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

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his objects as pieces of property; better to say that he is possessed by them: ―He appears inspired by them and seems to look through them into their distance, like an auger‖ (207). The task, surely, that lies before an ethical use of poetic language that would give vent to the absconded world of natural historical language would be one where the goal is to prevent the apocalypse from occurring through reminding ourselves of the transitory names of things before they become secreted away by the assumed purity of a legal judgment. Naming ourselves, is, seemingly, the only opportunity we get. How can man name himself, such that he avoids the apocalyptic end that all things tend toward? A proper name is not a sign (a common noun). If a taboo is something that is invoked to describe what is being repressed, then surely that taboo begins to be broken once it is given a name? Questions like these can motivate a reading of Benjamin‘s theory of language that reveals, through its eccentric inclusions, a consistent explanation of an aesthetic that attempts to undermine the taboo which entitlement creates and why self- control, in the sense of living-up to one‘s name, was deemed by Benjamin, in his prescription that one must attack taboo from the position of de-personalized authority, to be antithetical to avoiding apocalyptic ends. In fact, the attributes that Benjamin gives to man‘s language – that as transmission it moves from its genetic coordinates into the dissipation of its estuary, as information it mimics God‘s power to inform things with meaning, as law it induces fate – produce a plethora of disturbing qualifications that complicate the relatively stable two-word division with which he begins and from which he forms the implicate order of the OGT. Here are a few examples of those utterances about the two-word theory that have just such a problematic quality. These quotations are found in ―Trauerspiel and Tragedy‖, 17
―The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy‖, and ―On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.‖ They are all written in 1916 and are collected in Volume 1 of Benjamin‘s Selected Writings: Language never gives mere signs. However, the rejection of bourgeois linguistic theory by mystical linguistic theory likewise rests on a misunderstanding. (69) Sadness, unlike tragedy, is not a ruling force. It is not the indissoluble law of inescapable orders that prevails in tragedy. It is merely a feeling. What is the metaphysical relation of this feeling to language, to the spoken word? That is the riddle of the mourning play. (59) This play is ennobled by the distance which everywhere separates image and mirror-image, the signifier and the signified. Thus, the mourning play presents us not with the image of a higher existence but only with one of two mirror-images, and its continuation is not less schematic than itself. The dead become ghosts. The mourning play exhausts artistically the historical idea of repetition. (57) In the word, creation took place, and God‘s linguistic being is the word. All human language is only the reflection of the word in name. The name is no closer to the word than knowledge is to creation. The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytic in nature, in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word. (68) Every speech in the tragedy is tragically decisive. It is the pure word itself that has an immediate tragic force. (59) How language can fill itself with sadness, how language can express sadness, is the basic question of the mourning play, alongside that other question: How can the feeling of sadness gain entry into the linguistic order of art? (60) Thus, with the ambiguity of the word, its signifying character, nature falters, and whereas the created world wished only to pour forth in all purity, it was man who bore its crown. This is the significance of the king in the mourning play, and this is the meaning of the Haupt- and Staatsaktion. These plays represent a blocking of nature, as it were an overwhelming damming up of the feelings that suddenly discover a new world in language, the world 18
Page 1 and 2: TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
Page 3 and 4: Christopher David Chapman practice.
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
Page 7 and 8: objectification, while titles are a
Page 9 and 10: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
Page 11 and 12: taboo, as the following remark indi
Page 13 and 14: emind us too hastily only of Benjam
Page 15 and 16: e renewed in philosophical contempl
Page 17 and 18: the word “Title.” I do this out
Page 19 and 20: where fate - the agent of nature‟
Page 21 and 22: Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
Page 23 and 24: come into their meaning through the
Page 25: meaning in the words he appoints to
Page 29 and 30: God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
Page 31 and 32: conceived of as a pantomime where t
Page 33 and 34: ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
Page 35 and 36: aspects of his linguistic theory th
Page 37 and 38: decision-making powers, we can demo
Page 39 and 40: him to transpose arguments about th
Page 41 and 42: Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
Page 43 and 44: eath of this world, and from it the
Page 45 and 46: magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
Page 47 and 48: elegated to the setting in which th
Page 49 and 50: Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55 and 56: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 57 and 58: terms that this chapter wishes to c
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76: while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78:
Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80:
Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82:
George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84:
to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86:
commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88:
modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90:
the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92:
Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94:
delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96:
presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98:
described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100:
10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102:
obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104:
passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106:
Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108:
saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110:
then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112:
‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114:
difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116:
itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118:
subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120:
his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122:
eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124:
dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126:
Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128:
Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130:
apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132:
―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134:
to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136:
neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138:
y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140:
E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142:
that have not traditionally been co
Page 143 and 144:
The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146:
Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148:
Bornstein, for example, is interest
Page 149 and 150:
the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152:
Do come, do come. I can see us at B
Page 153 and 154:
the political implications of that
Page 155 and 156:
the winners of its game (148). Beca
Page 157 and 158:
iography and how he can be seen to
Page 159 and 160:
to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162:
view of Pound‘s political beliefs
Page 163 and 164:
which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166:
interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168:
elationships that they believed to
Page 169 and 170:
commemoration is to writing (Derrid
Page 171 and 172:
knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174:
new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175 and 176:
ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177 and 178:
Ontologies, such as those that belo
Page 179 and 180:
this mystery could only be experien
Page 181 and 182:
attention to the way names effect t
Page 183 and 184:
Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
Page 185 and 186:
understanding how de-personalizatio
Page 187 and 188:
Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
Page 189 and 190:
WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
Page 191:
The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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