyday life in order to
be able to see the light of day. For Hartman, the poetical version of this shift to
modernity was located in Milton: he is “perhaps the last who, with the strength
of despair,” can still express “the view of created things as instantaneously cre-
ated, and of man as the absolute creation,” the view that modernity will replace
with a regime of “accidence and fortuitousness” and of “material or environ-
mental fatality” (UV 157–60). For Auerbach, it is the figure of Dante who ushers
in the modern age and who makes possible a more satisfying literary encounter
with the accidence of everyday life. Near the end of Mimesis’ central chapter on
Dante, Auerbach connects his interpretation of Dante to the “Figura”-essay, and
notes that Dante’s realism consists in the production of “an almost painfully
immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings.” This achieve-
ment cannot be isolated from Dante’s Christian worldview, as it is “the Christian
idea of the indestructibility of the entire human individual which made this
possible for Dante” (2003: 199). Yet no sooner has Dante’s realism actualized
this possibility than it breaks with this transcendent framework and declares the
self-sufficiency of creaturely life. Dante, Auerbach writes, “created a world of
earthly beings and passions so powerful that it breaks bounds and proclaims its
independence. Figure surpasses fulfillment, or more properly: the fulfillment
serves to bring out the figure in still more impressive relief” (200). In Dante’s
 Immediacy, History, Nature 21

realism, “[t]he tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of

the image it had to contain” (202). Dante, that is, assures the continued possibility
of literary significance in modernity. After the Christian Middle Ages, significance
is generated in a process of “immanent refiguration” that no longer requires
reference to a transcendent source of meaning (Géfin 1999: 29).
Auerbach’s affirmation of the modern possibility of literary significance
makes it possible to connect literature to the rich variety of human life, which,
in Hartman’s early work, is always imagined as being under threat of Hegel’s
prophecy of the ends of art and history. Mimesis was written during the Second
World War in Auerbach’s Turkish exile from Nazi Germany, and these dismal
conditions explain why for Hartman these concerns crystallize in the figure of
Auerbach. Near the end of the 1970 essay “Toward Literary History,” Hartman
sketches Auerbach’s position in terms that are equally applicable to his own
early work:

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)

While Hartman’s account foregrounds an undercurrent of pessimism in

Auerbach’s work, it is important to emphasize that Auerbach’s affirmation
of realism also contains a much more hopeful aspect. For Auerbach, further
immanent refigurations of the European literary tradition remain possible in
the modernism of Woolf or Joyce with which he ends Mimesis. In a more recent
text on Auerbach, Hartman acknowledges Auerbach’s remarkable confidence
in the powers of prose: Auerbach, he writes, enjoyed “the spaciousness and
variety prose allowed: he foresaw a prosaic modern era but did not regret it as
such, only a tendency toward standardization” (IJ 178).11
When we observe the difference between these two assessments of Auerbach,
we see that the more recent one implicitly recognizes that the earlier projection
of pessimism reflects Hartman’s own inability to be satisfied with the prose of
the world. This inability testifies to Hartman’s residual investment in a reality
that is not the stuff of everyday life. By associating Auerbach’s attachment to a
mundane reality with the idea of prose, moreover, Hartman suggests an affinity
between this other reality and poetry. While Hartman’s case for English mod-
ern poetry, and for Wordsworth especially, profits from Auerbach’s affirmation
of historical meaning, it still credits poetry with a power that is unavailable in
Auerbach’s own history of realist prose. For Auerbach, Dante’s realism makes
22 Geoffrey Hartman

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

refiguration. Hartman is here separating Auerbach’s principle of intertextual

continuity from the affirmation of historical particulars that this continuity
makes possible, in order to connect it to a more elevated idea of nature, rather
than to the things of this world. If we return Hartman’s quotation to its original
context, his divergence from Auerbach’s work becomes unmistakable. Near the
end of Book V of The Prelude, entitled “Books”, the poet finds himself walking
with “a dear Friend,” “Repeating favourite Verses with one voice, / Or conning
more” (1985: 109, ll. 566–7). Yet this recitation does not prevent that “full
oft the objects of our love / Were false, and in their splendour overwrought”
(ll. 571–2), a disappointment that characteristically calls for compensation:

Yet was there, surely, then no vulgar power

Working within us, nothing less, in truth,
Than that most noble attribute of Man,
Though yet untutored and inordinate,
That wish for something loftier, more adorned,
Than is the common aspect, daily garb
Of human life. (ll. 573–9)

Wordsworth here voices the half-hidden ambition that informs Hartman’s

divergence from Auerbach: his wish for “something loftier” than Woolf’s
prosaic “random events.”13
This more lofty reality is intimately related to the medium of poetry. While
Woolf’s prose can affirm “an impersonally and constantly active principle
of life” (“VW” 78), it cannot grasp this purely poetical dimension of reality.
In the passage from which Hartman quotes, Wordsworth writes that he, who “in
his youth”

With living Nature hath been intimate,

Not only in that raw unpractised time
Is stirred to extasy, as others are,
By glittering verse; but, further, doth receive,
In measure only dealt out to himself,
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. (ll. 590–7)

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.

3. Wordsworth: The Phenomenology of Counter-Spirit

Hartman’s continuous revisions of his theory of modern poetry in his first
decade can be understood as parts of an attempt to falsify Hegel’s prophecy of
the ends of art and history. While The Unmediated Vision failed to find the right
terms to assert the value of historical and natural variety and of human individu-
ality, Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s poetical development in Wordsworth’s
Poetry, 1787–1814 is the culmination of a more adequate theorization of the
relations between poetry, reflexivity, and history—however compromised by
remnants of transcendence that theory still is. Not only is Hartman’s account
a celebration of Wordsworth’s achievement of “binding” his imagination to
nature (of akedah rather than apocalypse),15 the very fact that it narrates the
development of the poetical imagination on the level of the individual serves as a
retort to Hegel’s alleged indifference to human difference and individuality. The
level of narration, in other words, is itself, in the book’s terms, anti-apocalyptic.
Hartman writes that “Wordsworth’s explicit subject . . . is not cosmic or societal
except in implication. His subject is the growth of the mind . . . The special
nature of his theme, his focus on the individual mind, is already a sign of
a ‘general and gregarious advance’ in human self-consciousness” (WP 50).
Even while Hartman emphasizes that he has not schematized “an emerging Phe-
nomenology of Mind” (xxiii), the book is aware that the story of Wordsworth’s
imagination that it offers is an alternative to the victorious march of Hegel’s
philosophical knowledge. Wordsworth’s human imagination proves that a
 Immediacy, History, Nature 27

transition to a philosophical knowledge that undoes it is not inevitable:

Hartman writes that “[h]umanization . . . is conceived as a precarious transition
from imagination to the philosophical mind,” and that poetry manages to
express “the precarious and blended quality of human consciousness, which
is always in transition between natural and supernatural” (160–2). The dates
in the book’s title—1787–1814—may well convey the subtle suggestion that
at the very time that Hegel was engaged in the Teutonic systematization of
philosophy—The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807, The Science
of Logic between 1812 and 1814—England was quietly going through a
“Wordsworthian Enlightenment” that would serve as a more humane alter-
native to philosophical systematicity.
The narrative of Wordsworth’s Poetry offers a varied catalogue of applications
of the principle of affirmation through reflexivity that I outlined in the previous
section. Wordsworth’s imagination manages to affirm its essential relatedness to
nature throughout its growing awareness of its seeming independence from it.
The development of the story is propelled by an imaginative movement that
simultaneously affirms the priority of nature and its own increasing reflexive
distance from it. The book is at least comparable to the Phenomenology of Spirit in
that it applies this movement to ever new natural contents and ever new poetical
devices, in the same way that Hegel’s book proceeds through the repeated
application of a movement of Aufhebung. The narrative conceit that organizes
nature’s multiple roles—as both the origin of significance and as something to
be ceaselessly overcome—casts nature as a teacher or a guide: nature is a peda-
gogical agent that weans the poet’s mind, only to expose it to its “often fearful
methods,” which are only “propaedeutic” in what is ultimately a merciful
“pedagogy” (“PW” 214–18). It is nature itself that leads Wordsworth beyond
nature. Of course, this double role of nature—as both an active underlying
process and a visible set of particulars—recalls the Heideggerian setup of the
earlier interpretation of Rilke. And to compound the complexity of nature in
Hartman’s story, his divergence from Auerbach has also singled out a privi-
leged form of nature that, because of its association with the works of mighty
poets, is essential in enabling a process of poetical individuation—which is to
a large extent what Wordsworth’s Poetry is about. Importantly, the complexity of
nature is not as such a problem for the book: it makes possible the remarkable
descriptive variety and conceptual flexibility that characterizes Hartman’s
presentation of the multifarious interrelations between imagination and nature,
which this complexity allows him to trace at great length and in great detail.
It is instructive to home in on the different roles of nature a bit longer, if
only because it allows me to put into perspective the prevalent idea—
promoted by Hartman’s own later work—that Hartman’s Wordsworth pres-
ents an exemplary strategy for dealing with the memory of trauma and death.
When we look at the emergence of these themes in Wordsworth’s Poetry, it
becomes clear that this model of survival is rooted in a spectacular avoidance
of negativity.
28 Geoffrey Hartman

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

emerge as individuals, by confronting the possibility of our own death. For

Heidegger, such a confrontation is the very condition for the “eigentliche
Ganzseinkönnen” of Dasein, for Dasein’s capacity to set out on an existential
project (2001: 234). And the same goes for Hegel’s Phenomenology: here, the
struggle between master and slave is located at the threshold of the transition
from consciousness to self-consciousness. Hartman’s revision of Blanchot’s
two-step scenario skips this moment of confrontation; when this revised picture
then informs the narrative of Wordsworth’s Poetry, this evasion crucially limits the
relevance of Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s development.
Hartman repeats Blanchot’s and Heidegger’s distinction between the worldly
project of “an historical appropriation of the earth” and a confrontation with
Being that breaks through the worldly dissimulation of Being (“MB” 152), yet
this confrontation does not play a role in his account of individuation at all—
even if, in the sources on which he relies, such a confrontation is a necessary
step if the project of individuation is to get underway at all. Instead, the dissimu-
lation of Being has itself to be dissimulated: Hartman notes that, in order
“to live humanly and dynamically,” “besides the dissimulation of the whole
there must also be a dissemblance of the dissimulation.” In order to become
“existentialists,” “we must become freely blind” (152). Yet instead of explaining
this remarkable avoidance of Blanchot’s and Heidegger’s moment of individu-
ation in the face of death, Hartman overlays the relation between Blanchot and
Heidegger with a very different tradition:

though I think Blanchot is indebted to Heidegger, his understanding of

the latter’s philosophy is likely to have been mediated by a larger and pre-
dominantly literary tradition. If there is any one trait that unifies literary
movements since the Romantic period, it is their quest for an adequate
theory of unconsciousness or creative self-oblivion. (“MB” 153)

So instead of an outright confrontation with the dissimulation of Being,

Hartman pictures a form of literary individuation that occurs by confronting a
tradition of “creative self-oblivion.” Connecting to such a literary history that
dissimulates dissimulation allows the modern poet to avoid a face-to-face with
his own nothingness, without therefore having to surrender the possibility of a
project of individual self-development.17
In a Heideggerian scenario, the project of individuation can only begin when
the confrontation with death has created the possibility conditions for such
a project; for Hartman, poetical consciousness is already established through
an intertextual connection to the English poetical tradition at the moment
the poet is confronted with loss and negativity. As Thomas Pfau has noted,
Hartman’s Wordsworth addresses lethal threats to his own project “only after
the fact of “consciousness” has already been established,” and therefore the
threat of mortality “remains a psychological (rather than ontological) crisis of
an essentially reified ‘poetic’ consciousness-of-self” (1987: 496). The threat of
30 Geoffrey Hartman

death, or of a lethal (apocalyptic) separation from nature, figures in Hartman’s

account of poetical individuation as a psychological temptation, not as an
ontological fatality.18 In Wordsworth’s Poetry, Wordsworth’s self-conscious assump-
tion of his role in the history of English literature establishes him as a poetical
individual, and his sense of vocation generates a web of dynamic interrelations
between nature and the imagination. “[T]he great Nature that exists in works /
Of mighty Poets” activates a relation to natural process that is unmistakably
modeled on Heidegger’s account of the relation between Being and beings.19
On the book’s last page, Hartman acknowledges that he “may seem to exaggerate
Wordsworth’s sense of mission” (WP 338); still, this exaggeration is a methodo-
logical requirement: the assumption that Wordsworth’s sense of poetical vocation
is the salient fact in his career is a necessary condition for the book’s account of
the interrelations between nature and the imagination. As “Virginia’s Web”
already suggested, the nature that is celebrated in Wordsworth’s Poetry is some-
thing loftier than the mere sum of the things of this world. When we note
how this nature overlays the confrontation with death in Hartman’s account,
we see that Wordsworth’s nature is, quite precisely, reality minus death. This idea
of a nature and of an existence in nature that are essentially invulnerable even
in the face of loss still informs Hartman’s later interpretations of Wordsworth.
Wordsworth’s Poetry presents an intricate web of connections between nature
and the imagination, and this web is streamlined in a tale of the growth of
the poet’s mind.20 The poet’s progress consists in an ever more adequate
integration of ideas of time and place with the poet’s style, which reflects
an increasingly nuanced reciprocal attunement between nature and the imagi-
nation. Hartman’s name for both this stylistic achievement and this web of
interconnections is “metaphor”; he writes that in Wordsworth’s “unique style,”
“metaphor (transference) is a generalized structure rather than a special verbal
figure” (WP xxiii). This “metaphor”—a term that is derived from the Greek for
“to carry over”—is importantly a two-way affair, and is as such to be distinguished
from the one-sided activity of positing. In his essay “‘Setzung’ and ‘Übersetzung’,”
Rodolphe Gasché notes that metaphysical positing, “and even more so the
empirical, humanized version of it,” is “the activity of the self” (1981: 53). Such
a logic of self-assertion still governs Wordsworth’s position in his early Descriptive
Sketches (written in 1791–2), in which the eye “both puts and restlessly exceeds
‘the line where being ends’”: “if the eye continuously goes beyond, it is only to fix
a new line . . . and to transcend that also” (“DS” 524). Gradually, Wordsworth’s
poetry moves toward a very different ontology, in which such subjective positing
(Setzen) is always the translation (Über-Setzung, or metaphor) of a position that
precedes such subjective activity. Gasché connects this metaphorical process to
Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia:

All concepts of positing, according to which the act of positing is a present

act constitutive of presence, hinge on positing as the letting coming forth
into what is present. In order that an act may be the present act of a self
 Immediacy, History, Nature 31

engendering itself as spirit, a self presupposed by all real subjects, an original

thesis must already have taken place: a thesis through which the clearing is
freed in which a self can come to posit itself. (54)

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

revisions of Heidegger have made us expect, a renunciation of vision leads

to the compensatory activation of “a power in the mind independent of
sight” (241), a power that is drawn from an intertextual source. Hartman writes
that for Wordsworth, Milton serves as “the great example of a principle of
compensation he seeks to find in nature but which may also live at nature’s
expense” (99). By recognizing this example, Wordsworth manages to arrest
his exclusive confinement to external natural impulses, and to begin the
poetical labor of finding a place both inside and outside of nature. Encounters
with place are now no longer isolated traumas, but can become part of English
literary history.22
Hartman distinguishes two stages in Wordsworth’s overcoming of his break
with nature: first, there is the (nonpoetic) stage of selfhood, which is simply
a “criminal or ideological position” that affirms this break; then there is
(properly poetic) manhood, which is more than a mere position (Setzung),
but creates the possibility of activating metaphorical structures (Übersetzung)
in order to erase this rupture. While selfhood assumes that the intellect “is
basically revolutionary or contra naturam,” and is thus bound to “perpetuate
the ‘crime against nature’ from which it sprang,” manhood embodies the
“hope that man does not have to violate nature to become human” (126–34).
Manhood, in other words, consists in a massive reinterpretation of the fact
of our separation from nature; it involves the—again, metaphorical—capacity
to see the “straits of individuation . . . as a summation of natural process rather
than as an alienation from it”; Wordsworth “now sees the separation as part
of a process providentially encouraged by nature itself” (132–5). Rather than
leaving Wordsworth exposed to the traumatic memory of his separation from
nature, poetry “acts as a veil that uncovers another veil” (139). This is the
conversion from apocalypse to akedah that defines Wordsworth’s distinctive
poetical achievement. Hartman observes “a more general conceptual shift from
advent to presence, from picture-simultaneity to parousia, from hierarchy to
reciprocity” (205). In Wordsworth’s mature style, “[t]he strongest contrasts
become blendings” in which “[n]othing is denied its own mediatory role,” “yet
nothing is defined into absolute independent singleness” (166–8, 187). For
Hartman, Wordsworth’s “potentiality of interchange points to the ethics of
metaphor and perhaps of poetry as a whole” (186).
Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth combines a remarkable trust in
the unhindered continuity of nature and mind with a particular investment
in a rhetoric of trauma, shock, negativity, and death. This double emphasis
may lead to the conclusion that Wordsworth’s return to nature can count as
an exemplary case of post-traumatic stress management. Yet as I explained
above, Wordsworth’s remarkable resilience is made possible by an avoidance of
negativity, rather than by its survival. In light of the seminal role that Hartman’s
work will go on to play in the formation of trauma studies in the 1980s and
1990s, and of his own spectacular claim in The Fateful Question of Culture
that Wordsworth’s mediation of the trauma of industrialization achieved a
 Immediacy, History, Nature 33

“precarious cultural transfer . . . of English rural life” (FQ 7), it is helpful to

home in on Wordsworth’s Poetry’s tendency to recuperate moments of negativity
and death for the uplifting message of nature’s beneficial operation. Because
these encounters with negativity and the threat of mortality only occur as
episodes in an already consolidated self-consciousness, these traumas paradoxi-
cally serve as privileged vehicles for nature’s essential “non-traumaticity,” for its
care and concern for the individual.
One of the book’s emblems of man’s resilience in the face of death is the
shepherd in Wordsworth’s poem “The Last of the Flock.” Hartman can only
make him serve as such an emblem, however, by seriously misreading the extent
of his despair. “The Last of the Flock” is one of the Lyrical Ballads, and it recounts
the speaker’s encounter “on English ground” (1993: 85–8, l. 5) with a crying
man who tells the story of how, after having bought a ewe, “from this one, this
single ewe, / Full fifty comely sheep [he] raised” (ll. 32–3); when he is later
denied parish relief, he has to sell these sheep one by one (l. 51), and at the
moment of the encounter he carries the last lamb on his arm: “To-day I fetched
it from my rock: / It is the last of all my flock” (ll. 99–100). Hartman converts
the shepherd’s despair into an emblem of human resilience by noting that
“[e]very new sacrifice is prophetic, and brings home the idea of separation . . .
from all that stands between the self and its nakedness” (144). Although
Wordsworth’s poem gives no indication that the last lamb will in its turn be
sacrificed, Hartman’s interpretation already anticipates the loss of even the last
of the shepherd’s properties. It hastens the death of the lamb because such a
radicalization of the separation paradoxically enables a perspective of infinite
hope: Hartman writes that the dignity of the shepherd shows “how infinitely
capable of loss a man may be; so that our final image is the perseverance of an
individual” (144).
In light of the book’s overarching argument, we can see that this conversion
of a scene of suffering into a demonstration of nature’s charity involves a
recoding of the shepherd’s bare “rock” as the place of the sacrificial scene that
undergirds the book: the altar on which Abraham binds Isaac, that is, the scene
that is traditionally named the akedah, which is the name Hartman uses to sum
up Wordsworth’s anti-apocalyptic achievement (225). This scene demonstrates
how a sacrificial logic of substitution—Isaac is substituted by a ram, which is
in its turn a substitute for a lamb (Genesis 22.7)—generates the promise of
future multiplication (Genesis 22.17). When we apply this logic to Hartman’s
recuperative interpretation of Wordsworth’s poem, this means that it envisions
the future inversion of the shepherd’s story of decline, which will repeat the
earlier multiplication of sheep that started from a single ewe (ll. 24–5). Still,
Hartman’s interpretation can only echo Abraham’s promise of compensatory
multiplication when we gloss over an all-important detail in the poem. As I
noted, the last surviving lamb is not yet added to “the iterated sacrifice of fifty
sheep, one by one” (WP 144), as the poem gives no indication that it has already
been killed—it is, in fact, explicitly said to be alive (l. 38). When the shepherd
34 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.

4. The English Ideology

Wordsworth’s Poetry is a magisterial display of Hartman’s temporary resolution of

the concerns that had dominated the first decade of his career. His account
of Wordsworth’s poetical development establishes poetry as a distinct form of
knowledge that differs from abstract, philosophical knowledge. As poetry has
the paradoxical capacity to affirm both the freedom of the imagination and the
necessity of our connections to history and nature, it takes a substantial place
in modernity. In the immediate aftermath of this achievement, Hartman estab-
lishes himself as an important critic of criticism, and as the proponent of
a particular interpretation of modern English literary history. This double
emphasis on theory and literary history is reflected in the almost periodical
publication of collections of very diverse essays that follow Wordsworth’s Poetry in
Hartman’s bibliography: Beyond Formalism in 1970, The Fate of Reading in 1975,
and Criticism in the Wilderness in 1980. Hartman’s insights in Wordsworth, more-
over, are soon repackaged in a number of essays as both an assertive conception
of English exceptionality and a distinct theory of Romanticism. Even though
these versions of England and of Romanticism are repeatedly challenged in the
 Immediacy, History, Nature 35

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

that Hartman promotes in “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’,” yet

does so in a less dialectical, and therefore less adequate, way.25 Peckham attempts
to “reconcile” Wellek and Lovejoy by reducing Wellek’s three criteria to a “basic
or root-metaphor” that he terms “dynamic” (or “positive”) “organicism” (1951:
12–14). This positive organicism, which Peckham finds in The Ancient Mariner,
The Prelude, and Sartor Resartus (15n10), is radically different from a “negative
romanticism” that he encounters in “individuals who are filled with guilt,
despair, and cosmic and social alienation . . . they are Harolds, they are
Manfreds, they are Cains” (20). Here the advantage of Hartman’s account
becomes clear: for him, these solitary figures are a crucial part of the problem-
atic he is mapping, while Peckham excludes them from his ideologically
much more determined version of Romanticism. “Negative romanticism,” for
Peckham, is a “necessary complement” of “positive romanticism,” and it is only
discussed because Byron has to be given a place within Romanticism;26 he
acknowledges the existence of such a negative Romanticism only to relegate it
to the moment of Sturm und Drang, that is, before Romanticism proper really
took off.27 Hartman, in contrast, combines negative and positive Romanticism
in “a vital, dialectical movement of soul-making” in which the movement is
as important, and as distinctly Romantic, as the final state of this dialectical
progression (“AS” 299).28
Hartman’s double focus on Germany and England in “Romanticism and
‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’” is strategic: it allows him to grant the question of
the relation between Enlightenment and Romanticism the serious treatment it
has received in the German tradition, only to end the essay by privileging the
English version of Romanticism. This English literary history can be seen as an
analogical extension of Wordsworth’s development. Indeed, when Hartman
remarks that “Wordsworth exemplifies a peculiarly English relation of new
to old” (67), Wordsworth is made to exemplify a tradition that is itself an ana-
logical extension of his own example. As I noted, this modern tradition begins
with Milton, whose mature work is credited with the successful transcendence
of the “dichotomy of ‘gentle mind’ and ‘false theme’ which appears early in his
poetry”; this achievement “shows the enlightened mind still emerging,” and as
such constitutes “a stage in the growth of the English poetic mind” (“FT” 56–7).
The emergence of the poetic mind in Milton is “peculiarly English,” because
his poetry “produces the sense of a middle-region in which everything is numi-
nous and semi-divine,” and this temperance constitutes “the right kind of spirit,
or spirits, for English landscape” (58). English poetry does not “give up the
sophisticated superstitions by which literature had always amused, shocked, or
instructed” in favor of the progress of reason, but uniquely manages to respect
romance as “an eternal rather than archaic portion of the human mind, and
poetry [as] its purification” (55, 60).
England exemplifies a reciprocal integration of nature and imagination, of
fact and fiction, and of romance and reason that is neither abstract nor trau-
matic. Yet because it also constitutes a particular tradition, it can be compared
 Immediacy, History, Nature 37

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

in the prevention of an English Holocaust in The Fateful Question. As the

genealogy of this claim in Hartman’s early work makes clear, it derives less
from a responsible exercise in comparative literature than from a peculiar
affective investment in a certain idea of English literature and culture.
Germany, it seems, never manages to rid itself in Hartman’s work of its early
association with Hegel’s “curse”—even if, given the much more positive light in
which he figures in Hartman’s memoir A Scholar’s Tale (2007), Hegel himself
eventually manages to overcome that association. And if this is the critical
fate of Germany and England, we may well ask what has happened to France?
The French theory of Valéry, Sartre, and Blanchot played an important role
in the development of Hartman’s Romanticism. Yet after 1966, the work of
Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida will present Hartman with a form of French
theory that offers a much more direct challenge to his English ideology. As
the next chapter shows, Hartman’s readiness to rethink this ideology in the
light of such challenges testifies to his absolute unwillingness to let go of
Wordsworth’s England.
 Chapter 2

Of Climatology: Literature after Structure

. . . 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”

The international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences

of Man” that took place at Johns Hopkins in October 1966 is generally consid-
ered as a landmark in the history of twentieth-century criticism and theory. The
conference inaugurated the American career of French theory: it featured
contributions by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, who,
together with the Belgian Paul de Man, who made a number of remarkable
interventions in the discussions following the different presentations, would go
on to become key figures in the rise of theory in the 1970s. Hartman’s work in
this period—together with that of de Man, Derrida, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis
Miller—is routinely associated with the rise of French theory through the label
of the “Yale criticism.” Still, his engagement with the work of (especially)
Derrida and Lacan is often dismissed as a domestication that fails to appreciate
the true radicality of that work. Even if Hartman’s two main essays on Derrida,
which were published in 1975 and 1976 in the Georgia Review and were later
reprinted in Saving the Text (1981), read like derivations or even pastiches of
Derrida on account of their allusive and playful style, it is generally assumed
that Hartman somehow missed—or obscured—the real point of Derrida’s
deconstruction, just as he had missed the event at Johns Hopkins that launched
deconstruction in America.
So what was Hartman doing at the time of the Johns Hopkins conference? In
the fall of 1966, while Derrida was deconstructing the structuralism of Claude
Lévi-Strauss in Baltimore, Hartman was presenting a lecture in Berlin entitled
“Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure,” in which he underlined the
continuities between the work of Lévi-Strauss and Anglo-American thought.
40 Geoffrey Hartman

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.

1. The Derrida Event

The lecture that Derrida presented at Johns Hopkins was entitled “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Even if the stakes of its
deconstruction of structuralism were largely lost on an American audience for
whom structuralism was essentially a “foreign import” at the time (“AA” 150), in
the following years Derrida’s intervention sent “seismic tremors and after-
shocks” through the field of literary criticism (Martin 1983: xxiv).1 Standard
 Literature after Structure 41

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

opposes two different “interpretations of interpretation”: on the one hand, there

is a “nostalgia” for the “absent origin,” which “lives like an exile the necessity of
interpretation”; on the other, there is an interpretation “to which Nietzsche
showed us the way” that instead “affirms freeplay and tries to move beyond man
and humanism” (1972a: 264–5). Nostalgia and affirmation are, however, not
presented as two elements between which we “must” choose (il faut, as it says in
“La Différance”).4 Derrida writes in the last paragraph of his essay:

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

a nostalgic desire to hold on to the discredited empirical view. He attempts

to preserve “as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes” and adopts
“bricolage not only as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity”
(255–6). His position signals “an ethic of nostalgia for origins,” which is “the
sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of
which the Nietzschean affirmation . . . would be the other side” (264).
Such a nostalgic strategy that attempts to recuperate elements from the
renounced system in order to allow the possibility of order and meaning
to survive the demise of that system is very similar to the development of
Hartman’s career from The Unmediated Vision to Wordsworth’s Poetry. Indeed,
Hartman’s account of Wordsworth’s development can quite accurately be
described as the “vain and breathless quest” of an empirical subject and a poeti-
cal discourse to capture a chaotic reality that forever escapes them. Hartman’s
careful effort to leave room for the possibility of significance and order after
the demise of his earliest theory of modern poetry betrays a concern that the
end of the metaphysical worldview would surrender the things of this world to
mere disorder and freeplay, a dimension that Derrida indicates by signaling the
possibility of a Nietzschean affirmation. Before Derrida will call for a decision
between nostalgia and affirmation in 1968, their mutual imbrication in
“Structure, Sign, and Play” describes the dynamic of Hartman’s early career
quite correctly. This means that Hartman’s explicit engagement with Derrida
in the 1970s is not just an attempt to respond to a challenge that confronts
his oeuvre from outside, but a way of continuing developments that have been
a vital part of his work since its first decade. This also means that, even while
Derrida does not yet call for a decision between nostalgia and affirmation in
1966, the author of Wordsworth’s Poetry has at that time already made a decision
in favor of the nostalgic perpetuation of humanity and historical significance.
What Derrida’s pairing of nostalgia and affirmation makes clear is that such
critical nostalgia need also be understood as a (conscious or unconscious)
avoidance of an affirmation of freeplay, “with a certain laughter and with a
certain dance.”
The proceedings of the Johns Hopkins symposium were first published in
1970 as The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, and later republished
under the apparently more appealing title The Structuralist Controversy. By
bringing Derrida’s contribution in relation to Hartman’s work, rather than
to the (post)structuralist concern that the later title seems to impose on it, we
can see that it also engages with a (post-) phenomenological problematic—with
the question of how the subject relates to his world, and how the insufficiency
of framing the problem in this way leads to a new kind of philosophical ques-
tion. As I show in the next section, Derrida and Hartman treat the notions of
structure and system as parts of such a (post-)phenomenological concern. This
points to what Tilottama Rajan has called “the remainders of phenomenology”
in early deconstruction, which were soon forgotten when deconstruction in
America became institutionalized as poststructuralism. As Rajan writes, the
44 Geoffrey Hartman

term poststructuralism “names the fact that deconstruction in England and

America was perceived almost entirely as a problematizing of or emancipation
from structuralism, which retained the latter’s dismissal of phenomenology
and its rhetoric of the end of man” (2002: 4). Even if the encounter between
Derrida and Hartman failed to materialize in Baltimore in 1966, Hartman’s
work, in marked contrast to poststructuralism, confronts the challenge of
deconstruction without taking the dismissal of phenomenology and the end
of man for granted. Before its institutionalization as a poststructuralism that
proclaims the end of man, deconstruction still harbored the possibility of a
“humanisme de l’autre homme,” of a different ethics (4). Rajan notes that while
deconstruction transposes “phenomenological into linguistic models,” it “retains
the ontological concerns of the former”; more precisely, it maintains an “analytic
of finitude at the core of its focus on language” (7–8). In Rajan’s difficult words,
which bring to mind the residual Heideggerianism of Hartman’s early work,
deconstruction’s “turn to language returns on itself in an unforgetting of
the use of language to forget being, which will once again be forgotten by
poststructuralism” (124).
This pre-poststructuralist deconstruction closely resembles the early develop-
ment of Hartman’s career. This is the deconstruction he received, and not the
slightly later poststructuralist version that so thoroughly determined American
theory in the 1970s and 1980s. This divergence also explains Hartman’s rather
uneasy alliance with American poststructuralism, for which his work has always
seemed to be too much occupied with the human, psychology, nature, and
other themes that belong in a (post-)phenomenological, rather than a (post)
structuralist context. Indeed, it is only in the mid-1970s that Hartman manages
to find a place for Nietzschean affirmation in his work. In an essay on the
eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, Hartman writes in a note that
he does “not know how Derrida would interpret Smart’s use of names and
proper nouns. Or his ritualistically insistent, repetitive, affirmations. Would
he compare all this with Nietzsche’s ‘affirmation en jeu’ or Heidegger’s risky
‘espérance’”? (“CS” 452n19). Hartman only admits this more affirmative
moment, however, after he has carefully carved a space for it in his essentially
nostalgic critical project. So before we move to that conditional affirmation, we
need to look at Hartman’s self-emergence as a nostalgic critic of criticism in the
fateful year of 1966.

2. The Constellation of Criticism: Frye, Lévi-Strauss,

Poulet, and the New Criticism
The three essays in which Hartman takes on the major critical voices and
paradigms of the age together make up the first part of Beyond Formalism, the
collection of essays that Hartman publishes in 1970 and that consolidates his
status as a major critic and theorist.5 Such a confrontation with major critical
 Literature after Structure 45

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 future of literature and of criticism depends on a decision between saving

“the individual work” or adopting a totalizing approach. In order to save
individuality and difference, criticism needs an authentic, non-Olympian kind
of totality that does not simply neutralize the specificity of particulars but rather
brings them together in a way that is more respectful of their particularity, or of
what this passage calls their “aura.” Only through such a benign form of totality
can criticism save literature; and because literature is also criticism’s object, this
rescue operation also saves criticism itself.
So where do we find this authentic totality that can prevent the loss of the
object of criticism? When the passage above compares the situation of criticism
to “literature itself,” we recall that for Hartman, literature, and most specifically
Wordsworth’s poetry, is an act of preservation that avoids apocalyptic loss and
manages to bind itself to a nature that threatens to disappear. As such, litera-
ture’s work of preservation can become an exemplar for criticism’s attempt to
avoid the loss of literature. This means that it is doubly important for criticism
to bind itself to literature: if criticism lets go of literature it not only loses its
particular objects, but it also loses the very example through which it can learn
to relate to those objects. Literature is both the object of criticism and the
model for criticism’s relation to its objects. Frye’s error is that he severs the vital
connection between literature and criticism and only beholds literature from an
Olympian distance. Archetypal analysis threatens to “degenerate into an abstract
thematics where the living pressure of mediations is lost and all connections are
skeletonized,” precisely because it “depends on a disjunction between our
immediate experience of literature, which is guided by the tempo of the work,
and criticism, which lays out the completed pattern spatially” (118, 121). Instead
of immediate experience, Frye presents us with the posture of “the ‘virile man
standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets’” who can only scan “the Milky
Way of Romance as if it were an alienated part of his—and our—imagination,”
and not the fruit of the fertile interactions between nature and the imagination
(109, 131). The neutralization of literary experience alienates nature from the
imagination and condemns criticism to virile impotence.
Hartman’s uncompromising insistence on the value of the concrete experi-
ence of literature and art is a constant in his work. Yet as the essay also makes
clear, this attention to direct experience is not only an epistemological issue, but
also betrays a concern with hierarchy and order that again points to the persistent
ambivalence of Hartman’s response to the demise of the metaphysical frame-
work of his first book. He offers the following comment on the cornerstone of
Frye’s critical enterprise, the operation of “universalization”:

it must be pointed out that he fuses, or confuses, two notions of universality.

One is the scientific, and holds that the criticism of literature should be
pursued as a coherent and systematic study, which, like mathematics, has
elementary principles explainable to everyone. The other is evangelical, and
holds that critics have stood like priests between literature and those desiring
 Literature after Structure 47

to participate in it, whereas even a child should be able to be instructed in the

principles that make art nourishing. (111, italics mine)

While Frye’s approach adopts the principles of mathematics, Hartman proposes

to follow the example of literature. Frye’s “mathematical” approach dismisses
the traditional assumption that literary studies should be “the training, through
literature, of a specific and judicious sensibility” (113). For Hartman, Frye’s
evangelical ambition to do away with the experts who mediate people’s relation
to literature needs to be understood as an application of a pastoral motif that
he sums up in a line from Milton’s “Lycidas”: “The hungry sheep look up, and
are not fed” (115).
The line from “Lycidas” is usually interpreted as part of Milton’s indictment
of the clergy of his time. This partly explains why Hartman invokes it here, but
the resonances of the line do not stop there (and how could they?). The line is
delivered by the “pilot of the Galilean lake” (Milton 1997: 243–56, l. 109,
commonly assumed to be a reference to St. Peter) as an indictment of his
successor-shepherds’ failure to properly feed their sheep. These shepherds
disregard the hunger of their sheep “for their own bellies’ sake” (l. 114): they
“[d]aily dev[our] apace” (l. 129), and their mouths remain blind (“Blind
mouths,” l. 119) to the fact that their abuse of privilege has abolished the legiti-
macy of their claims to clerical distinction; their abuses have reduced them
to being merely the fittest participants in a struggle for survival in which no
genuine hierarchy remains. Yet Milton’s crucial figure of the “blind mouths”
also has a different meaning, which underscores the hope of the restoration of
real distinction that this passage intimates: the unworthy shepherds’ “blind
mouths” make them bad poets, as “their lean and flashy songs / Grate on their
scrannel pipes of wretched straw” (ll. 123–4). This reminds us that Milton’s
poem is first of all a lament for the loss of that better poet, Lycidas. St. Peter’s
intervention is not only an indictment of the shepherds’ mistreatment of poetry,
but it also uses poetry as a medium to express the promise of a restoration of
real distinction and of genuine poetry. St. Peter, in other words, is Hartman’s
exemplary critic, who has the power to preserve the promise of poetical
eminence—the very power that is at issue in Hartman’s essay on Frye.
We can now understand why Hartman invokes Milton: in the same way that
Milton invokes St. Peter in order to borrow his critical power, Hartman turns to
Milton’s poetry in order to borrow poetry’s power for criticism; what criticism
does with this power is, precisely, uphold poetry as a medium for the preserva-
tion of real difference and distinction. Poetry is both the object and the
exemplar of criticism. The point of Hartman’s criticism of Frye is that his faith
in the “radically protestant” availability of the poetical imagination threatens to
do away with the privilege of poetry (“LH” 359). In order to avoid this, criticism
must operate “like literature itself,” not “like mathematics.” In a decentered
world, criticism must adopt poetry as a new and no longer transcendent center
that can orient its operation and restore hierarchical order among the things of
48 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)

Whereas structuralism observes a homology between different myths, Hartman

notes a quite different structural equivalence: that between the ontological dis-
continuity on which he remarked before, on the one hand, and the tenuousness
and precariousness of narrative on the other. Myths are, in other words, no
longer homologous with one another, but with the structure of being. Hartman’s
conception of art’s role in human life is then a rather different version of Lévi-
Strauss’ functionalism: “the thread of the tale” is an adequate expression of
our discontinuous existence, and it therefore also functions as a medium that
somewhat remedies that discontinuity. Because the distinctive feature of art’s
mediation is its tenuousness, Hartman’s revision of Lévi-Strauss does make
room for the particularity of art and literature: language cannot be taken for
granted, as it is a “mediation to be renewed by the vulnerable genius of each
single poet” (“AA” 164–5). In this way Hartman, as he did in the essay on Frye,
manages to find a place for the specificity of literature in a post-metaphysical
framework, while ostensibly adopting a number of elements from the forces
that challenge that specificity—totality in the case of Frye, structure and homol-
ogy in the case of structuralism. Such concessions to the approaches he discusses
are, of course, an indication of Hartman’s partial agreement with and respect
50 Geoffrey Hartman

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

criticism—something which the logic of Hartman’s essay does not strictly

require. Wordsworth’s formal achievement warns criticism not “to overobjectify,
to overformalize” (550). Criticism, like poetry, has to overcome the desire for a
fixed point or for some ultimate referent. Yet, as Hartman knows, this desire
cannot be completely avoided, as “it seems inextricably tied to the referential
nature of signs or the intentional character of thought. All Wordsworth can do
is to emancipate the direction of reference” (550). Even if Wordsworth’s Lucy
is not to be reduced “to the imagined or the real by a temporal principle of
anteriority or an ontological one of priority” (550), criticism and poetry still
require a point of orientation, even if it is merely fictional.
In his discussion of the work of Georges Poulet, Hartman unearths Poulet’s
unavowed formalism by demonstrating that Poulet’s principled focus on the
writer’s consciousness forces him to “postulate a period consciousness” in order
to avoid the embarrassing problem that there are “as many consciousnesses
or cogitos as there are individuals” (551). What disturbs Hartman is not that
Poulet somehow reduces the sheer multiplicity of cogitos, but rather that
he does so in an arbitrary way. Poulet, that is, fails to perceive the essential
connection between form and human content. This is also apparent in Poulet’s
interpretation of Henry James: Poulet fails to appreciate the “differential
relation of form to consciousness,” and therefore fails to understand that the
“difficulty of representation” he observes is at the same time also “a difficulty
of being” (553). The point of Hartman’s correction of Bateson’s definition of
formalism is precisely to cast issues of form and representation as questions
of human existence. James’ problem is not, as Poulet has it, “that of facing as
a writer the plenitude of things and having arbitrarily to limit it”; rather, it
is “not to be able to think of consciousness as disinterested,” and therefore
consciousness has to be curbed by a formal decision, “by the self-imposed
convention of point-of-view” (554). Because Poulet assumes “too optimistic a
view of the Progress of Consciousness,” he cannot fathom how precarious and
conditional James achievement is and prematurely promotes it as “a stage in
the history of consciousness” (555).
Hartman is not so much interested in pointing to particular problems in
Poulet’s work, but rather in underlining the fundamental differences between
Poulet’s conclusions and his own conception of the relation between form
and consciousness. His own position clearly echoes crucial elements of his
early work, and therefore also of his interpretation of Wordsworth; and while it
makes eminent sense to show how Brooks’ and Bateson’s interpretations
of Wordsworth fail to capture essential elements of Wordsworth’s poetical
achievement, Hartman’s discussion of Poulet merely serves to underscore the
specificity of Hartman’s own Wordsworthian notion of literary form and its
difference from Poulet’s notion. It is, in other words, an ontological rather than
a critical argument. Together with the remarkable consistency of the three essays
from 1966, this indicates that Hartman’s confrontation with the dominant—
or, in the case of structuralism, emergent—paradigms in American criticism
52 Geoffrey Hartman

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.

3. Toward a Substellar Poetics: England’s Evening Star

The essay “Adam on the Grass with Balsamum” from 1969 offers an experimental
reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost that allows us to observe Hartman’s shift from
a metaphysical, heliocentric system to a more modest framework that replaces
the sun with a less grandiose celestial object—or, initially, a revised version of the
sun. The essay clearly revisits the moment of the transition from pre-modernity
to modernity, and it does so in the very oeuvre that already signaled that pas-
sage in The Unmediated Vision. Hartman characterizes his reading of Milton as a
“belated and pale” “imitation” of “a more adventurous hermeneutical
tradition”—the reference is to the Jewish interpretive tradition of Midrash—
that focuses its self-consciously diminished interpretive powers on only “one
place in Milton” (“AG” 169). The essay “[s]tart[s] with the sun,” and it reminds
us that the sun also casts a shadow at “the inaugural moment of human
consciousness” (168). Human consciousness, in other words, is not the condi-
tion of Frye’s “virile man standing in the sun . . . overlooking the planets” and
remaining unaffected by this shadow—it inevitably operates in the shadow
and in time. Hartman’s essay focuses on Adam, who is still untainted by
delusions of virility and “wakes out of the hand of God” only to discover “his
first perception” to be “of the sun in relation to himself” (168).
“Adam on the Grass” can be understood as a barely disguised restatement of
Hartman’s critique of Frye’s solar politics. The difference between Frye and
Hartman is coded in the essays’s organizing opposition between Satan and
Adam, and tied to their different interpretations of the sun’s place: Satan,
“in his Sun-bright Chariot,” solipsistically denies that his “puissance” is not
self-generated but derives from the sun, which is, for him, “absolutely self-
contained” (182); Adam, in contrast, “wakes to a world in which the sun is a
creature (res creata)” that exists in relation with other creatures (170). Satan and
Frye hold to a “demystified theory of participation,” in which man can without
any problems become “a partner of divine vision” (“GD” 116, “AG” 172). Adam,
for his part, is more self-conscious, and rather than naïvely believing in partici-
pation, he observes “the very image of desire for participation,” which situates
 Literature after Structure 53

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

model, which constitutes a modest triumph over the “‘Eastern’ or epiphanic

consciousness” that is essential to “the traditional type of sublime poem” (307).
While this tradition involved “a philosophy of transcendence, and a formulary
for the ‘translation’ of states,” Keats’ “nonepiphanic structuring” “tempers
visionariness into surmise and the lust for epiphany into finer-tone repetitions”
(310–17). Hartman explicitly reads Keats’ model as part of a national ideology
when he notes that “‘To Autumn’ is a poem of our climate” (308). The essay
brings together the main aspects of this climate: autumn its perennial season,
evening the time of day, and the moon—or, soon, a “surrogate moon” (“ES” 87)—
the celestial object that organizes its world.
That this Hesperian ideology is not Keats’ alone becomes clear when we note
that Hartman has to import the moon—which is missing in “To Autumn”—
from Wordsworth’s poem “Strange fits of passion” (“PI” 318). Wordsworth and
Keats are part of the same climate, and their differences are merely variations
of that climate. Within this climate, Keats can even be said to fall short of
the Wordsworthian ideal, as he fails to completely “humanize” Romance and to
achieve “Wordsworth’s fulfillment of Miltonic tenderness” (319). Unsurprisingly,
the distinction between Keats and Wordsworth amounts to different kinds
of centering:

Such qualities as decorum, impersonality, symbolic adequacy are a function

mainly of the concenteredness of “To Autumn”: the poem turns around
one image like a “leaf-fring’d legend.” Though Wordsworth’s poems may
also have a center of this kind . . . it rarely appears as picturesque symbol
or image. Wordsworth’s kernels are mysteries: charged spiritual places
which confront and confuse a mental traveler who circles their enchanted
ground . . . Keats’s experience is limited from the outset by Greek or pictur-
esque example. What perplexes his imagination is a mysterious picture rather
than a mystery. (325–6)

Keats, in other words, relates to a somewhat different center than Wordsworth,

and even if he relates to it in a fully adequate way, this mistaken reference point
asserts itself as a limitation in his poetical practice. Keats and Wordsworth offer
two variations of the relation between the subject and the semi-transcendent
object that organizes its world and that, in Hartman’s work in the wake of
structure, defines the specificity of the English climate.
Two further essays in this period, “Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’” (1969)
and “Reflections on the Evening Star” (1971), offer further elucidations
and variations of such a particular relation to a determinate indeterminacy.
Hartman’s discussion of Blake is concerned with his “poems on the seasons” in
Poetical Sketches (“BP” 193), which contain another “specific myth” about literary
history, and more precisely about the future of “the poetical spirit” in England
and the West (195–6). What makes Blake’s myth fall short of the Wordsworthian
 Literature after Structure 57

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

consolidated response to the challenges of structuralism and the likes. Let us

return one last time to the ending of Derrida’s essay “La Différance”:

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”:

The star-signifier appears as a sign accompanied by signs, or leading to other

symbols rather than to a sign-transcending reality. Since man cannot live
by signs alone, the evening star poem rouses our reality-hunger and per-
plexes the very idea of development . . . The star cannot be more than
a sign, given the intensity of the desire invoking it. The poem feeds the
sign, even fattens it: it wants it to be, if not more than a sign, then more
of a sign. (92–3)
 Literature after Structure 59

The evening star exists in an economy in which it needs to be recognized by

agencies that are dependent on it, and this relation of mutual dependence
prevents the star from definitively transcending its status as a sign. The idea of
“fattening” the sign reminds us of the Miltonic scene of the sun feeding on
Adam’s “reeking moisture.” Both scenes present a movement of accommoda-
tion that “brings truth down to earth . . . but in this way could gradually raise an
earthly mind to heaven” (“AG” 178). “Reflections on the Evening Star” restates
this tenuous equilibrium as a tension “between zoning (the star seen as inhabiting
its own zone separated by nature’s or poetry’s magic from various continua)
and zooming (a sympathetic or ecstatic movement of identification)” (“ES” 97).
As always, the task is to find a tenable position in between identification and
separation.
Hartman notes that Wordsworth’s Lucy poems achieve such a position in
relation to the “star-symbol,” because in these poems “the symbol stars”: Lucy
“becomes the moon, love’s absorbing center” (101). Yet his literary history of
the evening star does not stop there. It ends dramatically with a figure who,
unlike Keats, Wordsworth, or even Blake, is “afflicted by secondariness as by a
curse” (111). Samuel Taylor Coleridge almost invariably figures in Hartman’s
oeuvre in association with the particularly charged moment in “The Ancient
Mariner” before the fall of the albatross—which is apparently a less enabling
celestial point of orientation than the evening star.13 Coleridge is afflicted by a
“horror of stasis,” and he “leaves us with a depressing sense of hierarchy”; instead
of thriving in an inegalitarian but mutually reinforcing economy, Coleridge’s
poetry is a demoralizing work of sublimation that “always sacrifices to an origin
stronger than itself” (115–21). Coleridge occupies an extreme position in the
English climate: whereas Wordsworth makes do with a transcendence-surrogate,
Coleridge stands transfixed under a surrogate he fatally mistakes for the real
thing he cannot cope with.
The evening star is the key term in Hartman’s revision of his theory of
modern poetry in light of the challenges of structuralism, semiotics, and other
competing critical approaches that threaten to erase the privileged place of
poetry. Yet Hartman’s work increasingly begins to realize that the persistence
of poetry does not depend on the fate of competing academic approaches
alone. The consciously minor key in which Hartman develops his thematics
of the evening star is not only an indication of Hartman’s refusal of a strong
metaphysical framework, but also an expression of his awareness that the persis-
tence of poetry is now even more tenuous than in the period that Hartman’s
literary history covers. Hartman notes that the theme of the evening star
“repeats in small the strange survival of poetry within the lights and shadows of
historical circumstance” (125), yet he knows that such an enabling historical
clair-obscur can no longer be taken for granted in the present. His work increas-
ingly begins to emphasize poetry’s concern with the possibility of its own loss.
An essay on Marvell from 1968 reads his poetry as “at once a lament and an
acceptance of his situation as poet”; it is a “perennial monument of tears” in
60 Geoffrey Hartman

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

Memorial Mimesis: The Ecology of Literary

Knowledge

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.

1. Psychoesthetics and the Contemporary Sublime

In “The Poet’s Politics,” an essay printed in Beyond Formalism from 1970, Hartman
“start[s] with the assumption that ours is a political age”: our age is marked by
62 Geoffrey Hartman

the inescapability of “contemporary experience pressing against poetry and

precipitating its meaning” and by the disappearance of the “threshold” “between
art and its translation into immediate relevance,” which threatens “art’s very
place in society” (“PP” 247–8, “HW” 80). Hartman’s explicit identification of
this insistent contemporaneity as the threat of “politics” is obviously question-
able, and the essay immediately limits the scope of the discussion by shifting
the issue from “the relation of poetry and politics” to “the interdependence of
great art and popular art” (“PP” 249). Instead of pursuing the problem of
the interrelation between literature and society, Hartman replaces it with the
question of the integration of two types of art. The answer to this—far easier—
question is unsurprisingly found in Wordsworth. Hartman refers to the famous
passage in the preface to Lyrical Ballads where Wordsworth asserts the “mark
of distinction” that separates his poems, which exemplify the successful inte-
gration of great art and popular art, from “frantic novels, sickly and stupid
German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” that are
driving into neglect “[t]he invaluable works of our elder writers” (Wordsworth
1993: 248–9). Lyrical Ballads, according to Hartman, show us “how a poet can
penetrate the crisis of his time without bold symbols or violent poetic effects”
(“PP” 254).
I insist on these admittedly rather facile argumentative movements because
they allow us to see the structural limitations of Hartman’s early cultural
criticism. It is remarkable that the part of the Wordsworth-passage that is not
quoted is the one in which Wordsworth connects the “degrading thirst after
outrageous stimulation” (“PP” 249), which corresponds to Hartman’s diagnosis
of the contemporary pressures on art, with popular culture. The integration
that Wordsworth achieves—and that Hartman celebrates—eliminates the
connection between popular art and contemporary experience, and can thus
hardly count as a solution to the problem of the interrelations between art and
society. Hartman’s early cultural criticism can only assert the interdependence
of great art and popular culture by bracketing the latter’s popularity. A second
limitation emerges from Hartman’s routine gesture of turning to Wordsworth
to solve the present crisis. Hartman consistently tends to translate the question
of how literature can intervene in the present into the challenge of establishing
or maintaining an adequate relation to the past. Wordsworth’s poetry managed
to counteract the obsolescence of the “invaluable works of our elder writers,”
and his example is invoked in order to preempt that his work is forgotten in
its turn. Hartman constructs a rather wishful analogy between the present,
when the relevance of poetry is under threat, and a time when Wordsworth
successfully resolved comparable difficulties. Yet this analogy alone cannot
assure that poetry will be able to save its skin a second time.
While Wordsworth’s rescue operation for literature presents an exemplary
strategy for accommodating the combined pressures of past and present, it
is French Romanticism’s failure to integrate the past that singles it out as a
more realistic model for the current crisis. In the 1970 article “Reflections on
 The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 63

Romanticism in France,” Hartman exposes nineteenth-century France’s

failure to develop an integrated society: unlike in Wordsworth’s England, “in
France each political or intellectual principle developed separately and
completely,” so that by the time Romanticism arrived “in the exploding 1820s”
a fateful lateness separated it from the Revolution, and this made “a cultural
apocalypse” unavoidable (237–9). In “the limbo of his ‘musée imaginaire’” the
French poet lacked a continuity that could orient his “assimilative labor” on “a
multitude of fallen gods” (245–8). While Wordsworth countered the deluge
of second-rate literature with a poetry of his own, French poets overreached
themselves in their lofty mission as “the bearers of an enlightenment that will
flood the earth like the knowledge of God” (240). For Hartman, this French
condition has been generalized in contemporary America. It is hard to avoid
the suspicion that the specter of Jacques Derrida, the envoy of French theory
in America, was haunting Hartman when he was scripting this fateful cultural
transfer.
The terms in which Hartman formulates the failures of French Romanticism
also describe the challenges that define the function of criticism at the present
time. Hartman writes that “[t]he growth of the historical consciousness, its
multiplying of disparate models all of which press their claim, amounts to
a peculiarly modern burden,” which causes a “state of surnomie” in which
historical difference is “suspended by a quasi-divine synchronism” (“HW” 75,
“RF” 245, 239). The solution, which remained implicit in “Romanticism in
France,” because it is so closely identified with the decidedly non-French name
of Wordsworth, is art’s promotion to the status of “a genuine mediation: a
wrestling with, and separating of, the dead” (“HW” 83). What limits the appli-
cability of this solution is that the present day, with its “increasing accumulation
of men in cities,” and its “craving for extraordinary incident” (“PP” 253–4;
Wordsworth 1993: 249), tends to blur the distinction between the real and the
virtual, between the present and the past, rather than to decisively separate
the living from the dead.
A return to the (Romantic) past is not an adequate response to the cultural
condition Hartman diagnoses. In order to see what could constitute a more
promising response, we need a better understanding of that diagnosis. Let me
quote one more fairly typical piece of Hartman’s cultural criticism:

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

“Inexorable accumulation,” “disabling pressures,” “endless inflow,” “deluges”—

these terms describe a phenomenon that can without too much difficulty be
recognized as a species of the sublime. More specifically, they point to the first
moment of Kant’s mathematical sublime. Neil Hertz describes the mathemati-
cal sublime as follows:

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

model” (173). This disorder characterizes today’s cultural condition, and it

defines the remedial role that art can play, as art’s “psychic function” consists in
“either limiting a demand or reinforcing a potentiality of response” (174).
Hartman’s claim for art’s capacity to restore the balance between world and
mind after the unsettling experience of cognitive exhaustion does not simply
repeat the familiar recuperative two-step scenario of the sublime. Understanding
Hartman’s difference from this tradition can help us appreciate the peculiarity
of his position. In Neil Hertz’s reading, the Kantian sublime presents a “drama
of collapse and compensation,” in which the “intervention of reason” after the
experience of exhaustion recuperates the “sacrifice” of the imagination in order
to “consolidate a reassuringly operative notion of the self” (Hertz 1978: 70–4).
The ultimate victory of reason raises the suspicion that the initial failure of
the imagination was merely a ruse of reason: the emphasis in this triumphant
story shifts from “the failure of empirical imagination . . . to reason’s project in
requiring this failure” (Weiskel 1976: 41). In Thomas Weiskel’s words, “[t]he
cause of the sublime is the aggrandizement of reason at the expense of reality and
the imaginative apprehension of reality” (41). Bearing in mind the terms in which
Hartman has earlier described the decidedly worldly achievement of Wordsworth,
it is clear that he considers the (apocalyptic) sacrifice of reality too high a price
to pay for the survival of the subject. In his discussion of art’s curative capacity
to limit our demands upon the world, Hartman writes that this “may raise the
specter of a further limitation: of something more properly called a sacrifice”
(“DC” 174):

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 sublime threat of “inexorable accumulation” as the much more familiar

fear of loss and depletion, a fear that the experience of art can allay. The prob-
lem is that Hartman can only ascribe this vital role to art by mitigating the
condition it is supposed to intervene it. The question that remains unanswered
is how the operation of art or poetry can be translated into a lesson that can
penetrate the cultural crisis without sacrificing the essential connection between
that lesson and the medium of poetry, and without requiring an unhelpful
redefinition of this cultural condition that underestimates its radicality. I now
turn to two contemporaneous interpretations of poetry in which Hartman
attempts just such a translation.

2. “As the snow men do it”: Stevens, Hegel, and

Poetic Prescription
The last section of “The Poet’s Politics” turns to Wallace Stevens’ famous poem
“The Snow Man.” Hartman writes that the poem manages “to depict by one
exemplary movement (which is the poem) this defense against overthink,
against our relentless mental pollution of nature” (“PP” 256). While our minds
tend to be too “eager for thought,” and “to pollute our environment by ‘mean-
ings,’ by pathetic fictions” (256–7), the poem’s “mind of winter” teaches us how
to limit our design upon the world through its exemplary gesture of renuncia-
tion. According to Hartman, “Stevens asks us . . . to reverse ourselves and
become what we see instead of seeing what we are” (257).6 Stevens’ poem begins
with the lines “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the
boughs / Of the pinetrees crusted with snow” (1971: 9–10, ll. 1–3) Hartman’s
decision to read “The Snow Man” as a poem “about” the “indulgence of the
pathetic fallacy” (Bloom 1977: 54) is plausible (and common) enough. What is
less obvious is his decision to interpret this “aboutness” as a poetic lesson.
Indeed, how can we understand the poem—or any poem for that matter—as a
piece of advice for the contemporary snowlands?
The most obvious answer would be to derive this imperative power from the
poem’s opening line (“One must . . . ”). Yet in this reading, the whole poem
becomes one long prescription, and it is hard to see how its status as poetry
would be essential to this message. However laudable the message they convey,
Stevens’ words would hardly need the medium of poetry to make their point.
Hartman precisely needs a lesson that is essentially connected to the medium
of poetry. He locates the poem’s imperative force in its “exemplary movement”
of renunciation:

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

nature (“PP” 257). Poetry cannot exemplify the cancellation of a statement; as

stating is the only action available to it, it can only ever state such a cancellation.
I want to rephrase this problem in somewhat different terms, in order to
underline its close connection to Hartman’s diagnosis of present-day culture,
for which he wants to formulate a cure that is intrinsically connected to the
medium of poetry. This cultural condition consists in an excessive semantic
pollution of the external world, which Hartman earlier described in terms of
the mathematical sublime, and which threatened to sacrifice the connection
between mind and world. In fact, the snow man’s example of renunciation has
a specific place in Kant’s analytic of the sublime. I am thinking of the passage
where Kant notes that when we call “the sight of the starry heavens” sublime, we
must not ground this judgment in ideas about the “purposively appointed
orbits” of the stars or in “concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings”;
rather we must “take it, as we see it, merely as a broad, all-embracing vault [ein
weites Gewölbe].” In the same way, we must “not take the sight of the ocean as we
think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge . . . for instance as a wide realm of
water creatures”; instead, Kant writes, “one must consider the ocean merely as
the poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], in accordance with what its appearance
shows [was der Augenschein zeigt]” (Kant 2000: 152–3). According to Paul de
Man, who commented extensively on this passage, the poet’s “pure aesthetic
vision” when he considers the ocean is “previous to any understanding, to any
exchange or anthropomorphism” (1996: 82). It is a “Bloße Anschauung ” which
“merely sees” (83), and this resembles nothing so much as the wished-for out-
come of the snow man’s cancellation of our “relentless mental pollution of
nature” (“PP” 256). Hartman concludes his reading of Stevens by quoting the
lines “You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an
ignorant eye” (257). This “ignorant eye” severs the fateful connection between
mind and eye that led to the subject’s excessive imposition of meanings on
the nature it perceived. In Kant’s aesthetic vision, the eye “turns out to be
completely dis-junct from any mind whatsoever” (Warminski 2001: 16). We can
now understand Hartman’s attempt to assert the cultural relevance of poetry as
the promotion of pure aesthetic vision, “as the poets do it.”
Except that the poets don’t. De Man on two occasions differentiates Kant’s
version of seeing “wie die Dichter es tun” from the way an actual poet, William
Wordsworth, elaborates “similar intuitions” (1996: 81). The difference is precisely
that Wordsworth does restore the economy of eye and mind (and as I have
noted, this rearticulation is unavoidable in the medium of poetry). The
disintegration of Hartman’s snow man is phrased most drastically in Andrzej
Warminski’s remark: “what the poets do in Kant is not (like) what the exemplary
poet Wordsworth does” (2001: 5).9 Wordsworth, Hartman’s exemplary poet in
his campaign for the cultural relevance of poetry, does not perform the gesture
of renunciation that Hartman observes in Stevens’ snow man, and that is yet
supposed to describe poetry’s vital cultural role. The poetic lesson to be admin-
istered to the mathematical sublimity of contemporary culture is something
 The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 69

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),

Der Sinn verliert sich in dem Anschaun,

Was mein ich nannte schwindet,
Iche gebe mich dem unermeßlichen dahin,
Ich bin in ihm, bin alles, bin nur es. (ll. 30–3)

The snowman-like “pure aesthetic vision” is followed by the sacrifice of thinking

(Gedanken, l. 34) and the return of “the eternal” to a worldly reality: “Imagination
brings the eternal near to sense [dem Sinne], / and marries it with form [Gestalt]”
(ll. 37–8).10 According to Hartman, this “experience of the sublime,” vacillating
“between nothingness and nothingness,” elicits “a counter-assertive, inward,
humanizing power” (“SH” 150). This human power “allows Hegel to approach
the mysteries of the historical past,” even as it dissolves “the distance between
him and the mysterious heavens” (150). The poem removes the stars’ “taint of
absoluteness” (151) so they can come to preside over “the aether in which con-
sciousness expands its hermeneutic powers” (152). Hegel’s poetic excursion
thus restores the correspondence between human sense and worldly form and
affirms poetry’s vital role in keeping this “mimetic” connection alive.
70 Geoffrey Hartman

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):

Begeisterung trunken fühlt’ ich jetzt

Die Schauer deiner Nähe,
Verstände deiner Offenbahrungen,
Ich deutete der Bilder hohen Sinn . . . (ll. 45–8)

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.

3. The Loss of Loss: Freeplay, Mimesis, Noninheritance

When poetry fails to promote itself as the proper cure for the crisis of culture,
how can criticism yet help it intervene in that crisis? It cannot just rephrase the
lesson it wants poetry to carry in nonpoetic terms. Nor is Hartman content
to ascribe to poetry a privileged insight into the utter impossibility of the
coincidence of such a lesson and poetic materiality—a project that is in the
early 1970s rigorously pursued in the work of Paul de Man.13 In these scenarios,
criticism would effectively concede, if not aggravate, the decline of poetry’s
distinctiveness. For Hartman, this distinction must be preserved at all cost;
poetry’s force must be asserted, even if that force can no longer automatically
be identified with the lessons that Hartman wants it to hold. Hartman’s case
for poetry in the 1970s resumes a number of elements from his earlier work,
while it also introduces a crucial reversal. Recall that from The Unmediated Vision
on, Hartman affirmed poetry’s “distinctive mode of knowledge” in relation
to the dominant discourses of logic and philosophy (UV ix). Hartman’s early
work insisted on poetry’s material obliquity, its irreducibility to transparent
conceptual elucidation. In the early 1970s, as Hartman’s work increasingly
begins to engage with contemporary culture, it discovers that the real threat
to poetry’s distinction has not taken the form of a general transparency and
excessive clarity, but that the cultural leveling process—for which Hartman
had been prepared by Auerbach’s influence—has instead led to a situation of
radical obliquity, and to a mathematical sublimity that “cannot be economized”
(ST 111). In this context, it makes no sense to insist on poetry’s equivocality and
its resistance to clarity, as these features have come to characterize the culture
as such.
So how can poetry remain a distinct force in such a dismal condition? In the
contemporary situation, things are neither so stable as to lend poetry’s work
of destabilization any critical value, nor is their instability such that it can be
definitively stabilized in Hartman’s psychoesthetic economy. Things are at the
same time absolutely unmovable and perfectly fluid; they can neither fully
materialize nor definitively disappear, but only ever present themselves in a
spectral state of half-presence. This state in which no firm distinction between
 The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 73

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

and are therefore assumed to be in need of (conceptual) completion. Mimesis,

in contrast, does not aim to override “the constitutional insufficiency of sensu-
ousness,” nor does it “offer itself as the substitution for an incomplete nature.”
Instead, “[n]ature, or, if you like, sensuous particularity, is posited as a source for
potentially faithful, affirmative reiterations rather than something . . . requiring
substitution” (7).17 Mimesis restores the potential for creative and productive
repetitions, which also means that it restores the possibility of working through
loss, and thus of mourning. Hartman’s claim for poetry’s capacity to preserve
loss is essentially an affirmation of such a memorial mimesis. Hartman writes
that “Wordsworth’s originality does not lie in his ideas as such,” as that would
locate his genius on a conceptual plane and force him to fight a philosophical
battle that poetry can never hope to win; instead, “it has to do with the way they
emerge from the depth of felt experience” (“WR” 9)—a mode of emergence
that does not demand things’ completion or facile substitution, but merely
affirms the reality of their loss:

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)

Poetry’s memorial mimesis offers a solution to the problem Hartman encoun-

tered in his earliest attempts to promote poetry as a cultural power, and which
I traced in Hartman’s readings of Stevens’ and Hegel’s poetry. Poetry there
proved itself incapable of transmitting its lessons of renunciation and continuity
to culture; now poetry does not so much wish to convey a message, but rather
directly takes on the crisis of culture—in which reality and the possibility of loss
have disappeared in a sublime multiplicity of interchangeable things—through
its poetical work of affirming loss—which, as I explained, at the same time
restores reality as a ground for mourning. For Hartman, it is the task of criticism
to create the conditions that allow poetry to undertake such an operation.
The critic, Hartman writes, is “incurably a redeemer” in the “spirit-embedding
sense,” because he “materializes us” by salvaging the possibility of history
(“SP” 508). When this understanding of the work of poetry and the office of
criticism is consolidated, Hartman can accept—as he did not in an earlier phase
of his cultural criticism—that literature “is today so easily assimilated” by “a
pluralism verging on indifference . . . that the function of criticism must often
be to defamiliarize it” (“FR” 260). This work of defamiliarization, for which the
example of Derrida is eminently suitable, affirms poetry as a distinct force:
interpretation, Hartman writes, “literally ‘preserves’ art by allowing it to persist
like a separate stream or vortex in what surrounds it” (“SA” 221).18
In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how Hartman objected to the critical
posture of methodical detachment he encountered in the work of Northrop
76 Geoffrey Hartman

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,

our noninheritance of the struggles of previous generations is figured as a

living fact for us . . . the past is presented in its nonanimacy, its mortificiation,
such that the nonanimacy can be grasped as a relation to a still active past . . .
the experience of nontransmission and noninheritance, the experience to
which the phrase “sustaining loss” refers, is the experience to which a reflective
philosophical aesthetics must now be beholden. (6)
78 Geoffrey Hartman

What Horowitz asserts of philosophical aesthetics also goes for Hartman’s

practice from the mid-1970s on. Horowitz coins the term “cool modernity” to
refer to the refusal of the experience of noninheritance; cool modernity is “an
historicism of the present in which all history is equally present and equally
past at the same time.” This “cool indifference” relies on a false idea of tran-
scendence, on the idea of the successful “transcendence of the past.” Poetry’s
memorial mimesis counteracts this self-congratulatory fantasy, and helps us to
acknowledge “that the past, while dead, is not gone, and that we coexist with it
not as its afterlife but as its survivors” (22). Just as poetry resists the sacrifice
of the correspondence between the internal and external world, it salvages
our attachment to the past—not as a substantial continuity, but through the
affirmation of the loss of such a continuity. Stories “enable the dead to haunt
the living”; they are “a ceremony to evoke and at the same time appease the
perturbed spirit” (“WL” 400–1). This conception of poetic form as the “haunt”
of the dead (401) delivers the “ghostliness” that Hartman asserts in the face of
Michael Riffaterre’s cool “positivism of the word” (“UA” 185).
In the preface to his 1975 collection of essays The Fate of Reading, Hartman
writes that one of his aims is to “reinvigorat[e] the theory of art as mimesis or
representation” (FR xiii). In this section, I have demonstrated how mimesis
can be conceived as a form of mourning, and how this allows poetry to restore
a sense of history, and even to serve as a connective experience. Hartman writes
that “[t]he askesis of style” can “exert itself on a recognizably sensuous content
which survives it” because it no longer considers it its task to substitute for
sensuous particulars (233). Poetry persists as the placeholder of loss, while its
own survival must be guaranteed by criticism. As I show in my last chapter,
this task of preservation will lead Hartman to promote a form of “creative
criticism,” especially in his 1980 book Criticism in the Wilderness (and Hartman’s
diagnosis of the present is a good indication of what this wilderness might refer
to). At this point, Hartman’s work has decisively shifted from its earlier project
to preempt the collapse of poetry to the attempt to deal with an anxiety about
the loss of connection to the past. While this problematic focuses on the fate of
poetry throughout the 1970s, it will later turn to the memory of the Holocaust
when Hartman will increasingly begin to be occupied with the possibilities and
poetics of Holocaust testimony.

4. Toward a Theory of Representation

In the preface to The Fate of Reading, Hartman reminds us of the close connection
between the poet’s care for the sensuous particulars of nature and criticism’s
responsibilities to art. “The demand for contemporaneity on the one hand, and
endlessly competing formal options on the other, pressure the reader as much
as the artist”; for that reason, the critic “owes the great poem or novel an
‘answerable style’” (FR xiii). The artist’s and critic’s concern for things is always
 The Ecology of Literary Knowledge 79

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:

The “economy” of language-use arising from depletion anxiety ranges from

such devices of conservation as double-entendre, hermeticism and classical
restraint, to the complementary if opposite ones of revivalist forgery, radical
innovation and homeopathic promiscuity. (“CS” 433–4).

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

because the issue of the distinctiveness of a particularly English and a peculiarly

Wordsworthian poetry has been sidelined. Wordsworth’s renewed centrality for
Hartman’s project from the late 1970s on can then be understood as Hartman’s
attempt to bring the singular importance of Wordsworth back in line with his
defense of art and poetry.
The last passage of Hartman’s essay on Smart restates the essay’s focus on
Smart’s “comforting” of language and on the persistence of representation, and
it establishes an explicit connection between Smart and Derrida:

Derrida moves within a philosophical context of his own, and it is confusing

to juxtapose his theory and Smart’s poetics. I apologize for this “perspective
by incongruity,” as Kenneth Burke would call it, but I see no better way of
suggesting how complex yet encompassing the concept of representation
may become. Even if one acknowledges that Derrida’s very aim is to empty
this concept, at least of its psychological and metaphysical pathos, the “nature”
of representation remains a puzzle. (“CS” 452)21

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

Grave Immunity: Poetry and the

Preservation of Loss

“Was not” was all the statement.

The Unpretension stuns—
Perhaps—the Comprehension—
Emily Dickinson

The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory that Hartman presented at UC

Irvine in 1992 put forward a thesis that, if it had not been delivered with
Hartman’s characteristic care and circumspection, would immediately have
revealed itself as scandalous. In the introduction to The Fateful Question of
Culture (1997), the book in which these lectures are published, Hartman phrases
his central claim as follows: “I argue that Wordsworth, writing near the begin-
ning of the industrial revolution, achieves a precarious cultural transfer (trans-
latio) of English rural life”; Wordsworth’s poetry “gives representation
to what in English culture was previously unrealized or semi-articulate, a
potentiality only”; by shaping this potentiality as “a particularly English culture,”
Hartman continues, Wordsworth “saved English politics from the virulence of a
nostalgic political ideal centering on rural virtue, which led to serious ravages
on the continent” (FQ 7).
While it may not be entirely fair to excerpt only a few phrases from a dense
and difficult book, it is hard to avoid the enormity of Hartman’s thesis: in the
words of one commentator, Hartman’s claim is that “it is thanks to Wordsworth
that England witnessed the emergence not of National Socialism but of the
National Trust” (de Graef 2004: 25). Wordsworth’s poetry helped England to
resist the very temptations that had genocidal consequences on the continent.
The Fateful Question undoubtedly offers the clearest indication of Hartman’s
ambition to mobilize Wordsworth’s poetry as a remedial power in contempo-
rary culture and of his commitment to the exceptionality of English culture.
This chapter sheds some light on the features that Hartman foregrounds in
Wordsworth’s poetry and that sustain his claim for its momentous cultural
impact. Hartman writes that Wordsworth’s poetry achieved “the transmission of
a potentiality whose realism and idealism can no longer be distinguished and
84 Geoffrey Hartman

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.

1. Potentiality, Invulnerability, Loss

“A Touching Compulsion,” first published in 1977, presents itself as a contribu-
tion to Hartman’s “psychoesthetics,” and thus as an attempt to determine the
place of literature and art in the mental ecology that connects us to our cultural
and natural environments. While Hartman has earlier undertaken a correction
of I. A. Richards’ “managerial scientific model” (“DC” 163), this essay stages
a confrontation between Wordsworth and Freud, in “an attempt to lessen our
dependence on the applied science model of psychoanalytic inquiry” (“TC” 19),
a model that like the work of Richards fails to appreciate the place of literary
form in psychic life. Hartman situates Wordsworth’s difference from Freud at
the moment of the “transition from the first (and lost) love object to object
love” (21), the moment when, in Wordsworth’s own words, “The props of my
affections were removed, / And yet the building stood, as if sustained / By its
own spirit!” (qt. 21). Hartman is especially interested in the exclamation mark
and the hint of incredulity that lingers in these lines; they seem to convey that
the “troubled astonishment” at the fact of survival has not completely disap-
peared by the time the poet looks back on these moments. While the poet’s
knowledge of “why the world survives the mother as an object of affection”
smoothly “harmonizes with Freud’s understanding of how the lost object
becomes by internalization a constitutive part of the self that has lost it,” the
 Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 85

persistence of that astonishment in the moment of tranquil recollection

points to a certain hesitation. This moment of hindered progression will be
Wordsworth’s correction of the Freudian scenario.
Wordsworth’s astonishment amounts to an inability to buy into the psycho-
analytical fiction of the self-sufficiency of a world that exists “as if sustained / By
its own spirit.” In the young Wordsworth, this difficulty registers as what
Hartman calls a “touching compulsion”: Wordsworth writes that “often unable
to think of external things as having external existence . . . many times while
going to school I have grasped a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of
idealism to the reality” (qt. 20). This experience of irreality and the compulsion
to verify the reality of nature have an important analogue in Hartman’s work:
they correspond perfectly to the postmodern losslessness that I described in
the previous chapter, which brings on the anxious need to verify whether things
can ever be definitively lost. The problem Hartman locates in the young
Wordsworth is the very same condition the postmodern self is suffering from.
Wordsworth’s poetic overcoming of his touching compulsion will then serve
Hartman as the model for art’s curative intervention in contemporary culture.
So how does Wordsworth analyze and overcome his youthful compulsion?
Hartman writes that Wordsworth acquires a knowledge that is avowedly “regres-
sive rather than progressive” (21–2). Wordsworth knows that his touching
compulsion

is incited by a ghostliness in nature deriving from two related sources . . . The

fixated or literally animistic mind feels that if nature remains alive when what
gave it life (the mother) is dead, then the mother is not dead but invisibly
contained in nature. On the other hand, if the mother is dead, then the affec-
tive presence of nature is but a phantom-reality that must dissolve just like the
illusion it has replaced—the illusion of permanent Dasein (the mother’s).
Wordsworth’s touching, then, is a kind of reality testing: it wants to undo the
spell, or make contact with the “one dear Presence” in hiding. (22)

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)

(De)negation (Verneinung) has the structure of an Aufhebung, a Hegelian term

Freud uses to indicate that we have to do with a merely “intellectual acceptance”
that fails to overcome—or, alternatively, manages to retain—an “affective”
88 Geoffrey Hartman

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

As Hyppolite’s discussion makes clear, in Freud’s progression the affective

attachment to a lost reality (say, the mother) is inevitably abandoned in favor of
the lucid acceptance of a world bereft of the thing that has been lost.
The distinctive virtue of Wordsworth’s poetry is that it allows for a “progres-
sive” insight in the survival of nature without the necessity of giving up the
“regressive” belief that the mother was not dead: “It cultivates a refusal to leave
behind something deeply relational, something fundamental to the imagina-
tive life rather than its negation” (“WM” 198). Freud’s and Hyppolite’s accounts
of the genesis of the ego, in contrast, imply that the ego surrenders the primor-
dial affirmation of the love for the mother and that it accepts to go on living in
a fundamentally impoverished reality. The ego must accept the loss of the belief
in the continuing love of the mother. Moreover, this bereavement cannot be
mourned, as it is only once this primordial loss has been accepted that reality is
constituted as a ground where loss can be verified, and where mourning can
begin. I quote Freud again:

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)

Freud’s and Hyppolite’s scenario condemns human development to a false

consciousness that remembers to forget the irremediable loss of the possibility
of true enjoyment; it forces the ego to forget the “incommensurable abyss
between love, understood as true enjoyment, and its possibility” (Soto-Crespo
2000: 441). In his mature critical work on Wordsworth, this is precisely the
impoverished state of things that Hartman is unwilling to concede. Wordsworth’s
poetry offers a rejoinder to this scenario by demonstrating that the enjoyment
of nature does not require the sacrifice of a more primordial relatedness.
Wordsworth, that is, maintains that both true enjoyment and motherly love are
possible in this world. For Hartman, the peculiar strength of Wordsworth’s poetry
is that it preserves the mother’s potentiality to not-be in the actuality of nature, and
that nature is thereby established as the ground for reality testing. Wordsworth
allows us to evade a structural loss in order to empower us and to equip nature
for the “infinite task” of future mourning (“TC” 30). Making the undead mother
part of nature, Wordsworth’s poetry’s “eliding (subliming) of the referent” also
“elides the grave and suggests that poetry is a work of mourning that lies ‘too
deep for tears’” (“TU” 48n4, “TC” 28). This poetic elision establishes nature as
a ground for reality-testing, and thus for mourning.
Hartman’s interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry from the late 1970s on
always emphasize that Wordsworth’s mode of literary representation accomplishes
two things simultaneously: first, his poetry instigates a deepened awareness of loss,
of the fact that things can disappear, and as such it can be called upon to make
90 Geoffrey Hartman

a vital contribution to a postmodern culture where the possibility of loss has

become uncertain; second, Wordsworth’s poetry simultaneously affirms the
reality of something that remains untouched by loss—of what Wordsworth him-
self called a “lasting life / From all internal injury exempt” (qt. “TC” 24–5).
Wordsworth’s poetry conveys the assurance that underlying all the losses
life incurs, a dimension of experience persists unscathed. In the essay I have
been concerned with here, Hartman writes how “mother nature, or the mother-
in-nature, is the guardian of something invulnerable, which is either the
mother-child relation itself or an ideal of psychic development” (25).
Wordsworth’s poetry affirms both “a deepened awareness of loss” and “human
invulnerability,” and it insinuates an oblique relation between the two, which
Agamben also established when he writes about the uniquely human experience
of (im)potentiality: “human beings are the animals who are capable of their
own impotentiality. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the
abyss of human impotentiality” (1999: 182). Hartman’s position is not only
different here from Freud and Hyppolite (and through him also from Hegel),
but importantly also from Heidegger.4 For Heidegger, as I have noted before,
the exposure to one’s own death, and therefore to the possibility of one’s own
impossibility, is a necessary condition of every project of human individuation.
In Wordsworth also, “the abyss of human impotentiality” opens up with the
“transition from the first (and lost) love object to object love” (“TC” 21), and
thus also at the moment of individuation. Still, Wordsworth’s scenario emphati-
cally does not consist in an anxious face-to-face with the possibility of one’s
own impossibility: the self only faces its impotentiality as it is presented in a
poetic actuality that simultaneously guarantees its ultimate invulnerability. The
confrontation with the possibility of its own nothingness, in other words, is
lined with the assurance of invulnerability, and this strengthens it for future
casualties and confrontations with particular moments of loss. Just as the
Wordsworth of Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman’s mature Wordsworth combines
an insistence on the unhindered continuity between man and nature with a
rhetoric of death, negativity, and loss. Again, such invulnerability is only possi-
ble by avoiding the traumatic encounter with one’s own separation from nature,
which is yet a fundamental condition for the constitution of the self in some of
Hartman’s most important intertexts—in Freud, Hegel, and Heidegger.
To conclude this section, I want to add that Wordsworth’s victory over his own
touching compulsion also reflects Hartman’s consolidated response to one
more insistent intertext, the work of Paul de Man. Early in Allegories of Reading,
de Man defines the paradigmatic deconstructive scenario as an interpretive sit-
uation in which two incompatible readings are equally possible, even necessary.
Recall the logical impasse the young Wordsworth found himself in when he was
faced with the simultaneous assurance that nature is alive (and the mother is
not dead) and that the mother is dead (and therefore nature cannot be alive);
what is this if not an experience “whose grammatical structure is devoid of
ambiguity,” in which Wordsworth’s compulsive touching generates “two entirely
 Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 91

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).

2. Wordsworth’s Blessing of Impotentiality

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.

A Slumber did my spirit seal

I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees! (1993: 164)
92 Geoffrey Hartman

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

poetry’s general “condition of quotation, attenuated allusion and paraphrase”

(“WO” 185). Hartman submits that poetry is “the working-through of such
‘voices’,” and that it is the ghostliness of these voices that implores the poet
to work them through in his poetry (“DD” 207, “WO” 191). Hartman notes
that the lines from Milton are themselves an “echo” of Oedipus at Colonus, and
that they thus indicate “the felt though repressed power of pre-Christian
literature” (“DD” 207, “WO” 181). He further compounds the ghostliness of
this echo through the suggestion that Milton figures in Wordsworth’s poem as
“a screen” for “the real block” called Shakespeare (“DD” 215). Whatever the
complexity of these intertextual references, and however brilliant Hartman’s
interpretive work is here, what is vital is that Wordsworth’s quotation from
Milton “acts as a boundary that limits and even admonishes our desire for
self-inauguration” (211). Wordsworth’s poem embodies the belatedness and
secondariness of human existence as such. At the same time, Wordsworth’s
euphemisms only acquire their performative power by being a belated response
to a divine ur-fiat.
There is one crucial difficulty besetting this reliance on a divine speech act.
We generally tend to think of language as being inevitably removed from the
source of meaning and from an authenticating origin—that is, after all, what
the difference between reality and representation amounts to. Yet the divine
speech act that Hartman invokes is both linguistic and absolutely originary. The
metaphysical fiction of an originary speech-act has the peculiar power of
making the prime mover already a part of language, and it thus grants language
an inherent link to divine transcendence, and liberates it from its fateful
removal from the fullness of being. The position of transcendence is already
linguistic, and even if Hartman asserts its ghostliness by pointing to the voices
of Shakespeare and Milton, it is only if we assume the reality of God’s “super-
performative” that the linguistic power of euphemism can be understood as a
power at all.9 The problem with this is that this new crypto-theological picture is
used to account for a paradoxically powerful euphemism that will be used as
essentially a cure for a cultural condition, and most obviously so in The Fateful
Question of Culture. The previous chapter traced how Hartman’s work since the
1970s has moved from ontology to culture, and has come to look for a way to
promote literature as the preserver of historical experience within culture. In
Hartman’s extensive body of work on Wordsworth, however, we see that this
cultural role of poetry is ascribed to Wordsworth only by returning to a far from
self-evident metaphysical scheme. This return is perhaps not all that noticeable,
as it is described in terms of speech-acts and of the “relation between textuality
and referentiality” (“WO” 193), but it is an integral part of the Wordsworth that
Hartman promotes in The Fateful Question and elsewhere.
To conclude this chapter, and to further explain Hartman’s uneasy acknowl-
edgement of a religious dimension, I home in on another important theme
that his work elaborates in the period we are concerned with, his theory of
the “specular name.” This theme is developed in what Hartman calls his
 Poetry and the Preservation of Loss 97

“counterstatement to Derrida,” the essay “Words and Wounds” (1980), which is

printed as the last chapter in Saving the Text (1981), and in “Psychoanalysis: the
French Connection” (1978), the penultimate chapter in that book, which
addresses the work of both Derrida and Lacan. Taking his cue from the work of
Walter Benjamin, Hartman here speculates about the existence of a so-called
specular name, which is conceived as “a correlative in language” of the famous
“specular image” of “coordinated being” that Lacan locates in the mirror phase,
and which offers the child an illusory image of his or her wholeness. It is no
surprise that Hartman models this specular name as a speech-act: it is an “act of
vocative designation” that “strikes inward as a divine apostrophe” and through
which the self is “defined totally” (“FC” 88–94).10 Hartman writes that “the
scene of nomination . . . is bound to be ‘accusative’ as well as ‘nominative’” (94).
It is, quite precisely, the speech-act of “pure signification”—having “only a
referent . . . but no concept or signified” (“WW” 126).
The association of Hartman’s coinage with speech-acts may alert us to his
ambition to present his claim on Wordsworth as a correction of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Yet the suggestion that the specular name can serve as “a
correlative in language” for Lacan’s specular image seems to forget that for
Lacan, language is an essential part of the same story in which the specular
image is an episode, and can thus never serve as an alternative for that story.
According to Lacan, in the mirror phase, the child encounters an integrated
image he or she can assume as his or her identity. This identity is, however, in
Lacan’s twist, revealed to be only “an illusory modification,” because the corps
morcelé, “the fragmented or coordinated body image prior to the mirror phase,”
is only suspended (and not abolished) in this spectral image. In Hartman’s
interpretation of Lacan, fragmentation is not abolished because it “‘remains
active in the domain that Lacan names the verbal or symbolic in contrast to the
nonverbal or imaginary” (“FC” 92–3). For Hartman, there is a strict distinction
between the imaginary and the symbolic (or linguistic) domain; while the
specular image belongs to the former, Hartman coins the specular name to take
its place in the latter. What Hartman here conveniently forgets is that the sym-
bolic and the imaginary are always “coexistent, coimplicated, and intertwined”
rather than simply “in contrast” (Argyros and Flieger 1987: 61).11 Pulling the
imaginary and the symbolic apart, and equating the latter with language as
such, has a clear advantage for Hartman: it allows him to isolate the symbolic
realm as the domain that receives the persistent activity of the body’s fragmen-
tation and that has the power to correct the story that led from the specular
image to fragmentation. This correction is then Hartman’s theory of the
specular name, which offers a considerably less bleak story than Lacan’s hard
lesson that an integrated identity remains forever impossible.12
Hartman does admittedly point out that the specular name is equally illusory
as the specular image that it replaces: he writes that it corresponds to “the
concept of Word or Logos” in religion, and thus belongs to “a logocentric phase
of development,” and is as such complicit with “a desire for reality-mastery” that
98 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

Wordsworth’s—religiosity, this suggests a close connection between the

religious and the unacknowledged in this part of his work. Hartman quietly
corrects intellectual positions that claim to do without religion, and he holds
that lack of awareness against them because they are “not reflective or dialectical
enough” (“IF” 150). The religious, or the sacred, seem to be simply (and mini-
mally) that which threatens to go unacknowledged, and which yet cannot be
denied; the religious appears to be connected to a certain care for “what
we do not know, or what does not require our knowing” (François 2003: 68).
Hartman’s own theoretical interventions are never more “Wordsworthian” than
when they turn to those things that, because they do not allow themselves to be
known, or do not need our knowing, threaten to go unacknowledged in
projects that are all too intent on conceptual knowledge. If it is not too fanciful,
we could say that this care for the unremarkable and the unobtrusive is the
reason why the religious never moves to the foreground of Hartman’s theoreti-
cal work, but instead inheres in it in the same way that regressive knowledge
inheres in Wordsworth’s euphemism—unactualized, yet acknowledged in its
quiet persistence.
Argyros and Flieger are correct to foreground Hartman’s “stake in literature
as pathos,” but this statement can be made more specific by giving that pathos
the name of William Wordsworth. Hartman’s speculations on the specular
name are also applied to Wordsworth’s poetry. Hartman defines the “absolute
vocative” (another term he uses to refer to the specular name) as “the fiat itself:
the power of the logos to produce, out of itself as it were, a present and immedi-
ate response,” only to go on to ask the question whether the work of art can “let
the let-there-be be, suspend the absolute vocative in the system of language”
(ST 92). Considered in light of the specular name, literature is the work of
mourning “the death of the proper name”: the death knell of the proper name
“signifies the birth of the literary text” that “reaffirms [the proper name] in
time” (ST 77, “WW” 94). Poetry is then “the elaboration of a specular name”
(108). “A Touching Compulsion,” the essay I began this chapter with, ends
with the observation that “[i]n Wordsworth’s poetry mourning and memory
converge as an infinite task” (“TC” 30). As my discussion has made clear,
Wordsworth’s poetry has also assured that this infinite task can take comfort
in the certainty of an essential invulnerability. Poetry creates this invulnerability
through its work of affirming potentiality, although other elements in Hartman’s
theoretical and critical work indicate that the power of such a gentle affirmation
can, in the last analysis, hardly exist without a divine warrant. In the next
chapter, I follow Hartman in his effort to transport Wordsworth—and, inevita-
bly, the tensions that I have indicated in the construction of this “unremarkable”
Wordsworth—to other domains.
 Chapter 5

“Darkness makes abode”: Mourning,

Testimony, Community

1. Communities of Mourning: Anderson,

Nancy, Wordsworth
The clearest indication of the centrality of Wordsworth in Hartman’s mature
work is the fact that the logic of Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth—the
subject of the previous chapter—organizes his interventions in other fields.
This chapter traces the ways in which Hartman’s understanding of Wordsworth
informs his thinking on media, community, Jewish identity, and the memory of
catastrophe. The result is a remarkably cogent and consistent position that still
has an important contribution to make to current debates on these topics, if
only because Hartman’s position has until now not always been recognized in
these debates. Wordsworth’s poetry combines an affirmation of the possibility
of loss with an assertion of invulnerability, and this paradoxical capacity struc-
tures, most notably, the notion of community that surfaces intermittently in
Hartman’s work. Of course, the assertion of the relevance of Wordsworth’s
peculiarly empowering mode of mourning for a thinking of community—and
therefore also, if only indirectly, of politics—immediately invites two objections:
first, that the importation of this—or any—model of mourning into the realm
of politics reveals that model’s essential conservatism, and second, that the very
movement from poetry to politics constitutes a suspect species of aesthetic
ideology. If I begin by addressing these objections, it is because this approach
also allows me to begin sketching Hartman’s unique position.
The first objection is rooted in a widespread suspicion that a successful
process of mourning is by definition a normalization strategy that affirms
the status quo; it castigates mourning as what Eric Santner has referred to as
“an ultimately adaptive strategy to the governing reality principle” (2006: 89).
It holds that mourning all too easily overcomes particular losses and redirects
its liberated energies to new love objects that unproblematically substitute for
the ones that are lost. Such an outright dismissal of mourning often either
implicitly or explicitly embraces mourning’s counterpart: melancholia. It under-
stands melancholia as an ethically and politically commendable practice that
resists surrendering the memory of loss to a public space that all too often fails
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 101

to honor the memories of non-dominant groups. It remains unconditionally

attached to particular losses, and considers melancholia as “the only affective
posture that can maintain fidelity to those losses that the reigning ideological
formation would like to disavow” (Santner 2006: 89).
The second objection, which considers the importation of Wordsworth’s
literary achievement into the realm of politics as a form of aesthetic ideology,
is hard to avoid in the case of Hartman, who has recently rather cheerfully
confessed to what he calls “the cardinal sin of aesthetic ideology” (“PE” 454,
“PS” xxiv). The critique of aesthetic ideology has been a staple of literary and
cultural criticism since the 1980s, both in historicist and in deconstructionist
(or poststructuralist) approaches. Basic to this critique is the assumption that
the operation of the aesthetic can be characterized as a “process of ideological
deformation of the material, the real, the sociopolitical” (Kaufman 2000: 682).
The self-imposed task of critique is then to reverse that deformation, and
to restore the material and historical reality that the aesthetic has allegedly
deformed.
It is not difficult to appreciate the affinity between this critique of the
aesthetic and the melancholic critique of mourning: both approaches distrust
processes of formalization and mediation, and both profess to remain faithful
to the material reality that psychological, aesthetic, or conceptual mediations
supposedly distort. Such a suspicion of the aesthetic and of mourning has
arguably been the dominant critical posture in the fields of literary and cultural
studies in the last three decades or so; indeed, the realization that it can so
easily be invoked against Hartman is an unambiguous indication of his gradual
removal from the critical mainstream in the same period. In whatever field it
operates, Hartman’s work is rooted in the conviction that an unmediated and
uncompromising attachment to loss and to historical reality is impossible, and
that a measure of mourning and of aesthetic mediation is also preferable on
ethical and political grounds. A minimal process of monumentalization that
loosens our melancholic attachment to loss is not an objectionable act of betrayal,
but is in fact a prerequisite if our fidelity to loss is to acquire a sustainable and
rememberable shape. Moreover, for Hartman a moment of mediation is essen-
tial in making possible “the thinking of history and historicity themselves”
(Kaufman 2000: 684). Against the critique of aesthetic ideology and of mourning,
Hartman’s work insists that history, and especially the traumatic history that he
engages in his work on Holocaust video testimony, “surfaces not only in but also
because of an aesthetic medium” (Goodman 1996: 572).
Hartman’s conviction that it is impossible to confront reality in a pure
and undistorted way or to expose ourselves to a radically unmourned loss is
counterbalanced by the realization that a fully restitutive mourning or a full-
scale aestheticization of reality are ethically and politically unacceptable. The
importance of Wordsworth’s achievement is that it mediates loss in a way that
avoids both fallacies: it is a form of mourning that counteracts mourning’s ten-
dency to abstract from the particularity of loss, while simultaneously recognizing
102 Geoffrey Hartman

the essential role of mourning in the construction of psychic memorials that

make loss rememberable at all. This chapter shows how this different mourning,
which can be conflated neither with melancholia nor with traditional notions
of mourning, assures the often unacknowledged relevance of Hartman’s work
for overly polarized debates on community, nationalism, identity, and the
memory of trauma.
So how does Wordsworth’s poetry articulate a more ethically attuned kind
of mourning? The reading of “A slumber did my spirit seal” made clear that
Wordsworth’s poetry does not remain melancholically attached to Lucy’s death,
but instead suspends it in a perpetuated state of impotentiality that preserves
Lucy’s immutability. It avoids exposing us to the brute fact of Lucy’s death in a
way that is too direct to absorb or assimilate, and instead provides a minimal
monumentalization in a poetic form through which we can experience our
removal from her death. This loss is too extreme to confront directly, and it
is only when we can experience our removal from the trauma that it can be
assimilated as a determinate reality. Wordsworth’s aesthetic operation, in other
words, makes possible an experience of non-experience, and it is only through
this mediation that the reality that we cannot confront directly is created as
an object to be (indirectly) experienced. In this sense, Wordsworth’s poetry
“directs us to objects that are clearly there, clearly human, and clearly finite”
(“CD” 220). Against the prevailing idea that mourning and aesthetic mediation
constitute a betrayal of particular losses, Wordsworth shows that mourning, far
from hastening the forgetting of the lost object, is a prerequisite for giving it
a form we can experience and remember. Wordsworth’s poetry is “the equivalent
in words to communal tombstones” that yet remains “penetrated by contingency”
(“WH” 31, 34). The peculiarity of this kind of mourning is that it manages to
make loss and contingency a palpable part of the experience that the work of
aesthetic mediation makes possible. This aesthetics of mourning frequently but
unsystematically informs a particular thinking of community in Hartman’s
work. In order to understand the contribution that this form of community can
make to contemporary debates, it is useful to situate it in relation to two more
familiar conceptions of community.
The most conspicuous of these is the most widespread form of modern
community, the nation. Benedict Anderson, among others, has shown how
the nation relies on a particular stylization of death—a “cult of the dead” and a
beautification of heroic death that Hartman consistently denounces (FQ 191,
“AE” 137).1 Such blatant examples of aesthetic ideology often underlie totalizing
and exclusionary forms of community, and it is in reaction to these that a
radical re-thinking of the notion of community emerged in the 1980s and early
1990s at the crossroads of ontology, ethics, politics, and literary theory. The
most famous instances of this line of thinking are probably Jean-Luc Nancy’s
The Inoperative Community, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and
Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. These critiques of traditional notions
of community in their different ways also target the aestheticization of death
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 103

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.

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than

cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence
accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately
empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in
earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the
general reaction to the busy-body who “discovered” the Unknown Soldier’s
name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of
a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable
mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly
national imaginings. (9).

The cenotaph functions as a technology of community that enables a scene

of mourning, a display of “public ceremonial reverence,” that impresses the
citizen with the inevitability of the reality of a community she cannot perceive,
only imagine. The cenotaph can instill a sense of community because it pres-
ents the death of the Unknown Soldier as an anonymous death; it successfully
abstracts from the particularity and irreparability of the deaths of those who
have in effect died in wars and battles that the nation claims as elements of its
history and as constituent parts of its identity.
The national aesthetics of mourning consists in the construction of an affective
economy that thrives on a “peculiarly absolute abstraction of death” (Redfield
1999: 68). In the cenotaph, death is figured as “aestheticized anonymity” (68),
104 Geoffrey Hartman

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

impossible the distance and reflexivity that every commitment to community

requires. The notion of community that can be derived from Hartman’s
Wordsworth is characterized by a somewhat paradoxical commitment to experi-
ence, on the one hand, and reflection and distance on the other. In Hartman’s
work on Holocaust memory, this contradictory position is given a shape in the
figure of the “intellectual witness” (“HT” 260). Yet before we turn to Hartman’s
work on video testimony and on Jewish identity—two issues that are not neces-
sarily connected in Hartman’s oeuvre—we need to address a problem that
besets Hartman’s notion of community in the very field in which it originates,
that of literary studies.
The fact that Hartman’s work on mourning and community offers an ade-
quate response to the charges of aesthetic ideology and forgetful mourning does
not mean that it can find a hearing in a critical climate that has increasingly
been dominated by “melancholic” and “anti-aesthetic” positions in the period
in which Hartman’s mature work has taken shape. Indeed, how can an approach
like Hartman’s that offers a defense of literature on the basis of the merits of
experience—rather than, say, of an all too familiar set of vague humanist
values—find a place in a field that has increasingly begun to consider literature
as a cultural object or as an object of theoretical knowledge, rather than as
an occasion for experience? How, moreover, can a literary experience that is
necessarily open and indeterminate be promoted as a determinate vision? It
is at least remarkable that the two domains in which Hartman’s work continues
to figure centrally are trauma and Holocaust studies.5 There are obviously
complicated institutional and intellectual reasons for this state of affairs, but
we cannot fail to note that the two signature movements of Hartman’s late
work—the preservation of potentiality, the experience of non-experience—are
almost definitional of the objects with which these fields concern themselves,
that is, the afterlife of trauma and the memory of catastrophe. The fact that
these experiential structures are not, or no longer, linked to the objects of
literary studies underlines the difficulty of finding a hearing for potentiality
and experience in this domain.
Two of Hartman’s most straightforward pieces of cultural criticism, his essays
“Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics” from 1992 and “Public
Memory and its Discontents” from 1994, offer a good place to observe his attempt
to promote literary (and artistic) experience as a determinate “countervision.”
“Public Memory and its Discontents” locates the privilege of art in its ability to
be “more effective in ‘embodying’ historically specific ideas than the history-
writing on which it may draw.” Art is both more personal and more indeterminate:
it is “more personal and focused than public memory yet less monologic than
the memorializing fables common to ethnic or nationalist affirmation” (“PD”
104, 107). Literature, moreover, is neither a neutralization nor a re-animation
of the past: in literature “creative activity is often carried out under the negative
sign of an absent memory,” “as if the link between memory and imagination had
been lost” (107). Literature, in other words, enables an experience of removal.
108 Geoffrey Hartman

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.

2. Aesthetic State Solution: The Jewish Question

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote
that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism” (1969: 256). This statement reflects the insight that
what we think of as culture and civilization are in fact reflections of the values
of dominant groups, whose domination was only made possible, and can only
be maintained, at the cost of massive violence and dispossession. This insight
has oriented the major critical tendencies in the fields of literary and cultural
studies in the last three decades or so; it also informs the critique of aesthetic
ideology and the critical melancholia that I discussed in the previous section. In
his book Aesthetic Democracy, Thomas Docherty proposes a different reading of
110 Geoffrey Hartman

Benjamin’s dictum. He suggests we take the double-sidedness of the statement

seriously, and also entertain the slightly perverse possibility that there is no
document of barbarism that is not also a document of civilization. The result
is that the politics of aesthetic documents are truly undecidable, “neither intrin-
sically civilised nor intrinsically barbaric.” Indeed, “the document manifests
itself as the merest potentiality for either civilization or barbarism,” and the
promise of aesthetic democracy would then hinge on the capacity to inhabit
that potentiality (2006: 70).
This “inhabiting” corresponds to Hartman’s notion of the literary experience
of a mere potentiality, an experience that refuses a premature decision about its
status as either a document of barbarism or a document of civilization. Yet such
a moment of experience and of potentiality can matter only as long as no
decision about its status has been made, and because it is the one-sided and not
the radically open-ended reading of Benjamin’s phrase that most aptly charac-
terizes the major critical tendencies Hartman’s work has had to confront, such
a “premature politicisation” is often hard to avoid (71). When the chief occu-
pations of literary criticism are “ideology critique” and “identity affirmation”
(SS 216), the understanding of the literary text shifts from that of a practical
object or an object of experience to that of an object of theoretical knowl-
edge—a knowledge that can then be affirmed or critiqued (Comas 2006:
44–54). The point of all this is not to bemoan this state of affairs, or even to
defend Hartman against the charge that he fails to engage with contemporary
politics, but rather to account for the fact that Hartman’s investment in literary
experience as it has taken shape since the 1970s has failed to make a difference
in the field of literary studies. When its only potentially excessive and radical
moment—the moment of experience—is overwritten in the construction of
the text as an object of knowledge, it has no resources to defend itself against
its widespread misinterpretation as an uncommitted aesthetic ideology, or even
as an unconscious piece of propaganda for the victors of history. This account
not only makes clear why Hartman’s case for literature cannot but be misper-
ceived; in this section, it also makes it possible to correct some received ideas
about Hartman’s engagement with the issues of Jewish identity and Jewish
history. Indeed, the main difficulty in understanding that engagement is that it
does not fit customary forms of identity affirmation. At the end of this section,
I focus on a little-known and remarkably nasty exchange between Hartman and
Edward Said in the pages of Critical Inquiry that highlights the misfit between
Hartman’s and Said’s positions on ethnic identity and critical practice.
The first thing that needs to be remarked about Hartman’s approach to the
Jewish question is the reluctance and circumspection with which he proceeds.
Before Hartman’s essays on Derrida in the mid-1970s, only the 1969 essay
“Adam on the Grass with Balsamum,” which deploys Midrash techniques in an
intensely focused reading of Milton, could have suggested Hartman’s interest
in these issues (“LL” 15). When the essays on Derrida are collected in Saving the
Text, it is again Hartman’s reluctance to address issues of Jewishness that is
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 111

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)

This short passage is organized by two very different narrative movements: on

the one hand, it traces the destruction of communal (Jewish) experience, while
on the other, the succession of grammatical subjects—from Jewish ambition
over “this very people” to “we”—indicates a narrative that offers textual
compensation for that disintegration. The result is a shift from a form of com-
munity that is bound together by a shared territory—what Nancy would call an
“immanent” community—to a different form of community that is essentially
“uprooted,” but that still survives through a textual bond. Textuality grounds a
form of community that survives the absence of territorial continuity, and as
this condition marks Jewish experience, this form of community is recognizably
Jewish; yet precisely because it defines itself through its refusal of all territorial
claims, it cannot possibly be confined to the Jewish example alone. In the
same way that the Jewish experience has survived its uprooting and its dis-
memberment, the form of textual community that it exemplifies exceeds the
Jewish example. Throughout Hartman’s work on the Jewish question, “textual
dependence” and “imagination” are never merely Jewish constants—they
invariably also pose the question of community as such. Thus “text-dependence
is a way of living in secular time without rejecting a burden of greatness”
(“JT” 97); it offers an opportunity “to unify rather than divide the community”
(“RL” 31), and “[w]hether this is a typically Jewish or more general aesthetic
structure is hard to say” (“JT” 102). In light of the earlier discussion of the
relation between Hartman’s Wordsworth and the idea of community, it should
be clear that this textual community is not just an Israeli export product. Indeed,
it is rather the case that Israel is conceived as an—admittedly privileged—
instantiation of a Wordsworthian community that is grounded in an experience
of distance and discontinuity.7
That Hartman’s investment in the Jewish question is both very specific and
part of a more general concern is also apparent in the introduction to the 1986
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 113

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

critical inquiry is one medium in which the possibility of transcending one’s

own community should be cultivated.
Still, when Hartman blames Said for reducing critical inquiry to a polarized
confrontation between two fixed identity positions, we are reminded that such
a premature politicization had become nearly automatic in the critical climate
in which Hartman is intervening. Hartman’s complaint betrays a certain resis-
tance on his part to accept the changing terms of discourse in the field of literary
criticism. His failure to capture that what he considers to be Said’s personal
fault is in fact a nearly automatic movement of politicization makes it all too
easy to charge him not only with a barely disguised Zionism, but also with
a somewhat unworldly aestheticism. Said’s response in effect amounts to an
outright refusal to acknowledge Hartman’s critical position.11 Hartman’s posi-
tion is described as a posture of “olympian detachment” that is “interested only
in politesse.”12 In Said’s logic, not even this imputation of “evenhandedness”
saves Hartman from being identified with the wrong hand: he writes that
“[m]erging with a community is therefore quite a different thing if on the
one hand the community happens to deploy an army of occupation, or on the
other, if it is subject to that army’s brutality” (1989b: 200). This statement
suggests that only an unconditional “merger” with the Palestinian cause would
give Hartman the right to speak. As a rationale for his questionable rhetoric,
Said adds that “There is a war on.” Hartman’s problem is that this Ausnahmezu-
stand is not the exception but the rule in the critical climate of the day, and that
Hartman’s Wordsworthian notion of community cannot find a hearing in these
war games. Hartman is not with Said, and therefore against Said, and therefore
against the Palestinians, and therefore with the Jews, and therefore with no
one else: such is the reductive logic of identity politics that Said’s intervention
remorselessly exploits.13

3. Television and the Ethics of Holocaust Testimony

Said’s response to Hartman ends with the following judgment: “For a person
whose recent stock in trade has been bearing witness to the horrible past of his
own people, I find Hartman’s patronizing and hypocritical self-congratulation
both tasteless and jejune” (1989b: 200). This sentence repeats two prevalent
misunderstandings about Hartman’s project since the 1980s: first, there is the
barely disguised suggestion that attention to one’s own people leads to “self-
congratulation” as the basis for group consciousness—an equation that I have
dismantled in the previous section; second, it voices the idea that Hartman’s
work on survivor testimonies is somehow directly related to his imagination of
Jewishness. Most of Hartman’s work on testimony is produced in the context of
the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University that he
co-founded in the early 1980s and that has been filming thousands of interviews
with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. As I show, this part of Hartman’s
116 Geoffrey Hartman

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 testimony’s “counter-cinematic” operation, in perfect contrast, respects

the reality of what resists foregrounding and visualization, and it attempts to
make non-presence an occasion for genuine experience. It offers the most con-
crete occasion in Hartman’s oeuvre where non-experience can be directly expe-
rienced. Video testimony is essentially an effort to re-embody the different forms
of ghostliness that the visual media inflict upon contemporary life. Hartman’s
most concise formulation of the rationale behind the optic of video testimony
leaves no doubts about the Wordsworthian inspiration of this enterprise:

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).

The operation of video here resembles nothing so much as Wordsworth’s

capacity to find a poetic embodiment for ghostly forces that resist actualization.
Video uses television’s visualizing powers not in order to make present things
more present, but rather to give a visible and experienceable shape to testimonies
that by definition deal with memories that are themselves no longer accessible to
experience. Hartman’s video optics, that is, is designed to enable an immediate
experience of our distance from the catastrophe—a distance that is embodied
by the witness who is being filmed. A crucial challenge faced by this optic is
developing a way to convey the “immediacy” of the interview, the fact that it is
“a one-time event” happening “on the spot” (496). This concern informs the
Fortunoff Archive’s decision not to make the interviews available on the inter-
net, but to force potential viewers to actually travel to Yale in order to see the
video interviews there (“HT” 252, “WV” 223–4). The filming itself also aims to
convey to the viewer the immediacy and uniqueness of the event: the interview-
ers only use one camera that consistently focuses on the witness, and they only
rarely ask questions or prompt the interviewees. This minimalism contributes
to the immediacy of the experience—that is, to an immediate experience of
our non-experience of the memories that the witness recounts.
Given that video testimony makes possible an experience of removal that is
clearly modeled on Wordsworth’s poetic achievement, it is no surprise that
Hartman explicitly connects his optic to the notion of community. Hartman
repeatedly stresses the fact that the interviewers in the video testimonies “form
a provisional community and become, for the survivor-witness, representative of
a potentially larger community” (“TD” 10). Hartman uses Maurice Halbwachs’
notion of an “affective community” to characterize this “supportive group ready
to be a ‘witness to the witness’” (“ET” 501). The act of witnessing witness
provides the occasion for an experience that can ground a non-exclusive and
non-identitarian form of community that is open to all who want to share this
specific experience of a missed experience; it appeals “to a human commonality
118 Geoffrey Hartman

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

commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s liberation from the Nazis.

With uncharacteristic immediacy, Hartman edited a documentary volume
entitled Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (1986), in which he decries
Reagan’s visit as an attempt to “‘construct’ forgetfulness” and to effect a prema-
ture global “act of political absolution” (“BM” 60–4). For Hartman, the erpresste
Versöhnung that Reagan’s act of amnesia promotes is part of an aesthetic
ideology that recuperates death as the “work” of community: he writes that
“the choice of Bitburg . . . gave the impression of wishing to recall nothing of
the past except common sacrifices and a shared code of military honor” (64).
Hartman also objects to Reagan’s evenhandedness: “That detachment in the
president, that optimistic ability to overlook certain things in the past and so
to counter drift by an appearance of mastery, is what everyone felt” (65). This
objection resembles nothing so much as Edward Said’s attack on Hartman’s
“olympian detachment,” which I discussed in the previous section, and in
which Said also condemns detachment and evenhandedness as a refusal to
acknowledge very real atrocities. As for Said in 1989, so for Hartman, in 1985,
“there is a war on.” Still, these surprising similarities also throw into stark relief
the reasons why Said and Hartman could not possibly find a common ground:
for Said, the war targets the Palestinian people, and as such the dignity of our
common humanity, while for Hartman, there is a war against Holocaust memory,
and as such against the hope of a non-identitarian, non-exclusive form of
community. The central gamble of Hartman’s politics of memory is that the
latter kind of battle can have an impact on the former kind—or put differently,
that the promotion of a particular kind of memory-work can make a tangible
difference to real people in real situations. Hartman’s startling thesis on
Wordsworth in The Fateful Question is the most explicit instance of such a
commitment to memory. Indeed, his claim for Wordsworth is only a more
spectacular version of a dedication to testimony, literature, or any other form
of remembrance that undergirds the totality of his work. And because this
claim can so easily be dismissed as an absurd idiosyncracy, it at once exposes the
tenuousness of Hartman’s gamble to continue to fight the war of memory
rather than enlist for a more exotic tour of duty.

4. Remembering Creative Criticism

In an essay first published in 1989 and entitled “Criticism and Restitution,”

Hartman lucidly registers the logic that underlies the projects of restitution and
identitarian affirmation that were increasingly beginning to dominate the
humanities. Even though attempts to open up the canon profess to be post-
modern, Hartman recognizes a “diluted modernist ideology” in them that,
in the very process of “deprivileging the acknowledged work of art,” ends up
simply “privileging the yet-unacknowledged work” (“CR” 167). By countering
dominant forms of identity with the assertion of a marginalized identity, such
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 123

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:

What is transmitted, then, is the difficulty of dying, and the superficiality of

all progressive schemes that cover up the old order, that try to lay it to rest.
Eliot had the same trouble with the dead who could not be buried. He tries
to honor them, by equating truth and tradition, but the psychic problem of
incorporating the dead startles the economy of his prose. (81)

Eliot’s refusal of critical creativity, and of an engagement with the unburied

dead, ends up wrestling the pen out of his hand and incites the ghostwriting
that his refusal was meant to forestall.
The economy of mourning in Benjamin’s work is less deluded. For Hartman,
it offers an exemplary site where the “split between truth (immediate, apodictic,
iconic) and tradition (mediated, didactic, figurative)” is conserved as a problem
(81, “MI” 212). Indeed, the long chapter on Benjamin in Criticism in the Wilderness
presents an elaboration of the economy of mourning that we have come to
128 Geoffrey Hartman

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

a defeated potentiality or “retroactive force” which turns the true historian

(identified by Benjamin with the historical materialist) towards those who are
vanquished; not simply to represent or recuperate them by a gratuitous act of
sympathy but because the vanquished are the volcanic pavement on which
the victors march. It is they who give history its materiality, its uneven, unquiet
subsistence. (77–8)

For Hartman, Benjamin’s Theses perform a “chiasmus of hope and catastrophe”:

catastrophe is situated in the drive for the future, it is “proleptic . . . it ruins
time,” whereas hope is “located mysteriously in the past”: the “foundation of
hope becomes remembrance; which confirms the function, even the duty of
historian and critic” (77–8). It is in the same tenor that Hartman writes else-
where that the critic is “incurably a redeemer . . . in the spirit-embedding sense”
who “materializes us” (“SP” 508).25
The critic keeps the dead deadly by not restoring them to an indifferent avail-
ability through the latest realism; “the dead must be saved from the enemy . . .
by escaping their equivalence as the dead and so the indifference of memory”
(“BH” 201). This advertisement for creative criticism quite clearly echoes
the terms of Hartman’s defense of video testimony. So does this mean that
Hartman’s position, in regard to both video testimony and creative criticism,
can completely be identified with that of Benjamin? The very fact that it is
the medium of video in which Hartman’s ethos of materialization finds a
concrete shape already warns against a total identification of this critical ethos
with the position of Benjamin. A crucial aspect of Hartman’s optic of video
testimonies is that the visual framing embodies the survivor’s voice that of itself
would remain ghostly—a ghostliness that, Hartman notes, is still experienced
in “still photos from the past” (“ET” 494). Hartman’s optic is both emphatically
visual and undeniably anti-photographic. It is clear that Benjamin’s critical
practice, in marked contrast, relies to a large extent on the shock of the experi-
ence and the act of the “photographic freeze-frame” (Comay 1999: 59). Eduardo
Cadava, who has done more than anyone else to underline how photography is
crucial to Benjamin’s articulation between history and criticism, has usefully
 Mourning, Testimony, Community 129

summed up the “photographic event” that Benjamin’s practice provokes as

an event in which “experience experiences itself as the vertigo of memory, as an
experience whereby what is experienced is not experienced” (1997: 103).
Hartman’s optic enables an experience that is the exact opposite of this event:
an experience which avoids the vertigo of memory precisely by experiencing
what is not experienced. Put in a different register, Benjamin’s hope in the
decreation of the past is part of a program whose actualization relies on the
effects of what Hartman would recognize and dismiss as retraumatization.
This allows us to reformulate the tension between Hartman’s defense of an
exuberant creative criticism and his commitment to a vision of quiet resilience.
While Hartman adopts Benjamin’s economy of mourning in order to theorize
the position of the critic as a redeemer and materializer, this position is never
radicalized beyond the point where the critical activity of recalling “forgotten
voices, arguments, artifacts, ‘things silently gone out of mind and things violently
destroyed’” can still be harmonized with the achievement of Wordsworth’s
poetry (“SP” 508). It is symptomatic of the Wordsworthian subtext of Hartman’s
creative criticism that while he holds that “there is an identification of myself
with Benjamin” (“MI” 213), this identification is arrested when it begins to
threaten the preservation of the vision of untraumatic growth. If the storm
called progress “irresistibly propels the angel of history into the future . . . while
the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin 1969: 257), the
photographic freeze-frame that could arrest this certain catastrophe leads, for
Hartman, to a secondary trauma that perpetuates the catastrophe it aims to
prevent. This does not mean that Hartman gives up on the angel, but rather
that he, instead of photographing this debris, gently allows Wordsworth to hold
the camera and to film this picture.
I want to end by speculating that for Hartman, the image of the angel perceiving
“one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet” is always already overlain by a more benign scene of
trauma. The “Boy of Winander”-passage from The Prelude is, together with the
Lucy poems, Hartman’s privileged touchstone in his work on Wordsworth. This
autobiographical passage presents a young boy communicating with owls, until
he is confronted with the mild surprise of the owls’ silence. In this scene, the
single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage is couched as “a gentle shock
of mild surprise,” in which the pile of debris is shaped up as “Cliffs / And
Islands,” and in which the image of irresistible propulsion becomes the extended
arrest of a boy who “hung / Listening” (1985: 103–4). This passage, which
conveys nature’s readiness to soften the blows it inflicts, marks the limit of
Hartman’s identification with Benjamin; it pre-empts the “para-apocalyptic”
idea that there is a radical schism between past and future, and presents a
poetics that has “returned from revolutionary schism to the idea of a ground
out of which things grew slowly, precariously” (“TH” 292). Wordsworth’s poetry
may help us to cope with the shock of the radical rupture between past and
130 Geoffrey Hartman

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

prevent their dissolution in an indifferent multiplicity? The prototype of such a

gesture in which the distinction of particulars is preserved through the affirma-
tion of a totality that contains and connects them is, of course, the progression
that Hartman scripted in Wordsworth’s Poetry from a fixation on natural spots to
a reciprocal exchange between natural process and the imagination. If the
scenario that The Fateful Question proposes for loosening our unconditional
attachment to only one culture is convincing, it is so because Hartman’s work
has already demonstrated Wordsworth’s successful weaning from his fixation
on the particulars of nature. It is here that the notion of aesthetic experience
enters Hartman’s argument: in the midst of immediacies that “demand consent
to a worldliness for which there seems to be no alternative” (102), the experi-
ence of the potentiality of things, of their potential for loss, makes it possible to
reconnect to history and to imagine a life in excess of those inflowing immediacies.
Hartman’s analytic of culture, which is undergirded by a Wordsworthian structure
of experience, makes a compelling case for the merits of a radically open notion
of aesthetic experience that does not tell us where to go, but that reactivates a
historical agency by making it possible to imagine a future and remember a past
that exceed the limits of the reigning status quo. By identifying the transition
from one form of culture to another with a radically indeterminate aesthetic
experience, The Fateful Question successfully “restore[s] literature’s specificity as
a focus for thinking about culture” and promotes “literature itself as cultural
discourse” (2, 64).
While the book has achieved its goals, it somewhat compromises that success
by complementing its implicitly Wordsworthian case for literature with an
attempt to explicitly identify the literature it promotes with Wordsworth’s
poetry, most obviously through the infamous claim that this poetry “saved
English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centering on
rural virtue” (7).While we can argue that this hypothesis is primarily a historical
claim that does not interfere with the book’s cultural diagnosis of the present, it
still detracts from the indeterminateness of the notion of aesthetic experience
that the book promotes by associating that experience with a particular—and
particularly English—ecology of mind and nature. At the very least, it suggests
that Wordsworth’s poetry can offer a model for an aesthetic that can adequately
confront the condition of contemporary culture. Still, the suggestion that
Wordsworth’s successful prevention campaign makes it possible to prevent the
repetition of the disaster overlooks the fact that an adequate intervention in the
present must also address the fact that the disaster has already happened. This is
the issue of what the book, in the title of its fourth chapter, calls “language and
culture after the Holocaust.” Even if the book contains both a successful analysis
of contemporary culture and a peculiar historical claim about Wordsworth, this
does not solve its crucial problem: that of finding a contemporary and explicitly
post-Holocaust perspective that embodies an ethic that can still be recognized
as Wordsworth’s. So while Wordsworth, as we saw, managed to convey the
“presence of a half-perceived and half-created mode of life” that preserves
134 Geoffrey Hartman

its “near-muteness,” his present-day counterpart must give shape to an “intelligible

silence” by endowing “speech with a tacit dimension, a quality that, though fully
verbal, cannot be reduced to either intentionality or phenomenality and so
approaches silence” (73–5, 46).
So where does Hartman find this post-Holocaust Wordsworth? The answer is
at least surprising. In the introduction to The Longest Shadow (1996), Hartman
announces the publication of The Fateful Question one year later and describes it
as a book “on the idea of culture after two world wars and the Shoah” in which
he hopes to engage “thinkers like Blanchot and Adorno” (LS 2). A careful
consideration of Hartman’s work since the 1990s makes clear that these two
figures are crucial in his effort to conceive of a post-Holocaust Wordsworthian
ethic and aesthetic. Somewhat schematically, we can say that the resolution to
this puzzle takes the form of the following analogy: what Wordsworth did to
English culture in the face of industrialization, Blanchot does to Wordsworth in
the face of Adorno.1 This point needs some explanation. While Adorno plays
a complex role in Hartman’s mature work, in his direct confrontations with
Blanchot he is generally identified with his statement that “[n]o word intoned
from on high, not even a theological one, can be justified, untransformed, after
Auschwitz” (qt. “WN” 34, “SL” 46, “FS” 221). For Hartman, Blanchot responds to
this stricture—which seems to deny any possibility of salvaging a Wordsworthian
ethos for the present—by hearing it as an imperative to “transform rather than
abandon spiritual words,” and to go “in search of a post-Holocaust spirituality”
(“FS” 227). In a series of remarkably intense engagements with Blanchot’s work,
Hartman argues that Blanchot, like Wordsworth before him, manages to immu-
nize particular things from any attack or claim upon them by rendering their
existence merely potential and making it irrelevant “whether [they] actually
existed or not” (FQ 16n13).2 Blanchot’s work opposes a “rhetoric of specificity”
and resist the “sublime rhetoric” of specific dating used by a “histoire événementielle”
(SS 232, “WT” 370, FQ 109). Writing introduces a “referential vagueness,” “a
twilight of reference” through which historical specificity “disappears into an
immemorial suffering” (“WN” 38, “FS” 222–4). Instead of a literalizing insistence
on specific events, Blanchot’s work conveys “the consciousness of language as
incorporating a void” that indistinguishably figures specific losses as well as
those things that “language, as a condition of its possibility, passes over or
sublimates” (FQ 111–12). Blanchot, in short, provides a post-Holocaust version
of Wordsworth’s resilient euphemism. Even if the referents that Blanchot’s
work renders merely potential are, among others, those of his own question-
able politics before the end of the war, his achievement can be recognized as an
update of Wordsworth’s.
In an article from 1996 Hartman notes that “[s]oon there will be no version
of pastoral; Wordsworth’s may have been the last viable one, at the threshold
of modern industrialization and urbanization” (“TK” 552). One year later, in
The Fateful Question, pastoral—understood as a capacity to look at the world
“through the art of minimalized reference” (MP 6)—has crossed that threshold.
 Coda: Wordsworth after the Holocaust 135

Wordsworth’s “sensibility opens to the metasound of mute speech or nonevent,”

to “rural nature’s range of quiet and quieting influences” (142), and passes
them on by not making them manifest and by leaving them merely potential
(FQ 142, 150). Near the end of a 2003 essay largely devoted to Blanchot,
Hartman moves pastoral beyond another threshold, stating his conviction that
“literature after Auschwitz will not be essentially different from literature
before Auschwitz,” and that “the terrible beauty” born in the wake of the
Holocaust is terrible and beautiful because it testifies to “an invincible pastoral
or contemplative element” (“HH” 242). It is this “counter-spirit,” drawn from
the same source as the kind of spirituality that it updates “yet antithetical to it”
that Blanchot embodies in Hartman’s mature work (“FS” 224).
Of course, it can easily be held against Hartman that what he celebrates as
an exemplary meditation on the possibilities of post-Holocaust pastoral is in
effect Blanchot’s self-serving refusal to own up to his own contribution to “an
atmosphere that made persecution normal” (“SL” 62). Hartman emphasizes
Blanchot’s literary achievements and fails to judge him as a moral agent. In
the passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit from which Hartman has borrowed the
title of his book Scars of the Spirit from 2002, Hegel remarks that such a judgment
is always possible: “for the judging consciousness,” he writes, “there is no action
in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal
aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet toward the agent”
(1977: 404). This position—which Hartman refuses—is that of the “beautiful
soul,” who is incapable of externalizing himself through action and instead
impotently condemns the man of action’s confession by denouncing every act
as serving only particular interests. That Hartman refuses this position of the
beautiful soul—which he also does in the not unrelated case of Paul de Man—
becomes understandable when we follow the progression of the Phenomenology.
In Hegel’s account, the beautiful soul ultimately renounces the moral high
ground and agrees to meet “the consciousness that made confession of itself” in
the real world (407). Now everything is in place for spirit to move from the
stage of morality to that of religion. It is here that Hegel writes that “[t]he
wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scar behind” (407). Hartman’s conviction,
“contra Hegel,” that the “wounds of the spirit do not heal,” can then explain
why he declines to judge Blanchot, or indeed de Man (“SL” 61). The refusal of
such a facile condemnation is the price he has to pay in order to keep the
wounds of the spirit unhealed, and to keep the scars visible. The merit of
Blanchot’s work of potentialization is that he does not need the anaesthetic of
an erpresste Versöhnung in order to make sure that these wounds, while remaining
unhealed, at least no longer hurt as much as they used to.

***
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

Ortwin de Graef’s generosity in sharing his understanding of Romanticism and

postwar criticism with me has accompanied the writing of this book from the
very first draft. Arne De Boever, Dirk De Geest, Elke D’Hoker, Vivian Liska,
Bart Philipsen, Marc Redfield, and Frederik Van Dam read (parts of) the
manuscript at different stages of completion. Geoffrey Hartman has been all
I could have wished for in a subject: always willing to respond to my requests
for information and texts, always offering much more than I requested, and
expecting nothing. Mirjam has made the years in which I have worked on this
book the happiest of my life so far. Our son Mats accompanied the months
in which I wrote the final version of the manuscript as a mere potentiality. As he
was born just two weeks before I finished the book, this ending carries the
promise of more happiness to come.
 Notes

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

mention Auerbach, it focuses on the mixture of levels of style, which is a key

motif for Auerbach. This mixture has, according to Hartman, led to a dictate of
formlessness in the contemporary novel (which Hartman directly associates with
Woolf): “Sense and nonsense are both admitted; little distinction is made between
public matters and private; no restriction or insignificant event remain” (“HR” 61).
Still, the contemporary novel manages to incorporate the tension between the ease
of intimacy and the perceived “inauthenticity of every assumption of intimacy,”
and this tension restores literature’s “power of making room for the strange, the
different, and even the divine”—for, in other words, a less mundane reality (“HR”
64–70). See, as late as 1991, MP 199–202 for a critique of “the affirmative culture
of everyday life” that is directly related to Auerbach’s practice.
14
In his little book André Malraux, Hartman notes that “Auerbach’s Mimesis” is “not
irreconcilable with Malraux’s ‘Antimimesis’” (AM 87). While mimetic theories
of art “depict the artist in search of a style,” antimimetic theories depict “a style in
search of its artist” (88). The dialectical notion of literary achievement that
emerges in “Virginia’s Web” can be seen as the reconciliation that Hartman
envisioned. See Lindenberger (1984: 19–23) on the persistence of mimesis, “less
as consistently held theories than as expressions of a particular bias” that is “char-
acterized by constantly recurring terms such as ‘life,’ ‘nature,’ ‘human’ . . .” (19).
Lindenberger’s main example of this persistent bias is the reaction to the “anti-
humanism” and “anti-mimeticism” of “Barthes and other French critics” in the
1970s. It is remarkable that Hartman’s reaction to French theory (especially to
Blanchot, Malraux, and Sartre) operates in the same terms and is already under-
way in his earliest work.
15
It is no coincidence that Hartman’s distinction between akedah and apocalypse
recalls Auerbach’s opposition between figura and allegory: in both cases the
difference is between a movement that binds itself to nature or history and a
movement of abstraction that aims for the supernatural. Wordsworth’s poetry, for
Hartman, “always keeps below the level of allegory” (WP 55). While it has often
been noted that Auerbach, as a Jew, promotes a Christian principle of interpreta-
tion (which has, moreover, played a crucial role in the history of Christian
Antisemitism), Hartman also codes the opposition between akedah and apoca-
lypse in Christian terms, that is, as the distinction between Protestantism and
Catholicism (WP 334). See, however, “JI” (1985), where Hartman describes an
exemplarily Jewish binding to nature that he opposes to the Christian principle
of figural interpretation.
16
Hartman’s essay “Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth,” written in the early 1970s,
argues that Hegel’s signature movement of sublation (Aufhebung) is in fact a poetical
(and basically Wordsworthian) movement of elation. By this time, Hartman has
drastically turned the tables on Hegel: Hegel no longer constitutes a philosophical
threat to art, literature, and religion; instead, Hartman starts from the observa-
tion that “both art and religion remain alive,” which shifts the burden of proof to
the philosopher who “must deal with their persistence” (“EW” 190).
17
See Griffin (2005: 135) for the point that Wordsworth’s relation to nature is, for
Hartman, also “the relation between his and a prior text.” Donald Marshall’s
comparison of Hartman’s two essays on Blanchot (the first from 1955, the second
from 1960) focuses on the different accounts they offer of Blanchot’s relation to
Romanticism (1983: 137–44).
142 Notes

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

assimilation to the environment and an assimilation of the environment to the

domination of a subject that projects itself onto the world (1973: 167). See also
Adorno (1970: 201–2).
7
This was the crucial point of Hartman’s discussion of “the necessity or fatality of
some primary affirmation” in the work of Virginia Woolf (“VW” 74). See the
second section of my first chapter.
8
One notable exception to this view, quoted by Harold Bloom because it is “[t]he
worst reading possible,” is Stevens’ own comment: “I shall explain The Snow Man
as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to
understand it and enjoy it” (qt. Bloom 1977: 63).
9
See Jarvis (2007: 73–8) for a good discussion of de Man’s positioning of
Wordsworth.
10
This passage is eminently suitable for the “humanist” repositioning of Hegel,
because it inverts the traditional scenario of the triumph of reason at the expense
of the imagination, which we also encountered in the case of the sublime, into
the triumph of “Phantasie” at the expense of “Gedanken.” Considering the possibil-
ity of such an inversion, Hartman elsewhere remarks that “[r]eason, through the
dialectic, represents as something always already on the way to reason what
remains subversive of it . . . Art represents as something on the way to art what is
subversive of it” (ST 47).
11
Hartman borrows the notion of “elation” from Bertram Lewin (Lewin 1951). See
“SA” (226–7).
12
For a similar misreading, see Alan Grose’s comment to his own translation of
the poem (2002: 357). As in his earlier misreading of Stevens, Hartman is again
misunderstanding the category of fiction. If these subjunctives had been deployed
in a non-fictional context, they could be taken as a testimony to fiction’s distinc-
tive capacity to imagine the unreal, and even of the necessity of fiction in
establishing hermeneutic contact. Yet because they appear in a fictional context,
which has already generically affirmed this capacity, such a reading is here strictly
impossible.
13
See the discussion of de Man’s Blindness and Insight in Melville (1986: 115–38) for
a good exposition of the problems with this position, and for some of the grounds
on which it would be entirely forbidding for Hartman.
14
At the end of his essay, Liu introduces a distinction between “French postmodern
theory” (which he characterizes as “manic”) and the “major Anglo-American and
Germanic understanding of postmodernity” (identified with “a mourning so
existential as to be comparable to melancholia”), while suggesting that “these two
postures” may well be “the two faces of a single meditation on loss and history”
(1996: 559–62). Although Liu does not make this explicit, these two positions
can be read as a restatement of Derrida’s distinction between a nostalgic and an
affirmative version of interpretation, which I discussed in the previous chapter.
15
See Argyros and Flieger (1987: 64–9) for the double role of Derrida’s freeplay (or
écriture) in Hartman’s work.
16
My reference to the work of Jerome Christensen hopes to suggest the close
proximity between Hartman’s position and Christensen’s definition of “the
Romantic movement at the end of history” as “the willful commission of anach-
ronism” that resists “the cure of historicization” (1994: 469). Christensen’s call to
“now and again anachronize,” rather than to “always historicize” (476) is also
148 Notes

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

of transcending that situatedness were not precisely the point of Hartman’s

intervention.
13
See “RH” for this logic that “divides humanity coldly into friend or enemy.” What
makes Said’s reduction of Hartman’s intervention to a blind defense of Zionist
politics both more understandable and more damning is the fact that in the
period between Said’s response to Griffin (in the 1989 spring issue of Critical
Inquiry) and Hartman’s response to Said (in the autumn issue), the former had
provoked Edward Alexander to write his infamous “Professor of Terror”-piece
(Alexander 1989). Alexander there refers to Said’s “double career as literary
scholar and ideologue of terrorism” and laments his association with Columbia
University, “where Lionel Trilling once taught and exemplified the meaning of
sweetness and light in culture” (49). Given that Alexander’s slurs appear positively
subtle in comparison to many of the letters of readers in response to his readers
(in the December issue of Commentary), Said’s impatience with Hartman can
plausibly be understood as an effect of this heavily polarized situation. See also
note 22 below.
14
Hartman coins this term in an interview with Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay,
while he at the same time refuses to call this “optic” an “aesthetic,” most likely in
order to distinguish it from what the interviewers had just referred to as “the
Spielberg Aesthetic” and “the Riefenstahl aesthetic” (“ET” 494–5).
15
See Ferguson (1996: 516–23) for a good discussion of Hartman’s argument
against Spielberg.
16
This lack of attention to the fact of survival also informs Hartman’s criticism of
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project. Hartman writes that Agamben’s “desire
not to exclude the muselman and, by extension, the wretched of the earth . . .
neglects, when it comes specifically to the Holocaust, thousands of survivor
testimonies that actually exist” (SS 90). Agamben substitutes “an eloquent gener-
alization for close, empirical study” (90), and as such offers “a quasi-theological
response to questions raised about authenticity in a media age” (“ET” 508). For
Agamben, the Muselmann is the only truly authentic witness, a position that rests
on Primo Levi’s influential definition of the Muselmänner as “those who saw the
Gorgon” (qt. Bernstein 2006: 33). As I explain in my first chapter, this fateful
confrontation with the Gorgon informed Hartman’s figure of the “New Perseus,”
which functioned as the emblem of heroism and authenticity in The Unmediated
Vision, a position that Hartman soon recognized as a deeply problematic tempta-
tion. See Bernstein (2004 and 2006) for a critique of Agamben’s strategy of
deepening rather than dissolving the aporia of the impossibility of witnessing
that runs remarkably parallel to Hartman’s remarks. See Chare (2006) for a
contextualization of Hartman’s and Bernstein’s reservations (along with those of
Dominick LaCapra).
17
The distinction between Hartman and Hirsch can also be phrased in terms of the
cinematic vs. the photographic. For Hartman, “in still photos from the past—as
against the cinematic or the video/visual—you still experience something of
that ghostliness [of a disembodied voice],” which means that photos retain a
potential for retraumatization that the cinematic counteracts (“ET” 494, “AI” 77,
“IC” 643). For Hirsch, in contrast, photography has a “privileged status” as a
“medium of post-memory” precisely because Holocaust photographs “resist the
154 Notes

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.
 Works Cited

1. Works by Geoffrey Hartman

This list collects only those items that are cited in the book. I have generally referred
to the first published version; in cases where I have used a reprinted (and sometimes
altered) version, the reference to that version is preceded by an asterisk in the list
below. The items are ordered by year of first publication.

1954
The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry.
New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Repr., with a “Prefatory Note to the Harbinger Edition,”
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.

1955
“The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature.” Yale French Studies 16, 63–78.

1957
“The Taming of History: A Comparison of Poetry with Painting Based on Malraux’s
The Voices of Silence.” Yale French Studies 18, 114–28.

1958
“Milton’s Counterplot.” ELH 25.1, 1–12. Repr. in *BF, 113–23, and in CJ, 109–19.

1960
André Malraux. Studies in European Literature and Thought. London: Bowes &
Bowes.
“Camus and Malraux: The Common Ground.” Yale French Studies 25, 104–10. Repr.
in BF, 85–92.

1961
“Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and the Growth of the Poet’s Mind.” PMLA 76.5,
519–27.
“Virginia’s Web.” Chicago Review 14.4, 20–32. Repr. in *BF, 71–84.
“Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist.” Chicago Review 15.2, 1–18. Repr. in BF,
93–110, and as “Maurice Blanchot” in *The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French
Fiction 1935–1960. Ed. John Cruickshank. London: Oxford UP, 1962, 147–65.
 Works Cited 157

1962
“Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’.” Centennial Review 6.4, 553–65. Repr.
in *BF, 298–310, and in GH, 180–90.
“A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa.” Modern Philology
59.3, 214–24.

1963
“The Heroics of Realism.” Yale Review 53.1, 26–35. Repr. in *BF, 61–70, and in GH,
156–63.

1964
Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. *4th ed., with a new essay
“Retrospect 1971,” 1971.
“Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope.” ELH 31.2, 175–94. Repr. in *BF, 151–72.

1965
“Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” From Sensibility to Romanti-
cism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Eds. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold
Bloom. New York: Oxford UP, 389–413. Repr. in BF, 206–30, and as “Inscriptions
and Romantic Nature Poetry” in UW, 31–46.

1966
“Beyond Formalism.” MLN 81.5, 542–56. Repr. in BF, 42–57.
“Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure.” Yale French Studies 36–7, 148–68.
Repr. in BF, 3–23.
“Ghostlier Demarcations.” Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism. Ed. Murray Krieger.
Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia UP, 109–31. Repr.
in BF as “Ghostlier Demarcations: The Sweet Science of Northrop Frye,” 24–41.

1968
“False Themes and Gentle Minds.” Philological Quarterly 47.1, 55–68. Repr. in BF,
283–97, and in CJ, 120–33.
“‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’: A Brief Allegory.” Essays in
Criticism 18.2, 113–35. Repr. in BF, 173–92.
“Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci.” The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary
Theory, Interpretation, and History. Eds. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry
Nelson Jr. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 289–314. Repr. in BF, 311–36.

1969
“Adam on the Grass with Balsamum.” ELH 36.1, 168–92. Repr. in BF, 124–50.
“The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature.” Review of
Metaphysics 23.2, 240–58. Repr. in *BF, 337–55, and as “The Voice of the Shuttle”
in CJ, 52–68, and in GH, 223–37.
“Wordsworth.” Yale Review 58.4, 507–25. Repr. as “Wordsworth Revisited” in *UW,
3–17.
“Blake and the ‘Progress of Poesy’.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin
H. Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown UP, 57–68. Repr. in *BF, 193–205.
158 Works Cited

1970
Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.
“The Poet’s Politics.” BF, 247–57.
“History-Writing as Answerable Style.” New Literary History 2.1, 73–83. Repr. in FR,
101–13.
“Reflections on Romanticism in France.” Studies in Romanticism 9.4, 233–48. Repr. as
“Reflections on French Romanticism” in EP, 17–37.
“Toward Literary History.” Daedalus 99.2, 355–83. Repr. in BF, 356–86.

1971
“Theories on the Theory of Romanticism.” Wordsworth Circle 2.2, 51–6. Repr. as “On
the Theory of Romanticism” in *FR, 277–83.
“Reflections on the Evening Star: Akenside to Coleridge.” New Perspectives on Coleridge
and Wordsworth. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Selected Papers from the English Insti-
tute. New York: Columbia UP, 85–131. Repr. as “Evening Star and Evening Land”
in BF, 147–78, and in GH, 50–78.
“Signs of the Times.” Review of books by Richard Poirier, Paul de Man, and Robert
Langbaum. American Scholar 41.1, 146–58. Repr. as “Signs of the Times: A Review
of Three Books” in *FR, 303–14.

1972
“The Sublime and the Hermeneutic.” Mouvements premiers: études critiques offertes à
Georges Poulet. Paris: José Corti, 149–57. Repr. as “From the Sublime to the Herme-
neutic” in FR, 114–23.

1973
“The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis.” New Literary History 4.2, 213–27. Repr. in FR,
3–19.
“The Dream of Communication.” I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor. Eds. Reuben
Brower, Hellen Vendler, and John Hollander. New York: Oxford UP, 157–77.
Repr. in FR, 20–40.
“Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’.” Literary Theory and Structure:
Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt. Eds. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin
Price. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 305–30. Repr. in FR, 124–46.
“War in Heaven.” Review of Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.
Diacritics 3.1, 26–32. Repr. in FR, 41–56.

1974
“Christopher Smart’s Magnificat: Toward a Theory of Representation.” ELH 41.3,
429–54. Repr. in FR, 74–98, and in GH, 29–49.
“Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats’s Hyperion.”
Essays in Criticism 24.1, 1–19. Repr. as “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in
Keats’s Hyperion” in FR, 57–73.

1975
The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.
“The Fate of Reading.” FR, 248–74.
“Self, Time, and History.” FR, 284–93.
 Works Cited 159

“Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas.” Georgia Review 29.4, 759–97. Repr.
as “Monsieur Texte” in *ST, 1–32.
“Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History.” New Literary History 6.2, 393–413.
Repr. in BF, 179–200, and in UW, 58–74.
“The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre’s Interpretation of
Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’.” New Literary History 7.1, 165–89. Repr. as “The Use
and Abuse of Structural Analysis” in UW, 129–51, and in GH, 93–117.

1976
“Literary Criticism and Its Discontents.” Critical Inquiry 3.2, 203–20. Repr. as “Past
and Present” in CW, 226–49.
“Monsieur Texte II: Epiphony in Echoland.” Georgia Review 30.1, 168–204. Repr. as
“Epiphony in Echoland” in *ST, 33–66.

1977
“A Touching Compulsion: Wordsworth and the Problem of Literary Representation.”
Georgia Review 31.2, 345–61. Repr. as “A Touching Compulsion” in *UW, 18–30,
and as “Wordsworth’s Touching Compulsion” in CJ, 134–48.

1978
“Blessing the Torrent: On Wordsworth’s Later Style.” PMLA 93.2, 196–204. Repr. as
“Blessing the Torrent” in UW, 75–89.
“Psychoanalysis: The French Connection.” Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text.
Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Selected Papers from the English Institute, New Series 2.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 86–113. Repr. in ST, 96–117, and (partly) as
“Lacan, Derrida, and the Specular Name” in GH, 398–412.

1979
“A Short History of Practical Criticism.” New Literary History 10.3, 495–509. Repr. in
CW, 284–301.
“Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth.” Harold Bloom et al. Deconstruction and Criticism.
New York: Seabury Press, 177–216. Repr. as “Words, Wish, Worth” in UW, 90–119.

1980
Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. 2nd ed.,
with a new “Preface to the Second Edition” and a foreword by Hayden White, 2007.
“Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony.” CW, 265–83. Repr. in What Is Criticism? Ed. Paul
Hernadi. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1981, 113–25.
“Diction and Defense in Wordsworth.” The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and
the Poetic Will. Ed. Joseph H. Smith. Psychiatry and the Humanities 4. New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 205–15. Repr. as “Diction and Defense” in *UW, 120–8.
“Words and Wounds.” Medicine and Literature. Ed. Enid R. Peschel. New York: Watson
Academic, 178–88. Repr. (with variations) in *ST, 118–57, in CJ, 223–50, and in
GH, 273–90.
“Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University, March 19, 1979.” Interview by
Robert Moynihan. Boundary 2 9.1, 191–215. Repr. in Robert Moynihan. A Recent
Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de
Man. Hamden, CT.: Archon Books, 1986, 51–96.
160 Works Cited

1981
Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP.
“Communication, Language, and the Humanities.” ADE Bulletin 70, 10–16. Repr. as
“The Humanities, Literacy, and Communication” in *EP, 172–87.
“Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.” Yale Review 71.1, 13–27. Repr. in
*EP, 93–107, and in CJ, 182–94.
“The Poetics of Prophecy.” High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams. Ed.
Lawrence Lipking. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 15–40. Repr. in *UW, 163–81.

1983
“The New Wilderness: Critics as Connoisseurs of Chaos.” Innovation/Renovation:
New Perspectives on the Humanities. Eds. Ihab and Sally Hassan. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 87–110. Repr. as “Reconnoitering Chaos: A Statement on Contem-
porary Criticism” in EP, 199–218.
“Reading Aright: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’.” Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of
Northrop Frye. Eds. Eleanor Cook et al. Toronto: Toronto UP, 210–26. Partly repr.
as “Romance and Modernity: Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’” in GH, 118–27.
“The Weight of What Happened.” Review of Yosef Yerushalmi. Zakhor: Jewish History
and Jewish Memory and From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry.
Eds. and trans. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin. New Republic 3599–3600
(January 9), 30–4. Repr. in *LS, 27–34.

1984
“The Culture of Criticism.” PMLA 99.3, 371–97. Repr. in MP, 17–56.
“The Interpreter’s Freud.” Raritan 4.2, 12–28. Repr. in *EP, 137–54, in CJ, 207–22,
and in GH, 384–97.

1985
Easy Pieces. New York: Columbia UP.
“The Unremarkable Wordsworth.” On Signs. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins UP, 321–33. Repr. as “The Unremarkable Poet” in UW, 207–19.
“On the Jewish Imagination.” Prooftexts 5.3, 201–20.
“Meaning, Error, Text.” Yale French Studies 69, 145–9. Repr. in MP 149–54.
“‘Timely Utterance’ Once More.” Genre 17.1–2, 37–49. Repr. in *UW, 152–62, and
in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald
Schleifer. Norman, OK: Oklahoma UP, 1985, 37–49.

1986
“Introduction: 1985.” Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1–12. Repr. in *LS as “Bitburg,” 60–71.
(With Sanford Budick) “Introduction.” Midrash and Literature. Eds. Geoffrey
Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, ix–xiii.
“The Struggle for the Text.” Midrash and Literature. Eds. Geoffrey Hartman and
Sanford Budick. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 3–18. Repr. in CJ, 71–85.
“Envoi: ‘So many things’.” Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton
and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley, CA: California UP, 242–8.
 Works Cited 161

“Tea and Totality: The Demand of Theory on Critical Style.” After Strange Texts: The
Role of Theory in the Study of Literature. Eds. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller.
Birmingham, AL: U of Alabama P, 29–45. Repr. as “Tea and Totality” in MP,
57–73, and in CJ, 3–20.

1987
The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Foreword Donald G. Marshall. London: Methuen.
“Elation in Hegel and Wordsworth.” UW, 182–93.
“Wordsworth before Heidegger.” UW, 194–206.
“The Discourse of a Figure: Blake’s ‘Speak Silence’ in Literary History.” The Lan-
guages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds.
Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia UP, 225–40.
Interview by Imre Salusinszky. Imre Salusinszky. Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques
Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said,
Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller. New York: Methuen, 74–96.

1988
“Religious Literacy.” Conservative Judaism 40.4, 26–34.
“History and Judgment: The Case of Paul de Man.” History and Memory 1.1, 55–84.
Repr. as “Judging Paul de Man” in *MP, 123–48.

1989
“The Longest Shadow (In Memory of Dorothy de Rothschild).” Yale Review 78.3, 485–96.
Repr. in *LS, 15–26, and in Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal.
Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Times Books/Random House, 1989, 425–39.
“Criticism and Restitution.” Tikkun 4.1, 29–32. Repr. as “The Philomela Project” in
*MP, 164–75, and in CJ, 41–51, and repr. and revised as “Restitutive Criticism” in
Bologna: la cultura italiana e le letterature straniere moderne. Ed. Vita Fortunati.
Volume 2. Bologna: Universita di Bologna/Ravenna: Longo, 1992, 23–30.
“The State of the Art of Criticism.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen.
New York: Routledge, 86–101. Repr. as “The State of the Art” in MP, 90–109, and
(partly) as “The Critical Essay between Theory and Tradition” in GH, 258–67.
Letter in response to “An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference” in Critical
Inquiry 15.3, 611–46. Critical Inquiry, 16.1, 199.

1990
“‘Was it for this . . . ?’: Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods.” Romantic Revolutions:
Criticism and Theory. Eds. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
UP, 8–25.

1991
Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

1992
“Art and Consensus in the Era of Progressive Politics.” Yale Review 80.4, 50–61. Repr.
as “Art, Consensus, and Progressive Politics” in *CJ, 272–82.
162 Works Cited

1993
“Jewish Tradition as/and the Other.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 1, 89–108.
“Public Memory and Modern Experience.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2, 239–47.
Repr. in *CJ, 262–71, and in GH, 415–31.

1994
“Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz.” Cardozo Studies in
Law and Literature 6.2, 135–55.
“Public Memory and Its Discontents.” Raritan 13.4, 24–40. Repr. in *LS, 99–115, and
in The Uses of Literary History. Ed. Marshall Brown. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996,
73–91.
“Reading and Representation: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’.” European
Romantic Review 5.1, 90–100. Repr. as part of “Reading: The Wordsworthian
Enlightenment” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the
Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005, 29–44.
“Introduction: Darkness Visible.” Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Ed.
Geoffrey Hartman. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1–22. Repr. as “Darkness Visible”
in *LS, 35–59.

1995
“The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” Salmagundi 106–107, 127–45.
Repr. in *LS, 82–98, and as “Spielberg’s Schindler’s List” in GH, 369–83.
“On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3, 537–63.
Partly repr. as “Reading, Trauma, Pedagogy” in GH, 291–9.

1996
The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.
“Holocaust Testimony, Art, and Trauma.” LS, 151–72.
“‘Breaking with every star’: On Literary Knowledge.” Comparative Criticism 18, 3–20.
“The Reinvention of Hate.” Yale Review 84.3, 1–11. Repr. in *CJ, 251–61, and in GH,
355–64.
“An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” Interview by Cathy Caruth. Studies in
Romanticism 35.4, 630–52.

1997
The Fateful Question of Culture. New York: Columbia UP.

1998
“Shoah and Intellectual Witness.” Partisan Review 65.1, 37–48.

1999
A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections 1958–1998. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.
“Polemical Memoir.” CJ, xi–xxxi.
“Benjamin in Hope.” Critical Inquiry 25.2, 344–52. Repr. as “Walter Benjamin in
Hope” in *CJ, 195–203.
 Works Cited 163

“Text and Spirit.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 154–78. Repr. in SS,
119–35, and in GH, 191–204. <www.tannerlectures.utah.edu>

2000
“A Life of Learning”. ACLS Occasional Paper 46. The Charles Homer Haskins Lec-
ture for 2000. New York: American Council of Learned Societies. Repr. as
“Autobiographical Introduction: ‘Life and Learning’” in *GH, 11–26. <www.acls.
org/publications/op/haskins/2000_geoffreyhartman.pdf>
“Memory.com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era.” Raritan 19.3,
1–18. Repr. as “Tele-Suffering and Testimony” in SS, 67–84, and in GH, 432–45.

2001
“Witnessing Video Testimony: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” Interview by
Jennifer Ballengee. Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1, 217–32.

2002
Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle against Inauthenticity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
“Wounded Time: The Holocaust, Jedwabne, and Disaster Writing.” Partisan Review
69.3, 367–74.
“The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman.” Interview by Ian
Balfour and Rebecca Comay. Lost in the Archives. Ed. Rebecca Comay. Alphabet
City 8. Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 492–509.

2003
“Trauma within the Limits of Literature.” European Journal of English Studies 7.3,
257–74.
“Words Not from on High.” Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot. Ed.
Kevin Hart. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 33–8.
“Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit.” Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation
and the Holocaust. Eds. M. Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer. Maddison, WI: U
of Wisconsin P, 221–30.
“Holocaust and Hope.” Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Cen-
tury. Eds. Moische Postone and Eric Santner. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P,
232–49.

2004
The Geoffrey Hartman Reader. Eds. Geoffrey Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP/New York: Fordham UP.
“Passion and Literary Engagement.” GH, 453–9.
(With Kevin Hart) “Introduction.” The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice
Blanchot. Eds. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey Hartman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1–26.
“Maurice Blanchot: The Spirit of Language after the Holocaust.” The Power of
Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot. Eds. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey
Hartman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 46–65.
“The Struggle against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas Chare.” Parallax
10.1, 72–7.
164 Works Cited

2005
“Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment.” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment:
Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances
Ferguson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005, 29–44.
“Freud for Everyman (and Everywoman).” Review of the new Penguin Freud.
Raritan 25.1, 150–64.

2006
“The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s Profane Illumination.”
Wordsworth Circle 37.1, 8–14.
“The Humanities of Testimony: An Introduction.” Poetics Today 27.2, 249–60.

2007
A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe. New York: Fordham,
2007.
“Homage to Glas.” Critical Inquiry 33.2, 344–61.
“Preface to the Second Edition.” Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature
Today. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, xix–xxiv.

2009
“Wordsworth and Metapsychology.” Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory: Knowledge, Language,
Experience. Eds. Alexander Regier and Stefan H. Uhlig. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 195–211.

2. Other Works
Abrams, M. H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature. New York: Norton.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1970. Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis,
MN: U of Minnesota P.
---. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
---. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
Alexander, Edward. 1989. “Professor of Terror.” Commentary 88.2, 49–50.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso.
Angermüller, Johannes. 2000. “Derrida, Phenomenology, and Structuralism: Why
American Critics Turned Deconstructionists.” Pioneering America: Mediators of
European Literature and Culture. Ed. Klaus Martens. Würzburg: Königshausen und
Neumann, 163–70.
Apter, Emily. 2003. “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature,
Istanbul, 1933.” Critical Inquiry 29.3, 253–81.
Arac, Jonathan. 1987. Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary
Studies. New York: Columbia UP.
 Works Cited 165

Argyros, Alexander and Jerry Aline Flieger. 1987. “Hartman’s Contagious Orbit:
Reassessing Aesthetic Criticism.” Diacritics 17.1, 52–69.
Aschcroft, Bill and Pal Ahluwalia. 1999. Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity. London:
Routledge.
Atkins, Douglas. 1991. Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style. London:
Routledge.
Auerbach, Erich. 1969. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. Maire and Edward Said.
Centennial Review 23.1, 1–17.
---. 1984. “Figura.” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Trans. Ralph Manheim.
Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 11–79.
---. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in European Literature. Trans. Willard
Trask. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Bahti, Timothy. 1979. “Figures of Interpretation, the Interpretation of Figures: A
Reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Dream of the Arab’.” Studies in Romanticism 18.4,
601–27.
Balfour, Ian. 2006. “Responding to the Call: Hartman between Wordsworth and
Hegel.” Wordsworth Circle 37.1, 15–16.
Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition.
London: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt.
Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.
Bennington, Geoffrey. 1994. Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction. London:
Verso.
Berman, Art. 1988. From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structural-
ism and Post-Structuralism. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P.
Bernstein, J. M. 2004. “Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography
of Horror.” Parallax 10.1, 2–16.
---. 2006. “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz’.”
New German Critique 97, 31–52.
Bishop, Ryan and John W. P. Phillips, eds. 2009. Symposium: 40 Years of ‘Structure,
Sign, and Play.’ Theory & Event 12.1.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1955. “La solitude essentielle et la solitude dans le monde.”
L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 263–5.
---. 1988. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY:
Station Hill.
---. 1996. “The Undestructible.” The Blanchot Reader. Ed. Michael Hollander. Oxford:
Blackwell, 228–43.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford
UP.
---. 1977. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Bourke, Richard. 1993. Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the
Intellectual, and Cultural Critique. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Bové, Paul. 1980. Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry. New York:
Columbia UP.
---. 1983. “Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the
New Criticism.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad
Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 3–19.
Bradley, A. C. 1961. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.
166 Works Cited

Brecht, Bertolt. 1994. Journale 1. Werke vol. 26. Eds. Marianne Conrad and Werner
Hecht. Berlin: Aufbau.
Brisman, Leslie. 2005. “Daring to Go Wrong.” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment:
Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances
Ferguson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 263–80.
Bruns, Gerald. 1982. Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary
History. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.
---. 2005. “Poetic Knowledge: Geoffrey Hartman’s Romantic Poetics.” The Wordsworthian
Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam
and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 112–28.
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France.
New York: Columbia UP.
Cadava, Eduardo. 1997. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton UP.
Calin, William. 1999. “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: ‘Tis Fifty Years Since. A Reassessment.”
Style 33.3, 463–74.
Cavell, Stanley. 1982. “Politics as Opposed to What?” Critical Inquiry 9.1, 157–78.
Chabot, Barry. 1975. “Three Studies of Reading.” Review of Geoffrey Hartman. The
Fate of Reading, David Bleich. Readings and Feelings, and Eleanor Gibson and Harry
Levin. The Psychology of Reading. College English 37.4, 425–31.
Chare, Nicholas. 2006. “The Gap in Context: Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of
Auschwitz.” Cultural Critique 64, 40–68.
Chase, Cynthia. 1993. “Introduction.” Romanticism. Ed. Cynthia Chase. London:
Longman, 1–42.
Christensen, Jerome. 1994. “The Romantic Movement at the End of History.”
Critical Inquiry 20.3, 452–76.
Comas, James. 2006. Between Politics and Ethics: Toward a Vocative History of English
Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP.
Comay, Rebecca. 1999. “Perverse History: Fetishism and Dialectic in Walter
Benjamin.” Research in Phenomenology 29.1, 51–62.
Costa-Lima, Luiz. 1988. “Erich Auerbach: History and Metahistory.” New Literary
History 19.3, 467–99.
Critchley, Simon. 1998. “A Commentary Upon Derrida’s Reading of Glas.” Hegel
after Derrida. Ed. Stuart Barnett. London: Routledge, 197–226.
Davis, Robert Con. 1985. “Error at Yale: Geoffrey Hartman, Psychoanalysis, and
Deconstruction.” Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis
and Ronald Schleifer. Norman, OK: Oklahoma UP, 135–56.
De Graef, Ortwin. 2004. “Encrypted Sympathy: Wordsworth’s Infant Ideology.”
Partial Answers 2.1, 21–51.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. “Bartleby, or, the Formula.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 68–90.
De La Durantaye, Leland. 2000. “Agamben’s Potential.” Diacritics 30.2, 3–24.
---. 2009. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.
---. 1984. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP.
---. 1996. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminksi. Minneapolis, MN: U of
Minnesota P.
 Works Cited 167

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’écriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil.

---. 1972a. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The
Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Eds.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
UP, 247–65.
---. 1972b. “Les fins de l’homme.” Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 129–64.
---. 1974. Glas. Paris: Galilée.
---. 1981. “Economimesis.” Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics 11.2, 3–25.
---. 1982a. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: U of
Chicago P, 1–27.
---. 1982b. “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.” Margins of
Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 69–108.
---. 1995. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.
De Vries, Hent. 1999. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins UP.
Dickinson, Emily. 1970. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas Johnson.
London: Faber and Faber.
Docherty, Thomas. 2006. Aesthetic Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
Eagleton, Terry. 1998. Review of Geoffrey Hartman. The Fateful Question of Culture.
Times Literary Supplement 4971 (July 10), 6–7.
Elam, Helen Regueiro. 1996. “Introduction.” Studies in Romanticism 35.4, 491–507.
Elam, Helen Regueiro and Frances Ferguson. 2005. “Introduction.” The Wordsworthian
Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam
and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1–25.
Engström, Timothy 1993. “The Postmodern Sublime? Philosophical Rehabilitations
and Pragmatic Evasions.” Boundary 2 20.2, 190–204.
Ferguson, Frances. 1987. “Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth.” Diacritics
17.4, 32–43.
---. 1991. “On the Numbers of Romanticism.” ELH 58.2, 471–98.
---. 1996. “Romantic Memory.” Studies in Romanticism 35.4, 509–33.
Fletcher, Angus. 1972. Review of Geoffrey Hartman. Beyond Formalism. College English
34.3, 414–25.
Foley, Barbara. 1985. “The Politics of Deconstruction.” Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruc-
tion at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Norman, OK: Oklahoma
UP, 113–34.
François, Anne-Lise. 2003. “‘O happy living things’: Frankenfoods and the Bounds
of Wordsworthian Natural Piety.” Diacritics 33.2, 42–70.
---. 2006. “Hum-men: In Place of Further Development.” Wordsworth Circle 37.1,
19–22.
Freud, Sigmund. 1975. “Die Verneinung.” Psychologie des Unbewussten. Studienausgabe
3. Eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey. Frankfurt/
Main: Fischer, 371–7.
---. 1984. “Negation.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans.
James Strachey. The Pelican Freud Library 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
435–42.
Fry, Paul. 1996. “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordworth.” Studies in Roman-
ticism 35.4, 535–51.
---. 2006. “Progress of Poetry.” Wordsworth Circle 37.1, 22–7.
168 Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Fynsk, Christopher. 1991. “Foreword: Experiences of Finitude.” Jean-Luc Nancy.
The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis, MN: U of
Minnesota P, vii–xxxv.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1981. “‘Setzung’ and ‘Übersetzung’: Notes on Paul de Man.”
Diacritics 11.4, 36–57.
Géfin, Laszlo. 1999. “Auerbach’s Stendhal: Realism, Figurality, and Refiguration.”
Poetics Today 20.1, 27–40.
Glowacka, Dorota. 2006. “Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-Ontology in
Arendt and Nancy.” Culture Machine 8. <www.culturemachine.net>
Goffman, Ethan. 1998. “Review of Geoffrey Hartman. The Fateful Question of Culture”.
Modern Fiction Studies 44.4, 1067–9.
Goodman, Kevis. 1996. “Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism,
and the Apocalyptic Fallacy.” Studies in Romanticism 35.4, 563–77.
---. 2006. “On Geoffrey Hartman’s Psycho-Aesthetics.” Wordsworth Circle 37.1, 17–19.
Griffin, Robert. 1989. “Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward
Said.” Critical Inquiry 15.3, 611–25.
---. 2005. “Wordsworth’s Horse.” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry
and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 129–45.
Grose, Alan. 2002. “Afterword on Hegel’s ‘Eleusis’.” Philosophical Forum 33.3,
356–8.
Hall, Spencer. 1979. “Wordsworth’s Later Style.” Letter. PMLA 94.1, 139–41.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. 2006. The Character of Criticism. London: Routledge.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. The Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: Allen &
Unwin.
---. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP.
---. 2002. “Eleusis.” Trans. Alan Grose. Philosophical Forum 33.3, 312–17.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann.
---. 1977. Holzwege. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt/Main:
Klostermann.
---. 2001. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Helmling, Steven. 2001. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime,
and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: SUNY P.
Hertz, Neil. 1978. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.”
Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Selected Papers
from the English Institute, New Series 2. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP,
65–85.
Hirsch, E. D. 1960. “Objective Interpretation.” PMLA 75.4, 463–79.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the
Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1, 5–37.
---. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1, 103–28.
Hoag, Ronald Wesley. 1979. “Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Snow Man’: An Important
Title Pun.” American Notes and Queries 17.6, 91.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1973. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophi-
sche Fragmente. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer.
Horowitz, Gregg. 2001. Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life. Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP.
 Works Cited 169

Hughes, Daniel. 1981. “Geoffrey Hartman, Geoffrey Hartman.” Review of Geoffrey

Hartman. Criticism in the Wilderness and Saving the Text. MLN 96.5, 1134–48.
Huhn, Tom. 2004. Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of
Burke, Hogarth, and Kant. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP.
Hussein, Abdirahman. 2004. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London: Verso.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1946. Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel. 2 vols.
Paris: Aubier Montaigne.
---. 1971. “Commentaire parlé sur la Verneinung de Freud.” Figures de la pensée
philosophique: écrits de Jean Hyppolite (1931–1968). 2 vols. Paris: PUF, 385–96.
---. 1997. Logic and Existence. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Albany: SUNY P.
Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structural-
ism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
Jarvis, Simon. 2007. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Johnson, Barbara. 1984. “Gender Theory and the Yale School.” Genre 17.1–2,
101–12.
Johnston, Kenneth. 1981. Review of Geoffrey Hartman. Criticism in the Wilderness
and of The Humanities in American Life: Report of the Commission of the Humanities.
College English 43.5, 471–89.
---. 1990. “The Spell of Wordsworth.” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Eds.
Kenneth R. Johnston et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 3–7.
Jones, Mark. 1993. “On Knowing the ‘Lucy Poems’: Criticism as Containment.”
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 6.2–3, 96–105.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Eric
Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Kaufman, Robert. 2000. “Red Kant, or, The Persistence of the Third Critique in
Adorno and Jameson.” Critical Inquiry 26.4, 682–724.
---. 2002. “Aura, Still.” October 99, 45–80.
---. 2004. “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics,
Modernity.” The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Ed. Tom Huhn. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 354–75.
---. 2005. “Lyric’s Expression: Musicality, Conceptuality, Critical Agency.” Cultural
Critique 60, 198–216.
Kneale, J. Douglas. 1996. “Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth after
Geoffrey Hartman.” Studies in Romanticism 35.4, 579–607.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ed. Allen Bloom. Trans.
James Nichols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Krieger, Murray, ed. 1966. Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism. Selected Papers from the
English Institute. New York: Columbia UP.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1990. “The Nazi Myth.” Trans.
Brian Holmes. Critical Inquiry 16.2, 291–312.
Lambert, Gregg. 2000. “The Subject of Literature between Derrida and Deleuze:
Law or Life?” Angelaki 5.2, 177–90.
Leitch, Vincent. 1988. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New
York: Columbia UP.
Lentricchia, Frank. 1980. After the New Criticism. London: Athlone.
Lewin, Bertram. 1951. The Psychoanalysis of Elation. London: Hogarth.
Lindenberger, Herbert. 1984. “The Mimetic Bias in Modern Anglo-American Criti-
cism.” Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Volume 1: The
170 Works Cited

Literary and Philosophical Debate. Ed. Mihai Spariosu. Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins,
1–26.
Liu, Alan. 1985. “Christopher Smart’s ‘Uncommunicated Letters’: Translation and
the Ethics of Literary History.” Boundary 2 14.1–2, 115–46.
---. 1989. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
---. 1996. “The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning.” Studies in Romanticism
35.4, 553–62.
---. 2004. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago, IL:
U of Chicago P.
Llewelyn, John. 1986. Derrida on the Threshold of Sense. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Lovejoy, Arthur. 1924. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA 39.2,
229–53.
Macherey, Pierre. 2004. “Psychanalyse et philosophie: le problème de la Verneinung.” <stl.
recherche.univ-lille3.fr/seminaires/philosophie/macherey/Macherey20032004/
Macherey11022004.html>
Malraux, André. Les voix du silence. Paris: Gallimard.
Marrouchi, Mustapha Ben. 1991. “The Critic as Dis/Placed Intelligence: The Case
of Edward Said.” Diacritics 21.1, 63–74.
Marshall, Donald. 1983. “History, Theory, and Influence: Yale Critics as Readers of
Maurice Blanchot.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Eds. Jonathan Arac,
Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P,
135–55.
---. 1987. “Foreword: Wordsworth and Post-Enlightenment Culture.” Geoffrey
Hartman. The Unremarkable Wordsworth. London: Methuen, vii–xxiii.
---. 1990. “Secondary Literature: Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth, and the Interpre-
tation of Modernity.” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Eds. Kenneth R.
Johnston et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 78–97.
Martin, Wallace. 1983. “Introduction.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Eds.
Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis, MN: U of
Minnesota P, xv–xxxvii.
McGann, Jerome. 1992. “Reviews and Retrospects: Rethinking Romanticism.” ELH
59.3, 735–54.
McQuillan, Colin. 2005. “The Political Life in Giorgio Agamben.” Kritikos 2.
<intertheory.org/mcquillan.htm>
Melville, Stephen. 1986. Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism.
Manchester: Manchester UP.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1966. “The Antitheses of Criticism: Reflections on the Yale
Colloquium.” MLN 81.5, 557–71.
Milton, John. 1997. The Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. 2nd ed. London:
Pearson.
Mufti, Aamir R. 1998. “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and
the Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry 25.1, 95–125.
Nägele, Rainer. 1985. Text, Geschichte und Subjektivität in Hölderlins Dichtung:
“Unessbarer Schrift gleich.” Stuttgart: Metzler.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al.
Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P.
Nealon, Jeffrey. 1992. “The Discipline of Deconstruction.” PMLA 107.5, 1266–79.
 Works Cited 171

Newlyn, Lucy. 1996. “‘Reading after’: The Anxiety of the Writing Subject.” Studies in
Romanticism 35.4, 609–30.
Norris, Christopher. 1982. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
---. 1985. “Some Versions of Rhetoric: Empson and de Man.” Rhetoric and Form:
Deconstruction at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Norman, OK:
Oklahoma UP, 191–214.
---. 1988. Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory. London: Pinter.
Oerlemans, Onno. 2002. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto: U of
Toronto P.
O’Hara, Daniel. 1985. The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de
Man. New York: Columbia UP.
---. 2004. “The Culture of Vision.” The Geoffrey Hartman Reader. Eds. Geoffrey
Hartman and Daniel T. O’Hara. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1–10.
O’Rourke. 1997. “The Fatality of Readings: de Man, Gasché, and the Future of
Deconstruction.” Symploke 5.1, 49–62.
Peckham, Morse. 1951. “Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 66.2, 5–23.
---. 1961. “Toward a Theory of Romanticism II: Reconsiderations.” Studies in
Romanticism 1.1, 1–8.
---. 1970a. “On Romanticism: Introduction.” Studies in Romanticism 9.4, 217–24.
---. 1970b. The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays. Columbia: U of South
Carolina P.
Pfau, Thomas. 1987. “Rhetoric and the Existential: Romantic Studies and the
Question of the Subject.” Studies in Romanticism 26.4, 487–512.
Rajan, Tilottama, 1990. “The Erasure of Narrative in Post-Structuralist Representa-
tions of Wordsworth.” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory. Eds. Kenneth R.
Johnston et al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 350–70.
---. 2002. Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault,
Baudrillard. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
Rapaport, Herman. 1985. “Geoffrey Hartman and the Spell of Sounds.” Rhetoric and
Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Norman,
OK: Oklahoma UP, 159–77.
Redfield, Marc. 1999. “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics
of Mourning.” Diacritics 29.4, 58–83.
---. 2004. “Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon.”
Historicizing Theory. Ed. Peter Herman. New York: SUNY P, 209–33.
---. 2006. “Geoffrey Hartman: A Deviant Homage.” Wordsworth Circle 37.1, 3–8.
Riffaterre, Michael. 1973. “Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading of
Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’.” New Literary History 4.2, 229–56.
Rose, Gillian. 1993. Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell.
---. 1996a. “Potter’s Field: Death Worked and Unworked.” Maurice Blanchot: The
Demand of Writing. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. London: Routledge, 190–208.
---. 1996b. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Roth, Michael. 1988. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century
France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Said, Edward. 1971. “What is beyond Formalism?” Review of Geoffrey Hartman.
Beyond Formalism. MLN 86.6, 933–45.
172 Works Cited

---. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books.
---. 1983. “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community.” The Politics of
Interpretation. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 7–32.
---. 1989a. “Response.” Critical Inquiry 15.3, 634–46.
---. 1989b. “Letter.” Critical Inquiry 16.1, 199–200.
---. 2004. “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World.” Boundary 2 31.2, 11–34.
Santner, Eric. 1993. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
---. 2006. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.
Scholem, Gershom. 1972. “Walter Benjamin und sein Engel.” Zur Aktualität Walter
Benjamins. Ed. Siegried Unseld. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 85–138.
Simpson, David. 1999. “Virtual Culture.” Review of Geoffrey Hartman. The Fateful
Question of Culture. Modern Language Quarterly 60.2, 251–64.
Soto-Crespo, Ramón. 2000. “‘Scars of separation’: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the
Praxis of Loss.” Textual Practice 14.3, 439–56.
Sprinker, Michael. 1980. “Hermeneutic Hesitation: The Stuttering Text.” Review of
Geoffrey Hartman. Criticism in the Wilderness. Boundary 2 9.1, 217–32.
---. 1983. “Aesthetic Criticism: Geoffrey Hartman.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in
America. Eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis,
MN: U of Minnesota P, 43–65.
Stevens, Wallace. 1971. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
Taylor, Mark. 1984. Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.
Terada, Rei. 1993. “The New Aestheticism.” Diacritics 23.4, 42–61.
Thorslev, Peter. 1975. “Romanticism and the Literary Consciousness.” Journal of the
History of Ideas 36.3, 563–72.
Van Alphen, Ernst. 2006. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma,
and Postmemory.” Poetics Today 27.2, 473–88.
Vendler, Helen. 1988. “Critical Models: On Geoffrey Hartman.” The Music of What
Happens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 42–8.
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2006. “Timely Memory and Textual History: Geoffrey Hartman’s
Refiguration of Love.” Literature and Memory: Theoretical Paradigms, Genres, Func-
tions. Eds. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning, and Roy Summer. Tübingen: Narr,
67–79.
---. 2007a. “The Suspension of Reading: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’ and Trauma
Theory.” Orbis Litterarum 62.6, 459–82.
---. 2007b. “Benjamin, Critical Theory, and the Promise of Loss.” On the Outlook:
Figures of the Messianic. Eds. Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs. Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars, 21–34.
---. 2007c. “Mimesis and the Perpetuation of Modernity.” Third Agents: Secret Protago-
nists of the Modern Imagination. Eds. Ian Cooper, Ekkehard Knoerer, and Bernhard
Malkmus. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 43–62.
---. 2009. “Community and Literary Experience in (between) Benedict Anderson
and Jean-Luc Nancy.” Mosaic 45.4, 95–111.
Warminski, Andrzej. 2001. “‘As the poets do it’: On the Material Sublime.” Material
Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Eds. Tom Cohen et al. Minneapolis,
MN: U of Minnesota P, 3–31.
Weiskel, Thomas. 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP.
 Works Cited 173

Wellek, René. 1963. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History.” Concepts of

Criticism. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 128–98.
Wohlfarth, Irving. 1979. “Walter Benjamin’s Image of Interpretation.” New German
Critique 17, 70–98.
Wordsworth, William. 1974. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism. Ed. W. J. B. Owen.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
---. 1985. The Fourteen-Book Prelude. Ed. W. J. B. Owen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
---. 1993. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Eds. James Butler and Karen
Green. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.
Zarader, Marlène. 2000. L’être et le neutre: à partir de Maurice Blanchot. Lagrasse:
Verdier.
This page intentionally left blank
 Index
Abrams, M.H. 144n28
Adorno, Theodor W. 81, 134–5, 136, 145n9,
146–7n6, 155n1
and Maurice Blanchot 134–5
aesthetics 3, 5, 77–8, 150n11, 153n14
aesthetic ideology 100–4, 106, 107, 108,
121–2, 151n6, 154n19
aesthetic mediation 84–90, 116–20
aesthetics of mourning 102–4
aesthetic vision 68–9
and experience 102, 107–9, 133, 136–7
see also psychoesthetics
Agamben, Giorgio 1, 2, 102
Homo Sacer 153n16
on potentiality 86–7, 90, 121, 149n4
akedah 33–4
and apocalypse 23–4, 26, 32, 141n15
Alexander, Edward 153n13, 155n22
Anderson, Benedict 102–4, 105, 150n2,
150n3
antihumanism 10, 42, 69, 141n14, 142–3n20
anti-self-consciousness 22, 35–6, 125
anxiety
Angst (Heidegger) 28–9, 90
anxiety of influence 127, 143n22
depletion anxiety 65, 72, 80, 81
the fear of the loss of loss 73
separation anxieties 78–80
apocalpyse 28, 39–30, 31, 37–8, 46, 55, 63,
65, 108, 129, 142n18, 142n19
and akedah 23–4, 26, 32, 33, 141n15
Arac, Jonathan 139n6, 143–4n25
Argyros, Alexander 97, 98–9, 147n15,
150n11
Arnold, Matthew 136, 143n25, 155n23
and critical creativity 124–5
Atkins, Douglas 139n7, 148n18
Auerbach, Erich 9, 19–26
compared to André Malraux 141n14
compared to Northrop Frye 45
on Dante 20–1, 139–40n8, 140n12
and Edward Said 113, 152n9
“Figura” 20, 140n10, 140n11, 141n15
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Culture 9, 19–23, 45
on prose 21, 140–1n13
relation to Hartman 19, 139–40n8
on Virginia Woolf 23, 25–26
Aufhebung (Hegel) 27, 87–8, 93, 111,
141n16
authenticity 45–6, 48, 113, 140–1n13,
142–3n20, 153n16
autumn 55–7
see also winter
Bahti, Timothy 13, 139n4
Balfour, Ian 139n1, 153n14
Barthes, Roland 39, 141
Bartleby, the Scrivener (Herman
Melville) 1–2, 3, 7
and contemporary theory 1–2
Bate, Jonathan 146n4
Bateson, F.W. 50–1, 149n5
Benjamin, Walter 124, 126, 127–30, 136
and the angel of history 2, 128–9, 150n14
compared to Wordsworth 128–30
on Franz Kafka 127
on potentiality 109–10, 121, 128
and the specular name 97–8, 150n14
“Theses on the Philosophy of
History” 109–10, 128–9
Bernstein, J.M. 153n16
Bitburg 121–2
Blake, William 56–8, 59, 145n10, 145n11
Blanchot, Maurice 8, 17, 22, 38, 57, 102,
141n14, 143n24
on Hegel and Heidegger 28–9
on Jewishness 113, 151–2n8
politics before 1945 134–5
and Romanticism 29, 141n17
on solitude 28–9, 143n24
and Theodor W. Adorno 134–5
blessing 94–5, 98
Bloom, Harold 39, 76, 126, 146n2n,
147n8, 152n8
The Anxiety of Influence 127, 143n22
176
Bradley, A.C. 143–4n25
Brecht, Bertolt 135–6, 155n3
on Wordsworth 135–6
Brooks, Cleanth 50–1, 149n5
Bruns, Gerald 139n3, 148n19, 154n18
Bürger, Gottfried 37
Burke, Kenneth 80, 82, 124, 126, 127
Byron, Lord George Gordon 36, 144n26
Cadava, Eduardo 128–9
Camus, Albert 22, 152n10
Carlyle, Thomas 36, 126, 136
Cavell, Stanley 148n19
Chaucer, Geoffrey 22, 37
Christensen, Jerome 74, 147–8n16
Christianity 11, 20–1, 22, 96, 120, 140n11
relation to Judaism 17, 11, 141n15
Coleridge, S.T. 36, 59, 145n10, 145–6n13
Comas, James 110, 123, 144n1, 152n10
community 108, 113–15, 132, 151n7,
151–2n8, 154n19
imagined community (Anderson) 102–4,
105, 150n2, 150n3
inoperative community (Nancy) 104–6,
112, 150n2, 151n4
and mourning 102–7
and textuality 112
and video testimony 116, 117–18, 121–3
consensus 107–9
contemporaneity
see contemporary culture under culture
creation
decreation of the past 121, 128, 129,
147–8n16
God’s creation 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 52–3,
80–1, 140n12
creative criticism 41, 78, 123–30
and mourning 126–30
criticism, cultural 6, 61–4, 73, 81, 107–9,
113, 115–16
culture
contemporary culture 61–6, 72–3, 77, 85,
95, 116, 133–4, 146n3
distinction between “culture” and “a
culture” 132–3, 154n20, 154n21
English culture 5, 6–7, 32–3, 34–8,
83–4, 134
and nature 154n19
relation between art and culture 61–3, 73,
81–2, 89–90, 108–9, 115–17, 148n20
death 24, 26, 61, 91, 92, 122, 131
aestheticization of 33–4, 102–4
Index
of God 60, 140n11
as indistinguishable from life 72–3, 86
and individuation 28–30
as a moment of life 14, 16
of the other 104–6
deconstruction 2, 3, 4, 8, 39–44, 79, 90–1,
101, 124, 139n7, 149–50n9, 151n7
and the New Criticism 41, 144n2
and phenomenology 43–4
and phonocentrism 148n19
and poststructuralism 43–4
and the undeconstructible 90–1
and the Yale critics 39, 40–1, 144n3, 145n8
de Graef, Ortwin 83, 148n20, 150n1
De La Durantaye, Leland 121, 149n4
Deleuze, Gilles 1
de Man, Paul 8, 143n21, 149n4, 149–50n9
and deconstruction 39, 41, 69, 72, 90–1,
144n2, 145n8, 147n13
de Man affair 135, 152n11
on narrative 142–3n20
on Wordsworth 68–9, 147n9, 149n5
democracy 108–10
denegation (Verneinung) 87–90, 149n2,
149n3
interpretation of Jean Hyppolite 88–90,
93, 149n3
Derrida, Jacques
and American deconstruction 41–2, 43–4,
144n2
compared to Christopher Smart 81–2,
148n21
“Différance” 41–2, 58, 145n4
and freeplay 40–3, 45, 54, 58, 64, 71,
73–4, 81, 147n15
Hartman’s double response to 74, 75, 79,
81, 147n15, 148n20, 150n11
on Immanuel Kant 15
and phenomenology 43–4
and phonocentrism 148n16
relation to Hartman 3–4, 8–9, 38, 40,
43–4, 48–9, 54, 63, 74, 75, 79–80, 97–8,
110–11, 126, 151–2n8
on structuralism 41–3, 45, 48, 145n6
“Structure, Sign, and Play” 40–3, 45, 73,
144n1, 145n4
and two interpretations of
interpretation 1–2, 40–4, 57–8, 73,
145n4, 147n14
Descartes, René 11, 20
dialectic 18, 24, 28, 36, 74, 99, 141n14,
144n27, 144n27, 147n10
Docherty, Thomas 109–10, 111–12
 Index
ecocriticism 146n4
ecology 2, 4, 66–7, 133
and mimesis 65, 74–5
and psychoesthetics 64–5, 74–5, 84–6
elation 70, 93, 141n16, 147n11
Eliot, T.S. 124–7
on Romanticism 124–5
England
see English culture under culture and under
Wordsworth, William
Enlightenment 35–6, 63
the Wordsworthian Enlightenment 9, 27
epistemology 12, 45, 154n18
euphemism
as a feature of Wordsworth’s poetry 93–4,
96, 99, 134, 150n12
evening star 9, 40, 69, 145n7, 145n12
and English literature 56–60
as a literary theme 56–60
experience
and the aesthetic 102, 107–9, 133, 136–7
historical experience 17–26, 72–5
of non-experience 102, 106, 107, 117–18
Ferguson, Frances 37, 139n1, 145n17,
153n15, 154n18
Flieger, Jerry Aline 97, 98–9, 147n15, 150n11
formalism 19, 41, 50–1, 55, 144n3, 150n11
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies 4, 115, 116, 117
François, Anne-Lise 92, 94, 99, 146n4,
148n17, 154n19
freeplay 40–3, 45, 54, 58, 64, 71, 73–4, 81,
147n15
Freud, Sigmund 80, 91, 93, 98
on denegation (Verneinung) 87–90,
149n2, 149n3, 150n12
on mourning and reality-testing 74, 84–5
Fry, Paul 143–4n25, 155n23
Frye, Northrop 3, 40, 45–8, 49–50, 52–3,
75–6, 126–7
compared to Erich Auerbach 45
compared to G.W.F. Hegel 45
on John Milton 47, 52
and structuralism 45, 53, 57, 145n6
and William Blake 57, 145n10, 145n11
Fynsk, Christopher 105
Gasché, Rodolphe 30–1
ghostliness 103, 119–20, 127, 142–3n20
and media culture 116–7, 128, 153–4n17
in Wordsworth’s poetry 75, 76, 78, 79,
85–7, 96
177
Glowacka, Dorota 104, 105
Goodman, Kevis 101, 146n5, 149n5
Griffin, Robert 114, 141n17
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 114
Hartman, Geoffrey—biography
doctoral thesis 9
and the Fortunoff Video Archive 115–16
relation to Edward Said 113–14
relation to Erich Auerbach 9, 19,
140n9
relation to Israel 111, 151–2n8
relation to Paul de Man 145n8, 152n11
response to Ronald Reagan’s visit to
Bitburg Cemetery 121–2
stay in Berlin 39–40
stay in England 6
time at Yale 4, 9, 19, 115, 145n8, 155n22
Hartman, Geoffrey—works
André Malraux 8, 141n14
Beyond Formalism 34, 35, 37, 44, 61, 145n5,
152n10, 152n11
Criticism in the Wilderness 34, 78, 123–9,
151n5, 155n22
The Fate of Reading 34, 78
The Fateful Question of Culture 5–6, 9, 33–4,
37–8, 83–4, 96, 120, 122, 123, 132–5
The Longest Shadow 134
Minor Prophecies 132
Saving the Text 10, 39, 73, 80–1, 97, 110–11
Scars of the Spirit 10, 135, 151n6, 151n7
A Scholar’s Tale 6, 38
The Unmediated Vision 3, 8–17, 18–9, 20,
22, 26, 40, 42, 43, 52, 72, 131, 139n3,
139–40n8, 153n16, 154n18
The Unremarkable Wordsworth 3, 84,
151n5
Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 3, 8, 15, 16,
18, 19, 23, 26–34, 35, 40, 43, 50, 54, 61,
90–1, 133, 139n5, 142n18, 142n19,
142–3n20, 143n22, 143–4n25, 144n28,
148n19, 151n5
Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 18, 26, 28, 74, 75, 87–8,
90, 91, 93, 111, 139n1, 139n2, 139n6,
147n10
compared to Wordsworth 26–7, 28, 90,
93, 141n16, 148n19
“Eleusis” 69–72, 147n12
and the end of art 3, 10, 11, 15, 21, 22,
26, 35, 38, 45, 48, 92
on individuation 28–9
The Phenomenology of Spirit 9–11, 27, 29,
70, 71–2, 135, 144n27
178 Index
Heidegger, Martin 12, 15–17, 19, 28, 44, 58,
111, 139n2, 139n6, 142n19, 149n4
on individuation 28–9, 90
and Rainer Maria Rilke 15–17
on Verborgenheit 15–16
and Wordsworth 27, 28–31, 32, 90,
143n21
hermeneutics 52, 54, 64, 69–70, 125,
140n11, 147n12
Hertz, Neil 64–5, 146n1, 146n2
Hirsch, E.D. 50
Hirsch, Marianne 119, 120, 153–4n17
historicity 18–19, 20, 42, 101
history
literature and historical
experience 17–26, 72–5
Hölderlin 69
Holocaust 4, 78
and aesthetic mediation 101, 106–7, 109,
115–22, 134–5
and belatedness 120–1
and England 5–6, 37–8, 135–6
and Jewish identity 111, 115
and Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg
Cemetery 121–2
and Wordsworth 83–4, 116, 133–6
see also video testimony
homeopathy 81, 116, 148n20
hope 21, 32, 33–4, 92, 121, 132, 142n19
in Martin Heidegger 44, 58
in Walter Benjamin 128–9
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 8, 11, 16
Horowitz, Gregg 77–8
Huhn, Tom 74–5, 94
humanism 19, 44, 54, 58, 79, 80, 107
and animals 71–2
and antihumanism 10, 42, 69, 141n14,
142–3n20
and G.W.F. Hegel 10, 69–72, 147n10
Hyppolite, Jean
on denegation (Verneinung) 88–90, 93,
149n3
Logic and Existence 10, 139n2
identity politics 115, 122–3, 132, 154n20,
154n21
ideology 110, 114, 122, 123, 152n11, 154n20
aesthetic ideology 3, 100–4, 106, 107, 108,
121–2, 151n6, 154n19
English ideology 9, 34–5, 36–8, 40, 52,
55–7
and Karl Marx 145n9
imagination 3, 4, 23–4
dialectical relation to nature 5–6, 28,
30–3, 35, 36–7, 46, 94, 131, 139n5,
142n18, 142–3n20
and memory 107–8, 112, 132
and reason 26–7, 64–6, 69–71, 147n10
immanence 10, 14
and community 105–6, 112
in Erich Auerbach 21–2, 24–5
see also transcendence
immediacy 10–12, 17–18, 22, 57, 117, 133,
135–6
impotentiality
see potentiality
incremental redundance
in “Tintern Abbey” 12–14, 139n4
indeterminacy 54, 56, 107, 116, 133, 137,
142n20, 151n7
individuation 27, 28–30, 32, 78, 80, 88, 90,
142n18, 143n22
interpretation 32, 50–1, 53–5, 76, 108,
151n7
and expression 18, 19–20, 22, 24
Hartman’s early theory of 9–10, 12, 17
and indeterminacy 54–5, 90–1, 111–12
of poetry 33–4, 66–72
two interpretations of interpretation 40–4
see also Midrash; typology
intertextuality 24–6, 29, 32, 95–6, 144n28
Intifada, First 111, 113
Israeli-Palestinian conflict 113–15, 122
James, Henry 51
Jameson, Fredric 146n3
Jarvis, Simon 147n9
Jewish identity 4, 107, 110–15, 116, 118,
141n15
Johns Hopkins conference, 1966 39
Jacques Derrida’s contribution to 40–4,
144n1
Johnson, Barbara 143n23
Johnston, Kenneth 143–4n25, 149n6
Kant, Immanuel 15, 64–5, 68–9, 74, 146n2,
150n11
Kaufman, Robert 101, 136, 145n9, 155n3
Keats, John 55–6, 58, 59
compared to Wordsworth 56
knowledge 127, 132, 143n24, 149n3
absolute knowledge 10–11, 18, 139n2
literature as a form of 9–11, 19, 34, 15, 61,
72, 110, 154n18
 Index
literature as an object of 107, 110, 123
regressive knowledge 84–5, 87, 88, 92
Kojève, Alexandre 10, 72, 139n2
Lacan, Jacques 8, 38, 39, 97–8, 150n11,
150n12, 150n13
and the specular name 96–8, 150n14
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 120–1
Lanzmann, Claude 119
latency 2, 5, 106
see also potentiality
Lentricchia, Frank 41, 144n3
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 39, 42–3, 48–9, 54, 145n6
Lewin, Bertram 147n11
literary history 17–18, 21, 29, 32, 34–8, 50,
56–60, 127, 140n12
Liu, Alan 137, 147–8n16, 148n23
on loss 73–4, 147n14
on Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 28,
142n18
logic
as a threat to poetry 1, 10, 27, 61, 72, 86,
87, 90, 142n20, 148n19
loss 4, 133, 134, 145n7, 147n14
and community 102–7
Hartman’s rhetoric of 5, 6–7, 29–30, 32–4
and losslessness 72–4, 84, 85
and melancholia 100–2
and poetry 59–60, 61, 72–8, 84–90,
92–4, 100
and postmodernity 72–4, 84, 85
see also mourning
Lovejoy, Arthur 35–6
Macherey, Pierre 149n3
Malraux, André 8, 17, 18, 26, 141n14
Marshall, Douglas 141n17, 149n5, 149n6,
151n5, 155n23
Marvell, Andrew 59–60, 142n19
materialism 75, 128, 155n25
McGann, Jerome 144n26
mediation
aesthetic mediation 3, 46, 101–3, 104,
106, 116, 118–20, 142–3n20
in Claude Lévi-Strauss 48–9, 53
relation to the past 22, 57, 63, 126, 127
in The Unmediated Vision 8, 10–11, 12, 13,
14, 17, 139–40n8
melancholia 1, 100–2, 105, 106–7, 109, 113,
147n14, 151–2n8
Melville, Herman 1
Melville, Stephen 147n13
179
memory
and imagination 107–8, 112, 132
postmemory 119
public memory 84, 100–1, 103–4, 107–8,
116, 118–22, 128
see also loss; mourning; trauma
metaphor 30–2, 143n21
and Übersetzung 30–2
metaphysics 14, 16, 30, 46, 53, 58, 59,
139n7, 148n19
the end of 1–2, 8–9, 42–3, 48, 49, 52
as a temptation 17, 19, 22, 40, 96, 140n11
see also Derrida, Jacques; nostalgia
Midrash 52, 110, 112–13, 152–3n8
Miller, J. Hillis 19, 41, 144n3
and 1966 Yale Colloquium 145n8
Milton, John 32, 36, 37, 56, 58, 59, 95–6, 110
compared to Dante 22, 140n12
“Lycidas” 47
Paradise Lost 52–5, 140n12
in The Unmediated Vision 20, 22
mimesis 4, 131, 137
and community 121–2, 154n19
in Erich Auerbach 19–20, 22–3, 141n14
and Immanuel Kant 15
and loss 74–5, 78, 121
as a mode of emergence 74–5, 77–8
and modernity 11, 14–16, 77–8
and the sublime 65, 69
in Theodor W. Adorno 146n6
modernity 1–2, 10–13, 17, 20–1, 77–8
alternatives to modernity 113, 114, 120,
151–2n8
and John Milton 20, 22, 52
and poetry 6, 10–13, 17–18, 20–2, 34, 61
and René Descartes 11, 20
mourning 1, 73–5, 78, 89, 91, 93, 99, 107,
109, 147n14, 151–2n8, 153–4n17
and community 100–5
in Sigmund Freud 74, 84–5
in Walter Benjamin 127–30
multiculturalism 122–3, 154n20
myth 28, 35, 37, 48–9, 55, 56–8
Ceres and Proserpina 57–8, 70–1
In Jean-Luc Nancy 105–6, 120–1
Orpheus and Eurydice 57
Perseus 17, 153n16
Nancy, Jean-Luc 102–3
The Inoperative Community 104–6, 112,
150n2, 151n4
“The Nazi Myth” 120–1
180 Index
narrative 27, 49, 142n20
nature 12–17, 85–7, 89–92, 94, 129–30, 133
and culture 154n19
dialectical relation to the
imagination 5–6, 28, 30–3, 35, 36–7, 46,
94, 131, 139n5, 142n18, 142–3n20
and intertextuality 24–6, 37, 141n17
natural process (natura naturans) 14–17,
30–3, 54, 139n5, 142n18, 142n19,
142–3n20, 154n19
New Criticism 3, 40, 41, 50–1
and Matthew Arnold 124–5
New Historicism 73
Newlyn, Lucy 143n22
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nietzschean affirmation 41, 42, 43, 44, 58, 81
nonhuman, the 9–10, 152n11
Norris, Christopher 144n2, 144n3, 151n6
nostalgia
and the Holocaust 9, 83, 120, 133, 136
as a response to the end of metaphysics 1,
41–4, 48, 54, 58, 64, 73, 147n14 1
O’Hara, Daniel 144n28, 146n5, 151n5
ontology 22, 29–30, 44, 49, 51, 53, 54, 93,
102, 154n18
pathetic fallacy 66, 67, 147n8
Peckham, Morse 35–6, 144n26, 144n27,
144n28
pedagogy 27, 54, 60, 123
Pfau, Thomas 29–30
phenomenology 45, 145n7
phenomenological vision 11, 13, 14
and (post)structuralism 43–4
see also The Phenomenology of Spirit under
Hegel, G.W.F.
poetry
compared to prose 21–6
as a privileged genre 6, 11, 17–20, 47–8,
54, 59, 61, 67–74, 136–7
postmemory 119
postmodernity 1, 3, 4, 122–3, 125, 146n3,
147n14
and loss 72–4, 84, 85
poststructuralism 4, 41, 101
and deconstruction 43–4
and phenomenology 43–4
potentiality
and actuality 1, 2, 83–4, 86–7, 89, 90, 92,
95, 99, 102, 106, 107, 110, 112, 128, 131,
133, 134, 135, 137
in Giorgio Agamben 86–7, 90, 121, 149n4
and loss 87, 89, 99, 125, 133
in Walter Benjamin 109–10, 121, 128
Poulet, Georges 3, 40, 50–1, 145n8
problematics
as a form of literary history 18
psychoanalysis 84–5, 87, 93, 96–7
see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques;
Lewin, Bertram; psychoesthetics
psychoesthetics 64–5, 72, 74–5, 79, 80, 84–6,
146n5, 149n5
and I.A. Richards 64, 80, 84
Rajan, Tilottama 10, 43–4, 142–3n20
Reagan, Ronald 121–2
realism 19–23, 24, 83–4, 119, 128,
139–40n8, 140n13–4
Redfield, Marc 2, 103–4, 142–3n20, 146n2,
154n19
religion 17, 35, 70, 94–5, 96–9, 135, 141n16,
149–50n9, 150n11
representation 17, 19, 51, 78–82, 106,
154n21
in Christopher Smart 80–2
of the Holocaust 116–22
and presentation 78–80
in Wordsworth 86, 89–90, 93, 94
see also aesthetics; mimesis
restitution 34, 122–3
retraumatization
see secondary trauma under trauma
Richards, I.A. 64–5, 80, 84
Riefenstahl, Leni 153n14
Riffaterre, Michael 76–8
Rilke, Rainer Maria 8, 11, 12, 14–17, 27, 28
and Martin Heidegger 15–17
Romanticism 2, 6, 8, 9, 29, 125, 141n17,
155n1
and anti-self-consciousness 35–6, 125
critical misrecognition of 124–5
and England 22, 34–8, 60
as a form of memory 2, 4, 136–7,
147–8n16
in France 62–3, 64
theories of 35–6, 144n26, 144n27, 144n28
and Wordsworth 36–7
Rose, Gillian 113, 151–2n8
Roth, Michael 139n2
Ruskin, John 82, 148n23
sacrifice 59, 89, 111, 122, 123, 131
and akedah 33–4
of the imagination 65–6, 68, 69, 74, 78
see also akedah; mimesis
 Index
Said, Edward 110, 152n9, 152n10, 155n22
Beginnings 113, 145n7
discussion with Hartman 113–15, 122,
152n11, 153n13
Santner, Eric 100–1, 151n8
Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 141n14
Scholem, Gershom 150n14
Shakespeare, William 22, 37, 96, 109
Simpson, David 146n4, 155n1
Smart, Cristopher 44, 79, 80–2, 148n22
compared to Jacques Derrida 81–2, 148n21
solitude 28–9, 143n24
specular name 96–8, 99
and Jacques Lacan 96–8, 150n14
and Walter Benjamin 97–8, 150n14
speech-acts 80, 94–8, 149–50n9
divine speech-act 94–6
and the specular name 97
Spenser, Edmund 22, 37, 60
Spielberg, Steven 118–19, 153n14, 153n15
Sprinker, Michael 143n22, 146n2, 151n5,
151n6, 155n24, 155n25
star
see evening star
Stevens, Wallace
“The Snow Man” 66–8, 75, 81, 147n8,
147n12
Strachey, James 149n2
structuralism 3, 54, 59
in America 40–1, 43–4
and Anglo-American criticism 39–40,
48–50
Jacques Derrida on 41–3, 45, 48, 145n6
and Northrop Frye 45, 53, 57, 145n6
and phenomenology 43–4
sublation
see Aufhebung (Hegel); elation
sublime, the 56, 58, 64–6, 70, 80, 134,
147n10
mathematical sublime (Kant) 64–5, 68–9,
74, 146n1
substitution, logic of 33–4, 42
and mimesis 74–5, 76, 78
and mourning 74–5, 100
supernatural 23, 27, 35, 53, 141n15, 145n10
Taylor, Mark 140n11
television 115–17, 118, 125
testimony
see video testimony
textuality 91, 95, 96, 150n12
and community 112, 151n7
see also intertextuality
181
theology 16, 53, 54, 96, 98, 134, 139–40n8,
153n16
transcendence 92, 54
and descendentalism 58
in Hartman’s early work 11–14, 15, 17, 20,
21, 22, 26, 40
and semi-transcendence 47–8, 52, 54–6
see also immanence
transparency 73, 151n6, 151n7
trauma 32, 101, 102, 106, 107
Hartman’s rhetoric of 5, 6–7, 29–30, 32–4
and redemption 33–4
secondary trauma 106, 113, 118–20,
128–9, 145–6n13, 153–4n17
untraumatic continuity in Wordsworth 5,
6, 33–4, 36, 37–8, 90
see also loss
Trilling, Lionel 153n13
typology 20, 140n11, 154n19
undeadness 85–7
Valéry, Paul 8, 11, 16
Vattimo, Gianni 151n6
Vendler, Helen 155n22
Verneinung
see denegation (Verneinung)
video testimony 4, 101, 106, 107, 109,
115–21
compared to Schindler’s List and
Shoah 118–19
and Fortunoff Video Archive for
Holocaust Testimonies 4, 115,
116, 117
relation to Wordsworth 116–17
Virgil 21, 57
voice 79, 95–6, 106, 117, 128, 142–3n20,
148n16
Wandering Jew, the 35, 113
Warminski, Andrzej 68, 149n9
Weiskel, Thomas 65, 146n2
Wellek, René 35–6, 144n26
winter 57
and Martin Heidegger 14–16
and Wallace Stevens 66
wishing 25, 66–7, 77, 94–5, 149n7
Wohlfarth, Irving 139n7, 139–40n8
Woolf, Virginia 21, 23–6, 140–1n13, 147n7
To the Lighthouse 26
Wordsworth, William
“The Boy of Winander” 34, 129,
142–3n20, 149n7
182
Wordsworth, William (Cont’d)
compared to G.W.F. Hegel 26–7, 28, 90,
93, 141n16, 148n19
compared to John Keats 55–6
compared to S.T. Coleridge 59, 145n10,
145–6n13
compared to Walter Benjamin 128–30
compared to William Blake 56–8, 145n10
as critical exemplar 46, 50–1, 61–3
and English culture 5–6, 35–7, 83–4, 133,
135–6
and the Holocaust 83–4, 116, 133–6
and Immanuel Kant 68–9
and incremental redundance 12–14,
139n4
and intertextuality 24–6, 29, 95–6
and John Milton 32, 95–6
“The Last of the Flock” 33–4
and late style 95–6
the Lucy poems 50–1, 59, 84, 91–2, 102,
104, 129, 149n5, 154n18
Index
Lyrical Ballads 33, 62, 125
and Martin Heidegger 16–17, 28–32, 90,
143n21
and metaphor 30–2, 143n21
and popular culture 62
The Prelude 25–6, 34, 36, 129
and Sigmund Freud 84–90
“A Slumber did my spirit seal” 91–2, 102
“Tintern Abbey” 12–13
see also euphemism; nature; potentiality
Yale critics, the 4, 39, 41, 113, 144, 145n8,
155n22
see also Bloom, Harold; de Man, Paul;
Derrida, Jacques; Hartman, Geoffrey;
Miller, J. Hillis
Yale University
1966 Colloquium 145n8
Fortunoff Video Archive 4, 115, 116, 117
the Yale critics 4, 39, 41, 113, 144, 145n8,
155n22