University of Oregon

The Performative Basis of Modern Literary TheoryAuthor(s): Henry McDonaldReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 57-77Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4122330 .Accessed: 23/09/2012 12:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Comparative Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

HENRY McDONALD

The Performative Basis of

Modern Literary Theory

T HE TERM PERFORMATIVE is undoubtedly among the more complex and

ambiguous in the vocabulary of modern literary theory. It was coined by J.L. Austin in the 1960s to convey language's ability not just to communicate information but also to bring about or effect actions-from marrying and prom- ising to christening and declaring war-in accordance with social conventions.' In the wake of the John Searle-Jacques Derrida debate of the late seventies and

early eighties, however, the term acquired a very different connotation: that lan-

guage "performs;' but is not a form of action in any usual sense, because the

performance may always negate itself by failing to convey its intended meaning. Such uncertainty of meaning is illustrated by literary productions in which the results effected by the writer may be contrary to, or at least at some remove from, his or her purposes. Whereas Austin and Searle had defined performative utter- ances as rule-governed speech acts grounded in the social circumstances and intentional processes of the agent, the dominant connotation of the term that

emerged from the Searle-Derrida debate-a debate that most literary critics

thought Derrida had "won"-was that of autonomous, self-referential "text acts' whose occurrence was decidedly non-rule-governed. As Martin Heidegger, often

acknowledged by Derrida to be his most important philosophical influence, put it, "we do not speak language"; rather, "language speaks us" by fashioning mean-

ings that we can sensitize and attune ourselves to but never fully determine or control. Derridean deconstruction and Heideggerian "destruction" are philosophi- cal practices intended to heighten our attunement to language in the latter sense. Both valorize language as an ungrounded mode of being.2

1 In the second half of How toDo Thzngs Wzth Words, "performative" is displaced by the term "illocu- tionary" (also coined by Austin), just as the earlier "constative" is displaced by "locutionary" Searle adopts the term "illocutionary" and, except in Expresszon and Meanzng, infrequently uses "performa- tive" In Speech Acts, Searle makes clear his dissatisfaction with the latter term: "Austin's original in- sight into performatives was that some utterances were not sayings, but doings of some other kind. But this point can be exaggerated" (68). It is not sentences that "act:' Searle maintains repeatedly, but people; language "performs" only to the degree that it is the product of an intentional act (29).

2 In The Baszc Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger says, "It can be shown historically that at bot- tom all the great philosophies since antiquity more or less explicitly took themselves to be, and as such sought to be, ontology" (12). As for Derrida, the Western tradition is repeatedly characterized in terms of the pervasive influence of a "metaphysics of presence": "I do not believe that a single counterexample can be found in the entire history of philosophy" ("Signature" 3).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /58

In this essay, I trace some of the historical and philosophical forces that under- lie this valorization. I begin with an historical and philosophical overview of the

concept of "performative" language, comparing it with "allegorical" and "sym- bolic" languages as a means of bringing out some of the richness and complexity of the former's meaning. I then argue that the key feature of modern literary theory's valorization of language is that it subverts the "metaphysical" role tradi-

tionally given language as a reflection or mimesis of reality, substituting in its

place an "ontological" role of language as an ungrounded mode of being. Finally, I maintain that the engine of such ontologization is modern aesthetics and its anti-mimetic, anti-didactic, and language-based account of art. My effort through- out is to show that the rise of modern aesthetics gains a greater philosophical coherence when it is viewed against the backdrop of a radically new idea of "real-

ity;' one which did something classical metaphysics, the metaphysics of presence, had never done: it invested language with ontological significance.

I.

The demise of speech act theory as an active influence in literary studies in this country after the Searle-Derrida debate was coincident, roughly, with the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism.3 Indeed, it constituted one of the

many factors that set the agenda for literary theory in the following decades. In order to gain a broader perspective on these issues, we need to "rotate" the theo- retical orientation of literary criticism in a direction away from the dispute be- tween analytic and continental traditions over whether language is referentially grounded or not, and toward what I will characterize as a much more basic dis-

juncture between "pre-modern" and "modern" perspectives. From such a vantage point the term "performative" has a radical and at the

same time subtle ambiguity. On the one hand, language is "performative" in the sense that it participates in and resembles sensuously the reality it represents. "Language" is understood not as a set of conventional or arbitrary meanings imposed by us, but as what the seventeenth-century Lutheran thinker Jakob Boehme called a Natursprache or "language of

nature,' in which the essences or

natures of things impose themselves on us.4 In pre-modern allegorical narrative, for example, language is taken to be a reflection or manifestation of some extra-

linguistic reality that functions mimetically and didactically. "Presence" signifies in this instance not an experience reducible empirically to a private act of con- sciousness, or "idea" but a social and public experience, one version of which can be found in the following passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet

Two especially valuable essays that acknowledge the declining influence of speech act theory in

literary studies areJacqueline Henkel's "Speech-Act Theory Revisited" and Mary Louise Pratt's "Ide- ology and Speech-Act Theory."

4 On Boehme's pervasive influence on romanticism through his notion of an "Adamic" language, see Aarsleff, Language and Intellectual Hzstory 59, 60, 65, 84, 87, 97 n13, 317; Study of Language 154; "Rise and Decline" 282-84; and Beck 147-56, 381. On Boehme's influence on Schelling, see Aarsleff, Language and Intellectual 140-42, 144; and Bowie 3, 117, 178. On Boehme's influence on Coleridge, see Holmes, Early Vzszons 120, 365; DarkerReflectzons 53, 207, 250, 399. On his influence on Emerson, see Richardson 23-27, 221, 228.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/59

Letter. Speaking of the seventeenth-century Puritans in New England, the narra- tor remarks:

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes... It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglypics, on the cope of heaven. (1389-90)

In this passage, language is viewed as an act of nature, like a meteor shower or a picture. As for Augustine and most pre-eighteenth century theorists, language does not "represent" a reality that may be accounted for empirically by its ap- pearance within "the mind's presence-room"' as John Locke put it (60). Rather, language emanates or manifests the presencing of a reality, or essence, of which it is a part.5

The term "allegory" comes from the Greek allos, meaning "other," combined with agoreuein, meaning "speak openly;' thus implying that there are two levels of

meaning, often termed the "figurative" and the "literal;' in any allegory (Fletcher 2; Bahti 8). Nonetheless, we must distinguish between different kinds of dualism: between a relative or constrained dualism that presupposes a larger, unifying "pres- ence" that links the terms of the duality; and a radical or binary dualism that

presupposes only two independent entities that, precisely because they have no intermediate or "middle" terms-no unifying context by which one could com-

pare and order them-can simultaneously be separated from and merged with one another in dialectical fashion.

Defined in this way, the "dualism" of allegory is clearly non-dialectical or rela- tive; it is constrained by being subordinated to a larger encompassing unity or "presence'' In William Empson's words, "Part of the function of an allegory is to make you feel that two levels of being correspond to each other in detail and indeed that there is some underlying reality, something in the nature of things, which makes this happen. Either level may illuminate the other... so that it is not even obvious which is tenor and which is vehicle" (346). Although the unify- ing context of allegory cannot exhaustively be specified, it can always be speci- fied in part; it is always in process of being illuminated, a feature that explains why allegory has typically been written in narrative form. Thus, allegorical exegesis, or allegoresis, often functions, in Peter Szondi's words, "to annul the distance between reader and author" by drawing "the canonical text ... out of its histori- cal remoteness into the present, to make it not only comprehensible but also, as it were, present" (6). By the time of the classical age of the Athenians and the later Alexandrians, for example, Homer's language was no longer immediately comprehensible; the allegoresis of the Stoics bridged this gap by claiming that

5 Qtd. in Vance, "Saint Augustine" 251, 22. "Augustine does speak of things and of signs in [On Dialectics] . . . but he does not take the former to be referents of the latter. The world is divided into signs and things according to whether the perceived objective has transitive value or not. Things participate in signs as sigmnfiers, not as referents" (Todorov 40; see also 15-16, 35-59).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /60

contemporary ideas had been prefigured in allegorical disguise by Homer, just as later generations during the Middle Ages refigured Virgil's Aeneid as an alle-

gory of the human soul from birth to death. Similarly, the typological inter-

pretation of the Bible bridged the historical distance between Old and New Testaments by interpreting them in terms of the relation of promise and fulfillment (Szondi 6-11, 110). During the seventeenth century, as Sacvan Bercovitch has argued, American Puritans radicalized the tradition of Biblical

typology by applying such an allegory of promise and fulfillment to their own

contemporary history.6 In allegory, the temporal or "horizontal" dimension is subordinate to its '"erti-

cal" dimension, whose scale, or degrees of difference, is ideally fixed:

Allegorical dualism.., .is the natural result of the cosmic function of allegory, inasmuch as

cosmologies of times earlier than our own depended on a "chain of being"' in which, if one de- scended just a step lower than the lowest stage one could imagine, one reached a sort of absolute zero, Lucifer upturned in the pit of Hell, while his counterpart, Jehovah, stood at an absolute height of divine power and good. (Fletcher 223-24)

What is reflected, then, in the mode of allegory is a pre-modern confidence that the "mind" can grasp the "reality" represented in art, even if that grasp will

always be limited. It follows that the functions of allegory, as well as those of other pre-modern literary and artistic forms, can be properly didactic; art, like rhetoric, may "teach lessons" about life, including ethical and political ones (Fletcher 121).

If we turn now to the term symbolic, we find not just that the meaning of the latter is intimately bound to the meaning of allegory, but that it is bound to a

particular-and, from a pre-modern perspective, impoverished-understanding of allegory ushered in by Martin Luther during the Reformation and culminat-

ing in the work of Coleridge in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, it is only possible to understand the mode of allegory as "performative" in a distinctively "pre-modern" sense if one distances oneself from Coleridge's influential account. That account, shaped by Schelling and the Schlegels, associates allegory with the Kantian category of the Understanding, in which a concept, or "pre-determined form" is impressed "mechanically" on the "material" of experience. In A.W. Schlegel's words, The form is mechanical when through outside influence it is imparted to a material merely as an accidental addition, without relation to its nature (as e.g. when we give an arbitrary shape to a soft mass so that it may retain it after hardening). Organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it unfolds itself from within and acquires its definiteness simultaneously with the total development of the

germ. (qtd. in Wellek, The RomantzcAge 48)

Whereas "Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses"' symbol- ism is associated with the higher Kantian power of Reason. Its form is not pre- determined but "organic": "it shapes, as it develops, itself from within... It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative

6 See Bercovitch, American xiv, 4-10, 24-26, 125-60; Puritan 114-18; and Miller 29-31, 34-39, 133- 40, 173-85, 192-204, 305-15,460-63, 482-85.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/61

... Symbol is a sign included in the idea, which it represents" (Coleridge, On Language 40; Statesman's Manual 230).

This account, however, scarcely does justice to the pre-modern understanding of allegory; in order to grant the symbol a higher organic unity and ontological status, it attributes to allegory a rigid dualism.' Whereas traditional allegoresis assumed that one and the same truth could be understood in two different ways -philosophically and theologically, for example-the new mode of textual in- terpretation ushered in by Luther and the Reformation claimed, in Frederick Beiser's words, "not that they are different kinds of discourse about the same

subject matter, but that they are different kinds of discourse about different sub- ject matters" (27). The two "different subject matters" that Beiser refers to here

correspond to Augustine's "kingdom of heaven" and "kingdom of earth,' except

that the polarity between the two has been sharpened, by Luther, so as to consti- tute a "double-truth

doctrine'.' Such a doctrine entailed an "ontological distinc-

tion concerning different kinds of existence or realms of being" (25) that effected a radical dualism between reason and faith: All that we can infer about God from our natural reason, [Luther and Calvin] argue, is that he exists. We cannot have an adequate knowledge, however, of how he exists, of his essence or nature. Luther undercuts the main premise behind natural theology by denying that it is possible for rea- son to know the final and efficient causes of things. (31)

It is its hierarchical, cosmological framework that allows allegory, in contrast to modern "symbolism,' to serve didactic functions and convey its ideas directly, as opposed to the "indirections" of symbolism. Goethe's formulation of the dif- ference between the two, which, according to Rene Wellek and Tzvetan Todorov, was the main source for the development of the opposition between allegory and symbol in German romantics and Coleridge, brings this point out: "The allegorical differs from the symbolic in that what the latter designates indirectly, the former designates directly."8

Although it was Goethe who introduced the opposition between allegory and symbol, it was Kant who in the Critique ofJudgment initiated a dramatic change in the meaning of the word symbol. According to Todorov, Until 1790, the word "symbol" had a very different meaning from the one it was to acquire in the romantic era. Either it was simply synonymous with a series of other, more commonly used terms such as allegory, hieroglyph, figure (in the sense of number), emblem, and so on, or else it desig- nated primarily the purely arbitrary and abstract sign (mathematical symbols) ... Far from charac- terizing abstract reason, the symbol belongs to the intuitive and sense-based manner of apprehending things. (199-200)

Kant himself showed awareness of the change he was helping to initiate when in the Critique ofJudgment he remarked that "logicians" are "wrong ... to contrast symbolic with intuitive presentation, [for] symbolic presentation is only a kind of intuitive presentation" (227). As discussed in more detail below, a very similar kind of change of meaning was initiated by Alexander Baumgarten in the usage of the term "aesthetic" in the early eighteenth century. The two changes were,

7 For a discussion of the way in which modern commentaries have oversimplified traditional alle- gory, see Fletcher 103-35.

8 Wellek, The Later Ezghteenth Century 211; Todorov 200; Goethe 314, 1112, 1113. The final sen- tence in the passage of Goethe is from On the Objects ofthe PlastzcArts (qtd. in Todorov 199).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /62

indeed, interdependent, for both conferred on the sensuous features of artistic

representation an autonomy and epistemological legitimacy or seriousness that

they had lacked prior to the eighteenth century. Both, that is, were reflections of a more general change in which the ontological status of art was enhanced. Rather than being relegated to a subordinate sphere by virtue of its sensuous, particular- ized content-a content that traditional metaphysics had always regarded as hav-

ing an intrinsically deficient cognitive status-art gained a new and enhanced

ontological dignity as a unique, dialectically grounded form of experience in which what was formerly seen as a deficiency could be transformed into a virtue. The engine or life of art came to be viewed as a dialectical process in which the

particular was universalized, the sensous spiritualized-in which the art work carried within it what Hegel called "the sensuous representation of the absolute itself" (Introductory Lectures 76).

The new opposition between allegory and symbol served as one of the impor- tant vehicles of this ontological enhancement, or separation between metaphys- ics and ontology. Whereas allegory, as A.W. Schlegel said, was merely "the

personification of a concept, a fiction contrived only for this purpose, [symbol- ism] is what the imagination has created for other reasons, or what possesses a

reality independent of concepts" (qtd. in Wellek, Romantic Age 299). All genuine art, according to Karl Solger, is symbolic, for it unites essence and existence: "The symbol is the existence of the Idea itself. It is really what it signifies. It is the Idea in its immediate reality. The symbolic is thus always true in itself: not a mere

copy of something true" (qtd. in Wellek, Romantic Age 42). The "truth" of the symbolic is ultimately a function of the reflective capacities

of the mind. Its sources, if not exactly "within" consciousness, are in some sense within us, are a "reflection" (reflexion, Besonnenheit) of us? For Locke and Condillac, Butler and Coleridge, "reflection" could be used, asJohn Beer puts it, "both as an abstract word to describe a mental process and as an image invoking metaphors of religious and moral illumination" (lxxxix). It is by virtue of the reflective ca-

pacities of the mind that humankind, according to Kant, is given access to "the sublime" For crucial to the experience of sublimity is that "infinitude" which is

glimpsed above all in poetry and art:

Beauty is the symbolic representation of the infinite.., .the oracular verdict of the heart, these

deep intuitions in which the dark riddle of our existence seems to solve itself.., the power of infin-

ity itself, and the pursuit of the infinite, is properly natural to man, and a part of his very essence ... the longing for the infinite is ... one of the great arteries of true poetry and art.'0

From a modern perspective language is "performative" in a sense that can only be understood with reference to modern symbolism; it is autonomous and "stages, so to speak, its own reality or acts of consciousness. Language, that is, does not

participate in or resemble a reality external to it. Rather, the meanings of words are a function of the relations of arbitrary signifiers that, lacking positive values, are never, as such, "present." The reality that language exhibits or "performs" is

9 Rousseau 13. For further discussion of the importance of the term reflectzon in eighteenth-century thought, see Aarsleff, Locke 29, 107-9, 128-29, 155,163-64, 341-42, 350.

'o The first part of the quotation is from A.W. Schlegel, qtd. in Wellek, Romantzc Age 43. The second part is from his brother Friedrich's Phzlosophy of Lzfe 429, 426.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/63

not a "presence" but an absence or non-presence; it is an imaginative capacity or

potentiality of inwardness related to what the Germans call Bildung (inner cul-

ture), and which, although "within" us, cannot be controlled or mastered by us." In the words of Edgar Allan Poe, whose critiques of allegory anticipated modern

symbolism, and whose works brilliantly incarnate that nihilistic marriage of skep- ticism and romanticism diagnosed by Nietzsche, it is "some exciting knowledge -some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction'.2 Or, in

Heidegger's words in On the Way to Language, "the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words-in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language" (81). Such an

understanding of language as negatively, or "intransitively," performative informs Derrida's notion of ecriture. As he says in Writing and Difference, "The pure book, the book itself.., must be the 'book about nothing' that Flaubert dreamed of ... This emptiness as the situation of literature must be acknowledged by the critic as that which constitutes the specificity of his object, around which he al-

ways speaks" (8, 108). Language must "twist its tongue to speak the non-linguistic conditions of language" (Derrida, "Me-Psychoanalysis" 10). Timothy Clark sums

up the common features of Heidegger and Derrida's philosophical perspectives as follows:

Language cannot.., .become the object of any representationalist meta-language. This transcen- dental force of language can only be approached.., .by way of a mode of language that tries to hearken or resonate to its own sources or genesis. It must become an intransitive saying of saying, whatever the extraordinary stylistic innovations this demand requires. (149)

II.

What is at issue in the radically different modern and pre-modern accounts of

language as performative are the ultimate sources from which language gains mean-

ing. Pre-modern accounts-associated with a metaphysics ofpresence-posit those sources as beyond human experience yet comprehensible; the meanings that "the language of nature" conveys exist prior to our reception of them and are

imposed on us. Modern accounts-associated with an ontology of reflection-by contrast posit that those sources are a function of human consciousness, yet are not comprehensible in strictly rational terms. Metaphysics is an ancient term that carries Aristotelian and neo-Platonic connotations of a "chain of being'.' Ontology, on the other hand, is a modern term that was coined in the seventeenth century by an obscure Calvinist philosopher, and that became widely used during the

eighteenth century by the Leibnizian philosophers Christian Wolff and Alexander

" See Bruford for a discussion of the German concept of Bzldung from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Thomas Mann.

12 The quotation is from Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" (Poetry and Tales 198). Speaking of the influence of romanticism on modern criticism, Rene Wellek remarks, "much is not drawn directly from the original sources but rather comes through many intermediaries, through Coleridge, Poe, the French symbolists, and Croce" (Later Ezghteenth Century 4). Elsewhere, Wellek also comments, "Coleridge was the main source..,. not only for a long line of English critics but also for the American transcendentalists and for Poe, and thus indirectly for the French symbolists" (RomantzcAge 157).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /64

Baumgarten; the latter, not incidentally, also helped to establish the modern

usage of the term aesthetics.'" The terms Metaphysics and ontology thus have roots, respectively, in the two major currents of our western heritage, the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian. These currents, although inextricably linked to one an- other in innumerable ways, have nonetheless been engaged, as Nietzsche put it, "in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years" (488). Classical metaphys- ics may be distinguished from modern ontology by the former's lack of a distinct

concept of "existence" as radically contingent (see Kahn; Seligman 18, and Gilson

119). Usually set in opposition to the Aristotelian and more rationalistic concept of

"essence,' the notion of existence has its sources in the distinctively Christian

account of creation ex nihilo. It was given special emphasis by Martin Luther dur-

ing the Reformation and gained currency in modern times through the work of Soren Kierkegaard, which influenced Heidegger and other existentialist

thinkers.!4 By providing a counter-concept to "presence" it has also influenced, less directly, poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers (see Derrida, "Post-

Scriptum," "Faith," and "How to Avoid"). As I will use the terms in this essay, then, metaphysics inherits the rationalistic

emphasis placed on being by classical culture; it seeks the whatness or essences of

things (ousia, essentia), such "essences" forming a conceptually comprehensible, eternally self-generating, hierarchy or chain of being in which the human es- sence occupies one, but not the highest, level. Ontology, on the other hand, signi- fies not metaphysics, but what Kant calls a "metaphysics of metaphysics" (my emphasis). It inherits the sense of radical contingency placed on being by Chris-

tian-especially Lutheran-theology, seeking the thatness or "existence" of things (existentia), an existence not comprehensible in human terms but one with which human beings are uniquely qualified, by virtue of their capacity for language, to

engage. Whereas classical metaphysics declares ex nihilo nihilfit (from nothing, nothing comes to be), Christian thinkers such as Augustine maintain ex nihilofit -ens creatum (from nothing comes created being). Pre-Christian metaphysics asks, "What is?" Post-Christian ontology wonders that there is anything at all and

poses the question, originating with Leibniz but taking on its distinctively mod- ern implications with Hume, Schelling, and Heidegger, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"'15

13 The obscure Calvinist philosopher was, according to Rene Wellek, Rudolf Golclenius (1547- 1628) (American Criticism 161). See also Owens 35 and MacIntyre 542.

14 See Heidegger, Being and Time 30; Oberman 120-21, 274-75; Bambach 199-201; Richter 10, 88; and Zimmerman, Eclzpse 19.

15 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphyszcs 28; see chapter 4 for discussion of the meaning of Kant's phrase. Leibniz's question appears in "The Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason" [1714]. The sentence following the question, "For nothing is simpler and easier than something" (Selections 527), clearly indicates the non-ontological, determinedly metaphysical, and "non-modern" sense in which Leibniz understood the question. See also Heidegger's comments in "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being" (Nietzsche IV: 208); Exzstence and Bezng 328-49; Introductzon to Metaphyszcs 1-42; and Pathmarks 289, 317. See also David Krell's comments on the importance of this issue in Heidegger's works: "Study of [Heidegger's] later texts discloses the lasting quality of the issue of ground and nullity. Such study makes it impossible to assent to that interpretation of Heidegger's career which asserts that the problem of the nothing pertains to an 'existentialist' phase that is soon tranquilized into 'releasement' by 'thankfulness to Being'" (Heidegger Nzetzsche IV: 284-85). In his Essay on the Orgin of Language, Locke remarks on the metaphysical implications

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/65

The latter question is distinctively modern because the mere asking of it throws us into a "hermeneutic circle" that is not only inescapable but imposes on us skepticism about "the reality" of what lies outside us; it imposes a view of our- selves from within as stretched between a dialectical, but at the same time dialec- tically unresolvable, tension of being and nothingness. That tension subsists on, and is continuously incited by, the threat of nihilism. Such a threat, as Karl Lowith pointed out (51), could have arisen in radical form only in the context of the Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, for only those who believe they have been created out of nothing can be haunted by the contingency that they may become nothing once again.

For many centuries prior to the modern period a creationist account of the universe coexisted in apparent harmony with a rationalist and essentialist view of that same universe as the emanation of eternal categories of being. The fragility of this harmony was first exposed by the nominalistic philosophy of William of Ockham (later adopted by Martin Luther): What fourteenth-century Christian speculation tried to do was to blow up the solid block of Greco- Arabic determinism, and this was mainly the work of the Franciscan School. Ockham, for instance, was going to do it by simply annihilating all essences ... the block of Greco-Arabic necessity disinte- grates under the pressure of two charges of theological explosive: the absolute infinity of the divine essence and the absolute freedom of God's will. (Gilson 84-85)

Anticipating in a limited way certain features of modern empiricism, Ockham's nominalism "annihilated all essences" by insisting that such essences, or univer- sals, were only the common names we give to individuals among themselves. In reality, "there are only individuals:'16 Such nominalism thus stripped "the playing field of reality" by eliminating any intermediate entities, or essences, "between" God and man-by eliminating everything, that is, except language and thereby opening up a pathway to the valorization and re-ontologization of language that was a feature of Christianity from the beginning."

This "nihilation" and elimination entailed, at the level of language, what Stephen Nichols calls the abandonment of "the literal language of historical time and place, the univocal language of phenomena, in favor of... the more difficult and veiled language [of] scripture" (57). By engaging actively in the interpreta- tion of such difficult and veiled language, the individual reader participated in what was ultimately the discovery of his own existence. As John Scotus Erigena

of essentia as follows: "Essence may be taken for the being of anything whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally (in Substances) unknown, constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence. This is the proper original signification of the word, as is evident from the formation of it: essentza, in its primary notation, signifying prop- erly being" (238). Within twentieth-century French philosophy, Bergson, whose work Derrida has praised, anticipates the (ontological) "turn" to language. As Vincent Descombes says, "Leibniz's statement of the metaphysical problem [which is precisely not metaphysical from my standpoint]- why is there something, rather than nothing?-clearly shows that the metaphysician sets nothing on a par with something, or even accords it a certain priority. But in reality, explains Bergson, this nothing is an effect of language" (25). Robert Bernasconi aptly comments that in addressing the Question of Being, "There is no 'why', only the 'that'" (8).

16 The first part of the quotation is from Duns Scotus, qtd. in Lovejoy 156; the second part is from Descartes, qtd.in Doing 289.

17 For discussions of Ockham and his influence on German philosophy, see Beck, Early 78-82, 512-13; and Tillich, Hzstory 183-88, 198-99, 206-7.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /66

had put it in the ninth century: "The fabric of divine Scripture is intricately woven and entwined with turns and obliquities. The Holy Spirit did not desire to make it so because it grudged our understanding, a possibility about which we should not even think, but because it was eager to exercise our intelligence and to re- ward hard toil and discovery" (qtd. in Nichols 257). During the sixteenth cen-

tury this model of reading scripture was adopted and intensified. By "releasing the reader from the constraints of what one might call institutionalized allegory;' as Terence Cave has argued, "Protestant theories of Scriptural reading trans- formed the reading of Scripture from a process in which the reader passively accepted knowledge about what exists to a performative activity in which one par- ticipated in the discovery of the grounds of one's own existence" (151, 162-63).

Drawing on Ockham's work, Luther initiated a long history in which, as Norbert Elias and many others have maintained, Germanic Kultur, with its center in the written word and private experience, was privileged over French and English civilization, with its center in speech and courtly rules of conduct.'s The rise of

"writing"' in this sense, helped to effect the decline of the Latin "tongue"; it also

challenged the authority of those languages, Italian and later French, which, after the Middle Ages, had taken over the functions earlier performed by Latin

(CivilizingProcess 42-43; Curtius 25-35, 383-88). Although the eighteenth century was, ironically, the century in which the con-

cept of the chain of being "attained [its] widest diffusion and acceptance" (Lovejoy 183), it was also the century in which the metaphysical basis of the concept was undermined and eventually "destroyed" The principal agent of such destruction was time. For it had always been essential to the chain of being that its categories be fixed, that the whole of reality consist of the same number of individuals sepa- rated by fixed degrees of difference. Increasingly, especially in the writings of German romantics and idealists, there was a tendency to substitute the Faustian ideal of a "striving for the unattainable" (Streben nach dem Unendlichen) for the ideal of the soul at rest in its contemplation of perfection. Such striving is the

complement of a sense of absolute dependence on God that can be found in German writers from Luther to Schleiermacher: "The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety . .. is this: the consciousness of being ab-

solutely [schlechthinig] dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in rela- tion with God" (Schleiermacher 12). Such a sense of absolute dependence is

closely related to Schleiermacher's concept of "the hermeneutic circle": in both cases one must submit oneself utterly to the Word by enclosing oneself within the text, suspending all questioning of origins by recognizing, in Heidegger's words, that "What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way" (Being and Time 195). Indeed, since "the world itself came into existence through the spoken word of God,' the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is

equivalent to the textualization of existence: The expression "out of nothing" excludes the idea that before the origin of the world anything existed outside God, which as "matter," could enter into the formation of the world. And undoubt-

edly the admission of "matter" as existing independently of the divine activity would destroy the

18 Elias, Czvzlzzzng Process 3-43, 59-61; Germans 123-32, 323-24; and Czvzlzzatzon, Power 49-109. See

also Mennel and Goudsblom 13-24, 36-39.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/67

feeling of absolute dependence ... Our self-consciousness, in its universality.., can only represent finite being in general so far as it is a continuous being; for we only know ourselves in this manner but have no consciousness of a beginning of being. (Schleiermacher 153, 148, 146).

Although the pre-modern perspective confers on humankind a certain dis- tinctiveness, that distinctiveness is achieved by virtue of being torn by conflicting desires and propensities, of being a member of two orders of being at once, and therefore not at home in either; it is not a distinctiveness gained by virtue of a fall from innocence that has conferred on humankind a unique self-knowledge asso- ciated with an "infinite" capacity of mind!9 In the pre-modern view the capacity for self-consciousness is a product of, and in no sense a means of transcending, one's place in the order of the cosmos. Humans are always "'tweened'," occupying a position between angel and beast in a manner analogous to the Earth's position at the midpoint of the celestial spheres (Aristotle, Physics 266 [207a]; Grene 62-

63).Just as the pre-modern view of language as performative dictates that our

systems of representation, or languages, participate in the reality they represent, so too the metaphysics of presence dictates that the differences between the hu- man and natural worlds, or between elements within either of the two, be con- ceived in terms not of binary oppositions but of graded or relative differences that belong to the same chain or hierarchy of being. However great the "dis-

tance" that might separate "high" from "low" on such a chain, their oppositionality is not binary or mutually exclusive, but rather graduated or defined in terms of the contextual links between them.

In Shakespeare's tragedies, for example, the highmindness, nobility, and purity of the heroes, who occupy the highest rungs of the social ladder, are posited at the furthest possible remove from the egotism, sensuality, and slavishness of the villains, who are implicitly associated with the non-human order of bestiality. Yet these differences, however great, are only differences of degree, for connecting the two extremes is a hierarchy, in descending order, of the lower nobility, mer- chants, peasants, homeless beggars, and slaves. Moreover, the hero's position at the top of the social/human order is at the same time a position at the bottom of the celestial one. Social order is not only hierarchical; it is continuous with that of a yet higher hierarchy (Utterback 271, 278). Thus, there can be no hope for an "escape from necessity" such as Christianity holds out to those who have faith. That is why the subversion of the social order in classical and Shakespearean tragedy is usually a sign of a tear in the fabric of the cosmos. But again, disorder, chaos, and "nothingness" in these tragedies are not set in binary opposition to order, reason, and fullness of presence. Rather, the former are the "relative ab-

sence, the lack or privation, of the latter; they constitute not a part of "reality" but what lies "outside" it: a vague and indefinite dimension of unmeaning and

irrationality that cannot be represented, named, or made the object of any sort of knowledge--what Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus describes as "something awful,/Fearful and unendurable to see" (182).

The subversion of the concept of the chain of being requires, as Gilson puts it, that "there take place such events as are the work of freedom and escape neces-

19 For discussions of the distinction between the infinite and the unending, see Koyre 8; Wittgenstein 145-46, 218, 229; Lovejoy 66, 112, 116, 117, 123, 125, 127, 138; and Sorabji 198, 210.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /68

sity" (72). But in order to "escape necessity;' a principle of being must be posited "above being" (i.e., above the chain of being). Gilson calls that principle "exist- ence," and it is grounded in the unconstrained will of God through which the creation of the world ex nihilo was effected.2" What is "above being" will not only not be "intelligible" in an ordinary sense, but might even be said "to not be'.'21 And such an absence is not "relative" as Gilson emphasizes (137), is not a priva- tion or lack of presence in the traditionally Catholic, non-mystical sense, but is rather, in Derrida words, "an absoluteness of absence" (Limited Inc 7). As Eckhardt, from whose writings Heidegger chose the epigraph for his 1915 habilitation on the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus (Safranski 64), states, "There is in God neither to be nor being; for, indeed, if a cause is truly a cause, nothing of the effect should be formally in its cause. Now, God is the cause of all being. Hence

being cannot formally be in God.'22 The sense of the world as a rational, orderly process found in pre-modern

thought is reflected above all in "the principle of sufficient reason" formulated

by Leibniz: "Nothing happens without a reason ... For a thing to be rightly esti- mated I state as a principle the Harmony of things, that is, the greatest amount of essence exists that is possible. It follows that there is more reason in the exis- tence of a thing than in its non-existence. And everything would exist if that were possible" (92-93). Here the distinctively modern question, "Why is there

something rather than nothing?" is implied only to be disqualified. For in order

seriously to ask that question, one must first have a concept of nothingness as distinct and separable from any particular "something'' And it is precisely such a

concept that classical and medieval thinkers for the most part lacked; their use of the concept of "nothingness" is relative to, and not independent of, "what

is'.' "Existence"' for such pre-modern thinkers, is contained within and subsumed by the necessary and eternal realm of essences that constitute "reality"

III.

I observed above that the term ontology was coined and became widely used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to give expression to a new sense of the "being" of language. Something similar happened with the term aesthetics, except that rather than a new term being coined an old term was given an entirely new sense and meaning. Traditionally, aesthetics had referred to a kind of sensuous experience that could become the object only of a "confused;' "indistinct" perception, and thus could never attain the status of genuine knowl-

20 As I have argued elsewhere, Nietzsche's thesis of "the eternal return of the same" stands op- posed to a Heideggerian account of being quite as much as a Christian one. This is not to imply, however, that there aren't significant differences between Heideggerian and Christian views; see Caputo, Hezdegger and Aquznas 147-84.

21 Aristotle, GreaterHzppzas 1545, 292e; cf. Parmenedes 23 (129e).

22 Qtd. in Gilson 39. For discussion of Eckhardt and his influence on German philosophy, see Beck 43-45, 59-60, 71-73, 510-11; and Tillich 144, 201-3. On Eckhardt and Heidegger, see Heidegger, Nzetzsche III: 220; Caputo, Mystzcal 105-12, 129-30, 216-17; and Zimmerman, "Heidegger, Buddhism" 241-42, 250, 258.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/69

edge, which from Descartes and Locke through Hume and Kant's first Critique had been viewed as the product of perception that was intellectually pure, with- out sensory components""23 The two changes were, indeed, interdependent, for both conferred on the sensuous features of artistic representation an autonomy and epistemological legitimacy or seriousness that they had lacked prior to the

eighteenth century. Only by transposing a creationist account of the cosmos onto the realm of art could the work itself, as a distinct mode of being, be granted the

independence and autonomy required by modern modes of criticism, whether

philological, hermeneutical, New Critical, or poststructuralist. Whereas art, for Dante, was "the grandchild of God" (Inferno XI: 104) and thus grounded in, as well as subordinate to, metaphysics, for romanticists such as Friedrich Schlegel the artist supplants the functions of God-"as God is to his creation, so is the artist to his own" (qtd. in Lussky 78)-and so provides his creation with its own

ontological status. Descartes's reduction of the properties of matter to the lowest common de-

nominator of "extension" as well as his replacement of the metaphysical concept of ousia or essence with that of "knowable object:' had given the domain of sen-

sory experience a "solidity" and self-identity it had lacked in classical times.24 None- theless, as I have noted, it was Alexander Baumgarten, a rationalist philosopher of the Leibnizian-Wolffian school, who first treated aesthetic experience as a radi-

cally different kind of cognition, which Baumgarten called "sensate cognition'.'25

To the ancients Baumgarten's phrase would likely have seemed incoherent, since

sensory experience existed too far down on "the chain of being"' and was too

23 On the sensory, "confused" nature of the aesthetic response in Leibniz, Hutcheson, Addison, Burke, Hume, and others see Guyer, Experience of Freedom 60, 62, 65, 81; Thomas 166; Ross, "Beauty" 237-41; Mackie 387-96; and Furniss.

24 In The Prnczples of Phzlosophy Descartes argues that "the nature of the body consists not in weight, hardness, color, and the like, but in extension alone" (Method, Medztatzons and Phzlosophy 335). See also Marion 114; Kenny 203-4; and Ariew 65. A large part of the appeal of Descartes's dualism of mind and matter was, as John Cottingham says, that "The theologians could now be offered a metaphysic in which consciousness was a suz genens phenomenon, wholly detached from corporeal events of any kind" (240-41).

25 In his Aesthetzc Benedetto Croce specifically disputes the revolutionary nature of Baumgarten's notion of sensate cognition: "critics attribute to Baumgarten a merit he cannot claim ... According to them, he effected a revolution by converting Leibniz's differences of degree or quantitative dis- tinctions into a specific difference, and turning confused knowledge into something no longer negative but positive by attributing a 'perfectio' to sensitive cognition qua talis; and by thus destroy- ing the unity of the Leibnitian monad and breaking up the law of continuity, founded the science of Aesthetic. Had he really accomplished such a giant stride, his claim to the title of 'father of Aes- thetic' would have been placed beyond question" (214). R.G. Collingwood, strongly influenced by Croce, does not even mention Baumgarten in his The Principles of Art. But the arguments of Croce, who is concerned to establish the priority of Vico in this regard, do not seem to me very convincing, and in any case Croce acknowledges that in the work of Baumgarten's "disciples"-including Meier, Mendelssohn, and Herder-just such a break with tradition was eventually carried out (212-19, 242- 56). Rene Wellek is somewhat more positive regarding Baumgarten's role: "Baumgarten, however, has not only the merit of inventing an important term More definitely than anybody before him with the possible exception of Vico, he distinguished the realm of art from the realms of philoso- phy, morality, and pleasure... Art and poetry are 'cognition' but not thought; they are nonintellec- tual knowledge, 'perception'" (Later Ezghteenth Century 145). Or, as Paul Oskar Kristeller says, "Baumgarten is the founder of aesthetics insofar as he first conceived a general theory of the arts as a separate philosophical discipline with a distinctive and well-defined place in the system of philoso- phy" (425). See also Cassirer 338-60.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /70

much like a chaos of particulars incapable of being put into rational order, to be

genuinely cognitivized. By comparison with knowledge that was "clear and dis- tinct"' a knowledge modeled on mathematics, it "lacked reality"' although this lack was a matter of degrees or of graded differences, however vast the propor- tions such differences might entail. The assumption behind this scheme was that

"knowing" was proportionate to "being'.' It is not that our senses "deceive" us; rather, it is that the data that they present to us is incapable of being cognitivized. Plato, for example, argues that art is representational or mimetic in that its con- tent, the "reality" it seeks to reflect, is the same reality that governs our ordinary lives. However, due to its sensuous form it is a lower degree of that reality. For Plato, the disorder, even "madness, of a total immersion in sensory experience cannot be overcome in art because the poet, is required to submit himself to, not control, his Muse. Aristotle, more typically Greek than Plato in this respect, is less able to imagine a world without poets than was Plato in The Republic and so

gives art a more respectable status, emphasizing that "poetry is more philosophi- cal than history," because it deals with universals, as well as particulars. But the

compliment is back-handed: although Aristotle, unlike Plato, welcomes the sen- sual delight that the experience of art can bring, he nevertheless agrees that such experiences do not lead to much in the way of knowledge. The experience of art, being grounded in the senses, cannot be disinterested or "objective"26 That is why Aristotle found music a more essential form of mimesis than paint- ing: in his view it possessed a greater capacity than other forms of techne or art to imitate directly, and by imitating to unify, the patterns and flows of sensuous and intellectual experience (Politics 1309-16).

For modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer, however, music, viewed now not as a techne but as a gateway into a region of rarefied experience that only aesthet- ics can represent, is privileged for exactly the opposite reason-for its ability to dramatize the absolute irreconcilability of intellectual and sensuous experience, of the noumenal and phenomenal spheres of reality. As Schopenhauer says, "The

inexpressible depth of music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so

inexplicable, is due to the fact that it produces all the emotions of our innermost

being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.., .music [is] the

copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented" (1:264, 257; see also I:154, 256, 321; 11:404-32, 447-62; and Magee 117-88, 240-41, 351-402).

This rarefied conception of the functions of music reflects a more general feature of the modern sensibility: that sensuous and intellectual experience are bifurcated and not linked, necessarily, by any unifying context. Sensuous experi- ence, that is, is not a form of cognition-however "unclear" and "indistinct"-at all, but rather the "unknowing"-and in Kant's notion of the "Sensibility," the unknown and unknowable-basis for cognition (Pure Reason 42, 56; see also Guyer, Claims 13-16, 388-90).

26 Aristotle, De Poetzca 1464, 1451-56; Metaphyszcs 689. "'Knowing' is a matter of language, of stat-

ing; it is not a 'having of sensations' or 'sense data'" (Randall 7). For Aristotle's conflation of what we today regard as the separate provinces of epistemology and ontology, see Categorzes 35; and Meta- physzcs 713-15, 729, 732, 735, 747, 776, 782.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/71

By insisting that there is a domain of experience centered in the sensory world that could not be simply dismissed as "lacking in reality," Baumgarten helped to

give that domain an autonomy that allowed it to be thought of as qualitatively different from, and eventually set in binary opposition to, intellectual experi- ence. The essential and unbridgeable gulf between intellectual and sensuous

experience thus consisted in the fact that while the former, so long as it was "clear and distinct,' gave us real knowledge, the latter was a "substratum" that did not "give" us knowledge but rather served as the unknowable basis for all knowl-

edge. Art could thus be granted a privileged ontological status, but at the cost of

being defined in opposition to a distinct mode of "knowing"' or episteme, associ- ated with modern science.

Baumgarten's understanding of aesthetics as sensuous cognition was thus radi-

cally innovative, an innovation whose specifically philosophical consequences were developed in the work of Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, and Herder, but not fully realized until the publication of Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1791, a work that provided, in Dieter Henrich's words, "tools for establishing the aes- thetic attitude as self-contained and autonomous, thus as the foundation for a

conception of art that envisages art as a primordial way of being related to and situated within our world" (30). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant in essence establishes the basis of modern epistemology, asserting that "existence is not a

predicate" and therefore that "knowing" what something is does not necessarily imply that it is; it might be a mere "possibility" that lacks reality or existence. In Locke's terms, just because we have "ideas" does not mean that they correspond, or "conform" to, objects external to and independent of those ideas. This pos- sible lack of correspondence is reflected in Kant's distinction between a purely possible realm of logical (analytic, synthetic) truth and a demonstrably actual realm of empirical (a posteriori, a priori) truth. What that purely possible realm of

logical truth is predicated on, however, cannot be accounted for within experi- ence, even if it "arises" from experience. Its basis is noumenal, or phenomenally unknowable, a function of the instruments of perception, which Kant character- izes in terms of consciousness rather than of language, by means of which our access to reality is mediated. To highlight such unknowability, Kant terms such a basis "the thing-in-itself" (Pure Reason B307)-a thing not "for us;' in Hegel's ter- minology, but concealed, as though behind a veil, from us. Although for Kant "the concept of a noumenon is a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility" (B312), in later thinkers such a concept prompts the "abysmal" thought that there is in fact nothing behind the veil.

For moderns, then, art is no longer a techne, or practical, sensuous activity, whose purpose is didactic and moral. Rather, it is a form of reflection, a sort of performative meditation, on the finitude of human being. That meditation at once penetrates to the heart of the human essence and "elevates [erhebt] our imagination, [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity:' a sublimity that, like Heidegger's anxiety toward death, can be experienced only when the mind is "elevated above any fear of... natural ef- fects" (Kant, Critique of Judgment 121, 123). This notion that art is grounded in the mind's activity of self-reflection, an activity exhibited above all in the arbi-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /72

trary and "created" nature of literary language, proves decisive for the aesthetic theories of Schelling, Schiller, and Hegel, all of whom image the aesthetic expe- rience in terms of a dialectical interplay of being and nothingness, however dif- ferent the roles given to aesthetic experience in their thought as a whole.

Modern aesthetics arises not by competing directly with the other sciences but

by constituting itself in its own separate and autonomous sphere. But in order for this modern constitution of aesthetics to occur, there must have occurred first a revolution in our view of the objects of the sensory world. That world needed first to be rationalized, intellectualized, in a way made possible by mod- ern science. Once having gained a uniformity and predictability, a regularity and

consistency that is assumed by Kant in his description of the a priori intuitions of

space and time, the confused nature of art's subject matter could gain a status which, although still confused (indistinct), was clear: art could impose its own

special kind of logic on the senses, a logic concerned with particulars and ex-

amples rather than rules and maxims, a logic which in Leibniz and Baumgarten could achieve a higher dignity than that given to it by the Greeks.7 Such logic produced a kind of knowledge that did not equal or rival that of the other sciences but which nonetheless was of indirect relevance to the real world: that is, its relevance was not in terms of truth, but in terms of beauty. The experience of beauty could thus be made disinterested: it could be given a cognitive status subordinate to that of the sciences (Baumgarten) and then be freed, in the romantics, from the need to masquerade as something cognitive altogether, asserting its importance on entirely different grounds, in order not merely to

compete with the sciences in importance but to assert its superiority. Kant's "dualism',' then, although still largely "classical" or constrained, is the

'jumping-off" place for the development, in the thought of such idealists as

Schelling and Hegel, of a qualitatively different kind of dualism based on binary opposition and made possible by the elimination of "the thing in itself" or un- knowable realm of noumena. The latter dualism is at once more radical and more subtle than Kant's, since it makes room for the potential collapse, para- doxically, of all oppositions. It is through such a collapse, or "universalization" of the Kantian antinomies, that the way is prepared for a modern ontology of re- flection, or absence, that does not merely limit and simultaneously preserve the

authority of science by skeptically critiquing its empiricist basis, as Kant did, but instead subordinates the analytical logic of science (based on the law of non-

contradiction) to a dialectical logic that is linked, in Schiller and Schelling, to aesthetic and religious experience, which is identified, in Hegel, with the unfold-

ing of the Concept throughout history; and which characterizes, in Heidegger and Derrida, the "being" of language itself. It is a logic, in all cases, that affirms the most extreme, non-rationalist (but not necessarily irrationalist) implication of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo-the implication that God's essence is wholly distinct from and independent of created existence-except that in place of the entirely free and arbitrary will of God, dialectics substitutes an autonomous logi-

27 For a helpful discussion of the independence of the notions of "clarity" and "distinctness" in relation to aesthetic objects, see Norton 30-33.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/73

cal mechanism fueled by historical processes that has "its otherness within itself," as Hegel says in the Phenomenology of Spirit (34). The logic of deconstruction, although fueled by arbitrary linguistic oppositions rather than historical pro- cesses, similarly contains its "otherness" within itself in so far as its very identity is

stipulated as dependent on such otherness. The valorization of written language characteristic of modern ontology is "un-

derwritten" by a modern "existentialism" in Gilson's sense, which presupposes a

binary opposition between sensuous and intellectual experience exemplified in its most radical form in the non-naturalistic tradition of German philosophy. Organicist theories of language and the modern semiotic view of the arbitrary nature of the sign both arise out of the aesthetic tradition fostered by German romanticism and idealism. But that tradition itself cannot be seen in isolation from the rise of modern science. For it is only modern empiricism's reduction of the classically "mimetic" view of language to a view of language as referring refer-

entially to objects outside itself that it becomes possible to take the further step of viewing language as anti-mimetic or representative of nothing-I mean Nothing -outside itself. The pre-modern metaphysics of presence, as opposed to the modern ontology of reflection or absence, does not have an empirical basis. Al-

though classical mimesis adopts a "correpondence theory of truth;' the corre-

spondence postulated is between model or archetype (Idea) on the one hand and object or "thing" on the other hand. The latter object is conceived as so unclear and indistinct that it is virtually without knowable properties and there- fore utterly dependent, in its "being,' on the Idea. In order for "meaning" or a

logically based notion of truth to arise, the independence and autonomy of its

counter-concept, the empirical, had to be established-an independence and

autonomy that no classical conception of eidos could provide since the latter was never seen as a feature of a subjectivity and capacity for reflection intrinsic to the human species. It was indeed the genius of German idealism to found the doctrine of the arbitrary nature of language on a basis at once universal and contextually independent so that it could be governed by a logic that was "other" to nature, yet a logic that was organicist-an organicity possessed of a "second"' distinctively human and reflective, "nature" In this way post-Kantian idealism transcends the limitations stipulated by Kant on knowledge of being through methods based on the self-limiting character of language. Homo textilis results from the narrativization of life within the boundaries of the text, such that life's highest moments are captured, realized, and made possible by words positing a life, or being of the text, that leaves behind any mere equation of life and words.

University of Oklahoma

Works Cited

Aarsleff, Hans.Language and Intellectual Hzstory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

. "The Rise and Decline of Adam and His Ursprache in Seventeenth-Century Thought" The Language of Adam, Dze Sprache Adams. Ed. Allison P. Coudert. Vol. 84. Berlin: Wolfenbutteler Forschungen. 277-95.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /74

. The Study ofLanguage zn England, 1780-1860. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Ariew, Roger. "Descartes and Scholasticism: The Intellectual Background to Descartes's Thought" The Cambridge Companzon to Descartes. Ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 58-90.

Aristotle. The Baszc Works ofAnstotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.

Austin, J.L. How To Do Thzngs Wzth Words. 2nd ed. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Bahti, Timothy. Allegores ofHzistory. Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Bambach, Charles R. Hezdegger Dzlthey, and the Criszs of Hzstorzczsm. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Beck, Lewis White. Early German Phzlosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996.

Beer, John. Introduction. Azds to Reflectzon. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. John Beer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. xli-cxlix.

Beiser, Frederick. The Soverezgnty of Reason: The Defense of Ratzonality in the Early Englzsh Enlzghtenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The AmencanJeremzad. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

The Puritan Origzns of the Amercan Self New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Bernasconi, Robert. The Questzon of Language zn Hezdegger's Hzstory of Being. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985.

Bowie, Andrew. Schellzng and Modern European Phzlosophy: An Introductzon. London: Routledge, 1993.

Bruford, W.H. The German Traditzon of Self-Cultzvatzon: 'Bzldung' from Humboldt to Thomas Mann.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Caputo,John D. Heidegger and Aquznas. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982.

. The MystzcalElement in Hezdegger's Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Phzlosophy of theEnlzghtenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951.

Cave, Terence. "The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance" Mzmesis: From Mzrror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols. Hanover, NH: University Press of New

England, 1982. 149-65.

Clark, Timothy. Derrzda, Hezdegger, Blanchot. Sources of Derrzda's Notion and Practice of Lzterature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. On Language. Vol. 3 of Coleridge's Wrtzngs. Ed. A.C. Goodson. Foreword

John Beer. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

- . "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius' Critizcsm: The Major Texts. Ed. WalterJackson Bate. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. 390-92.

Cottingham,John. "Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics, and Science'.' The Cambridge Companzon to Descartes. Ed.John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 236-57.

Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic: As Sczence of Expresszon and General Lznguistzc. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1909.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Lzterature and the Latzn Mzddle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Derrida, Jacques. "Faith and Knowledge" Religion: Cultural Memory in the Present. Ed.Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 1-78.

- . "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negatzvzty zn Litera-

ture and Lzterary Theory. Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 1-34.

- . Lzmzted Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber andJeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. 29-110.

"Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell and the Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham" Trans. Richard Klein. Dzacntzcs 9 (1979): 4-12.

-. Pohltzcs ofFrendshzp. Trans. George Colhlins. London: Verso, 1997.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/75

"Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices" Derrzda and Negatzve Theology. Ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992.

. "Signature Event Context." Trans. Samuel Weber andJeffrey Mehlman. Lzmited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. 1-23.

- Wrting and Dzfference. Trans. and Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Descartes, Rene. The Method, Medztatzons and Phzlosophy of Descartes. Trans. John Veitch. Intro. Frank Sewall. Washington: M. Walter Dunne, 1901.

Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Phzlosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Doing, James Conroy. "Denial of Hierarchy: Consequences for Scotus and Descartes'.'Jacob's Ladder and the Tree ofLzfe: Concepts ofHzerarchy and the Great Chazn ofBezng. Ed. Marion Leathers Kuntz and Paul Grimley Kuntz. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 283-95.

Elias, Norbert. The CzvilizzngProcess. Trans. EdmundJephcott. New York: Urizen Press, 1978.

- . On Czvilzzatzon, Power and Knowledge. Ed. with intro. Stephen Mennell andJohan Goudsblom.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

. The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habztus in the Nineteenth and Twentzeth Centures. Trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell. Ed. Michael Schroter. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1996.

Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.

Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolzc Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964.

Furniss, Thomas. "Addison, Joseph.' Encyclopedza of Aesthetzcs. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 12-16. 4 vols. 1998.

Gilson, Etienne. Bezng and Some Phzlosophers. 2nd ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Stud- ies, 1952.

Goethe,Johann Wolfgang von. Maxzms and Reflectzons. Ed. Simona Draghici. Washington, DC: Plutarch Press, 1997.

Grene, Majorie. A Portrazt of Anstotle. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

- . Kant and the Experence ofFreedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. The Norton Anthology of Lzterature. Ed. Nina Baym. 5th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1998. 1306-1446.

Hegel, G.W.F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. Intro. and commentary Michael Inwood. London: Penguin, 1993

- . Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Heldegger, Martin. The Baszc Problems ofPhenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

- . Bezng and Tzme. Trans.John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962.

. Existence and Bezng. Ed. Werner Brock. South Bend, IN: Gateway, 1949.

. An Introductzon to Metaphyszcs. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. Kant and the Problem of Metaphyszcs. Trans Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1997.

. Nzetzsche. 4 vols. Trans.Joan Stambaugh, David Farrel Krell, and Grank A. Capuzzi. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1987.

- . On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper, 1971. - . Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Henkel, Jacqueline. "Speech-Act Theory Revisited: Rule Notions and Reader-Oriented Criticism: Poetzcs 17 (1988): 505-30.

Henrich, Dieter. AesthetzcJudgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studzes zn Kant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /76

Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflectzons, 1804-1834. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

- . Coleridge: Early Vzszons, 1772-1804. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Kahn, Charles H. "Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy" Ed. Parviz Morewedge. Phzlosophies of Existence. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. 7-17.

Kant, Immanuel. Cntzque ofJudgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.

. Cntzque ofPure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Modern Library, 1958.

Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of hzs Phzlosophy. New York: Random House, 1968.

Koyre, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinzte Unzverse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. "Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual Overview" Encyclopedza of Aesthetzcs. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 3. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 416-28. 4 vols. 1998.

Leibniz, G.W. Selections. Ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Charles Scribner, 1951.

Locke,John. An Essay ConcernzngHuman Understandzng. Ed.John W. Yolton. London:J.M. Dent, 1976.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain ofBezng. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Lowith, Karl Martzn Heidegger: European Nzhzlzsm. Ed. Richard Wolin. Trans. Gary Steiner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Lussky, Alfred. Tzeck's Romantzc Irony. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1932.

Macintyre, Alasdair. "Ontology." The Encylcopedza of Phzlosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. Vol. 5. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 542-43. 8 vols. 1967-72.

Mackie, Erin, ed. The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selectzons from the Tatler and the Spectator. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 1998.

Marion, Jean-Luc. "Cartesian Metaphysics and the Role of the Simple Natures" The Cambridge Com-

panzon to Descartes. Ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 115-39.

Mennell, Stephen, andJohan Goudsblom. Introduction. On Czvilizatzon, Power, and Knowledge. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 1-45.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mznd: From Colony to Provznce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Nichols, Stephen G. "Romanesque Imitation or Imitating the Romans" Mzmesis: From Mzrror to Method, Augustzne to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982. 36-59.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Baszc Writzngs of Nzetzsche. Trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1968. 439-602.

Norton, Robert E. Herder's Aesthetzcs & the European Enlzghtenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man Between God and theDevil. Trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbartl. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Owens, Joseph. "The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics-Revisited" Ed. Parviz

Morewedge. Philosophies ofExzstence. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. 33-59.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Ideology and Speech-Act Theory." Poetzcs Today 7 (1986): 59-72.

Randall,John Herman. Aristotle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.

Richardson, Robert D.Jr. Emerson: The Mznd on Fzre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Richter, Friedrich. Martzn Luther and Ignatius Loyola. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1960.

Ross, Stephen David. "Beauty" Encyclopedza ofAesthetzcs. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 237-244.4 vols. 1998.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Dzscourse on the Ongin and Foundatzons of Inequalzty Among Men. Rousseau's Poltzcal Wntzngs. Ed. Alan Ritter andJulia Conaway Bondanella. Trans.Julia Conaway Bondanella. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988. 3-57.

Safranski, Rudiger. Martzn Hezdegger: Between Good and Evzl. Trans. Ewald Osers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS/77

Schlegel, Friedrich von. Schlegel's Phzlosophy ofLzfe, and Phzlosophy ofLanguage. Trans. A.J.W. Morrison. London: George Bell and Sons, 1876.

Schleiermacher, D.E. The ChnstzanFaith. English trans. of 2nd German ed. Ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Steward. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1928.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Wzll and Representatzon. 2 vols.Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969.

Searle,John. Expresszon and Meanzng: Studzes zn the Theory of Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

-. Speech Acts: An Essay zn the Phzlosophy ofLanguage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Seligman, Paul. "Being and Forms in Plato" Phzlosophies of Exzstence. Ed. Parviz Morewedge. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. 18-32.

Sophocles. Oedzpus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1941.

Sorabji, Richard. Tzme, Creatzon, and the Contznuum: Theories zn Antzquzty and the Early Mzddle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Szondi, Peter. Introductzon to Lzterary Hermeneutzcs. Trans. Martha Woodmansee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Thomas, Downing A. Muszc and the Orngns of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Tillich, Paul. A Hzstory of Christzan Thought: From ItsJudazc and Hellenistzc Origins to Exzstentialzsm. Ed. Carl E. Braaten. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Utterback, Raymond V. "The Natural Order: Doctrines of Hierarchy and Correspondence in a Generation of Shakespeare Criticism'"Jacob's Ladder and the Tree of Lzfe: Concepts ofHzerarchy and the Great Chazn ofBeing. Ed. Marion Leathers Kuntz and Paul Grimley Kuntz. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 267-82.

Vance, Eugen. "Saint Augustine: Language as Temporality" Mzmesis: From Mzrror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982. 20-35.

Wellek, Rene. The LaterEzghteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Vol. 1 of A Hzstory of Modern Crtzicsm 1750-1950. 8 vols. 1955-92.

-. The Romantzc Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Vol. 2 of A Hzstory of Modern Critz- czsm 1750-1950. 8 vols. 1955-92.

- . American Crtzcism 1900-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Vol. 6 of A Hzstory of Modern Crtzczsm 1750-1950. 8 vols. 1955-92.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Phzlosophzcal Investzgatzons. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972.

Zimmerman, Michael E. Eclzpse of the Self:

The Development ofHezdegger's Concept ofAuthentzczty. Athens: Ohio University Press,1981.

-. "Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology." Ed. Charles Guignon. The Cambridge Companzon

to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 240-69.