the end of coursework

Yesterday I submitted the last assignment required for my MA coursework. I guess that means I'm half-way done my degree. I'll be spending the summer working on my French and preparing for my thesis. Over the past semester, I've been posting excerpts from paper proposals, and I thought it might be worth linking to them here as a way of wrapping things up.

I wrote two essays that dealt extensively with the work of Walter Benjamin. This research strategy ended up saving me a lot of time and effort. One essay focused on Benjamin's methodology of historical materialism in order to engage questions of cultural memory--raised by poststructuralism (most notably in Derrida's Archive Fever and Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge)--summed up in the figure of the archive; the other essay was an attempt to convince my deluded professor that there was more to recover from Benjamin's discussion of literature than its "inherent" power to "defamiliarize" readers. See related posts here and here.

My third and final essay developed out of a class on Shakespeare that brought his early modern representations of class into conversation with the return of the commons we're witnessing in contemporary theory. My paper drew on Cesare Casarino's discussion of the common, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's redefinition of love (as a force of ontological becoming witnessed in the collective solidarity of the poor) from their 2010 book Commonwealth, in order to address the apparent class transitions that occur in King Lear  and Timon of Athens. See related post here.

I'm not sure whether these papers ended up being successful, but the readings they allowed me to do were absolutely worthwhile.

Love and Property in King Lear

Shakespeare's King Lear is often moralized into a plea for the body as a measure of equivalence between sense and speech, matter and value. The thrust of Edgar’s closing imperative, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” has been modeled for us by Cordelia, but as the play’s first scene of property exchange among Lear's daughters demonstrates, even speech that is reconciled in the body can render the subject as property (V.iii.326). While Goneril describes her love as “beyond what can be valued, rich or rare” and Regan gestures toward a love that makes her “an enemy to all other joys” (I.i.63, 75), Cordelia articulates a love that is no more than the self-evident “bond” she has daily performed; and, against the extravagant returns of her sisters, Lear interprets Cordelia’s love as a “nothing” because she refuses to give it the illusion of totality. Rather, her pragmatism and honesty sees her dividing up her love as though it were property, like a parody of Lear’s division of his kingdom: “half my love with him, half my care and duty” (I.i.104). By articulating the status of her love (and her body) as property (rather than dealing in abstract valuations like her sisters), Cordelia shows how the resolution of speech and feeling in the body (or, in Lear’s eyes, into “nothing”) still produces a valued object for exchange. As France declares, “She is herself a dowry” (I.i.243). By her negative gesture Cordelia makes herself into a surplus value in Lear’s filial system of exchange. What was “unprized” has now been made “precious.” 

The play moves from Lear’s first mention of “nothing” (a sovereign annulment of filial bonds, which still governs the system of exchange) to a negative mode of  “incorporation.” To negate the body’s value only to reinstall it as a more “desireable” of property follows from an understanding of love that is predicated on possession; but as the play progresses we see articulated a love that simultaneously dispossesses the loving subject and recognizes its own surplus in the common. 

King Lear presents us with a handful of nobles who, as Edgar muses in Act 2 Scene 3, must become “nothing” in order to remain “something.” Before rushing to the play’s ambiguous conclusion and making that “something” into restored social capital, we might dwell on those scenes from the heath. Of course, we can read Edgar and Kent as figures that desire repatriation; figures that retain allegiance to a king who has provided them with wealth and friendship. But on the heath, Edgar recognizes the power of the negative as a kind of surplus common: “To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear: / The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst turns to laughter” (IV.i.2-6). Here, Edgar expresses the surplus of his dejection: he has moved outside a debt economy and “owes nothing” to the hands that have shaped his fortune. In the same scene, the recently blinded Gloucester realizes something similar when he suggests, “Our means secure us, and our mere defects / Prove our commodities” (IV.i.20-21). Gloucester scorns the man “that will not see / Because he does not feel,” points to the “power” of the poor, and calls for “distribution to undo excess” (IV.i.70-73). Later as he prepares for suicide, Gloucester offers the rest of his “purse” to Edgar, unaware of the obvious irony that this small redistribution of wealth to the poor is, in fact, a transaction of filial obligation. 
          While “nothing” assists the exchange of property in Lear’s court and masquerades as “something” in Timon’s Athens, it takes on a different function on the heath. Here, Lear moves beyond the love-as-possession that animates his attitude towards his daughters and colours their “ingratitude” as a lost love-object (a loss that haunts the paternal bonds of love throughout the play). When Lear suggests that “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous” he points to a desire for surplus that is common to all.

Common time: Benjamin, Agamben and the Messianic

While the historicist finds satisfaction with the establishment of causal connections between various events, suggests Walter Benjamin, the materialist historian “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time." Such a view of the past is inevitably bound up with redemption, and the Messianic promise of revolutionary act will, according to Benjamin, retroactively redeem and realize the muffled longings of the past—it will make good on the utopian promise of its failed revolutionary attempts. Therefore, our attempts to understand the past must take this negated longing into account. “Like every generation that preceded us,” writes Benjamin in his second of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, “we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that."

In The Time That Remains, a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Agamben attempts “rescue” Messianic time from its common misconception as eschatology; this distinction, he argues, is essential to Paul’s letters. A Messianic conception of history does not wait for the Messiah to come (i.e., for the end of history), but is instead a paradigm of historical time in which we act as though the Messiah is already here. As Agamben has pointed out, this is not an apocalyptic vision of history; “the Messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.” Such time does not wait for a decisive moment but instead sees the present as "now-time." Another word for this is kairos (often translated as occasion, but in Paul’s sense, properly Messianic), which is traditionally opposed to chronos (chronological or secular time). Both concepts, Agamben points out, are necessarily interlaced such that “kairos is nothing more than seized chronos, a time remaining.” Messianic time, says Agamben, rather enigmatically, is the relation itself. The difference is minute, but it is also decisive. 

For Paul, this means that we will retain out distinctions (callings, vocations), but they will cease to divide us—such categories (circumcision, for example) become “nothing.” For Paul, the divisions of law are not forgotten or annihilated, but are rendered "inoperative." The community that Paul is attempting to assemble is both inside and outside the law.

Benjamin’s “real state of exception” coincides with the messianic interruption. As Agamben points out in Homo Sacer, “from the juridico-political perspective, messianism is . . . a theory of the state of exception—except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.” Benjamin emphasizes that a connection to the Messiah is not to be created from this side of history.

Benjamin's conception of messianic time (now-time) shows us that we have something in common with the past, and lives in the faith that we will have something in common with the future.

common value

Although Plato’s dialogues were written in the form of conversations, they have founded the philosophical tradition as an introspective, monological pursuit. At least, this is the line of reasoning put forth by Cesar Casarino in the preface to In Praise of the Common (University of Minnesota Press), an effort of collaboration with the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Negri. Not suprisingly, when the other (Socrates' dialogue partner) speaks in a Platonic dialogue, he does so by the rules of dialectical progress, based on fixed (that is, assimilated) identities that tend toward sublation. The history of the Platonic dialogue, writes Cesar Casarino,

has culminated in the now hegemonic liberal-democratic discourse of identity and in its suffering invocations of “dialogue” as a means of negotiating and reconciling differences among various and sundry identities (as if there was actually any real difference rather than sheer equivalence among identities, even despite the incommensurable inequities that they always index and that they are meant to redress in the realm of representation alone, and as if, hence, anything like a real dialogic relation—that is, anything like dialogue at the level of the real—could even begin to take place among them). 

It is for this reason that the “dialogic” nature of Platonic discourse must be distinguished from Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the dialogic relation. For Bakhtin, the “entire dialogue-monologue binary opposition” is constituted by this relation: the dialogue materializes this relation by affirming it, while the monologue materializes it by foreclosing it. In both cases, language invites (or desires) some form of response, which in turn requires its own response and so on ad infinitum. If the dialogic relation unfolds in this way then the conversation is dialogical, “for it involves response to and from—rather than sublation of—the other.” But to avoid the Platonic connotations (which are due both to the currency and the history of a loaded term like “dialogue”) Casarino wisely opts to speak of such intellectual negotiation as “conversation” (deriving from the Latin conversari: to keep company with) in his discussion of the common.

Conversation is the language of the common because it brings us together as different rather than identical to one another. Casarino points to an early text by Dante, a treatise on the vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia), in which language is described as common to the human collective. Dante argues for the superiority of the vernacular over locutio secundaria (scholarly language) because it is employed by the whole world and because it is more “natural.” The vernacular is, in Casarino’s words, a “linguistic potential (that is, the capacity to learn language) and a linguistic practice (that is, the process by which such a capacity comes to its fruition through acquisition and usage) common to all human beings.” Here, we do not have two different types of language, but instead two different ways of learning, using, and conceptualizing language.

For Dante, the linguistic sign is a translating apparatus that is at once both sensory and rational. It must be comprised of both, for pure sensory knowledge is only possible for beasts and purely rational knowledge is only possible for angels. Human beings are unique because communication occurs across a subjective gap (beasts and angels do not have this problem): language must be sensed in order to be rationalized. Casarino highlights four points regarding Dante’s linguistic configuration: first, in Dante’s schema, the vernacular and the sign are equivalent to one another; second, the sign is able to translate and transcend the individual differences of every human being; third, the sign is described as a medium of exchange which move back and forth between producer and consumer; fourth, the sign is, as we have seen, both sensory and rational, bodily and spiritual. In sum, writes Casarino, “for Dante the linguistic sign functions already like the modern sign of value par excellence, namely, money.” The primary opposition between matter and spirit, which characterizes the majority of Hellenistic and medieval theocracy, is eventually displaced by a new fundamental opposition: matter vs. value. As Kiarina Kordela writes,

While spirit could manifest itself only in the Word, value has two manifestations: a semantic one, as the word or the signifier representing the concept that refers to a thing; and an economic one, as the equivalent exchange-value representing the relevant value of a thing (commodity). The advent of secular capitalism amounts to the transformation of the economy into a representational system.

In Dante’s sign, therefore, we see the beginning of value as a mediating third term: the sign partakes of both matter and spirit and enables their exchanges, and consequently their differential semantic value.