Aesthetics, theory, and the profession of literature: Derrida and Romanticism.(Jacques Derrida)(Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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"DERRIDA AND ROMANTICISM": THE BRACE OF NOUNS THAT CONTRIBUTORS to this special issue of Studies in Romanticism have promised to discuss form a conjunction that will probably strike readers as neither surprising nor obvious. The joining of a famous name to a large topic, usually with the implicit half-hearted promise that the former will explain the latter, has over the years proved a popular formula in the humanities. (1)In the present case the formula works nicely as a prod to thought because the phrase "Derrida and Romanticism" grants access to compelling questions only after first teasing us with unpromising initial appearances. For at first glance this dyad can certainly seem as contrived as any set topic. The words "romanticism" and "romantic" enjoy no visible privilege in Derrida's work, and indeed almost never appear there. A trawl through his texts elicits little more than the rare throwaway usage, as when--I cannot in good conscience say "for instance," since this is almost the only instance I have found--during a late interview focused on books and electronic media, Derrida warns an interlocutor to "be wary of a progressivist--and sometimes 'romantic'--optimism, ready to endow the new distance technologies of communication with the myth of the infinite book without material support, the myth of universalist transparency, of communication that is immediate, totalizing, and free of controls, beyond all frontiers, in a sort of big democratic village. " (2) As a medium-strength, parenthetical pejorative in scare quotes, "romantic" here connotes a na'ive sort of logocentrism: a starry-eyed "progressivist optimism" propelled by fantasies of technology without technicity, communication without signs, and politics without mediation. The term has no dialectical complexity; Derrida is using it casually, in the somewhat informal context of an interview. We are a long way, here, from the "Yale critics" with whom Derrida was for a time associated--even a long way from a literary critic like Jerome McGann, whose influential reduction of romanticism to "ideology" still grants romanticism a certain satanic grandeur. (3) (After all, if romanticism in some way is ideology, it will never be just one topic among others--which, a skeptic might add, means that professors of romantic literature can rest assured that important work remains to be done.) From this perspective one would say that the best that can be said about the pairing "Derrida and Romanticism" is that it brings into relief the national, institutional, and perhaps above all the professional-disciplinary determinations of the idea of "romanticism." Located on the slippery divide between literature and philosophy, the notion of romanticism nonetheless remarks and reinforces that disciplinary difference. Derrida was of course well aware of this, as another rare appearance of the word romanticism in his oeuvre--the noun, this time, capitalized--makes clear. "One cannot understand [Paul de Man's] privileging of allegory--I was long puzzled by it for this very reason--if one is not familiar with the internal debates of Anglo-American criticism concerning Romanticism." (4) So far as one can tell, Derrida never actually became familiar with those "internal debates"; they were alien to his training and presumably never greatly interested him. (5)

Yet on the other hand, as soon as one presses past the nominalistic question of whether or how or how often Derrida uses the word "romanticism," his relationship to romanticism and the professional study of it becomes vastly more dynamic and ambiguous. It is not simply a matter of reversing the poles of the inquiry and noting that whether or not Derrida was interested in romanticism, professional romanticists have been interested in him. They obviously have been; but so have critics from any number of fields and subfields of the human sciences. A stronger claim can be made. Professional romanticists in the United States have, I suggest, felt the pressure of "theory"--which is always in the end to say "deconstruction"--more acutely than scholars in other literary subfields in the American academy. To say this is not quite to say that a greater proportion of romanticists than, say, modernists, have expressed an interest in Derrida. This may or may not be true (someone with social science training might want to do a citation count someday), but I have in mind a kind of professional and disciplinary pressure that can easily take the form of active disinterest or hostility. Whether or not Derrida gets discussed more often by them (I leave that question open), his shadow falls more heavily on academic romanticists than on scholars in other literary-historical fields. We know this intuitively. If in mock-Husserlian spirit we try replacing the word "Romanticism" in the title of this collection with another literary-historical period metaphor ("Derrida and Victorian Studies," "Derrida and Renaissance Studies," even--though here we come close--"Derrida and Modernism") we lose something. The pairing "Derrida and Romanticism" carries with it a faint note of urgency that does not, I think, simply reduce to the narcissistic imaginings of a readership--to the fact that "we" (i.e., the probable readers of these sentences) are professional or pre-professional romanticists.

Professionalism does, however, have something to do with this historical and perhaps conceptual affinity between "romanticism" and "theory," as does the general history of literary study in the American university. I want to offer here a triple claim: I) The academic field of romanticism drew particularly heavily on aesthetic discourse as it took shape as a discipline in the United States and, mutatis mutandis, other parts of the English-speaking world; 2) aesthetics is a self-resisting discourse that comes into being only by generating the possibility of "theory" as its dark double; 3) romanticism, therefore, in the American academy, has historically tended to be a privileged, ambivalent locus of theory and the resistance to theory, of aesthetic ideology and radical critique. For the full argument behind many aspects of these claims I have to refer readers to previous work; but I shall try to summarize and develop in a new way a few crucial points. (6) For the sake of expository economy, the pages that follow juggle the three assertions above into two sections: an initial section on aesthetics and theory, and a subsequent one on romanticism. In the third and final section of this paper I return to Derrida so as to venture, in conclusion, a few remarks aimed at making him into a romantic despite himself.

I

All areas of study in the humanities and fine arts owe the modern form of their existence to the discourse of aesthetics: that is, to the nominally secular discourse that began life in the eighteenth century as a reflection on the beautiful and sublime, and developed over the course of the nineteenth-century into a kind of humanism that is still very much with us. Indeed, few aspects of Western cultural life are unmarked by the pedagogical narrative implicitly (and quite often explicitly) structuring aesthetic discourse. The idea that "art" and "literature" exist as culturally specific objects and experiences; that contact with these objects or experiences is in some way good for you, even if they are good for you by way of not doing anything positive or determinate for you; that, in consequence, the state and (particularly in the U.S.) philanthropic private entities should support museums, schools, libraries, performance spaces and companies, and so on; that general schooling should involve periodic (if trivial) exposure to literature and the fine arts--all these ideas orbit around the obscure, tension-riddled notion of the aesthetic as a space, event, or experience. The aesthetic is usefully useless, interestingly disinterested. A certain degree of contact with it goes into the making of a citizen, because the disinterested space of aesthetics grants access to universality. In its different modes and contexts this universality can be that of state or nation, or of the supra-political realm of human existence presupposed in some half-conscious fashion by even the most violently exclusive forms of Western nationalism. Acceding to the universality of human existence through the formality of the aesthetic-through the exemplarity of aesthetic objects, performances, texts, or, in the Kantian account, the exemplarity of aesthetic experience itself--the acculturated citizen accedes, at least in principle, to the realm of political representation. Having been put proleptically into touch, via aesthetic experience, with the promise of humanity itself, the citizen is in a position to represent others (or at least vote for those who do). Late nineteenth-century European middle-class culture makes this point emphatically and repeatedly: if suffrage is to be extended to the working classes, those classes must be not so much educated as acculturated.

The discourse of aesthetics made possible, among many other things, the professional study of literature and the arts in the twentieth-century university....

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