Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language , livre ebook

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160 pages

English

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This book explores the relationship between literature and ethics, showing how literature and art work to open up a part of ethics that resists traditional philosophy. Focusing on three American Romantic texts—Wieland, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and The Marble Faun—Robert Hughes demonstrates how each dramatizes the ethical, psychological, and existential imperative to put the experience of our own traumatic limits (death, mortality, and being) into poetic language. To develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, Hughes also draws on four twentieth-century continental thinkers—Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou—each of whom, in his own way, proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension of ethics. The book also points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary post-Romantic continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics, and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up, this subjective space of foundational ethics
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction

1. Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History

Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What It Goes to Prove

2. Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics

The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier

3. Brown’s Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death

Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death

4. Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being

Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger’s Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting that Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One’s Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny

5. Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude

Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism

6. Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun

Hawthorne’s Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of the History of Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address

7. Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma

The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics

Epilogue: Word after Word

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Esthétique et philosophie de l'art

USA

United States of America

Literary theory

Romanticism

États-Unis

Gothic

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	02 août 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438431956
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	15 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor

Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language
Robert Hughes

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Robert, 1968–
   Ethics, aesthetics, and the beyond of language / Robert Hughes.
         p. cm.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 978-1-4384-3193-2 (alk. paper)
   1. American fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Aesthetics in literature. 5. Psychology and literature. I. Title.
   PS374.E86H84 2010
   813.001—dc22                                                                                                      2009051690
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

List of Illustrations Cover: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Orpheus , Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY Illustration 1: Portrait of a young woman, purportedly Beatrice Cenci, artist unknown. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Roma Illustration 2: Vincent van Gogh, Shoes [F255]. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) Illustration 3: Iannis Xenakis, first page from the score of Nomos Alpha. Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited, 1967.

Acknowledgments
Cover image: Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Orpheus , Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.
A shorter, earlier version of chapter one was published under the same title in Arizona Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Fall 2005).
The image of the portrait associated with Beatrice Cenci, in chapter 2 , has been granted courtesy of the Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico e Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma. Photo credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.
The image of Vincent van Gogh's Shoes , in chapter 4 , has been granted courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
The image from Iannis Xenakis' score for Nomos Alpha , in chapter 5 , is reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. © Copyright 1967 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited.
A shorter, earlier version of chapter 7 was published under the same title in Postmodern Culture 17, no. 3 (May 2007).
Introduction

Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
Since at least the time of the classical Roman poet, Horace, it has been a commonplace of how we speak about literature to say that it must not only delight and give pleasure—it must also instruct and be useful ( Ars Poetica , lines 333–34, 343–44). True, we do not ordinarily expect a poem to teach us how to make a couch or train a horse, but when children are required to read literature in school, perhaps more than anything else we expect it to educate their moral sensibilities. Ubiquitous as the Horatian platitude remains, it has hardly gone uncontested in recent centuries—even among critics and writers seeking merely to refine its scope. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who so often proposed an explicit moral to his tales, nevertheless did not flatter himself that such apothegms, or the romances that support them, operate with anything like direct influence. As he puts it in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables :
When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The Author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral … — … as by sticking a pin through a butterfly—thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. (352)
Thus, Hawthorne suggests—and perhaps the old Roman would agree with him 1 —that the living ethical force of a work of literature, the good that it may effect, is reducible neither to the content of any didactic advice it may offer, nor even to its moral theme. Indeed, to insist relentlessly upon a direct exposition of the moral is to do violence to both the aesthetic and the ethical potential operative in the work, since this potential derives from some indirect, “far more subtile” process amenable to beauty, pleasure, and life.
Such indirection seems counterintuitive in many respects, not least of which is our everyday notion of language. In the ordinary consideration of the matter, language is a tool. One has a thought, perhaps a moral injunction, and wishes to make it someone else's thought too, so one speaks, or writes, and the thought is thereby carried on the wings of language from one's own mind to that of the other. And yet, upon further reflection, most people will also recognize that language can reach beyond its function as a tool for the communication of ideas. In language, writes Johann Gottfried Herder, the great eighteenth-century critic and philosopher,
[a] breath of our mouth becomes the portrait of the world, the type of our thoughts and feelings in the other's soul. On a bit of moving air depends everything human that men on earth have ever thought, willed, done, and ever will do; for we would all still be roaming the forests if this divine breath had not blown around us, and did not hover on our lips like a magic tome. 2
Language is more than just the first, most fundamental technology and does more than just carry ideas from one head to another. It is also, as Herder suggests, the foundational fact of our humanity. In the most thoroughgoing way, language structures our thought, guides our perception, and gives the very raw material of our dreams and imaginings. Even beyond its celebrated power for representation, language reaches into our souls, enlivens the world and the things around us, and structures the most basic relationship between ourselves and the other. It is the most essential work of literature—as the present book will argue—to renew our sense for this dimension of language beyond representation. But if this is so, how then are we to understand the common intuitive sense, recognized from Horace to Hawthorne, that literature also bears upon the ethical? What does this insight imply for an ethics beyond representation and representational thought? How would we understand an ethics in these terms? And how, finally, are we to think about the relationships among literature, ethics, and this “beyond of language”?
So here, on the terrain of this “beyond” of language, the present study addresses itself to the intersection of two problems: the problem of literature and the problem of ethics. The problem of literature regards the question of what literature is—for present purposes, this regards especially the question of how literature works to engage the reader's interest and passion, what kind of work it performs upon the reader, and how it manages to afflict the reader with the urgent sense that something in the text is calling for a response. The problem of ethics regards the question of whether anything even remains of ethics after one concedes the point that virtually everything one may consciously think perhaps falls more properly under the heading of politics —that is, under the historically contingent and the ideologically freighted. At the intersection of these two problems, then, one finds the two more precise questions of this book: how might one think of a properly ethical dimension to literature, and how might one think of an aesthetic dimension to ethics. These key questions are posed in tandem by the core literary texts of the present work, three works of Romantic American fiction: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), Washington Irving's “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860).
Each of these texts, as we shall see, strikes a complex relation between the ethical and the literary, a productive tension between an intellectual effort to describe or to present the ethical and the necessarily indirect, aesthetic workings of literary fiction. In the postscript to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for example, the text begs the question of the moral of the preceding tale, but then seems to assert that no reasonable moral may be derived from the remarkable legend. In Wieland , the prefatory advertisement claims as the novel's purpose the illustration of the moral constitution of man, but then the novel proceeds to destabilize both an ethics of faith as well as an ethics of reason. In The Marble Faun , the preface announces the novel's ambition to evolve a thoughtful moral, but then weaves a text of the most fragile uncertainty and profoundest perplexity, as if to suspend its readers in relation to a void of thought, a place where ethics confronts some impossibility of thinking.
The present study reads these works of early American fiction and takes them in earnest both for their moral ambitions and for the impossibility they seem to announce in the way one can think about ethics. What this book finds is that each text locates an ethical demand precisely at the place where language and understanding fail and reason arrives at an impasse. Literature, as we shall see, highlights and imposes a psychological, existenti