TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

his subjectivity as a blend of fact and fiction, goes unheralded in theories and readings
like Blasing's. Her preoccupation with the Symbolic Order, as if it, alone and
autonomous, were the hearth and home of all cultural production permeates a number of
recent theories about the relationship between subjectivity, history, and lyric-poetry.
Pound‘s de-personalized poetry requires no such metaleptic break for its expression.
Sharon Cameron, for example, finds that "we don't know what the im of
impersonality means" (ix). Impersonality, in a nutshell, usually refers to the artist's
understanding that her style underwrites and conditions the form of aesthetic production.
Cameron's return to the topic of impersonality betrays its essentialist bias in its tacit
answer to the rhetorical question she poses, when it offers Simone Weil among its
exemplary impersonal figures. Her version of impersonality ignored the constitutive
factor that style plays in the registry of the real. Weil‘s understanding implies, instead,
that impersonality involves the dissolution of a person or ego that is at odds with a
foundational aptitude for self-fashioning. Weil's philosophies of egoic-dissolution depend
on there being some essential thing that can be dissolved. Pound's impersonality begins
with the much different premise: that there was ever any such thing as a person to begin
with. Impersonality, to hazard a definition then, is the awareness that style lends
existence its ability to aesthetically register itself for an audience's consideration. It was
his prerogative to extend this belief such that he became the screen upon which his
narrator, Mauberley, would fashion his fictionally creative author, ―E.P.‖
We might begin to address Blasing‘s impulse to combine Deleuzian and Lacanian
models of subjectivity with that which Sharon Cameron believes has been perennially
missing in our understanding of impersonality. We might restate her problem then by
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