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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

sadness allows nature to slough off its lament. It speaks as the other to both nature, as it is misunderstood, and history, as it is represented in a determined way, the victim of natural laws as they are defined by networks of entitled knowledge. Benjamin would take these early thoughts about language, nature, and the taboo aesthetics that would express, or have expressed, nature‘s sadness, and expand them into his dissertation. The Origin of German Tragic Drama is also an attempt to provide a defense based in historical observation of that linguistic theory. This is because it finds in the Baroque that moment when nature had been most thoroughly repressed by the appropriative aspect of the title: ―Of all the profoundly disturbed and divided periods of European history, the baroque is the only one which occurred at a time when the authority of Christianity was unshaken‖ (OGT 79). The effect of this authority gave aesthetic uses of language no actual let. Because man could neither submit to, nor rebel from, the language of Christianity, the trauerspiel emerged as the only legitimate expression of historical change. Real history is expressed in the trauerspiel, Benjamin argues, through its realization that nature mourns under man‘s ambiguous words for it. The apotheosis of trauerspiel lies in its a-signifying, gestural, core: ―[t]here is no such thing as a tragic pantomime,‖ Benjamin would note, both in ―The Role of Language…,‖ and then again in OGT (59, 118). The things that a trauerspiel presents to its audience are topical, political, and easily suggest their being the result of a minimally submerged, universally recognized, historical fact or spirit. What else does the trauerspiel reveal, then, about taboo, aesthetic language, and their relationship to nature and history? The answer lies in following Benjamin with his suggestion that knowledge of a thing exists only in its extremes – in this case, those 25
aspects of his linguistic theory that treat of fate. If fate is produced by the name man gives to himself, then, as fate, it would seem to be the contradiction of the expression of natural history. In seeking the quintessential example of the trauerspiel, Benjamin concurs with Goethe that it occurred in the drama of the Spanish playwright Calderon, for it was he that was best able to articulate the proper role of fate within natural history. Instead of conjugating fate as the direct opposite to the aesthetic intention of the trauerspiel‘s articulation of natural history, Benjamin uses fate to demonstrate the irreducibly dialectical identities of both ―natural history‖ and ―fate.‖ Natural history is possible because of the grace that fate bequeaths; fate is more than the result of some ineluctable and divine determination: Goethe‘s deference [to Calderon] is absolutely decisive if we are to acquire insight into the drama of fate. For fate is not a purely natural occurrence – any more than it is purely historical. Fate, whatever guise it may wear in a pagan or mythological context, is meaningful only as a category of natural history in the spirit of the restoration-theology of the Counter-Reformation. It is the elemental force of nature in historical events, which are not themselves entirely nature, because the light of grace is still reflected in the state of creation. But it is mirrored in the swamp of Adam‘s guilt. For the ineluctable chain of causality is not in itself fateful. (OGT 29) If the mourning of nature is to be heard, it must overcome its personification in guilt. It is precisely the challenge that a philosophically deterministic theory of history makes to nature that fate, as Benjamin construes it, serves to thwart. Trauerspiels expose the lie of deterministic history, that ―ineluctable chain of causality,‖ in their representation of death‘s significance as atonement rather than as inevitable punishment. The best stance from which to write a trauerspiel and confront the falsity of the personification of natural history in guilt – the aesthetic practice in which ―natural 26
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 and 26: meaning in the words he appoints to
Page 27 and 28: ―The Role of Language in Trauersp
Page 29 and 30: God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
Page 31 and 32: conceived of as a pantomime where t
Page 33: ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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
show all

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?