With reference to the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, this essay considers how the intersections of address, poetry, and sex are unworked in poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Carl Phillips, as well as in Ira Sachs’s short film Last Address and Michel Foucault’s essay “Lives of Infamous Men.” The essay argues that the structure of poetic address undergoes a radical mutation or transformation across nonlyric genres and forms, especially at the hands of theoretical approaches that stand to the side of matters of identity, intersubjectivity, and personhood.

The following is an edited transcript of a discussion with Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak, editors of the collection Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited (U of Edinburgh P, 2022), and three of its contributors, Jacques Khalip, Kate Singer, and Nancy Yousef. Samuel Baker, who teaches British Romanticism at the University of Texas at Austin, led the conversation, which also features questions from Hannah Wojciehowski, coeditor of TSLL, and graduate student Mustafa Aycicegi. By asking these scholars about their process, we aim to share with readers a sense of the purpose and contributions of this collection, and of the work of assembling collections.

The editors’ introduction to this special issue of differences titled Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani describes the issue’s focus on the speculative importance of aesthetics in Leo Bersani’s scholarship, especially his attention to a “syntax of thought,” or the structural innovations of thinking, reading, and perception explored throughout his critical writings. The introduction also emphasizes Bersani’s ongoing attention to relationality through the aesthetic and how it contributed to his decades-long rethinking of sexuality, sociality, politics, and art.

This essay treats the concept of coercion in Leo Bersani’s writings as a matter connected to questions of aesthetic form, mobility, and immobility. It reads passages from his work on Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio, among others, to argue for noncoercive modes of attention and relationality.

Wordsworth’s writing detects and investigates pleasures that are overlooked, underacknowledged, and ‘unremembered’. This book explores Wordsworth’s sustained interest in the ethical and aesthetic value of lost, inaccessible, and unfelt pleasure throughout his poetry and critical prose. Such pleasures are marginal and fleeting; they pass by silently and are recognized only retrospectively. Yet they shape the aims, technique, and ultimately the whole affective economy of Wordsworth’s writing. Rather than understanding the domain of pleasure to be subjective personal experience, Wordsworth posits affects and attachments beyond conscious experience and possession. By tracing the intertwined history of romanticism and psychoanalysis, the work teases Wordsworth’s interest in unnoticed experience apart from the psychoanalytic concepts that have shaped our understanding of it. Reading Wordsworth against Freud, it rethinks central critical categories: repression, sublimation, mourning, happiness, pleasure, and the gift. In Wordsworth’s account of composition, it locates the resources to rethink poetic pleasure: not as wish-fulfilment, nor as aesthetic escape, but as an engaged and reparative relation to the world.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAlexander Freer, Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. US$70.00.Jacques KhalipJacques KhalipBrown University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 52, Number 4Fall 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716079 Views: 88Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The first chapter turns to Roland Barthes’s passing meditation on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice as a starting point for describing Wordsworth’s thoughts on an unfinished world. Singularly averse to co-optation, the unfinished contrasts with tropes of containment that seek to capture the world as a thing that is nominally our own. A concluding section on the Canadian painter Paterson Ewen’s Close Up Of A Planet With Three Satellites alongside a sonnet by Wordsworth on the planet Venus pushes the discussion toward theories of anonymity, planetarity, and the inhuman.

This essay reads Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am with William Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea in order to consider how figures of apocalypse and animality map onto what Derrida calls the bottomless gaze, or a point of view of non-reciprocity and inhumanness that challenges humanist and posthumanist interpretations of the animal other. I contend that the notion of lastness becomes a powerful negative force that brings us to a limit or an end of our human investment in thought itself. By imagining other perspectives through which to impossibly think beyond and against life, Derrida's and Blake's works explore posthumous or unlived figurations of thought that take us away from the norms of life, survival, and progress.

This collection of essays takes its title and its point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts both historical terms—“contemporary” as well as “Romanticism”—in play as period designations and critical paradigms. While the methodological orientations and the objects of analysis are genuinely diverse, each of the essays collected here makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin’s conception of history: These are critics who “grasp the constellation” into which our “own era has formed with a definite earlier one,” in this case the era of Romanticism. The contemporaneity of Romanticism explored or addressed by the essays in this collection is not predicated on Romanticism’s unacknowledged historical or conceptual persistence. Rather, the constellations addressed in these essays regard Romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own “now” time: What is the unlived of the contemporary Romanticism? What has Romanticism’s singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is Romanticism’s contemporary “redemption value” for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

This essay considers how extinction functions as a concept within romantic studies and as an inhuman dynamic inscribed in the concept of Romanticism itself. Beginning with an essay on Paul de Man and moving to analyses of Wordsworth and Clare alongside contemporary work by Dipesh Chakrabarty, it argues for the necessity of rethinking evolution and life in the context of the Anthropocene. How would romantic thought change once one thinks of lives that are not reducibly human? And what would be the status of such poetry?

Of Queer NeutralityJohn Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press 2014, 252ppIn what way does the concept of 'decision' invariably involve space and being-together? How can it be at once a relational term and a mark of apartness that structures being? To decide something means to already come belatedly to a scene of decisions that has preceded us without our knowing. Perhaps the simplest and yet most complex artifact that radiates these questions, taken from John Paul Ricco's extraordinary and beautifully composed new book, is the blank sheet of paper: on the one hand, as a medium of inscription, representation, and communication, it subtends and actualizes the decision to commit word and image to the page; on the other, it is the inert blankness that overrides any inscribed decisions in the first place, undoing and admonishing forms as the paper's whiteout points to what is always already there - the vacancy of the emptied and erased page that endlessly separates meaning from matter, sense from sensuality, subject from object. Like the bounding lines of an Agnes Martin drawing, where ink seems to cut into a background that very soon pulses to the fore at closer view, the blank sheet is the aesthetic event, collecting us together to decide while also dispersing us of judgment by way of its residual and persistent nothingness. In The Creation of the World or Globalization, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that 'separation, the stepping-out-of-one-another, is at the same time, Entscheidung, decision: it is the decision of Being, the decision of nothing into being or to being ... the whole of existence as an ensemble or partition of singular decisions'.1 Citing this passage in his introduction, Ricco draws us towards queerly intimate scenes of separation, differentiation, anonymity, or together-in-aloneness, scenes that appear just as soon as they disappear into several contemporary visual, theoretical and literary objects that wrestle with the impersonality of sociability and sexuality. In the second term that guides the book, 'scene', Ricco again turns to Nancy, in order to consider how being-together, if thought performatively, exceeds figuralization: 'scene' describes the 'spacing and transitivity' that at once establishes the mobile mise-en-scene of exposed being. In other words, 'scenes' describe 'the name for the spacing and transitivity of being-together (the to or toward of shared exposure), which perhaps even does without a figure and identification' (p8). The scenic is the space of decisions, and throughout his book, Ricco's arguments pay strong tribute to a mise-en-scene set by Nancy, Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. His readers are led along pages of deft analyses that are concise and tightly woven, if at times allusive and uncompromising in their unwavering attention to an archive of anti-identitarian and anti-relational thought.And in a similar way as in his first book, The Logic of the Lure, Ricco pursues a series of 'scenes' that primarily engage Nancy's theoretical opus as an impetus for aesthetic elaboration, particularly the recurring notion of a queerly 'inoperative community' that balks at economization, membership, or identification. It is to this precise point that Ricco consistently returns in his writing: the anonymity of relationality itself, the sheer impersonal demands of shared, common, life-in-retreat. As a reminder of the failures of expectation and awareness that sear the social, Ricco tarries with the ethical, political and aesthetic practices through which an 'unbecoming community' might be thought.In this way, The Decision Between Us argues for an inoperative aesthetics, or a perversely Kantian purposive purposelessness that endlessly performs this negative strain, cutting through the liberal norms of co-existence, belonging and commonality. If the book's analytic language often seems to ward off any positive declarations, it is because the scene of the decision, for Ricco, is aligned not with autonomous agreement or consensus, but with forces of thought that are external to or outside of decisions themselves. …