how the new new middle ages will be a radiant modernism with a queer cowboy for its dean: kalamazoo 2009

"A city of light is built on a cliffside.
The edge of the abyss is too damp.
The first birth has no memory."

Tomaž Šalamun

Despite (although not, in order to spite) a recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen in which he declared that the colon/long title is dead, that the slash is the new colon, etc., I have titled this post with such a long title and a colon as above. It is a long post, and its not telelogically driving up to one point or presi about the conference. But I am trying to cultivate an ethos or an anticipation in it for a rough beast I think I feel (or at least want to feel) slouching towards a future kalamazoo, and a future middle ages.

I have been meaning to post-kalamazoo blog since I returned, via car, from that 12 highway-hour pilgrimage; but alas, I was fated instead to endure a headcold that prevented me from thinking or writing anything so much as an email of a few lines until now. It is more than safe to say that I had a fantastic time, and that again I want to thank every one that is making medieval studies and the humanities in general a better place to be building, dwelling, and thinking. Folks involved in the BABEL swarm-singularity are all so beautiful I can barely even think of naming them all. But, new to Kalamazoo and comrade-in-scholarship at NYU Liza Blake pulled her share in making this year memorable, as did one Mo Pareles. One Julie O. (who has been making some waves in a conversation over at In the Middle) as well was a wonderful person to have met and to see happy to meet BABEL as well. As usual, the event and ensuing late-night frivoloty took its own toll on my wakefullness, which also delayed this post.

So much of the discussion over at In The Middle has focused on discussions surrounding pleasure and affect, stemming from a set of BABEL panels on pleasure and ethics in medieval scholarship, that I think I would like to try to give shelter to another set of movements that were going on during the conference as well. These movements were not really a separate discussion from that of pleasure and ethics, but I want to remember them as in some way as a distinct thread of thought. §

Radiance and Theory: A Phenomenology without Subject and Without Concept

Only God exists. Spirits are a phantom.
Blind shadows of machines concealing the Kiss.
My Death is my Death. It won't be shared
with the dull peace of others squashed beneath this sod.

Whoever kneels at my grave--take note--
the earth will shake. I'll root up the sweet juices from
your genitals and neck. Give me your mouth.
Take are that no thorns piece your

eardrums as your writhe, like a worm,
the living before the dead. Let this oxygen
bomb wash you gently. Explode you only

so far as your heart will support. Stand up
and remmeber. I love everyone who truly knows me.
Always. Get up now. You've pledged yourself and awakened.

Tomaž Šalamun, "epitatph"

These musings are trying to collect up a whole bundle of thoughts from talks given on various panels by Anna Klosowska, Eileen Joy, Nicola Masciandaro, Karl Steel, Mo Pareles, Eileen Joy, and Ethan Knapp. Really, what has perhaps prompted me the most is Ethan Knapp's assertion that theory is not dead, but that theory may not be or have ever been what we think it is. Namely, that 'Theory,' a la Derrida et. al., when it entered into the US academy in the 1960's, could only be admitted by making itself something that would fit into what was already going on. Thus, the Yale school allowed theory to be admitted into our departments, at the cost that it enter as being about--in the last analysis--language and only language. Really, the whole body of literature we might call the theoretical turn owed and owes an immense debt to phenomenology--a debt which had to be forgotten to gain admittance into american thought. So, in medieval studies, in continuing to do 'theoretical work' in this field, perhaps it is time to turn to theory as a turn to phenomenology as a way of thinking about conditions of possibility--which is to say a way of thinking about everything itself and not just to confine our thought to language. And, to do so is to admit into the project of medieval studies and literary criticism the capacity of doing philosophy itself--writing about the middle ages not just to produce some more knowledge about Chaucer or whoever, but as a whole alluring event, a philosophical event calling into the nearness the distances of the cosmos itself. Theory thus as events of life and not just events of language--as the path of language into the world and its events and appearances (and not as a way into the monad of consciousness a la Husserl--but into the split of that consciousness, always already at work as not in synch with itself, as Derrida discusses in his most early of books la Voix et le phénomène).

I like this kind of phenomenology. As a way of getting back into the world. As a kind of event which forces a rupture in language so we can slip into a more pleasurable world. But I like this kind of phenomenology as well because I do not think it needs to be thought either with concepts or in terms of a subject whose presence and experience forms the sole site of arbitration for the happening of phenomenon. Phenomenology, rigorously understood, could be read as language about phenomenon--about what appears, or what happens. And, if Karl Steel's relentless and careful readings of animal's in the middle ages, especially as they are thought of at the moment of death and the moments of the apocalypse (at the very closing of cosmos itself!)--if this work teaches us anything, it certainly teaches us that all sorts of events have no need of a human subject in order to happen, or to matter. Last year, Karl gave a paper (if my memory serves me right) in which near the end he stated how he wanted to hold on to a particular moment of speculation, of hesitation, about the fate of animal bodies at the moment of the resurrection (what happens to ingested animals, etc.), as holding open the possibility of thinking the animal as animal, at its most animal, as animal first and last--and then lamenting that this medieval text quickly foreclosed this possibility. This year, Karl's work, I would say, held open that very possibility (thanks to Nicola Masciandaro for a good conversation that helped me piece this out), as pure poetry, and opening up the ringed space of the forgetting of the animal, while still keeping it ringed enough to be an open space, to hear the very language of the animal at its most animal, for the animal.

Anna Klosowska, in comments on a BABEL panel all about the place of pleasure in medieval studies (I will post my own preliminary remarks from this panel right after this post), called for scholarship without concepts, following Graham Harmon, and what she calls a post-abysmal way of thinking. This, and the babel of the animal the moment before its annihilation--these are the radiant events of a new phenomenology that will open out of contact with the middle ages. For Anna, we ended up--even before the pleasure panel, at the same panel as Karl's paper above--back at the moment of radiance in troubadour lyrics, with the figure of a lark weaving light--an intense radiance that seemed to me at once the poem as alluring jewel and the poem as luminous food, a feasting for the eyes and body in a burning heat. And this lead to a discussion later about burning up and purgatories. But this purgatory would not be purgative, would be the moment of ease. For, the figure of the poet or the intellectual as tortured genius has got to go--yes, it is still hanging around and it has got to go because we need to think the event of writing and the event of reading as these moments of radiance, or bearing witness to "the alchemical creation of the world." But how can we trust this radiance is not the shiny jewel of some demon ready to torment us back into being 19th century artists again?--more on this below.

Additionally, in the SSHMA panel on Queering the Anglo-Saxon studies , Eileen Joy recast the queer possibility of incest in talking about the lives of Guthlac in an inordinate love of what is at hand, of what is closest: for her, the sibling, the sister. Yet, in this love, are we seeking an alternative to the asceticism or the masochism that we call queer perhaps all-too-delightfully in the lives of saints, in Foucault's lives of infamous men, in Foucault's cura sui which he hoped would produce a kind of extra-discursive queer body? Or, do we find ourselves back in that bind: the queer self-abjecting; only in the self-denying, subject-destroying mode which is, my friends, the essence of the destructive practice of the religious (the re-bound, the re-read, the overdetermined, re-legio)? "Can someone help me take the religion out of my queer sex, but not take the queer sex out of religion, because that's the most interesting part--and here we are back where we started" [qtd. from memory, open to correction] Joy asked. Again, we are stuck in this bind of wanting the pleasure, the event of pleasure, a phenomenology built around pleasure. Why not insert here a phenomenology of pleasure and not of a consciousness? This is perhaps how Mo Pareles' paper on the same panel, thinking about the Legion story from Mark in the OE gospels, worked so well with Eileen's paper. Mo's paper looked into those flows and swarms and multiplicities of the man inhabited by the demon who is called legio because he is many, and the demon's migration with Christ's permission in the swine. She asked about the queer contagion, still around now, of the multiple and the demonic, being tracked now across our nation as a swine flu that demands the closing of flows and borders, demanding singularities and not swarms (to clarify, Mo was not asking for the closing of borders, etc....those who fall to the usual fear of the queer contagion). What is the moment of this passage, in its medieval OE manifestation, that touches on the modern and brings with it the allure that draws into its nearness the queer scholar? How do we understand this event as a literary and philosophical event?


What I want to offer then instead as the locus of the phenomenon of such a phenomenology is a kind of radiance, a kind of intensity. Not a replacement for the human subject in new clothes: I am not talking about you or me, not about conscious things. I am thinking about the happy coincidence of matter and matter in such an intense way that a kind of radiance happens, that a kind of gravitational allure occurs which then in turn just might allow a critical mass of consciousness to snag on it, to cooperate in a moment of bliss. If we are then going to talk about the responsibility or the ethics of this phenomenon, if we want to ask about whether the affects of the alluring are always good or always feel good, we need to ask why we want to ask about responsibility in the first place. Whose responsibility, and to what or to whom--to possibility?

That is, this is a moment of radiance 'beyond good and evil' that I would be after. The moment here is beyond the movements that have been reading--since its inception with Rimbaud et. al.--of literary modernism as the final movement of pessimism. Rather, this intense moment of the phenomena as alluring radiance, as the threshold of life and ecstasy, is perhaps the importance of modernism. Modernism as a supreme radiance, or desire for radiance. Where my collaborator Anna Klosowska would see Heidegger as the epitome of the modern that needs to be gotten beyond as the abysmal, I might actually re-incribe as within this radiance: right at the hear of a modernity and a literary modernism--especially where it contacts the medieval (in Pound's first Canto, in Eliot's Quartets, in early Auden, in DADA etc.).
§

For example, let's take a epitomizing piece of high modernity, a ready-made (that most depraved elegance of dysfunctional and disruptive modernist art--for the true parts of modernism were not the shoring of fragments against one's own ruins, but the lichens and freezes leeching into the ruins themselves, cracking the remainders of the past to dust not to eliminate it, but so we could ingest it and truly live AS the past!--pace the poetry of Pound, HD, prose of Stein, the saison en enfer, etc. See Charles Bernstein, A Poetics, "Pounding Fascism" et. al.) that I discovered while I was washing with my dishes the other day, in the form of an upside-down ramekin which I later placed on a nice rug in my living room for the sake of a digital photo:



HIC PORCELAIN it says. HERE PORCELAIN I think immediately of Nicola Masciandaro's paper his year at Kalamazoo which amounted to a phenomenology of decapitation, and ended with the voice of st. Edmund's head in the story of St. Edmund, calling out here, here, here, so people can find it, cradled by a hungry wolf who guards the head from the other beasts. A moment of tenderness, of event-ness in the sheer impossibility of the king decapitated and talking, with the greedy wolf cradling the disjunction of its being cut-off and its open mouth gaping open the space-time of différance at the where its most poetic of voices is produced: HIC PORCELAIN. Here. This. Here, this modenity, here, this middle ages. Thus event happening as the poetry of a HERE whose (perhaps unintentonal?) latin calls into nearness the scholarly language of a middle ages as it meets up so contingently with the high modernist 'ready made' so-decreed by the whim of a tired scholar washing his dishes on a spring evening in 2009 in Brooklyn, NY.

The ramekin is a perfectly brightening and glowing event, beckoning waves of allure into its radiant gravitational reach. HERE, PORCELAIN. Autodeictic and autoindexical movement, the bottom of the ramekin, usually hidden, calls to no one and to everyone that turns it over to tell us what we already know and tell it to us with its stamped on text HIC PORCELAIN, a mix of Latin preposition and modern English noun, already a labeled museum piece for the anthropology of a future excavating our most serious of culinary endeavors (crème brûlée, for example, a stamped HIC hiding under the crisp caramelized top, the creamy middle, the ceramic under-layer--for a crème brûlée involves the ramekin as well!--and facing the normal force of the table which upholds it!). Remember what C.S. Lewis wrote in his Discarded Image, even if he is stilted in his historiography: "One gets the impression that medieval people, like Professor Tolkien's Hobbits, ejnoyed books which told them what they already knew" (200). This THIS, this HERE, this HIC PORCELAIN calls to no one, does not need us, but pulls us into its radiance as a visual event of the poem when washing dishes and suddenly things, objects, MATTER itself can call out to the living, invite us to live with it, and radiate with it, in the threshhold of matter and life. This is what a medieval medieval studies, a disruptively modernist medieval studies could do under the sway of a new phenomenology which would demand a NEW INDEXICALITY (see Derrida's chapters on the index in Husserl in la Voix et le phénomène)--poems for papers and films for bibliographies. Love-ins for the queer university which is not a place or an institution but a incestuously auto-indexical event that happens at any school [and this came up in the BABEL panel on Ethics, with thanks to Carolyn Anderson on making space for the queer reader in the classroom even in cowboy boot Wyoming,, and more tangentially with papers on the coercive possibilities of language in writing and teaching...].

Thus literary modernism as a moment of our relatively more recent past is perfect as it calls to us and to the medieval as well, as a moment we are still not getting despite its passing late last century--as a moment as infinitely distant and near to us at the same time as the medieval has always been--they shine brightly forth in that which just happens, HERE.


I know this is full of rambling. more systematic, or at very least more lucid thoughts to follow in the next few days and weeks on more specific thoughts on what this radiance is, where it happens, and where it pulls us into our medievale future.

more while expecting kalamazoo...

Here is the paper, finally, from the Glossator conference in April at the CUNY graduate center. The final roundtable with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Greetham, Jesús Velasco, and Avital Ronell, with introductory remarks and questions from Nicola Masciandaro, can be heard here.

Affects and Their Gravities: Commentary as a Capacity of Care

1. Commentary and Secular Sense

Wai Chee Dimmock, ostensibly an Americanist, has argued for “literature as a democratic institution, vibrant and robust.”[i] Alternately, she finds literary culture a kind of slow moving “civil society”: “an unusually fine grained and lasting one, operating on a scale both too large and too small to be fully policed by the nation-state.”[ii] For Dimmock, the literary as such “is not an attribute resident in a text, but a relation, a form or entanglement, between a changing object and a changing recipient, between a tonal presence and the way it is differently heard over time.”[iii] Literature, “is thus an object with an unstable ontology, since a text can resonate only insofar as it is touched by the effects of its travels.”[iv] The literary is thus a relation.

We could, already, at a conference like this, apply certain epithets to this relation in a manner facile (yet perhaps needful)—understanding the literary as commentary, the act of translating which enables much of the movement of this society through deeper time as a kind of commentary. And we would in so doing deepen our understanding of commentary, of what we call the ‘literary.’ Yet, following this relation into moments of its manifestation will bring us to a strange territory: one that our classical notion of worldly civil society—one for and in this world—cannot, for all that, account for. Such a sense of the literary which, as relation we would call commentary, through deep time, would include strange phenomena. For instance, as Dimock enumerates, “Translation—the movement of a corpse by a vehicle driven by someone other than himself, and the movement of a text by a vehicle driven by something alien—unites the living and the dead in a gesture steeped in mortality and inverting it, carrying it on.”[v] Dimock is thus willing to admit that to acknowledge the sense which emerges from such a relation comes with a certain risk—as we knowledge that the literary as relation (between us, here, but also but also in meaningful relations with the dead) we must also acknowledge its filiations with the content and structure of religions and the religious.[vi] Just as Jean-Luc Nancy must acknowledge that politics (specifically the politics of democracy) in its history as the “renewed aporia of a religion of the polis” must go the way of fundamentalist theocracy or follow a radical “reinvention, perhaps, of what secularity means,” so too commentary (if we take it as a literary relation), like politics, must “assume a dimension it cannot integrate for all that, a dimension that overflows it, one concerning an ontology or an ethology of “being-with,” attached to absolute excedence [excédence absolue] of sense and passion for sense for which the word sacred was but the designation.”[vii] How might we gloss of this sense of being-with, trembling within what we call commentary?

Heidegger’s thinking on the structure of Mitda-sein (being-together) as a structure equiprimordial with Dasein stands out from his analysis of Care as a fundamental structure of Dasein in Part 1 of Sein und Zeit, to the point that Being-with or Being-together would be necessary for our being itself. I would offer this sense of Care which determines being-with as a gloss on a possible ground of an “ethology of ‘being-with’”:

Since being-in-the world is essentially care, being-together-with things at hand could be taken in our previous analyses as taking care of them, being with the Mitda-sein of others encountered within the world as concern. Being-together-with is taking care of things, because as a mode of being-in it is determined by its fundamental structure, care.[viii] (180)

To invoke this concept of Care is to assert that one’s being can only emerge as already oriented towards the Being-together of others that involves taking care of things. Being together thus involves a taking-care-of-things-together. It is this concept of Care, I would contend, which could provide access to the new kind of secularity that literature as civil society (as a way of Being-together) would need in its theoretical enunciation: a way of understanding how literary practices—specifically those of commentary—are caught up in the practices that simultaneously produce and consist of the sense of the mysterium being-together [the glosser participates in a society across time addressing herself to the text, the author, and previous glossers at the same time that she squeezes the sense out of a line of verse in bringing the stylus to the margin]. I would thus link commentary as Care to an ethos of Being-with while at same time reckoning with the resemblance of such a sense-producing structure to the production of sense proper to religions by locating its manifestation in the radically worldly and mundane practices of reading and writing (commentary).

According to Heidegger’s conceptualization, Care appears equiprioridally with Being itself, resulting in the practice of taking care of things as part of one’s reactionary and determined responses to the thrown-ness of finding oneself being-in the Mitdasein of others.[ix] Even so, this formulation of Care inextricably links Being-together to the possibility of the appearance of the mysterium of Being at all: “The being of Da-sein means being-ahead-of-onesself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered). This being fills in the significance of the term care...”[x] Care is a fundamental structure, not the result of conscious or appropriative practice. But when commentary might be understood as a taking care of things (texts) together (together because glossers will inevitably add to and argue with each other across time and space while they fill up the margins of a given text) then the question could then be posed—as we are together at a conference on commentary: can concrete practices of taking-care-of-things-together contain the possibility of producing in reverse the kind of exceedence I would ascribe to Care? I would offer the remainder of this paper, a commentary on two short sections from a contemporary poem, to risk attempting what must amount to that impossible heresy.

2. Commentary on two lines from “Daughter” by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge[xi]

from part one, “Dream”:

An angel swims silently to a flat rock in the night, where seabirds are sleeping, senses them,

and stops. Their recognizing her in the moonlight, without waking, is the physical sensation of meaning

of your dream, when you awake. The birds’ dream represents an angel, and later it shelters the meaning,

angel.

Berssenbrugge’s poems, like this one, charge the line with a task of generously exhausting her readers—pushing them into a game of remembering as one reels further and further towards the right margin. They can be for this reason, very forgettable lines—hard to call up and quote, but nonetheless leaving a reader with a residue of specific affects. These lines open a scene in which a swimming angel can sense.

The birds, sleeping, recognize the angel, and this recognition forms something of a ‘phenomenological correlative,’ to recognize in this line something akin to Eliot’s objective correlative even if it will open onto these secular literary aesthetics. The dream of the birds, within the dream of the poem (so-named by the section heading “dream”) does the work of a language, representing an angel, sheltering the meaning angel, and unfolding, even as an ethereal dream within the fiction of a poetic dream, a ‘physical sensation of meaning,’ except that unlike Eliot’s figure, here the sense is not conveyed with reliance on an image.[xii] Instead, the poem-commentary insists, sense is literarily and physically sheltered by the sound of the poem pronounced, and sheltered by a dream—as if the dream, as a wish or a desire, were also a physical phenomon in the world of the dream within the dream, pulling the angel towards itself, a gravity of affect pulling in and giving shelter to the meaning, even in an echo of itself after the dream is over.

The very first line physically works to shelter this sense, dissipating the s-sounds throughout the line, so that the angel’s approach, silently swims, is, physically, intimate with the very word ‘sense’ when the line is audibly pronounced. The physical feeling of the s anticipates sense before its arrival, but also helps to shelter it in the memory of the reader or listener as sound physically ties the end of a long line to its beginning, helping one to remember the sense of the long line. This “physical sensation of meaning’ consists in a recognition without waking—a dreaming within a dream which recognizes what is outside of the dream, but, impossibly, without breaching the boundary of the dream—giving the shelter of the dream over to itself on the condition that it shelter more than just dream (ie. meaning), even as what it contains (the meaning Angel) is within the ‘dream’ of the poem, but outside the dream of the birds inside the poem. §

from part 2 “Commentary”:

The dream represents a meaning to me. Then it’s a structure that shelters the meaning.

My emotion can represent an evaluation or contain one, of interaction between an etheral object

and an organism. The angels bows down.

The commentary opens itself by saying what the dream is doing. It does this in the form of lineated verse—verse of a long line, almost resembling prose, yet failing to reach all the way to the right margin despite coming quite close. The commentary establishes a temporal order for what the dream does (we must hold in reserve the question of which dream?): first, it represents. then, it is (a structure that shelters the meaning). Either the form of the two sentences of this first line is not parallel, or the being of the dream is considered its activity by the end of the first line. The dream thus has its being in sheltering. The difference between representation and being is quite significant. The dream is a structure that shelters the meaning. Now, what sort of structure is it?

Dimmock reminds us, as she explains her privileging of the audible over the visual in her theory of the literary relation, that “Literary study makes a large provision for the unvisualizable,”[xiii] and I might offer this moment as such a instance of that provision. What kind of structure shelters a meaning? If the meaning has moved into the very operations of ontology, it is a meaning whose being is in its very relation, in its unfolding as unveiling. The shelter of such a delicate creature would then surely be strange. Yet even though I would desire philosophical rigor for this paper in the last instance, I am really dealing with poësis, a poësis which is prior to any philosophy—so we will dare to name what is strange. To do so we must venture out of our text briefly because it is only later in the poem where we read that what is contained in the dream, the scene of the dream (rocks, angel, birds, etc.) is “like a stage set” (Part 2, 2^nd complete stanza).[xiv] A stage, as the marking off of a limit which is nonetheless an opening—an enclosure whose function it is to open for the audience, an open circle—a structure which functions to allow an event to occur from inside which overfills it and brings the audience into relation with it as the event of a theater, a figure (pace Nancy on Gérard Granel) operating in the mode, of “the simultaneity of the open and the ringed...the simultaneity of the void and the divided out”[xv]

The claim of the second line opens the possibility of a vacillation between representating and sheltering, or, containing, but with respect to an emotion. This similarity to the relations of the first line suggests the possibility that the dream is, or at least can operate in the manner of, an emotion—the history of dream as wish-fulfillment underscores this possibility—the dream as desire. The desire is not in itself an evaluation, but can contain one. This is the relation between a being (an organism) and an ethereal object (the literary). A desire then operates here as the stage of, or the scene of, the intellection. The affective lien between a being and the literary shelters the sense of that relation. The poet-exegete identifies a shelter within the text and cares for it—even while taking shelter in it among the other readers that will encounter this shelter. Her and our commentary Cares for this shelter, expanding it without compromising its uniqueness—making it available to a community on the condition of maintaining its singular texture. This Care is not the Anxious care of the religious for the sacred word worth more than the World [Heidegger’s Care too suffers under Angst], not the gnostic privileging of Word over World which the literary as a civil relation, a conference on commentary, or any civil gathering around any text constantly risks practicing. As sheltering, commentary could operate as a practice of giving the world back to itself in its very worldiness.

For the shelter to undergo the circumspection of commentary and yet continue to function as a shelter of meaning it must somehow be able to be given back itself and its sheltering. This sheltering and what it draws towards itself (in terms of the sense of the poem) as well as the preservation of this sheltering (which any commentary on it would require) thus provokes a relation that is the very meaning of Heidegger’s Care: “the possibility of a concern which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him, not in order to take “care” away from him, but to first to give it back to him as such.”[xvi] This poem’s own gloss on itself, if it is to care for itself, cannot simply open up this shelter and grasp at or gaze on the meaning that the shelter shelters, but must leap ahead of the poem’s own appearance so that it give back to the poem the event of its sheltering. The poet-exegete moves and thinks and is-with all of these events in the dream which operates as a stage that opens for the performance of the poem—a shelter which, once given it back to itself so that meaning be immanent in its sheltering, exerts such a gravity so as to make our sheltering of the poem’s sheltering possible, and in turn our gloss, our meaningful being-with.

At the end of our text, the Angel bows down. The Angel seems to have escaped from the dream and into the commentary. The angel tends to the sheltering, bows in the commentary to the sanctuary of sense that, being literary, can only be (in the first instance) felt or heard. Again, the dream first sheltered the meaning, “angel,” a thing that outside of it, bows down, as part of its commentary. The poem, at least the part of it which consists of the dream, is not unless the angel is, and is in such a way that it tends to the poem’s sheltering of sense as part of the commentary to the dream. The Angel is not only the dramatization, but also the literal event of the poem’s leaping ahead of both the sheltering and the meaning sheltered even within the topology and vocabulary of the poem itself so it can infinitely give itself back to itself. This angel is then not a religious worshipper, not bowing out of penitence or unworthiness, but in following and attending to, indeed leaping ahead of and sheltering, the affective gravity of the Being-with of the poem as commentary in which it has its being. Something of this being-with escapes itself while still remaining worldly and finite—escapes the finite figure of the dream which nonetheless somehow shelters the infinite sense that resounds in the impossible space and movement of the Angel between the inside and the outside of the dream.[xvii]

The success of the poem’s commentary on its own dream/desire depends on the preservation of this finite structure which shelters sense exceedent enough for an Angel from within the dream to bow to it. This is a capacity of the literary Dimock describes as the ability for tiny details of a text to shelter global relations through deep time: “These two—finite parameters and infinite unfolding—go hand in hand. The latter is embedded in the former, coiled in the former [I might say, sheltered by]...Scalar opposites here generate a dialectic that makes the global an effect of the grainy.”[xviii] This careful and circumspect bringing out of almost infinite sense out of finite figures might be seen as a concept of commentary itself as the ‘spice’ or “savor of the significance of the text” (as Nicola Masciandaro would say).[xix] But it need not be glossed as a religious exegesis of transcendent sense. Rather, I would gloss this relation of Care as the very relation of commentary, infinitely leaping ahead of the shelter so as to give the shelter back to itself in its sheltering (here, in the mise en abîme of the exe-poësis which, despite what it is, escapes itself to bring us in turn, outside of the poem, into the same relation, pulling us together into the shelter of its auto-commentary): a capacity for which, while remaining secular, a secular structure cannot keep account; a tending to the sense which, given back to itself, exceeds itself—the relation to the infinite that we are first drawn to by a finite dream, or even a desire for the finite entity of a poem bursting out from exegesis.

Giambattista Vico’s etymology of lex (for law) famously explains the term as referring initially to a gathering of acorns, then as a gathering of vegetables or crops, and finally “a collection of citizens, or the public parliament” from which gathering of lex or law gives way again to the gathering of letters into the legere of reading.[xx] This etymology, no matter how inventive, importantly roots reading in a practice emerging from a civil way of being-together. Literature operates as a lex alternative to the compulsory civil gathering of nations—but as a relation, one which gathers not only letters—where the civil gathering, rather than making the literary possible, is made possible and in fact manifested imminently in the literary. Commentary tends to this gathering-relation as being-together—across time and in a secular space, in the absence of the scribe and/or the receiver—, promotes it in reverse of the Heideggerian schema with which I began this essay, gathers beings into a secular order arising co-extensively with its sense in the shelter of commentary. Commentary tends to an alternative lex, not only alternate to the nation-state Dimock wisely wants out of, but also in its capacity to include sense in that order of being-together. Commentary: a secular practice of being-together, which can assume a dimension of sense.

[i] Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA (March 1999):1060.

[ii] Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: America Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8.

[iii] Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1064.

[iv] ibid., 1061.

[v] Dimock, Through Other Continents, 16.

[vi] ibid. Dimock refers to World religions as “well established phenomenon, one of the most durable and extensive on earth,” 23.

[vii] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Opening,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo et. al. (NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3.

[viii] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 180.

[ix] Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, §38 “Falling Prey and Thrownness,” §26 “The Mitda-sein of the Others and Everyday Being-with,” and §27 “Everyday Being One’s Self and the They,” on authentic Being and the everyday “leveling” of being or falling of discourse into idle talk, into which “Da-sein is disperesed in the they and must first find itself” (p.121), those passages part of those themes of Heidegger so misread by Sartre.

[x] Heidegger, Being and Time, 179-180.

[xi] Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “Daughter,” in I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006), 77-79.

[xii] Cf. F.O. Mathiessen, “The ‘Objective Correlative,” and “The Auditory Imagination,” in The Achievement of T.S. Eliot: An essay on the Nature of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

[xiii] Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” 1066.

[xiv] Berssenbrugge, “Daughter,” p. 78 Part 2, 2^nd complete stanza.

[xv] See Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Faith That Is Nothing At All,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, 73.

[xvi] Heidegger, Being and Time, 115.

[xvii] In one of the later Harry Potter novels (and I will remain vague here for those who have ‘spoiler’ concerns), Prof. Dumbledore says to Harry, who is concerned about the status of their current conversation within the poles of dream and reality, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and XXXXXX (New York: Scholastic, 2007).

[xviii] Dimock, Through Other Continents, 77.

[xix] Nicola Masciandaro, “Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy,” given at CUNY Graduate Center, Glossing is Glorious: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary, April 9, 2009.

[xx] Giambatissta Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1968), Book 1, LXV, p. 240.

excerpting from the corpse...

An excerpt from the middle-end of a seminar paper called "Knowledge, Sense, and Security: A Treatise with Reference to Walter Benjamin and Julian of Norwich," for a now-complete course called 'Security Issues":

....

For, the vision is of the head of a dying or dead Christ, an image not alien to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book. The passage is so astonishing that I will quote it here at length:

And in alle that time that he shewd this that I have now saide in gostley sight [of the Virgin], I saw the bodley sight lasting of the plenteous bleding of the hede [of Christ]. The gret droppes of blode felle downe under the garlonde like pelottes, seming as it has comen oute of the veines. And in the coming oute they were browne rede, for the blode was full thicke. And in the spreding abrode they were bright rede. And whan it came at the browes, ther they vanished. And notwithstonding the bleding continued tille many thinges were sensed and understonded, nevertheles the fairhede and the livelyhede continued in the same bewty and livelines.

The plentoushede is like to the droppes of water that falle of the evesing of an house after a grete shower of raine, that falle so thicke that no man may nomber them with no bodely wit. And for the roundhede, they were like to the scale of hering, in the spreding of the forhede. Thes thre thinges came to my minde in the time: pelletes, for the roundhede in the coming oute of the blode; the scale of a herring, for the roundhede in the spreding; the droppes of the evesing of a house, for the plentoushede unnumberable. This shewing was quick and lively, hidous and dredful, and swete and lovely.[1]

The head is continually bleeding, as if an infinite source of sensual sorrow and dying/decay, but with the constant and incessant mechanisms of life still at work. This is the combination of bleeding (as an operation of a body that is dying by bleeding out or by having been tortured with the ‘crown of thorns’ but also as the operation of a healthy living body when cut or even, in medieval medicine, bled for medicinal reasons) with the assertion that what is shown to bleed is, while hidous also lovely and in fact, with a certain “fairhede and livelyhede” in “the same bewty and livelines.” Thus the head itself and its gloss give way to a lively and bustling production clarification of colors and their location in the image which in turn gives way to a description of movements and shapes by means of strange similes—some very oddly specific (the herring) and others quite vague. That the vision in this image is only of the head is even more astonishing, as if presenting another impossibility in the Head of Christ severed (even if only for the sake of or in the representation of the vision) from the body: the decapitated God. The vision actually could have potentially contained within it the same problem Benjamin sees facing the writers of the Trauerspiel, that of a world where certain religious mechanisms remain, but the sense has been evacuated. That this could have been a problem for medieval writers, in advance of the Protestant removal of religious sense from profane life, is perhaps an emendation to be made to Benjamin’s historiography. What is important is that this play of representations, the simultaneity of death constantly refreshing itself in the vanishing blood within the mechanisms of life and dying (bleeding) becomes the absolute source for the productions of sense in Julian’s poetics, gives way to a whole flurry of similes concerning the sensual qualities of the dying Christ-head which are then re-iterated in terms of both the fact of their occurrence as simile and their sensual relation to things of this world. Julian, structurally, thus understands in advance what Benjamin claims for the poetics of the Trauerspiel:

And if it is in death that the spirit becomes free, in the manner of spirits, it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own. For this much is self-evident: the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse...Seen from the point of view of death, the product of the corpse is life. It is not only in the loss of limbs, not only in the changes of the aging body, but in all the processes of elimination and purification that everything corpse-like falls away from the body piece by piece. It is no accident that precisely nails and hair, which are cut away as dead matter from the living body, continue to grow on the corpse. There is in the physis, in the memory itself, a memento mori; the obsession of the men of the middle ages and the baroque with death would be quite unthinkable if it were only a question of reflection about the end of their lives.[2]

Benjmain even cites Lohensteins’s work “celebrating ‘the passion of Christ in alternate Latin and German poems, arranges like the limbs of the human body.’”[3] What is important to notice about this is the view of the corpse from the point of view of death, but for the sake of life, and the production of writing (be it critical or literary) and its sense in relation not just to the sensuality of the body, but to the figure of the body at its most secure and insecure—the dead body (sure it is dead, yet being dead, entirely vulnerable). Christ’s head, without his body, provides a most compelling example of this phenomenon, still sensing, seemingly forever producing sense extending out from the profane things of Julian’s own world. And the relation of Julian’s writing to the impossible (decapitated for the sake of the vision) head of Christ is one of sense-production, bound up in the manifestation of this kind of sureness not related to the sureness of gnostic knowledge for salvation from this world.

Julian pulls off an extraordinary trick in the order of sense available to her late-medieval female position, fully embodying this very logic of the corpse not only in her writing, but in an effort which effectively returned sense to the order of this world for her. The certainty that her writing manifests is written already in, on, and around, the sensations of Julian’s own late-medieval female body, and specifically her own death experienced as her life as an anchoress. That is, we speak not only of writing and sense related to the figure of a corpse, but also the writing of Julian’s own corpse. That becoming an Anchoress meant undergoing a ritual of last rights and enclosure into the anchorhold (as a tomb) as a gesture of being dead to the world is a commonplace of scholarship on late medieval piety.[4] Underscored by Julian’s own near-death experience which accompanies her vision, we cannot but wonder to what extent this ritual actually freed Julian to determine the course of her writing—to what extent being dead-in-life exempted her experience of this world from the compulsion to produce knowledge for the sake of salvation in the other world of resurrection. She writes that we are to be seker (against the dominant usage of the term as knowledge/safety-from-damnation) not to produce security but by taking the security of sense in writing for granted and thus paradoxically writing from the security of the corpse. By becoming dead, and becoming a corpse—by asserting the security of her body as dead—she locates the security of her writing’s ability to relate to the order of sense in this world. Julian locates the security of sense in this world in the writing of the corpse.

[1] ibid., 7:9-24. To clarify: the passage is explaining that Julian saw the bleeding head also, during the entire time that she experienced her ghostly vision of the Virgin.

[2] Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 217-218.

[3] ibid., 218.

[4] See Christopher Cannon, “Enclosure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109-113.

soon, folks, soon--and some thoughts on collaboration

Have I been not posting for a month? Sure.

Things have been frighteningly busy, with academic and extra-academic deadlines. But, out of this, I can promise you my paper from the Glossator conference on which I posted previously, comments in anticipation of Kalamazoo (as soon as I get a particular paper written about Julian of Norwich and her relation to the concept of the literary by way of comparing Margery Kempe and Denise Levertov, for one Carolyn Dinshaw).

I have been working on an update for the Romance I sometimes write on put up here.

Also, I am happy to say that as of today there exists a rough document that my co-conspirator Anna Klosowska and I are at least currently willing to call something that we wrote together for an upcoming BABEL volume (I've posted on this as well, below, about Chrétien and Samuel Beckett). Actually, collaborating with Anna is fantastic. Its actually festive, like, as in, entirely rigorous and intellectual, engaged and repsonsible, and yet somehow wild and even hallucinogenic at times. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I've been under the sway of Amy Hollywood's writing on Bataille in her Sensible Ecstasy lately--so perhaps I'm just inclined to interpret my own scholarly endeavors with more radical and subject-shattering jouissance than one should (?). And I certainly do not mean to claim collaboration as a kind of mystic practice in a rank and file reading of Hollywood (though, if I was going to assent to a reading of theorizing as secular mysticism, she'd be the one to go to...). Nonetheless, it is possible in collaborating that every little bit you write on, each sentence or thought sent back and forth, might suddenly pop up as at once seemingly out of one's own mind as well as entirely out of that which is not the mind--making you satisfied that you are not in fact everything--and on the condition of that satisfaction, also demanding one partake of that sneaking suspicioun that there is just (in Leo Bersani's words) this All-ness. And yet, all you are doing at that point is doing a reading, sending it to a friend, and expecting a reading in return and vis-versa: for literary critics, just doing our jobs. I really like what we have written, and will perhaps put up a sneak preview of a bit of it soon.

Exile, Old English, ASSC

Here is my paper from the ASSC graduate conference, last month. I was privileged to this give on a panel with Mary Kate Hurley and Mo Pareles. The paper was given with this handout which contains images I reference near the end of the paper.

Where Wisps of Being Mingle:

Theorizing The Space of the Wræclast in Christ and Satan

I want to first invoke Joyce Hill’s call, now almost some 20 years in the past, to attend to the divergent ‘Germania’ and ‘Latinia’ approaches to the so-called Old English ‘biblical poems’ (an article now anthologized in R.M. Liuzza’s Junius 11 Casebook). Yet I would direct us not to Hill’s call for a sober empirical attempt to correct our biases in approaching ‘evidence,’ but to the theoretical implications which appear in “the coming together of Germanic and Latin (Christian) cultures in medieval northwest Europe.”[i] Hill analyzed “the two extreme positions from which scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have approached the vernacular poetry of Anglo-Saxon England.”[ii] From out the earliest Germanic philology and antiquitarianism, feeding into a now infamous nationalism (that understandably continues to darken the sound of ‘philology’ in some quarters), the ‘Germania’ approach allowed that these poems “could be dismissed, as they frequently were, as at best dull paraphrases, deserving of comment only for a few passages, which critic after critic cites as evidence of a persistent Germanic spirit surfacing in the Christian subject matter.”[iii] Twenty years ago Hill could claim that “the biblical poems are obviously catching up,” but only at the cost being read almost solely in terms patristic traditions and Latin Christianity.[iv] I want to offer a reading of the Junius 11 Book poem Christ and Satan geared towards the political work of the poem—analyzing the production of a space that is political, or, rather, determinative of the political, operating a space at the historical, theoretical and literary confluence of Germania and Latinia.

I begin with this lengthy detour because I believe that reading Old English as a confrontation of Germania and Latinia forms the site of a particularly important crux of the west itself: a privileged site for deciphering the space of exile. The space of exile as such open a aporia deep within the ‘west’ and certain impending political disasters around the world. I refer to Giorgio Agamben’s now famous claim that the structure of sovereignty as a double exclusion resides in a figure taken from the Latin tradition and Etruscan law, the homo sacer. Yet, Agamben’s analysis of the structure of this relation to the one who is exiled will rely on a term whose Germanic linguistic origin Agamben sees fit to note (it is of such importance that I ask forgiveness for a long quotation):

If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law, or the supreme rule of the juridical order: it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes itself in it by suspending it. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion, we shall give the name ban (taken from the old Germanic term that designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign) to this potentiality...of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying...He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it, but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.[v]

Now, Agamben insists that while we might view the task of sovereignty as an ‘ordering of space,’ the space of the exception remains prior to this ordering and always at the threshold of what constitutes an outside: “the state of exception opens the space in which the determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first becomes possible. As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time).”[vi] But even if this space is permanently un-localizable, or perhaps more importantly if it is, we have yet to decipher the structure of this space as such. So, what is the space of exile, and how is it structured? Given how much we mention exile as readers of Old English—in this corpus of literature that is at once on the edge of and in deeply within the west (geographically and temporally), it seems more than fitting to turn to Christ and Satan.

The Old English word wræclast, a masculine noun glossed by Bosworth-Toller as “an exile track,”[vii] despite being most easily associated with the Exeter Book elegies, occurs three times in the Old English poem Christ and Satan in the eleventh-century Manuscript Junius 11, making Christ and Satan the poem with the most occurrences of the word in a single poem of the extant corpus. Junius 11, of course, also contains Genesis A and B, Exodus, and Daniel, in that order. Christ and Satan is placed at the end of the manuscript and was added later, in multiple, different hands from the first three sections, almost tacked on to remaining folios of what began as a more majestic production, on the outskirts of the book itself in time and space.[viii] I am concerned here with the structure of the space named by wræclast, a word most often associated with the socially or politically defined spaces of exile in the Exeter Book, but which occurs in its highest density in Christ and Satan.

In the Exeter Book elegy known as “The Wanderer,” wræclast names a space one must wadan[ix] (go through, wade through), and also a track or space that commands the complete attention of one’s being, as “warað hine wræclast” (the exile’s path holds him/awaits him/keeps him).[x] Similarly, the speaker in the Exeter Book poem we call “The Seafarer” provides a self-description as an exile among “þe þa wræclastas widost lecgað” (those who follow the exile’s paths the farthest [out]).[xi] In Beowulf , we read that Grendel “wræclastas træd,” (tread on, trampled on the wræclast),[xii] suggesting that the clearly less- if not entirely non-human can move through this space.[xiii] In a more clearly political context, the Old English Death of King Edward, describes how the king, following the defeat of Æthelred by Cnut, “wunode wræclastum wide geond eorðan”[xiv] (dwelled in the exile’s paths widely through the earth).

What is common to all of these uses of the word is the suggestion that the wræclastas is a space, be it landscape or seascape, to where one is cast out from a community and it’s safety, where one is alone, and through or around which one constantly moves—exposed as lonely and without shelter in a vast space. In the above examples, the space is wide, is described as having space enough to wander, dwell, follow, etc. It is indeed Agamben’s threshold where life and law become indistinguishable: the wanderer bereft of any social space for whom any politics would consist in survival; the seafaring pilgrim who, ironically nihilistically, renounces this world as the space of his proper being; the outlawed sovereign king; the monster. Their space is structured in a way such that it both allows and demands movement—the term paired with a verb connoting a sense of travel, wandering, and specifically wandering through a large lonely space. The word thus seems to retain a strong trace of the second part of its compound structure: last (es), a noun meaning “a step, footstep, sole of the foot, track, trace.”[xv]

Satan then, in relation to the sovereign God by placement in lawless space, by the ban of God, would seem to occupy a quintessentially exilic space. And one might initially account for the occurrence of wræclast in Christ and Satan as an appropriation of the mode of the soliloquizing complaint employed by the poets of the Exeter Book elegies, as Robert Hasenfratz has also observed.[xvi] The whole first section of the poem is of course filled with the complaints of Satan and the fallen angels whose cunning and sense of being wronged might even rival that of Milton’s Satan. The first appearance of the word is in one these complaints by Satan, very much in the mode of an elegy. He says that he must: “hweofran ðy widor,/ wadan wræclastas” (roam/turn about widely,/ travel the exile-path).[xvii] Satan’s verb-phrase emphasizing strenuous travel and space is perhaps underscored by the common but still strange plural appearing wræclastas, as if the space is not continuous, but a whole mess of paths. By saying wadan wræclastas, Satan attempts to frame his speech-act to register as that of a lonely and widely wandering exile, demanding the more sympathetic affection we are more willing to lend to the Wanderer. Yet, 20 lines before this initial use of this term, Satan first laments fixity as part and parcel of how his place of torment is structured: “þis is ðeostræ ham, ðearle gebunden/ fæstum fyrclommum; flor is on welme/ attre onlæd” (This dark home is tightly bound/ with fast fire-bindings, the floor is of flame/ kindled with venom).[xviii] Satan cannot in fact wander through the space he names as wræclast even if he wants to in order to hide from the shame of his sin—as the hall is, to him, relatively narrow. Satan claims “Ic eom limwæstmum þæt ic gelutian ne mæg/ on þyssum sidan sele, synnum forwundoed” (I am of such a size that I may not hide/ in this wide hall, totally wounded/stained by sin)[xix] The second time the word appears, Satan is obliged to say that he dwells there in a way characterized by fixity: he explains that “ic geþohte adrifan | drihten of selde,/ weoroda waldend;| sceal nu wreclastas/ settan sorhgcearig, | siðas wide” (I designed to drive the Lord from the throne/the hosts of Ruler; I must now anxious-sorrowing, settan the exile’s paths, the wide ways)[xx]. Satan must “settan,” which can mean “to dwell,” but also, dwelling with the sense of fixity, as in “to establish” or “to set up.”[xxi] These statements are marked strongly by the first person pronoun, as trustworthy or untrustworthy testimony about the very being of Satan, which in turn reflects something about the space he is in. So the wræclast names the space in which Satan dwells, (at least as Satan names it) but unlike in any of the Exeter Book occurrences, Satan describes this space as a structure that can be established in fixity. Remember, he has described it as a kind of shelter, or sele (hall)—implying that the structure of the place wræclast names might be thought otherwise—to the extent that the wræclast could consist of a static ‘home,” with a “floor,” even if this floor is constructed of flame and torment. How is it that Satan is exposed, to what is his being exposed in the sense belonging to the exile under the ban of the sovereign (God), if he is in a narrow shelter (relative to his large size) and not a wide sea or fen?

Satan’s being is exposed to the other beings in this narrow fixed space, and to the subsequent painful dimming of the boundaries of his being as it mingles with that of the others and the structure of the space itself. For, the third occurrence of wræclast reminds us that the fallen angels also dwell in this place, as is it is in their speech that they explain “þæt wræclastas wunian moton” (We should dwell in the exilic space).[xxii] That the demons speak at all in the poem reminds the reader that Satan’s speeches and uses of wræclast are in dialogic relation to those of the fallen angels, as the fallen angels use this word in a speech dialoging with those of Satan. These fallen angels dwell there, like Satan, because, as they say, “we woldon swa/ drihten adrifan of þam deoran ham”[xxiii] (they would have driven the Lord out from that precious home)—they would have exiled God. This occurrence of wræclast in a dialogue, naming the space in which that very dialogue occurs, suggests that the space is structured in a much less ‘lonely’ way than habitually thought. Perhaps Satan and his demons intentionally ‘misuse’ the term, trying to garner sympathy as if in they were in the plight of the lonely wronged exile and not would-be cosmic Sygbryt’s (who the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Cynwulf drove out of his lands for unjust deeds). But the sheer density of the term’s occurrence in Christ and Satan seems to me to suggest that a reader would have been expected to have the capacity to understand the term in this context, even if ironically. So it is worth asking what the term would mean in this case, even if Satan and the fallen Angels invoke it infelicitously, without the proper political authority, or with intent to deceive.

This relationship between the multiple beings inhabiting this particular space and the structure of the space itself would then call for further re-thinking of exilic space in terms of how the space structures the relations of these beings to each other. In Christ and Satan, this indistinction between inside and outside (identified by Agamben as the topos of the ban) seems to extend itself to the difference between a space and beings that inhabit it. [xxiv] The fallen angels who themselves occupy the space also constitute it as a world for Satan. Satan himself identifies part of the place’s torment for him in complaining that “hwilum ic gehere hellescealas,/ gnornende cynn”[xxv] (Sometimes I hear hell-servants,/ a mourning kin). In this wræclast, some beings are fixed in space, but the distinction between what constitutes the place/space, and what inhabits it is confused or diffused.

So, the wræclast, as a place of exile, or exile-as-punishment for outlawry, may generally name a space understood less as one through which one can or must move, so much as a space in which an unclear relationship between space and beings, and beings and beings, is recognized as part of the structure of what wræclast itself names. In Christ and Satan, instead of a place to freely and widely wander in a romanticized conception of exilic space, Satan uses the term for a space of torment recognized more by its relation to torment and punishment, its relation to how relations function inside this space, and how the relation between space/landscape and Beings dissolves.

Agamben invokes his homo sacer as bare life, a category to which we might assign a wispy sort of ontology, a kind of being in relation to juridical structures only in its non-relation and whose being if it indeed has being in a rigorous sense—this being has at best a dim sort of ontological status. But the exiles of the wræclast—as it appears most densely in this early Germanic language text that is nonetheless the confrontation of that Germania with the theology of Latnia—the being of these exiles is even less than wispy. These beings are themselves part of the structure of the space that defines their being, their cries flitting painfully into and out of one another. The space is as much constituted by static wisps of beings whose boundaries between each other are thin and overlapping as it is by place.

As such, wræclast names a space whose structure in relation to the Beings that inhabit it must be thought in itself as a primordial ground for thinking categories of ‘life,’ and ‘the political.’ The trick, with Christ and Satan, is to think the word in this manner when reading an ostensibly theological poem. The difficulty of understanding this term perhaps reveals the urgent importance of the politics and theology enunciated by the confluence of Germania-Latina in Old English poetry. The exile, the transient of the west, is today increasingly defined in some cases not by movement and migration, but by being inscribed in a lack of freedom of movement, identified with the condition of the place itself: I cite the atrocious restriction of movement by the Israeli army during the current/recent war in Gaza, or the debacle of GTMO. To illustrate this crux of the west, unconcealed from within a strange Old English poem, I would even risk rather recklessly appropriating as images commensurate with that of the space of exile in Christ and Satan, these images from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, of paperless people in cages at the train station, whose structure of exile is made of each other, and whose status, fixed in place in their tiny wræclast among the other exiles leaves them barely encounterable to the hero of the film, much less the viewer for whom they structure only a ‘background’ image. So how do we relate to, or speak of, this space of exile, if its inhabitants so mingle, if they are under a ban which, in Agamben’s words, demands of us that we “put the very form of relation into question and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation...”[xxvi] These questions arise, after all, from the complaints of a Satan whose use of the word wræclast we, on the one hand, should simply not believe as a felicitous use of the term. He may, after all, be trying to frame himself as inhabiting the space of exile to garner sympathy. But, if hell, if the exiled being, is simply inaccessible to our critical thought, presenting us with the threat to the western conception of ‘relation’ itself in the play of presence and absence, accessibility and inaccessibility, then who is it that will name the space of exile and her relation to it? Satan’s crafty complaint at once reveals that exilic space is better understood by the ontological status of its inhabitants than by its shape and size (as an Old English Satan struggles against his own language, revealing the limitations of the suffix last); but reveals also that insincere naming—naming a space with a name that the named space exceeds negatively, speaking about a space or territory without the political authority to do so—is the only speaking that can actually identify exile properly. If it is this convoluted concept of relations to language that we need in order to read the space of exile in Old English poetry, or in any text for that matter, then philology—a discipline trained to read agreements, kinships, influences, rhetoric, etc.—has, at the moment, a pressing task—deciphering perhaps not representations of space and individuals, but the (actual, not the mimetic) relation between the two itself in the realm of the political.

---

[i] See Joyce Hill, “Confronting Germania Latina: Changing Responses to Old English Biblical Verse” in The Poems of Junius 11: Basic readings, Edited by R. M. Liuzza (London: Routeledge, 2002) pp. 1-19.

[ii] Joyce Hill, 1.

[iii] ibid., 5.

[iv] ibid., 6.

[v] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 28.

[vi] ibid., 19.

[vii] Bosworth and Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (hereafter as Bosworth-Toller), s.v. “wræclast.”

[viii] George Philip Krapp, Introduction, The Junius Manuscript, ASPR 1(New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. xii.

[ix] The Wanderer, in The Exeter Book, ASPR 3, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie and George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 1.

[x] ibid., 32.

[xi] The Seafarer, in The Exeter Book, 55.

[xii] Beowulf, in Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburgh 3^rd Ed., Edited by Fr. Klaeber (Boston: D.C. and Heath, 1950), 1352.

[xiii] This would of course not surprise a reader of Boethius, who comments on the criminal, a status which often is the cause of the exile’s state (though notably not with the wanderer), that “So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being and animal,” from The Consolation of Philosophy, Translated by Victor Watts (London: Penguin, 1966, Revised Ed. 1999), 94.

[xiv] The Death of King Edward in Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR 6, Edited by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press), 15.

[xv] Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “last.”

[xvi] See Robert Hasenfratz, “The Theme of the ‘Penitent Damned’ and its Relation to Beowulf and Christ and Satan, Leeds Studies in English, New Series 21 (1990), pp. 45-69, see especially p. 54. Hasenfratz actually attempts to refine and understand sympathetic responses to the Satan of Christ and Satan like Margaret Bridges who finds, according to Hasenfratz, that Satan “has become the figure of pathos like the exiled Wanderer” (45).

[xvii] Christ and Satan, in The Junius Manuscript, ASPR 1, Edited by George Philip Krapp (New York: Columbia, 1931), 119-120.

[xviii] ibid., 38b-40a. See also 101b-103a: “Hær is nedran swæg,/ wyrmas gewunade. Is ðis wites clom/ feste gebunden” (Here is the sound of snakes, and serpents dwell/ This binding of torment is/ bound fast).

[xix] ibid., 129-130.

[xx] ibid., 187-189.

[xxi] Bosworth-Toller, s.v. “settan.”

[xxii] Christ and Satan, 257.

[xxiii] ibid., 254b-255.

[xxiv] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Soveriegn Power and Bare Life, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.28.

[xxv] Christ and Satan, 132-133b, (Bosworth-Toller does not gloss hellescealc, but does gloss scealc, first as “servant.”)

[xxvi] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29.